See what I did there with the bold.

We do things, we make decisions and choices without even considering the options.  Our subconscious not only can provide us with important facts, like all the words to the closing song of Gilligan’s Island, it also will bring up complex thoughts like the results of thinking or provide a course of action.  Don’t believe me?  Think of the last time you drove a car somewhere and had one of those realizations like, “Holy crap I’m driving a car and not paying attention to where I am or where I’m going!  How did I make it this far?”

Learning anything requires repetition, so does unlearning.  But before you start training yourself what you want to do, like Zippity the Zebra in Man vs. Beast you have to “realize it’s a race.”  The key there is to set yourself a standing order to notice when you do some physical thing . Go on, put that subconscious to work for you noticing you taking the phone out, or eating that 28th cookie.

Now you are at that crossroads, where you make the choice.  The thing you’ve done at up until this point over the last 87 times this choice came up, the thing you decided you wanted to change for some reason, will seem very compelling.  It may even seem crazy that you ever wanted to or could change.  Here is where you will need to have thought out the good reasons for why you will change, to overrule the habit and emotional response that is tied into taking that habitual action.  What you want to do here is put yourself in the right frame of mind to realize, that, yes there are actually other things you might want to do besides restock the floors in Tiny Tower.

The way I recently learned and am trying to do that is to have a nice little slogan, “WWID?”  This means, “What Would I Do? Where I, is me heroically taking into account my full hierarchy of values.”  This is a pretty general mindset, depending on the particular habit I’m trying to change I may just focus in on that one for a few weeks and have a different slogan to recall in my time of need.

So in summary, I plan to take certain things I don’t want to do anymore and notice when I’m doing them so I can wake myself up enough to know, “it’s time to make a choice,” and then put myself in a heroic frame of mind to make that choice.

Recently I unthinkingly upgraded MobileMe to the new Calendar. Which of course broke all of that for various reasons. And this turned out to be the best thing I could do, as now I have a much simpler solution that seems to accomplish the same goals and work more reliably.

Now my phone synchronizes with the Google calendar directly using ActiveSync. And my desktop and laptop BusyCal synchronize with Google calendar directly but only need to be running when I need a calendar there. So MobileMe solved my occasional calendar problems by becoming useless for me.

At this point I’ll have to evaluate if there is any point to keeping MobileMe at all or if I can simply use DropBox to keep the other things in sync that MobileMe does for me, and I certainly don’t need another email account, or IM account and their iDisk solution is a joke compared to the ease of Dropbox.

Is there any other value to this service I’m missing?

Yes I get the low level irony of me claiming to be impatient and taking the time to write this rant. But if you think about it, I have now seared this into my memory with this 5 minute interlude.

Basically I start trying to plan out some structure that is used to capture the main things I need capturing, which anyone can tell you are a list of your projects. A list of your next actions. And some sort of calendar to capture the hard landscape of what is happening. And finally a reliable reference file. Where to store stuff you may need to reference later, reliably, in a form that is easy to look up.

Well as a guy who builds systems and programs this is a nightmare, I start thinking this is simple enough to build something. Well it isn’t, because all of the sudden I have something way more complex than the 37signals people have built, and it will take me a good 8 or 40 hours to put together. And then I start thinking about backup, because hell if this is my life I better be able to back it up. And of course I don’t have time for this because while I am thinking about this I am shirking all kinds of other responsibilities, and the fires are growing all around me. Then I run around for 3 days putting them out and long for an uninterrupted month where I can construct this super-duper life runner application.

Well I am a father, and I work, and I have hobbies, there is no uninterrupted month coming any time in the forseeable future, which I can’t really see much of anyway because I am so busy running around putting out fires, or planning for the utopia in some distant future. I really need to work on my middle game.

Anyway, starting today, I am going to errect a little bit of scaffolding to try and hold my life together. I am going to spend about 10 minutes thinking about the simplest system that can possibly work.

*I am picturing a calendar and a notebook.*

I think the biggest thing here is consistency of putting everything there, and to get in the habit of looking at it several times a day. Maybe I can trick myself and write “email” or “bloglines” on the cover, since I typically look at both of those several times an hour.

