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Likely, no. Possible? Well… maybe… We can always hope, right? < p>I’ve been sick as a dog since Saturday. Just thinking about this, though, made my head feel a little less congested and my limbs ache a little less. |
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Fascinating development with Leah — she has met up with Okorie Johnson, a cellist formerly with (among others, I guess) Jennifer Daniels, and played with him last Saturday. They along with J. Tom, our guitarist opened up for The Brindley Brothers at their club Jammin’ Java in Vienna. Hopefully I’ll be meeting Okorie on Monday at rehearsal; I hear he’s fantastic, which makes one additional person in the band better than me. >Sigh.< |
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I’ve made up a few RPM packages that will help you get your Red Hat Linux 9 box subscribed to the updates already (or soon to be) available at FedoraLegacy.org. The rhnlib and rhn-applet packages are simply stock recompilations of the most updated ones available on Fedora Core 1. The up2date package is the one that I’ve patched to use the FL public key and a new sources file. It should work exactly as the Red Hat-provided package in every other respect, including supporting apt and yum repositories. Get ‘em here:
< p>All are signed with my GPG public key, and I have source packages available as well if you need them. (Replace “i386″ or “noarch” in the above URLs with “src” to get them.) < p>ADDENDUM: As noted by a few helpful individuals, the up2date package above does not provide a fully functional /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources package. You will need to substitute URLs for your closest mirror. Please DON’T use the main fedoralegacy.org servers, since they are straining at the load. |
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< p>Having spent a good portion of yesterday hacking on my central home server (which provides print queueing for everyone else at home), I can now say that if you want a modern printer, you can’t go wrong with an HP printer. I threw away several hours trying to get an Epson Stylus Photo R200 to work. I only bought the darn thing because I was curious to how it would work, suspecting that the HP would not present any challenge whatsoever. < p>The Epson was advertised as working with both Windows and Mac OS 9 and X, so that’s usually a good sign, especially the MacOS X part. But when push came to shove, it only spoke to the gimp-print driver sporadically and with uncertain results. After about three and a half hours and a yawn attack, I decided to throw in the towel. Perhaps I was just demoralized after aceing my RHCE exam, but it just seemed like too much work. < p>My central box runs Red Hat Linux 9, and support is just peachy using its older hpijs driver under CUPS for the DeskJet 990. However, my main workstation uses Fedora Core 1, which has an entry in redhat-config-printer for the HP 5150. Both worked flawlessly and took approximately 10 minutes total to set up, including unwrapping the thing, installing the print cartridges, and setting up CUPS. < p>Turns out that HP (not surprisingly, given their corporate Linux strategy) has basically open-sourced their drivers, meaning the “hpijs” driver maintainers have a pretty easy job getting most HP printer products to work immediately upon release. So why would I not want to give my money to HP? They’ve earned it by contributing to the free software community, the way I see it. Not to mention, they made my life much easier simply installing their products. I don’t expect manufacturers like Epson to cater to folks like me, who are basically edge cases, or “fringe” if you want to make me sound like I’m just missing the word “lunatic” in front of it. But there’s no reason I should just give Epson my money when HP is obviously doing a little extra work to earn it. < p>Lesson for Today: Not Every Battle Is Worth Fighting. Oh, and HP rocks. Yeah, that’s the ticket. |
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Returned last night from Red Hat HQ in Raleigh, NC, after taking the RH300 to update my certification status. This morning I received my score in the mail, 100% on all categories! In all honesty, if I hadn’t done that well I would have been embarrassed, since (1) it was a recertification since I took the test back in 2000, and (2) I am certified to teach for them too. Nevertheless, I learned a couple extras in RHEL 3.0, and will put them to good use at home and on the job. I also took a couple minutes to update the links on the side. |
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< p>If you do any kind of post-mortems on volumes with lost data, or hacked systems, you might want to check out Sleuthkit. If you use Fedora Core (as I do), you might want to check out my SRPMS (source RPMs) for both sleuthkit and autopsy. (Due to the fact that they are hosted on a brain-dead Mac web server, try right-clicking, choosing “Save link as…” and remove any “.html” ending on the file name.) < p>Please do report any inconsistent builds or other problems you observe that are related to building or packaging. I am not the maintainer, so do not ask me for support or enhancements. Enjoy! |
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If you like cats, you should definitely not watch this. And you might not want to buy a Ford anytime soon, either… not that, given the overall quality of their cars, you were probably hurrying out to do just that anyway. < p>Note to the clueless: The Ford Ka is a European compact, and the Sportka is a pointlessly juiced-up version, kind of like the SVT Focus, which, no matter how much they flog it on Alias, is just stupid. |
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For Mothers Day I got Eleya a Cingular GSM cell phone. We have started referring to it as the Zoolander phone because it seems impossibly tiny. The actual model is a Samsung s307, and it has all the latest geegaws such as cool ringtones and background wallpapers, Web browsing, SMS messaging, and so on. It weighs under 2.5oz and thus affords her a measure of “geek chic” of which she had scarcely heretofore dreamt. Oh wait, did I mention I got one for myself too? |
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A frank and uncompromising, but realistic assessment of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, on NRO today. The author is a founding member of the Iraqi National Congress, a dissident group formed in the 1990′s and funded in part by the U.S. Government, but this does not change the fact that groups around the world are engaged in the worst sort of global hypocrisy. Yes, the atrocities committed against these helpless prisoners is shameful, outrageous, and shows the absolute worst side of humanity. But it is no different than the shameful and outrageous atrocities committed in almost any other conflict for thousands of years. Excusable? NO. But is it something we can understand, battle, and correct through swift and fair justice? Absolutely. < p>What we can pride ourselves on — only if we, the United States, pursue justice faithfully and without regard to consequences — is that our way of life is premised upon the idea that actions like these abuses are to be scorned and punished. Many other cultural philosophies would posit that these abuses are to be accepted… or even praised. |
