Older blog entries for mperry (starting at number 19)

Sunday afternoon-

Started playin around with AMANDA to get an idea about how it works, what I can gain from it to backup my smallish home lan. Pretty cool and easy to setup. There is a deb package for it that works pretty well too. I am using a Exabyte 8700 tape drive with the 2.4.13 kernel and the "old adaptec driver". The new driver seems to want to get a "message" from the device and the exabyte does not speak that language at all.

I also am exploring backing up my windows systems using SAMBA and a BSD box with a amanda client running on it.

If you want an easily configured backup solution, I think AMANDA seems pretty solid. I also tried AFBACKUP but I could not get the authentication to work right. ARKEIA is free to download but I could not get a network problem fixed that plagued me through 3 days of trying.

I attended the Linux Showcase only one day due to illness but would have liked to attend the Friday evening handhelds.org BOF but could not.

In other news, my days at Linuxcare are waning away and Christmas approaches. Appears that I will be off work during the holidays and this means I can be home with my wife and kids for the whole season. That's a nice change.

Sunday evening after...

Been an interesting some months, have to say. Built a new system for some work going on and took it from debian stable to unstable in about an hour.

Spent a lot of time at work playing with new laptops which is kinda nice and then writing the reports which is not so nice. Began working on associated documentation on a pet project of mine which must live in seclusion for now. I have a feeling by first of next year it will not be so. Way to early to speculate on what it will mean and to whom, but its fun and rewarding doing the research and then writing the documents.

Not a very lot to say these days. Sometimes its fun to write; other times its fun to lurk. Lurking was something almost forced by pacbell today in the East Bay from Fremont to Newark and Union City. No dsl, no nothing for 7 hours. This was building up yesterday with a series of shorter outages. I also have this feeling that performance seems hampered here. I guess I could go looking for another ISP but I have been here for almost 3 years and its still more of a local business.

Oh well, deal with it tomorrow! Have another beer now.

Well, its been almost 2 weeks since I posted anything here. Been pretty busy working on a variety of laptops which seem challenging to get Linux working on. I think I managed to learn a bit about how to compile X from CVS since I have probably done it about 30 times now give or take.

Have not had much time to mess with my IPAQ lately and I wanted to take a look at some of the networking stuff especially with regard to wireless.

I suppose one could say things are moving right along. Halloween, and my son is very excited. My daughter, who is three, is totally taken in by house decorations and runs around yelling "boo" all the time.

I think I will have a lot of interesting things to say around about 1 December or so :)

New day here...

My big announcement, at least for me, is I am leaving Linuxcare on 30 November 2001. A lot of reasons, some personal, some professional. Am I happy? I think so. Do I have something to look forward to? I definitely think so.

Many thanks for the kind words ianmacd . I don't feel quite able to address some of your very well written questions right now. I think that you know the truth though.

Thanks to that group at Linuxcare that has always been there for me, helping me, sometimes being that guru that is so necessary. I have always felt so close and through the next weeks I don't feel any further away. You are all in my thoughts and I have enjoyed the work and play and the trips to other planets (inside joke for the Linuxcare folks!).

See everyone on these dusty roads soon.

Quite a day today. Simply exhausting, perhaps exhilerating, and interesting to say the least. As I watched today unfold, it dawned on me that I am glad of the final outcome.

More on changes and mods most likely tomorrow. Suffice to say that many things will end shortly and others will begin.

New challenges, especially!

Waning days of the vacation.

Last day or so has been off but working on some things I would definitely like to get done before I return. I have a strong feeling that I am about to witness some basic changes in my life. I don't want to go on or post an epic here. When I left archeology behind, it was after 15 years of happiness tromping through the American Southwest and Mojave Desert doing environmental protection and consulting and finding a lot of very significant prehistoric cultural resources as I went. But my time came up for that. One day, I just knew it. I was walking in a pretty park in Daly City and I had this burst of realization that I would never walk from "Barstow to Las Vegas" ever again nor would I work on a 1,000 mile long natural gas pipeline or be on US Government federal properties like the Forest Service or the Air Force or the Navy. I walked away from that with some sense of accomplishment but also a sense of completion.

I am nearing that also in other arenas. I feel I have completed things and I believe change is coming. I believe that change can be good and if one does not adapt and adopt to it, it leaves you behind and you have not gained.

Where I am going with this, I don't quite know yet. I want to announce something, but its too early. I want to find a new place I can journey through, find some happiness in, find a lot of challenge, and go for another walk in another park.

No big news for me on things Linux. I am happy with it. It seems to encompass me with its flexibility and learning abilities. I also feel so glad to know the people I work with and have worked with.

Very gratifying.

Ongoing vacation and sometimes work diary :-)

We spent a few days on two short trips which were nice getaways. Earlier we went to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and we just got back from Sonora and a trip to several pretty nice state parks.

Working on a few documents and technical approaches that are continuing labors of love for me. I have done a lot of work around custom Linux solutions both from an implementation and design architecture standpoint and I had decided some months ago to bring all this together into a paper. The focus of this particular work is on Linux and its adoption over a strategic lifecycle. Very interesting evolutionary perspective which perhaps comes from some years of doing exactly that in the Social Sciences (archeology).

I had hoped to move past fvwm but its such an interesting window manager that I am still on it. Lots of things to learn about it. Hopefully tomorrow, I can get some work things done so that I am not terribly behind when I arrive back at $JOB this next week.

One other note... dsifry , I apologize for missing calls from you. I will take care of what I promised. We were on vacation the last week.

Late in the evening.

Very interesting events happening. Soon changes will occur. As a archeologist friend once told me, "there is nothing as inevitable as change".

Watch for it.

Very pleasant now in the East Bay. I read a interview with Tridge at linux-mag which was a good read about his take on most everything.

Since I am officially on vacation, I have been doing a lot of vacation type stuff but still seem to have a few work tasks now and then. One interesting thing lately has been exploring a few window managers which caught my interest before. Primarily, fvwm2, blackbox, enlightenment; but I also have used icewm on occasion. There are so many choices that I can pretty much spend a day on each one I am interested in. Learning about fvwm2 was on today's list. I am nowhere near a pro, but I learned a bit about its .fvwm2rc file and how to exec things in it. Exploring window managers using debian is a breeze! My alltime favorite is still windowmaker because perhaps I have used it for so long and it seems to do what I need. I think I could use fvwm2 also though.

Tomorrow, I think I will learn a bit about how icewm does things

On the portable, ipaq side, I have been playing a lot lately with the pre5 release of familiar linux. Things are working quite well as I have noted before.

On the play side, I am finding several games to be very good challenges for my admittedly marginal game playing abilities. I really like simcity and Alpha Centauri; but Descent claims both my time and some sense of vertical and horizontal displacement.

Thanks go out!

Last day of work for 2 weeks! Woohoo! Not to sound too mysterious, but I was able to do something for someone that is rated as a Master and is responsible for a lot of help in what I do. I ain't gonna say what that "something" is but I think the mystery person knows who he is. Suffice to say that it gave all of us a great deal of pleasure to do this.

Thanks to that mystery person who is also rated as a Master in these prestigious settings for all the help with ThinkPads, desktops, servers, and everything.

Minimal Notes on the Work Thing-

On the workside, I think there will be a lot of interest in some of the things we are into now. The real news will have to wait a bit longer but its very cool and I think people will find it challenging, interesting, and provocative.