I have to convince my brain that it doesn’t have to be perfect to start using it.

If you want to skip my gripping adventure in geekdom, and just fix your problem, read [Prevention and Recovery of XP Dual Boot Problems[(http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-May/msg00908.html). Thank you “Jack Aboutboul” for putting this together.

Well if you are still interested, or if that didn’t help you much, maybe a recount of my adventure will.

*Background*: I installed Fedora Core 4 in early July. I left some room for Windows XP too, figuring I would eventually have to install it. Well the first thing I found out was that XP wants to write to the first partition on the disk, even if you install to some other partition. (I know it’s just the MBR) but the installer seems to think it can’t continue unless you put a file system on the first partition that it understands.

So I figure, okay no big deal, I’ll use parted and move stuff around. No good. Extended partitions can’t be moved, they can be resized though. And Since redhat started including SELinux and maybe for other reasons as well, the ext3 file system they set up, has a bunch of options turned on that parted doesn’t understand and because of that it won’t even try and do the resizing and moving for you. So the answer to that is to use resize2fs to change the filesystem size, and then use fdisk to change the corresponding partition size to match. Now is the time to break out the calculator and take good notes (measure twice cut once). Then create new duplicate partitions further on in the disk and use dd to copy the existing partition data over. Leaving a nice clean 15 GB at the beginning of the disk for XP to do its worst.

… *8 hours pass* …

Finally XP is installed and fully patched with security updates, and has firefox, thunderbird and gaim installed. Okay, great, now just reboot with the FC4 install disk, go into rescue mode, change the active boot partition, run grub-install and update the grub.conf to point at the new partitions, right? :-( very wrong!

Fedora informs me that there is no linux installation here, but thanks for coming out. I look at fdisk and see much to my dismay all kinds of weird errors about all the non windows partitions not ending on a sector boundary. *oh boy* My first thought is that the xp installer did something stupid and messed with the other partitions, and boy was I angry. But then I decided that the data is all there, the new partition doesn’t extend beyond where my first linux partition **was**. So unless xp maliciously overwrote all that stuff, it had to be recoverable. And I don’t remember waiting patiently while the installer wrote zeros all over my work for the past 2 months.

So I boot the machine in knoppix fire up one of the best programs I have ever come across testdisk which is used for partition recovery. And testdisk does not give me good results at all. Even after messing around with the options to tell it TARFU.

So I grabbed a coke zero, and sat down and played a game of Madden 2006, of course I threw 2 picks on my first 3 passes, which led to 14 points by Oakland :-(. I have to remember to always kick off to start the game if I am frustrated. I recovered and won 31 - 14, with McNabb coming off his slow start to throw 3 TDs.

So I turned to google thinking, many other people had to have this problem. And I was lucky to come across this. After reading through, I was very angry for not taking a dump of the partition table before installing xp. But I figured, if I try a few different number of heads for the disk geometry, maybe it will work out, and I won’t actually be changing anything, just the way I am looking at the data on the disk. I tried 255. And things looked better to fdisk now.

Still a little loopy, because the XP install was done with the heads set to 240. So I fired up testdisk, and now it found all the partitions, and things were looking right, so I used it to write out the partition table, rebooted, did the grub thing noted earlier. And *BAM*! everything back to normal.

So hopefully if anyone else has this problem, they can have a better chance of finding the solution. Specifically when anyone else is me again.

So if you want help resisting this urge to spend money, go to your library and get a library card. There are some good books there, but that is not the only reason. In the Buck’s County Community College Library you have electronic access to the O’Reilly Safari collection. And you don’t actually need a card to get in there to use it, just have to drive there. Also if you have a card for any Pennsylvania library you can get to Access PA Power Library which gives you access to a lot of stuff you would ordinarily have to pay for. Well in this case you are paying for it with tax money, but you aren’t using it. Probably the best feature of the Power Library is access to NetLibrary which is chock full of stuff, including some technical books (A search for books with the word “programming” in the title published between 2000-2005 resulted in 49 books.) The downside is you need to read the books on your screen, but they are PDFs so I can read on my Linux desktop.

