Older blog entries for dsifry (starting at number 37)

I love it when a plan comes together...

So far so good, learning some interesting things about building bootable CD-ROMs. Thank goodness, there are a number of good projects already oth there putting together the CDs - the Linuxcare Bootable Toolkit, the LNX-BBC, the BBLCD Toolkit and others. Still, it has taken me about a week to come to grips with El Torito, initrd, rdev, syslinux, cloop, and all of the other niggly things that can go wrong.

It is really cool to break through bottlenecks and actually create something other than coasters...

Stay tuned...

Layoffs

My heart goes out to the folks who are without work involuntarily, good luck in the job search!

Startups

I'm a startup guy. I'm in the throes of getting a new venture off the ground. It's awesome. I love watching an idea turn into reality, watching other people get jazzed about the idea, watching an idea blossom into a business. It's better than sex. Really. After all of the crap I've been through with my last startup, there's a part of me that's astonished that I'm throwing myself into the breach yet again. Still, it feels so great to be working on something creative again. And the hope (folly?) is that I'll take the lessons I learned in the last go-round and make sure to not let them happen again.

Personal

Having fun with the bbq - since it's almost autumn in SF, the summer fog is finally lifting and so I've been doing a lot of grilling in the afternoons. Yum. Melody just keeps talking more and more, I'm secretly convinced she's a child genius. She's solving puzzles made for 4 year olds, and she isn't even 2 yet! She shows a lot of signs of giftedness. Whoops! There goes all of my jinx-buzzers, going off again. Wierd that I'm superstitious about good thing happening in my life - I'm much more comfortable when I'm struggling, in a wierd sort of way.

New Arrivals

Welcome, mperry! Welcome, aftyde!

Yee ha! Finished with my big consulting project yesterday. Flew out to Denver and gave a presentation to the CEO and senior management team, and it went well. The final report we wrote turned out to be 360 pages long. No kidding. Double sided and bound, it still seemed about as big as a midsized city's white pages. Heh heh. I'm really looking forward to this week off before LinuxWorld - I need to get my batteries recharged again.

Personal

Looks like Melody's caught something - she had a fever of 100.5 this morning. Poor baby...

Funny

Want a good laugh? Check this out. Where else can you combine humor, religion, civil liberties, and microsoft-bashing all in one non-fiction story? Worth the read.

Cool, passed a major test today - went over the final report with the customer's team this afternoon, and they were impressed. I still have a few more things to work on, but the major hump is over. Now all I gotta worry about is the presentation to the CEO on friday. I'm looking forward to it.

Domain names

Who says you can't find good dot com domain names anymore? I just picked up a sweet domain tonight. Heh heh heh.

Broadcast2000

Got it built on my debian box, from source. Digitial Video editing, with batch procesing capabilities, and good SMP utilization apparently. Quite nice little package. Too bad that you can't go directly to Real format from it - you apparently have to output to quicktime, and then convert it from there, possibly with some free Real tools. Haven't gotten that far.

Six Feet Under

I'm really getting into this show. Very cool stuff. I love the Thomas Newman theme music, too. This week's episode was creepy with the SIDS baby, though. Having an 18 month old made that one hit a little too close to home.

Cranking onwards and upwards. Making the final push for one of my clients, I've been doing nothing but writing reports and cleaning up interviews, writing a tech audit, you name it. Ugh! Busy busy busy. No time really to spend with the family, I'm spending most of my time sitting on the damned computer getting these reports done.

Calendaring

I was interviewed by Michael J Hammel of LWN on the current state of calendaring on Linux, both open source and proprietary code. He made a mistake in an attribution, saying that dyork was involved in ReefKnot. What I told him was that ReefKnot was being led by skud who worked at the same company as dyork, and that I didn't remember Skud's full name at the time of the interview. Sorry Kirrily! Sorry, Dan!

Ricochet

Any former Metricom Ricochet users out there? I bet you've now got a useless modem on your hands. Anybody want to sell their modem? If so, send me an email.

Sweet, just rebuilt my firewall box, turning it back into a real firewall - not a firewall with a web server, FTP server, cvs server, streaming media server, etc. I migrated all of my important web sites over to another server. All in all, a pain in the ass, but at least I have the box running debian instead of an old version of red hat. Bad news? I had to reboot it after a 265 day uptime...

Phew. Just checking in, I've been deep underwater doing work for a client. In addition, I've been learning software RAID for Linux, the Linux LVM, and I've switched over to the new version of Mozilla (although 0.91 is the latest in debian-unstable, I'm awaiting 0.93 to make it into sid).

I'm actually still getting some work done. No time lately to work on Openflock or GCTP though... Grrr. I would really like it if the next company I start doesn't have to rely on proprietary software for group calendaring...

Whew! Busy day. After getting a bunch more work done for one of my clients, I sat down and finished the article about privacy I've been working on. It should really shake a few people up - there's some scary stuff happening right now, I can tell you from personal experience.

dyork, I'm really glad to see that the LPI has matured to the point where you feel comfortable letting go of the reins. Kudos on a job well done! csm, congratulations! You're brought tremendous integrity and a lot of hard work to the LPI, and it's great to see that the LPI is getting such a qualified new leader.

Now if I could only get some time off to go play golf...

Sweet! I got dvgrab working on my box, and I successfully grabbed an hour of digital video from my camcorder, scene by scene. I figure that at MPEG1 compression, I can get about 2 hours of video and audio onto a standard CDROM. That mean that I can take all nine hours of video that I have from Melody's birth onwards and put them all on about 4 CD-Rs. This will also be a lot easier to burn and distribute than copying the DV to videotape directly. Interestingly, ~1 hour of (almost raw) video and audio is 11.4 GB of data. Now I know how many hard disks I need to buy for my ultimate DV/NAS box.

Broadcast 2000

I also now have a reason for 100Mbps in the house - I have been unable to get Broadcast 2000 to run on my debian box. In the meantime I'm stuck with a windoze box running Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 SE Basic - basically the video editing software that came with the Firewire card I bought. I also found that I can't use xanim to display MPEGs made in this process. I can use realvideo files that it generates, however. When will we get a decent video viewer for Linux? Something that can view quicktime and newer MPEG streams?

PCMCIA Firewire Cards

By the way, don't ever get a PCMCIA Firewire card. I got one, and it is essentially useless for capturing video. Lots of dropped frames, lost audio, the works. Funny, a PCI card from the same vendor shows no such problems, even with a Pentium Pro 200 CPU. I guess that just shows ya that PCI is a MUCH faster bus than PCMCIA - even cardbus - even a 33MHz PCI bus.

Next Project

Must get more disks for new NAS box, and must get 100BT switch for the living room...

Whew! I've been getting a workout lately writing MRDs. It's funny - after I wrote the first one, writing the second was much easier - and now I'm going back over the first one to polish it up - there's so much I missed, and it is often so easy for me to slip up and write specs instead of requirements. You see, I already have the design layed out, sir... :-)

Birthdays

Happy birthday, hacker! How's things going? Haven't heard from you in a while.

Went to my uncle's 70th birthday party on Sunday. That guy's still got more energy than I hae at less than half his age. That and a huge heart to go with his energy. I sure wish that I'm that cool when I'm 70.

Melody

Unbelievable tht she's almost 18 months old. What an incredible cutie she is. Yeah, I'm a proud dad. So sue me. Here she is frolicking with her second cousin, and here she is with mom and dad in pigtails.

Off to bed.