* Nearly a week without an update!!! I figured I’d better get something in here or people might think this was Mark’s page!! (Just kidding Mark!!!) Anyway a lot has happened and I will try to get at least the highlights posted.
* The trip to KC was quite a success as we solved several more of those unusual cabling problems. Pretty much the same kind of thing as before. I can only surmise that someone “borrowed” the connectors and replaced them with the wrong ones. All in all, all the problems were easy fixes.
* Last Thursday night, Joe and I had a great meal at a place called McCoy’s in the Old Westport area of Kansas City. (Kind of a cross between the Loop and the Riverfront here in St. Louis). We managed to walk several blocks to a place called the Grand Emporium (which, rumor has it, was named “Best Blues bar in the US”, twice). The opening band was kind of a ska version of Steely Dan and they were having a great deal of fun (although the man on the mixing board really should hae been paying attention). The main act was a local woman who, although very good, sounded too much like Melissa Etheridge to be enjoyable. Now, Melissa is an amazing artist, so don’t get me wrong, it’s just that if I want to hear Melissa Etheridge, I want to hear Melissa Etheridge and not some knock-off.
* Worked on Dad’s lawn mower on Saturday. I ended up completely disassembling the carbuerator (sp?) and found quite a bit of sediment, but it appears there may be more wrong than just that, so I will have to work on it again later this week.
* Sunday was wonderful! I got to spend the afternoon in my big fat lazy chair and watch the Rams meander through the game with the 49′ers while enjoying a blazing little fire in the fireplace! (ahhh! the creature comforts!!) I’m not sure where I picked up this fascination with football lately, but it sure beats raking leaves!!
* Logan dressed up as a soldier for Halloween this year in a costume that Connie (Faith’s friend from California) had sent him. We spent over two hours trick-or-treating with a couple of his friends. He made quite the haul! I’m sure we will be set until the next round of candy at Easter.
* Made some modifications to my Sawfish configuration at work so I will post those to my Sawfish page sometime tomorrow. I finally “de-cloaked” on the sawfish mailing list and let them know about the page as well, so I hope to get some feedback soon!
* There really seems to be a “Ghost in the Machine” or machines in this case. The last three problems at work have been quite strange. In all three cases, the equipment in question has worked very well for some time. (records of historical data prove this). In the first case, I have a data connection that streams reports from box A to box B and is collected on box B for dissemination. Suddenly, the modular connector that has been in place for well over six months is now the wrong kind. That’s right, I changed out a connecter (rj45 to db25) to a crossover connector (still rj45 to db25) and now it works again. Okay, somebody must be playing a prank, right? The second case involves a user’s permissions. This user has been listed in the group file on three different machines as having access to certain files. All of a sudden, the entry in the group file is gone on all three machines –at the same time!!! So after adding the user back into the group files on each of the machines, all is well again. Case #3: Again a connection between two boxes (One an AT&T 3B21D and the other a Sun Netra-T, in case you were wondering..) that has worked for many months. In the Devices file the entry for the connection was misspelled. No way could this connection ever work with an invalid entry. Yet, for many months, it did just that. Hmmm… All Hallow’s Eve doth approach…..
* Later tonight I will be going with my nephew Eric to see about getting the car he wants. The bank approved his loan, however it was for considerably less than the dealer wants for the car and I am not sure if I can talk them down that far.
* I managed to fix my themes issue finally! Not exactly a kosher solution, but hey, it works. I added a “matching” line to my custom file that pulls in all the decorations for a particular theme. I will post the code changes tomorrow.
o The following comes from my custom file. (custom-set-typed-variable (quote match-window-profile) (quote ((((WM_NAME . “*”)) (frame-style . Aquaified)))) (quote match-window) (quote match-window))
o This works by matching all windows on a wildcard entry (the asterisk after WM_NAME).
o “Aquaified” is the name of the theme downloaded and installed from the Sawfish website.
* I did a bit more work on Mark’s page while he watched so that he could see exactly what I did. I edited his file with emacs in html-mode. Mark pretty much freaked out at the font-lock stuff and can’t wait to get a hold of a copy to install for himself!!! (I have a copy of “Emacs in 24 Hours” that comes with several versions of Emacs on a cd that I will bring in for him tomorrow)
* I have decided that my statistics will not return. I have looked over previous entries and find very little value in them at the moment. They may return at a later date when I can utilize a database backend or somsuch, but until then thay are simply too cumbersome to fret about.