I can only speak for PA but I am sure that many other states have similar deals, and it can’t hurt to go to the library and check it out.

I think the main reason I got interested in programming and playing with computers at all was games. I would never have given a second look at my Dad’s TRS-80 if he hadn’t shown me how to load up some game, he acquired from who knows where, with the data cassette drive and start playing.

> You are in a dark cave, there is a hallway to the west, another to the east and a smell > of rotting flesh from the south, you have a pocket knife, and there is a torch on the > floor…. What do you want to do?

I learned BASIC on that thing just so I could try and mimic what the authors of that wonderful game had done, and my love of programming came from video game roots.

Man, I was hooked, from then on I would have trouble with my body weight, because I would prefer to sit in front of the TRS-80, Atari, IBM PC AT, Beltron, Commodore 64, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, N64, PlayStation 2 than do other stuff. I mean sure I played sports, and did all kinds of other stuff, but sometimes it was a battle to pull myself from playing *River City Ransom* one more time, “This time I’ll win without buying the cowboy boots!”

Anyway, since then I have gotten degree’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, have taken numerous programming courses, have done programming professionally, and have always thought of doing game programming, but never had the guts to follow through. Always doing what other people thought was a more viable means of making money. But hell, I have a day job. I get paid that way, if I am going to do side work, that may eventually become a way to get paid, I need to do something I have passion for.

And video games are that passion. So yeah, add me to the list of all the geeky wanna-be’s who tried this. Because I am trying. My goal is to have something playable by the end of September, and hopefully sooner. And yeah I am going to the dark side to do this, because if I do want to eventually make some money on this, I need to maximize that chance. I am going to try and do this in C# with DirectX on windows.

*GASP*! I thought you hated windows?! I thought you were mister Linux. Well I got news for you, to quote a lovable scoundrel, “Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution. … I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for the money.”

So I start today, actually I started about 3 days ago, but I publically start today. So watch this space, for the next revolution in gaming. :)

1. If you can afford it get some kind of non-CRT monitor, like the ones on laptops or those nice LCD (or whatever technology it is) displays. They are more crisp. My work provides one for me. 2. Turn down the brightness. Turn it down all the way until it reaches a point just below where it is comfortable, then turn it back up 1 or 2 clicks. You still want it to be comfortable, but why stare into a 1000 watt light bulb if you can stare into a 30 watt bulb instead. 3. Turn down the contrast too. This one I remember hearing that it is easier on the eyes if the contrast is not very high. 4. Go outside a few times a day and look at stuff far away, and under natural light. Especially if you are locked in a room with fluorescent bulbs. 5. Blink. If you notice that when you are staring at a screen you don’t blink, you probably should figure out a way to make yourself do that.

I have found that my eyes are less strained feeling the more I pay attention to this kind of stuff. Maybe you will too.

plus the Jets suck. Seriously a first round pick for Doug Jolley, watching your preseason it doesn’t even look like he is starting.

TO=“xxx@gmail.com” SUBJECT=`zenity –entry –text=“What do you want to get done?” \ –title=“GTD\ Entry”` if [ “$?” -eq “0” ] then echo | mail -s “${SUBJECT}” ${TO} fi

and mapped it up to F12 using a technique from my previous post. And now any time I think of something I want to do I just hit F12, type a quick “next action” and hit enter. Later I can process my gmail inbox. I may also have to find a way to batch this process for when I am going through my physical inbox. But so far so good.

By the way, Buy the book, (or get it in a library or whatever) it’s great, it at least makes you feel like you can do lots of stuff without worrying about it all the time.

Once you understand the Iceberg Secret, it’s easy to work with it. Understand that any demos you do in a darkened room with a projector are going to be all about pixels. If you can, build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished.

Outside of the context of my life this may not be huge to you. But if you shared some of the experiences I have over the past 5 years, you would understand how profound this is. Or you might say, yeah, I know that, who doesn’t know that.

