Uncle Bub
My Uncle Bub passed away last night. I’m not really sure what to say about him. He was my grandfather’s brother, and I saw him most summers at his ranch for a few weeks. Him and his wife, Vernelle, would come down once or twice a year. Always in the spring for a HAM fest (amateur radio swap meet), and sometimes for Thanksgiving.
Bub was one of the the nicest men that I’ve ever been around, but he was no pushover. He stood up for what he believed in and defended it tirelessly. He was proud to be an American. He loved this country very much, and, like most men of his generation, volunteered for military service (Navy in his case) during World War II. He served for several years in the Pacific Theater. I’m not quite sure what he did, what ship he served on, if he helped liberate any islands, or anything like that. I do know that at one point he was assigned to a small island that was a munitions depot for raids that the front lines were doing. Part of his job was to guard the munitions depot, and blow it up if the Japanese managed to get their hands on the island. This never happened, so I guess he and his men did their job well. An interesting story that he told me that was one night an interesting bomb arrived at the munitions depot. He said that they were not allowed to look at the bomb (it was covered with a tarp), or do anything with it. They were to make sure that no one entered the building until the bomb was moved on to its target. Of course, they had to look at the bomb, and they did. It was unlike anything they had seen before. It was HUGE. A few days later the bomb moved on, and they thought nothing more about it. A few days after that World War II was over with. It wasn’t until years later that photos of Fat Man were declassified and published that Uncle Bub learned what it was that he was guarding. In some small way, my uncle was part of bringing the worst war the we’ve seen in a long time come to an end. I’m proud of him for that.
Bub was a Modern Renaissance Man. He was an avid hunter, fisherman, rancher, gourmet chef, archaeologist, Native American afficiando, and history buff. Like most people of his generation, he had a ton of stories to tell, and I loved listening to every single one of them. I just wish that I had been closer to him (geographically), so that I could have spent more time with him listening to his tales.
In the later years of his life, his chemotherapy had taken his hair and beard. Someone meeting him a month ago wouldn’t believe me if I told them of his bushy gray hair, and his full beard. His white teeth always shone out from between his whiskers, and he was very quick with that smile. It’s a smile that I’m going to miss.
While I was close to Bub, I’m not looking forward to the pain that I’ll see on the faces of Vernelle, DeNise, Reese, Jeremy, Jordan, Merideth, B. T., Melba, and the rest of the family. I’ve always felt more sadness for those around me than for myself in situations like this. I am going to go to his funeral this Saturday, and I’ll do what I can to be strong for those around me. Yes, I’m going to grieve, and those around me today at work probably don’t see it much. I generally do this in private. I have a 6 hour drive ahead of me tomorrow, and that will be my time to feel my emotions. I have a 6 hour drive back Sunday, and that will be my time to start my recovery. Don’t worry. My emotions won’t overwhelm me to the point that I won’t be able to drive. I’ll be ok.
There’s a question that James Lipton asks his guests on Inside the Actors’ Studio that goes, “If Heaven exists, what do you want God to say to you at the Pearly Gates?” I know that Heaven exists, and I hope that God says to me, “Welcome, Beosig. We’ve saved a table for you at the back, and your family is waiting there for you.”
I have one more person at that table now waiting for me.
Bub, I’ll see you at that table when my time comes. Say “Hi” to Papa and Granny for me, and save up some good stories for me when you see me. I want to hear them all.
First Test Still Going
It appears that I jumped the gun on my reporting that the first court test of the GPL had been side stepped. Looks like Monsoon Multimedia is going to comply, but BusyBox and the SFLC aren’t going to let them off the hook for past transgressions. Looks like they’re going to go for some sort of settlement as punishment to Monsoon Multimedia. As Daniel Ravicher says in this article, “Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance.”
I fully agree. Breaking the law until you’re caught should result in punishment of some sort. It would be like letting a serial thief off the hook because he promises not to do it again after being caught red handed. There needs to be some sort of down-side to stealing something that someone else was kind enough to allow you to use for free.