* The upgrade to 0.32 was very painless, just configured and make installed. No errors. very nice. I still have problems with themes. Aaron was kind enough to send me some hints regarding this, but to no avail. Oh well, it’s something I will have to work on some more.
* Re-worked Mark’s page so that it could be seen by unix-based browsers. It turns out that there were a couple of extra <table> tags floating around messing things up
* I only worked a half day today. This afternoon I visited my new physician for the first time. I ended up getting a tetanus shot and finding out I am working very hard towards having high blood pressure. The joys of growing older. At least I don’t have a hernia!!
* John Harper just released version 0.32 of sawfish so I guess I will be upgrading my Sparc at work tomorrow.
* Charlie was asked to contribute a bit of code by one of the Emacs developers!!! Wow, how cool is that?
—Now there is a man who knows where his towel is at! (see h2g2)
* Seeing that I upgraded my Sawfish installation yesterday, I thought it was time to update my “Sawfish” page. I added a screen shot as well as rewriting a majority of the text.
* I noticed the other day that Aaron not only has been visiting here, but also added a link on his “Places I’ve visited lately”. Very cool! Thanks, Aaron!
* Today was a bit slow at work so I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Sawfish (0.31.1) on my Ultra II. This of course required the upgrade of librep and rep-gtk. I ran into the very same problems this time as before (see Sawfish). After actually reading the README’s and the FAQ, I changed the default GTK shared memory settings and finally got my window treatments to display correctly. (Although the themes still wont work)
* I spent some time working on the Mac SE/30 tonight. After re-installing the Dayna port drivers, I have come to the conclusion that a) I think the ethernet card is broke or mis-configured and b) fixing it is currently beyond the scope of my skill and desire. This is a project that will need to be shelved until more patience and/or need arise. On the other hand, if anyone is willing to a bit of a trade, I’ve a really spiffy SE/30 and a Quadra 605 I just might be willing to let go of!!!!!
* One last thing, I no longer work for Southwestern Bell Wireless. I now work for Cingular Wireless. This is the result of the merger of BellSouth and SBC Wireless. So it really isn’t a job change, just a name change. And oh boy, what a name. That’s karma for you! We spent the last year making fun of our competitors name (Verizon) and here we are challenged with Cingular. You probably wont see any advertisements (well, maybe a few) until after the first of the year. Until then, all of the corporate branding will remain intact (i.e. I still answer the phone with “Southwestern Bell…”)
* Well, I suppose I might as well start calling this “Weekend Update” since that is the only time in the last two weeks that I have had to make updates!! I will try to summarize the last week’s progress in a bit. The current stats may return if I can get back to daily updates. A couple of things on my mind at the moment that I would like to share: First, when Faith gets caught up on her journal and posts it, you will see that this litter of kittens has been a struggle from the beginning, health problems seemed to dominate the first few weeks of three of the the little ones. “Lymphedema” — I think that’s what she calls it- has pestered the three and caused some significant swelling. I do not wish to speak too hastily, but it seems that the kittens are overcoming this as the swelling has gone down considerably as they grow! We have discussed the possibility of just keeping all of them as we have grown quite close to them over the past weeks. My only consolation from the last litter was that of Gizmo and Gonzo who did not need to be separated and went to the home of an old friend. I think that may be the only way we can part with any of these as well. If they must be separated (and I guess they must- nine cats is just too many) I hope that we can find good homes for them with people we know and trust. It really is like raising children in a way- especially when it comes time to let go…. The second thing on my mind is an entry in Charlie’s journal regarding the two movies Faith and I watched last weekend. After a week to reflect, I feel I may be wrong about “Howard’s End”, but I will need to watch it again to make a decision. As for “Eyes Wide Shut”, further reflection only strengthens my earlier comments that this is not a film to be seen. By anyone. At anytime. Sorry. That’s just the way I feel.
o Monday: A minor victory in my crusade against ignorant contractors: The Lucent tech from last week was replaced with a much more senior technician who could at least spell U-N-I-X!