But it doesn’t matter, based on the understanding I reached this morning reading Chapter 25, it will forever alter the way I handle the creation of software. Sure there are other great insights provided by Joel, and they may all be even more important, or seem more important. But as for me, as for right now, there is nothing more important to understand.

When it comes to software there is nothing, absolutely nothing more important about it than the user interface.

I guess with it being a Friday I will have to read the the joke RFC too. Side note: If you try really really hard to tell a joke and it really is only mildly amusing, does it still count as a joke?

Also I downloaded ipodder last night and grabbed a few podcasts to listen to on the travel to and from work. Mildly interesting, I guess at least as good as some of the commercial radio around here. The only problem is the people tend to not have a very strict agenda and digress into really boring topics or inside jokes, it’s like college radio where all they talk about is how cool it is to be able to communicate over this wonderous medium that is radio. “And here we are voices coming to you through the air, isn’t radio great! I wish everone would do this.”

Although I think an hour long podcast of just the little 5 - 10 second self-promotional rock and roll intros with ominous voiceovers that each caster inevitably makes for themselves would be fun to hear. It would be like just hearing that little segment of the Rob Zombie song Howard uses to launch his show every day, over and over. (Yeah I know, I am the only one driving around at 6 that hears this. But it sounds cool.) Seriously I think most of the people doing podcasting probably wanted to do it, just because they always liked this really cool part of some song wanted to have it as their intro music, much like the WWE wrestlers have, or that episode of the family guy when Peter wished for theme music to follow him around all the time.

“Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus ….”

It is full of really detailed articles on how to build the projects within. The best one for my money is the 5-in-1 network cable. For those of you who are always looking around for one of those Cisco cables or a crossover cable, this is the only way to fly. Probably would take about 30 minutes to throw together once you had all the parts, which is the same 30 minutes you would spend searching through piles of old Cisco boxes every few weeks when you realize you left your console cable somewhere. Plus the null modem and the crossover are priceless to carry with you too, and since it was something you put together, you will be less tempted to leave it behind for someone else to use.

Some of the other articles look good too, the primer on soldering is a must read for getting started with this kind of stuff.

To sum it up: Chock full O’ Geeky goodness. So subscribe or at the very least order the first volume from Amazon to check it out.

• 59 to INBOX
• 373 to the caughtspam folder
• 10 misses
• 0 false alarms

That means I got 7.8 times as much spam as I got messages in my inbox. I am sure there are much greater horror stories out there, but damn, I really am not going to buy a rolex or prescription drugs based on an email that looks like a ransom note, because of all the interspersed mispellings and numbers to try and make it through my filters.

And check out your local craigslist, which is basically a high signal to noise classifieds section. I think they charge for job postings to support themselves, but otherwise anyone can post. And they wisely have RSS feeds for most of their stuff too.

But this should provide for some nice 1.3 MP shots at the bike race. I am even considering looking to see if I can get a hold of the pocket cam x to play with and take some 2.1 MP shots, and see if the flash actually makes it useful indoors. However I haven’t found any reviews or example pics from that, which makes me skeptical. Also I’d like to find a refurb or something so I don’t have to pay a full $100.

When I am feeling especially stressed about lack of productivity, I like to read things like The Tyranny of Email and pretend that somehow I will be able to incorporate those suggestions into my routine. And on occasion I was able to enact some policies suggested in that article. Of course the inevitable result was a catastrophe that I got stuck fixing for a large amount of time because I was ignoring email.

Here is a scenario: As the smart programmer is not able to rein in a poor idea being circulated immediately, because the other powers that be are having a near real time discussion over email and choose to enact said poor idea without the mandatory idea cool off period. The result will be that the customers expectations are already set in such a wrong-headed manner because of course a bad idea can’t just live inside your company it must immediately be communicated to any and all customers, who will undoubtedly agree with and begin to demand that it be implemented.