Of course, I’ll keep you apprised as developments continue.
Season Premiers, Part 1
It’s season premier time! Here are my thoughts on the shows that I watched last night.
Just finished watching Chuck. It was a pretty good show. Neat premise, decent actors, good action, and funny comedy. The pilot was a good one, and I’ll continue to watch it for at least a few more episodes to make sure that it’s worthwhile. Jayne from Firefly/Serenity is in the series! I totally didn’t recognize him until near the end of the episode. I think it’ll be fun to see what kind of NSA agent he plays. Yes, the hot CIA agent is fun to look at, so that doesn’t hurt things. I just wish I knew why here eye-teeth were so friggin’ huge. Every time she smiles, it scares me a little inside. I can get over that though. The one big gaff was that Chuck left Stanford five years ago, and he was talking about his old friend Bryce. While talking about Bryce he mentioned that he remembered working with Bryce to write Zork on a TRS-80 while at Stanford. Ummm… Guys? Nice flashback to the past for us computer geeks (reference to Zork AND TRS-80 in the same sentence is nice), but your target audience for that reference (computer geeks) all know that Zork was written on the PDP-10 in the late 70′s. Yes, it did run on the TRS-80, but this was over two decades ago… not five years. Anyway, that one minor bit aside, the rest of the show was wonderful. I can’t wait for next week to hit.
After Chuck came The Big Bang Theory. This promised to be a funny show for the geeks in the world. This is why I watched it. Apparently Chuck Lorre thinks that smart people are horribly retarded when it comes to social interaction. I take offense to this stereotype because it is rarely true once they get out of high school. The really large words that were thrown around were really distracting because it is equally as rare for even the most intelligent people to talk like that in a social situation. I know that characters are supposed to be exaggerated to really be interesting in fiction, but it can’t be a constant thing or it really gets annoying. There were some good lines in the show, and the best line of the show was in response to, “What do you guys do for fun around here?” The line was, “Today we tried masturbating for money.” Worst line was about the Sun’s position relative to the stars at the time of birth determining personality. It’s actually the position of the Earth relative to the stars as we perceive them that has spawned astrology…. Duh. If you’re going to make a show about smart people, then smart people are going to want to watch. Don’t make stupid mistakes like that. Overall, I’m thinking that this show is going to be a waste of time and energy, but we’ll see how it goes… I’ll leave it on the DVR for now, but no promises that it’ll last more than a week or two.
After that was Two and a Half Men. I came into this show with high hopes as it was a tried and true veteran of comedy. The hilarious lines came one after another. Each performer lived up to even the harshest critic’s expectations. If anyone says anything bad about the season opener of Two and a Half Men, then I have a few theories about them:
- They are horribly stupid.
- They are part of Al Qaeda.
- They are part of Focus on the Family.
- Chuck Lorre did something horrible to them as a child.
- #2 and #3.
- They are Denise Richards, and they still hate Charlie Sheen.
- They hate to laugh because they feel that enjoyment is a mortal sin.
- #1 and #6.
After this, I caught the last half of Journeyman because it was on. I had no intention of watching it, but I had nothing else that I felt motivated to start working on at this late hour. It was pretty good, but I wish I had caught it at the start of the show. I’m not a big fan of time travel shows because of the horrible paradox holes that most writers manage to blow into the plot. I try to ignore them, but most of them jump out and slap you in the face. As I said, I didn’t catch the first half, but the second half was put together reasonably well. I’m not sure I’ll DVR it. I’ll probably just stumble across it when I have time.
The best show of the night (that I watched) was by far Two and a Half Men. I fully expected this. I’m going to continue to give Chuck my time, but Big Bang Theory only has one more shot to get over the “first show jitters” before I remove the timer from my DVR.
Don’t expect updates on these shows the night after they come out. Life is pretty busy for me, and there may be some lag between the time they air, and the time that I watch them.