o Tuesday: I have finally started to attempt to integrate my Mac SE/30 onto my network at home. There is an installed Daynaport ethernet card, so this really shouldn’t be much trouble. (Unless of course if you count my glaring lack of Macintosh skills!!!) This should be quite the learning experience. After a bit of research, it looks like I can just use Netatalk on my BSD box and I will be able to communicate with the Mac via appletalk! Netatalk support is actually built into the BSD kernel, so I added “options netatalk” and reconfigured my kernel, rebooted and I got zip. No connectivty whatsoever. It turns out that not only do you need kernel support, you also need a handful of userland progs to control the connections. These are available in a port (sort of like an RPM for BSD. Of course, my copy of the port collection is incomplete with no sign of Netatalk.
o Wednesday: After quite a bit of poking and prodding (and finally grabbing an older “ports” collection!) I managed to install and configure Netatalk, but I still cant get any reliable traffic to pass between the Mac and BSD. I managed to snarf acopy of MacTCP and install it directly onto the SE/30 via floppy. I assigned an IP and netmask- but still no luck.
o Thursday: OK, so by now I am beginning to pull my hair out with this Netatalk/MacTCP thing! I read all sorts of documentation regarding this type of connection. The only thing I seem to be lacking is a default “zone” for the Mac to attach to. OOh well, I will have to save trying that for next week!
o Friday: Reorganized my cubicle to make better use of the space (or extreme lack thereof! - now this would be a great place to utilize Tardis technology!) Just as things were winding down for the end of the day, around 3:30, the Lucent guy asked if I wouldn’t mind driving to the other switch and cabling up some equipment before heading for home. Well, yes actually I do mind, but I went anyway. I ended up getting stuck in downtown traffic- both ways! but I did get everything connected before heading for home. Once home I continued the theme of reorganization and tore apart my office at home and reconfigured everything! Now I have both my BSD monitor and my Win98 monitor easily viewable from my desk.
o Saturday: Today we tackled the downstairs living room. A complete rearrangement of the furniture yielded a much more “feng shui” area. The entertainment center is now between the fireplace and the window (at a bit of an angle) and the furniture all faces (turned one way or another) that corner of the room. I can’t wait to try it out!
o Sunday: Just to round out the weekend, Faith and I decided to rearrange our own bedroom. After positioning the bed on the west wall we had to manuever the two dressers back and forth a bit before finally deciding where to put everything! Of course, I need to re-run the cable and clean up a bit of phone cable, but all in all I would say that all this domestic change has been quite positive! This afternoon we went back over to my Mom & Dad’s for some more plumbing work. Just had to switch out a bad flapper valve on a really old toilet. It only took about three minutes, but we stuck around to chat for while. My sister now has a small web page over at Gundaker where her business really seems to be taking off! She has turned into quite the “go-getter”! We made it back home in tme to light up the fireplace and watch the Packers/49′rs game. I must say that the new layout downstairs is quite nice!
* Just a quick note for today: Faith has added a couple of pages here. Just a few pictures at the moment, but more is on the way. (I copied over some of my code as a base, but she customized them to suit her via telnet and vi!!)
Faith’s Page
* This morning Logan and I brought the rear wheel of his bicycle to the repair shop. The hub broke so that the gears from the chain would not engage to turn the wheel. The guy behind the counter replaced the hub in about two minutes! That went a lot quicker than I thought.
* Logan had a friend spend the night, so Faith and I watched some TV in the bedroom. We settled in just as “Howard’s End” began. Both of us being great fans of Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, we were eager to watch! What a disapointment! I was unable to find any compassion or feeling for any of the characters at any point during the film. I am sure others will disagree with me, and perhaps rightfully so since I have not read the book upon which the film was based, but I found myself waiting for the depth and development of the characters all the way until the credits rolled. Hrmph. We will have to rent “Remains of the Day” to help remove the bad flavor from my palate.
* From one bad movie to another. We decided to go ahead and watch Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”. This was the single most agitating movie I have had to sit through. Every aspect of the film (from the annoying soundtrack to the gossamer thin plot) begged for someone to turn it off! Also being a Kubrick fan (especially “A Clockwork Orange”) I simply had to watch the film to its conclusion. Perhaps after some time has passed I will be able to reflect back with a better view.
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
October 31, 2000 7:42 pm | 
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