Of course the only true way to untangle this mess is to kill the people that started it, and anyone who is propogating the myth that this dumb idea is any good. Sort of an idiot genocide. But life, often, seems to be about compromise. Short of killing everyone in a two mile radius, you will probably need to put your creative solution hat on (caution: this may involve consuming alcohol) and find a way to provide the eventual end result of the requested feature, in a less evil way. Which of course will simply be added to your queue of very, very, very urgent things that need to be done.

Now you have these options:

1. suck it up, and fulfill the new requirement.
2. The ever popular, ignore it and hope it dies of it’s own poisons
3. The customer (much like a small child) may have a propensity for distraction, and you can simply pop the adult equivalent of “Finding Nemo” into the proverbial DVD player.
4. Go back in time, check your email, and launch a preemptive strike to avoid this horrible alternate timeline where Biff Tannen becomes rich and marries your mother.

The lesson in this discussion is that if you redefine your theory of productivity to value the stamping out of bad ideas over the actual producing of goods, in this case bug free software. Then you can happily go through your day reading email, calling people stupid, and using your rapier-like logic to destroy all the bad ideas. You can then leave at 4 PM feeling very accomplished. This will put you right on the fast track to upper management. And leave you plenty of free time for practicing martial arts, in case you miss an email and need to proceed with the idiot extinction plan.

Now I have to work on designing my new corner desk.

So I am currently seeking options, I have basically ruled out replacing it with something similar. I would prefer a desk that will support being moved (taken apart and put back together) many times without an extroidinary amount of damage occuring as a result. So I guess anything made out of some kind of metal or pvc tubing hooked up to wooden horizontal areas would do okay. But I haven’t had much luck finding anything that was too interesting browsing on-line furniture collections.

So here are the basic requirements.

• Sturdy enough to support moving without breaking
• Strong enough to support my Dell 21" monitor
• Corner desk (the above mentioned monitor likes to be in the corner so it isn’t three inches from the edge of the desk)
• the monitor should be raised, so it is at the right eye level.
• Plenty of horizontal surface area for all of my crap
• I think I like to take advantage of the vertical as well, for storage, some sort of hutch or shelving system
• Something that is smart and puts computer parts where I can reach them would be nice.
• need something quickly.

My current thought, is the only way I will meet all my needs inexpensively is to build something myself. But to meet the quickness demand, I will probably have to buy something crappy temporarily, which will eventually make it’s way to the basement, after I can build the ultimate desk.

Anyone have any desk suggestions? Or even some suggestions on how to build a desk?

Is there a SpamAssassin MT plugin?

Or is the solution much simpler?

better yet:

1. Before you start writing a method, decide whether it will ever return null. Document this decision in the @return section of the method’s Javadoc.
2. Never have a method return null unless there’s a really good reason for it.
3. If your method returns an array or a collection, there’s no reason to ever return null. Return an empty array or collection instead.
4. If you have a situation where null is a valid value for a variable, you can make use of the Introduce Null Object refactoring, to make the behaviour explicit.

Read more here.

There are few creatures more feral and dangerous than a stressed, sleep-deprived, overly-caffinated programmer who has just been told that a bug they fixed two months ago has resurfaced… for the third time.

- www.junitee.org

When working in a geographically distributed development environment. Anyone who can’t find the time to be as verbose as possible when updating the rest of the team as to what they have done, should be promoted to management as soon as possible where they can do the least amount of harm.

<a href="http://sco.iwethey.org/">SCO</a> like this: SCO

It would be pretty sweet if someone at SCO managed to sneak that up on their home page in a hidden <div/>. Come on, you know you want to.

Also you might be interested in taking a different approach suggested on the linux-elitists mailing list: here. Basically they suggest that we may benefit from getting information directly from SCO's mouth, by calling and asking for a sales weenie to explain to us how we can become legal Linux users. Or maybe request an annual report so we can consider investing in SCOX. The idea being that this will cost them money to support quite a few requests by freedom lovers everywhere that are not pleased with their current noisy and irritating business practices.

Of course the stock price being down 10% today doesn't bode well for much except class action suits. I guess if you already jumped on you can always file a complaint with the SEC. This tact was suggested here and followed up here. Good point those sco exec's stock dumping since June have been piling up (source).