PS: If I vanish from the face of the Earth within the next week, check the CIA’s secret European prison system. I just mentioned CIA, NSA, astrology, Al Qaeda, Focus on the Family, and Denise Richards all in the same post. I’m pretty sure some high powered government computer somewhere is digging through my blog as you read this flagging me for vaporization in the near future. What? Yeah. I’m reading 1984 right now. Why do you ask?
New Server
I’m building a new server that hosts this web site, my email, many other web sites, and other miscellaneous goodies.
The hardware is:
AsusM2NBP-VM motherboard
AMD64 X2 4800+ CPU (2.5 Ghz)
1 GB DDR2/667 RAM
160 GB Western Digital SATA 300 GB/s HD (three of them)
Sony 16X DVD-ROM/CD-ROM
Mid-tower case with 450 watt power supply
An extra 80mm fan (case came with 2)
Some SATA power connectors
80 wire ATA-133 rounded IDE cable (the case has a window, and rounded cable are cooler)
Got the hardware put together Friday night. First thing I did was setup the BIOS goodies. I wasn’t paying attention, and I went to set the integrated video card to the minimum RAM setting since it uses system memory. I set it to “disabled” instead of the lowest setting. Oops. After setting up the BIOS, I rebooted, and the system wouldn’t come up. I thought back on what I did, and realized my mistake. I cracked the case, removed the battery, and flipped the jumper to clear the BIOS RAM. Rebooted again, and setup the BIOS again with the proper settings. The lowest setting is 32MB of RAM for video. I really only need about 2MB. That’s 30MB of RAM wasted. Oh well….
Started installing the OS (Ubuntu Server 7.04 for AMD64), and it choked right near the end with a corrupted package. The package was the kernel image… Kind of need that.
I rebooted and ran the built-in CD integrity check. It found the problem. I burned a new CD, and did the integrity check. Same problem. I assumed it was a bad ISO, so I downloaded a new ISO. At this time it was about 1:30 AM Friday night, so I went to bed during the almost 2 hour download.
Got up Saturday, and the ISO was good. The third CD burned was good, and started the install. The problem that I noticed right away was that I had setup two the SATA drives to be a RAID 1 array in the BIOS/RAID controller, but the install package still saw three individual drives. I figured it would see two drives with one of them being the hardware RAID. Turns out the the RAID system on the motherboard is a combination hardware configuration and software RAID. Of course, the motherboard came with Windows drivers for doing software RAID, but this doesn’t help me. I decided to scrap the idea of having hardware RAID since that wasn’t an option. I rebooted, reconfigured the drives to be all independent of one another as far as the BIOS/RAID “controller” is concerned.
Did a configuration using software RAID under Linux, and did the install. The install went fine, but after I rebooted, I had black screen with a cursor at the top-left corner. Crap. GRUB wouldn’t even load. I figured it may be a problem with my software RAID settings, the hardware, the OS, or some combination of all three. I was able to boot from the CD, and then choose “Boot From First Hard Disk” and it would boot. Not an acceptable solution. I Googled and searched Ubuntu Forums for the rest of the day trying to find solutions to the problem. Tried troubleshooting GRUB, and software RAID, and hard disk configurations, and all sorts of stuff. I finally decided that I needed the Ubuntu Alternate 7.04 CD because there were some reports of it having better software RAID support. Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s site does not really tell you what the difference between desktop, server, and alternate are. Turns out that the server version that I was using does have software RAID support, so I didn’t need the alternate CD. While the ISO was downloading, I ran into town to pick up that rounded cable that I listed above. When I got back home, it was already 5:45, and I had to split to get to my D&D game that started at 6:00. I was late getting out of the house, but that’s ok.
Sunday rolled around, and I decided to do an install without using any kind of RAID. Just break the install down to the simplest form to reduce all variables. I used all three drives during the install. The first I put root (/) on. The second was for /home, and the third was for swap and /usr. Same problem. Ok. I knew that it wasn’t the RAID doing this. Had to be a hardware failure, or a BIOS misconfiguration. Like most BIOS books, this one sucked. There is a setting for “HDD SMART Monitoring”. Not sure what that is. I look it up in the book, and it tells me, “This allows you to enable or disable HDD SMART Monitoring.” No shit. WHAT IS IT? Come on!
Anyway, I roll through the BIOS settings without using the book since it’s worthless. I pay careful attention to each screen with all settings that are there. I finally get to a screen that lists all three of my hard drives. “Yep. They’re there.” I say to myself. I almost move on, but I told myself that I needed to pay special attention to every detail in the BIOS. I look a little closer, and I see some instructions on the side bar. It’s telling me that I can use ‘+’ and ‘-’ to change the boot order of the drives! Brilliant! I had already chosen my boot order to be CD then hard drive with all other options (floppy and removable media) disabled. This screen was actually letting me choose which hard drive to boot off of first! I looked a little closer, and my SECOND hard drive was listed FIRST. Huh? I didn’t do that! Why would #2 be the default first choice?? I don’t get it. This was why things weren’t booting! I had put my MBR and /boot/ on the first drive in ALL installs that I did, and that wasn’t the boot drive in the BIOS settings. What I don’t understand is that this is the “boot order” for the hard drives. If #2 failed, then it should have tried #1, and then #3. Nope. #2 failed, so it just choked and sat there.
I finally fixed the boot order for the hard drives to go in the logical order of #1, then #2, then #3. I then booted the system without a CD in it, and the system booted, loaded Linux, and got me to my login prompt! I felt like I was finally making some headway. Yay!
The next step was to boot from CD, setup my software RAID (RAID 1 for /) on #2 and #3. I then setup /boot, swap, and a large backup partition where my weekly rsync of / gets copied to just in case. I then ran through the install (again) and things worked just as I expected. After the install, I rebooted, and the system came up just like I thought it would on Friday night. Yay!
I then spent a few hours on and off during Sunday to get various things installed and configured on the box. I’m going to spend my evenings this week and this up coming weekend getting everything that I need installed, and as configured as I can get it.
The next step will be to get it online full time with a static IP at the colo. This probably won’t happen until I’m back from Breckenridge in the second week of Oct. Once this happens, then I’ll start copying the gigs and gigs (about 15 or so) of data that I have on the old server to the new server and making sure that things work. After a week or two of doing this, I’ll do the cut-over, and then take the old server offline after a week or two delay which will help me ensure that I didn’t miss anything.
I’m itching to get home tonight, so I can start throwing packages on the new server to get it all going. Should prove interesting!
First Test Sidestepped
Looks like the first test of the GPL in a court of law has been sidestepped. I’m glad that Monsoon Multimedia has promised to do the right thing. I hope that they follow through with their promise, and publish their code changes.
My only gripe about this whole thing is that it was a solid case in support of the GPL, and setting some precedence in an actual court ruling would have done wonders for the free software movement.
Ah well…. Maybe next time.
First Test
The GPL (GNU Public License) which is what most open source software is released under is about to be put to the first test in a court of law. I use GPLv2 for my open source projects. I may shift to GPLv3 for future releases. I’m still waiting for GNU’s release of a common-man’s explanation of what the GPLv3 really means and what changes before I make this decision.
Here is the story.
This greatly interests me because I’ve always been a huge proponent of free software. If software is not free, then I’ll pay for it if I need it, can afford it, and a decent open source alternative does not exist. I’m a member of the Free Software Foundation, and of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I recently discovered the Software Freedom Law Center at OSCON, and I’ve been reading a bit about them. If I have some spare cash in the future, and it looks like they’re doing the right thing for free software, then I’ll donate some to them as well.
I’m going to keep an eye on SFLC’s RSS feed to monitor progress on this case (and others.) If it looks like I can somehow help out, I’ll see what I can do for them.
I hope that the GPL case actually goes to court, and that the judgment is in favor of the GPL. It would be a HUGE boon for open source and free software. It would prove that you cannot steal from others and make a profit from it. Just because someone gives you the source code, it does not mean that it is part of the public domain. There is a different between licensed free software, and public domain software, and most people don’t realize the difference. It’s time that people with money were taken to point to show them that they cannot just steal something and make even more money off of it.