Also rumor has it that the IBM counterclaims were filed last night. I would imagine you will be able to find copies shortly on both sco.iwethey.org and GrepLaw.

Update: (August 8, 2003) IBM counterclaims available here

I was able to track this down in the perl.dbi.users newsgroup, here I have also put the complete text of the posting in the extended part of this entry entry. http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/perl.dbi.users/17822: Newsgroups: perl.dbi.users Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 09:29:24 +0200 (CEST) To: Rudy Lippan cc: dbi-users[at]perl.org Subject: Re: DBD::mysql and RedHat 9 Message-ID: From: sguazt[at]kerbero.com (Marco Guazzone) References:

Yesssss!!!!!! It works!!! Thank you very much!! But, finally, what is it the wrong side? Is it the perl-RH9 version? However some packages did compile well even if the LANG var was setted. [on my machine I have LANG=en_US.UTF-8] With the perl-RH8 version I hadn’t this problems!

Regards, Marco Guazzone

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Rudy Lippan wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Marco Guazzone wrote: > > > > Hi, > > I’ve just installed RH 9 on my laptop; then I’ve downloaded the mysql > > 4.0.12 binary distribution from www.mysql.com and the DBI package and > > installed them. OK! > > Then I’ve tried to install DBD::mysql 2.1026 but I’ve got these errors: > > > perl Makefile.PL > > … > > > make > > Makefile:89: *** missing separator. Stop. > > Try this: > > unset LANG; perl Makefile.PL; make. > > > Later, > > Rudy > >

Lots of good information, and a high signal to noise on the linux-elitists list. If you are interested in Hard free software questions and clever answers.

Let me close this entry with a quote from Darl McBride the SCO Group CEO in August 2002 (reference).

Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.

Also MSWord takes a lot of kicking around from myself included, but it is not terribly difficult to get it to do what you want. I think working with Knuth’s TeX, LaTeX, and GNU texinfo, have helped me to better understand what goes into document formatting and therefore be more effective in using MSWord when I need to format my documents. But give me emacs and people who can read plain (extremely portable) text files any day.

My favorite part of the CrossOver install is captured in this image.

Luckily there appears to be no collateral damage from the War of smoke containment. This upgrade of power supply has cleared up a few of the idiosyncrasies that I have experienced with this system over the time I have been using it. So, lesson learned, the power is the lifeblood of the computer. So don’t skimp on the powersupply just because it will come packaged with your really cool case.

So it turns out once you let the smoke escape from that silver box, the machine will not work. And it is possible, even if you get a new box with brand spankin new smoke, that some of the elves and gnomes, maybe even some of the critical ones, could have been killed in the fallout of the massive smoke release.

The power supply in sherlock died today. Sherlock is the name of my desktop, anyway the PS is the only part of the system I didn’t hand select so it is my fault. I was running my geforce4ti in there and it was only a 300W powersupply from “Deer Compuyter CO, LTD”.

I have been given recommendations for the following types of PS: PC Power and Cooling and Antec. Hopefully I can find a nice 450W from one of these manufacturers at CompUSA this morning, otherwise I will have to decide if the cost of overnight shipping is less than or equal to the value of getting Sherlock back up and running, and assessing any additional damage.

Additional powersupply recommendations are welcome…

A company I am associated with has a Cisco Pix 515 in their main office and actually happens to have a spare 501. So they thought it would be a good idea to have a VPN between their main office and their branch office. Their branch office has a Lucent Pipeline 75 for their 128 Kbps ISDN connection. The offered me a nice payday to get the VPN to work for them, so having quite a few years of Cisco and general network experience I happily accepted. Read on for a technical overview of the problems and solutions I encountered.

The initial network I found in the branch office was quite simple. A static IP address on the Pipeline that was configured for Port Address Translation (PAT), or in Lucent Pipeline terms, NAT with a single address. Probably a pretty common configuration for an office like this and most any house network using one of those Linksys now Cisco devices.

The problems began when I realized the NAT/PAT on the Pipe75 wasn’t smart enough to do some sort of workaround translation on ipsec packets. The incompatability and workarounds on this are generally well known. Googling for the various combinations of vpn, ipsec, nat, masquerading, etc. will give you some nice background material on the problem.

Well now I run into the first major roadblock and that is that Lucent is terrible at providing information and support on the products the assimilated. I don’t have a support contract with Lucent and neither does this company, they just were given the hardware when they signed up for ISDN service many years ago. In order to get access to Lucent’s knowledge base and forums apparently you need to pay them for support. Obviously this kills of any secondary free support structures that could arise in their forums before it even could begin. Well I was able to locate some useful documents: Pipeline 75 Users Guide and the Pipeline 75 Reference Guide. Also I was able to get a support account that had minimal access to some whitepapers that Ascend published for the customers years ago, but none of them dealt with this situation, only with trying to get the VPN implementation on the Pipe75 to work.

I was able to get the ISP to issue an additional Static address. So now I have to /32’s to work with. The pipe75 and the Pix. Now what I am going to do leave the original static address on the external interface of the Pipe75, I am having the ISP statically route the other slash-32 to the first one (the external pipe75 interface).

And here is where I got a little ghetto or clever, depending on how you look at it. Say the addresses I have are 172.16.1.105/32 and 172.16.1.180/32. Well 172.16.1.105 is the outside interface of the pipe75, and somewhere the ISP should have an entry like: ip route 172.16.1.180 255.255.255.255 172.16.1.105. Now the internal interface of the pipe75 is set to 172.16.1.177/29 and I set the external interface of the Pix to 172.16.1.180/29, and I set the default gateway on the PIX to go to 172.16.1.177. Yeah I am masking out a few real addresses. But it won’t effect the ISP and I am severely doubting that the users at the branch office have any reason to go to those real IP addresses I am masking out. Well anyway it is a risk I am willing to take. So at this point all I need to do is turn off NAT on the Pipe75 and I am good to go.

The status at this point is I am waiting on someone at the ISP to enter the route for me. Then I can get into the Pipe75 and turn off NAT. The Pix and everything else are already in place as they should be, just need that route so I can stop doing uneccesary translations which are breaking my ipsec, and all other non-ipsec traffic will just be PAT’d by the PIX to 172.16.1.180.

If nothing else, I have some nice notes here, if I ever need to revisit this configuration.

So does the standard advice of don’t use a .0 release for RedHat, which I have often recieved, apply to this 9.0 release? Should I continue using 7.3? Is this jump to 9.0 along with their recent announcement of their RedHat Enterprise Linux, just evidence that the marketroids are taking over.

Just in case you wonder, both my desktop and my laptop are running 8.0 and I have been generally pleased. It is very pretty. I have also heard from a few that have upgraded to Gnome 2.2 from RedHats Rawhide that they are quite pleased with the enhancements, and claim it is even more complete. So I will be taking advantage of my subscription to download the 9.0 isos, and promptly installing.

Maybe someone with bandwidth to burn would let me upload the 9.0 isos to their server, once I grab them?

This is good

It is particularly good when the architects of the software and the developers of the software aren’t the same people or even working at the same company. It provides a common frame of reference for the build of the application. All you hackers who are also Howard Roark fans out there may complain that it constrains your creativity and it is just reimplementing what someone else did. And I agree on one minor point and that is the root of the argument. Something done isn’t glorious simply because someone else did it. And relying wholly on others for not only innovation and progress, but to do your work for you, is absolutely repulsive.

However, Roark, as an architect, had to constrain his work in a certain way. He was limited by the laws of physics, engineering and by building materials, it is his ability to integrate all these constraints and laws into a single unified whole that made him the hero. And while the parallel may not be complete (or may be non-existent) you can utilize the work that was done in developing the MVC as some of your building material, and on top of that you may construct your work.

Now I can get back to working at 1400x1050 and in Linux. The backup laptop I was using was only capable of 800x600 under Linux, and 1024x768 under wintendo

Now if only I could run M$ Project under Codeweavers Crossover Office.