Windows XP came out yesterday. Oh. I completely forgot. Yawn.
Windows 2000 with training wheels and bright colors and double the CPU/memory requirements. Be still my heart.
I don’t think I’m a Windows author anymore.
Country clubs revisited
Country club churches. I had a conversation with my good friend Brad about country-club Christianity. We didn’t come up with any great answers but I think we took a couple of good steps. What’s not being in a country club look like? Talking to strangers, that’s what. And I think I know what the last line of the conversation should be. Not, “Nice to meet you.” Your mama taught you to say that, because it’s polite. It’s what everyone expects to hear. You shouldn’t say that. You should be rude. I think those last words should be, “I’m glad you were here.”
And you better be glad he or she was there, because God is.
Now, here comes the important part: follow-up. Remember that person’s name. Pray for that person during the next week. Make sure you pray for the chance to see that person again. If you didn’t care about that person on Sunday, I guarantee you will after you pray for ’em for a week. Then, on the next Sunday, find that person again and make sure you say something. I don’t think you should necessarily tell that person you’ve been praying for him or her. It seems to make people nervous.
I don’t know how the conversation should go. You figure it out. You’ve made friends before. But I still think you should be rude and close with the line, “I’m glad you were here.”
And don’t forget the follow-up. And if the person’s not there next Sunday? Find another stranger. But don’t forget the first one.
Neither Brad nor I have any idea what will happen if a lot of people start doing this. But I know nothing bad will come of it.
Something else. Tomorrow I want to talk about Linux some more. And I want to talk about cubes. Cubicles at work? No. Apple Cubes? Not exactly. I saw one of these yesterday and I want one, so chances are it isn’t from Apple.
OK, OK, yeah, this is bugging me…
I’ve been avoiding the subject. Time to quit. I wrote this last night, then I found a good way to crash a Linux box (a good electrical storm does the trick) and lost it.
Has anyone else noticed that you’re more likely to find someone to talk to you, listen to you, and understand you in a bar than in a church?
That bugs me because I’m supposed to be one of those guys you come to for those three things, and I take a whole lot more than I give in that area. People my age just don’t come, because when they do, everyone acts like they’re not there. Yours Truly included, because I’m up in the loft, behind a pair of keyboards and monitors or a video camera, too busy making sure the right images are projected up on the screen. I’m too busy pursuing some ideal called “Excellence in Worship” to have any time for a stranger.
So, we so-called “leaders” just huddle, comfortable in our little clique, marveling at the 50 people joining our congregation next month, completely oblivious to our hundreds of inactives and people who visited, then decided to go find somewhere else to get their needs met. Hopefully they went to another church. Chances are a good number of them decided they’re just as well off staying out later on Saturday nights.
So I’m mad. Mad at myself as much as anyone. But something has to change. It doesn’t matter how excellent your service looks when the sanctuary’s only half full.
Webshots and Weatherbug, away with you!
The bane of the NT administrator’s existence banished. I had a problem last week with a user who was complaining about lockups. I went and looked at the system, and it turned out not to be lockups at all–the system was running out of CPU cycles, so it appeared to lock up, but if you let it sit long enough, it would recover. The system had so many user-installed toys, such as Webshots and Weatherbug and RealAudio and RealJukebox, that it didn’t have enough punch left to do real work. I disabled the toys, to many objections, and told the user to call me if the system had any more problems. I told her that yeah, the way I set up computers is drab and boring and utilitarian, but they work.
Supposedly Windows NT won’t allow regular users to install software. In reality, they can install a lot.
Here’s the trick. Open regedt32 (not regedit) and navigate to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. Go to Security. The All Users group has special access. Change that to read-only access.
We did that at work on one machine, then logged in with a non-priveliged account, and we must have been the first people in history who had problems installing Webshots and Weatherbug.
Some programs may install anyway, though they fail to write the run key. But in order for them to start up, the user will have to drag the executable to their personal startup group. Most of the users who install this garbage don’t know how to do that.
Hard drive first aid. I had an external Mac SCSI hard drive that was acting up. I was able to get it to run once, for about 5 minutes. From then on, when you powered up, it would just seek incessantly. Stiction, I hoped–though it’s unusual for stiction to set in while a drive is actually running. I shut it down and let it rest. No improvement.
My normal cure for stiction is to blow-dry it to heat it up above operating temperature to loosen the oil. Lacking a blow dryer, I resorted to something I really don’t like to do. Well, since this was a Mac peripheral, I didn’t really care. And I made a pretty big show of it. I held the drive about six inches off the floor. “I’m gonna do it!” I said. My coworkers looked up. I released the drive, sending it hurtling to the floor. The force of the impact knocked the front of the enclosure loose.
“You’re recalibrating it?” someone asked.
I grinned, picked up the drive, snapped the front cover back on, and plugged it in. The drive ran. I copied the data off to another drive. It was a bit slow–this isn’t a healthy drive–but it copied. And the drive ran all day, to my amazement.
Incoming links: http://gsw.edu/~oiit/techsupp/software.html
Linux thin clients
Finally, a complete tutorial on doing Linux thin clients! Colin Mattoon over at LinuxWorld has written a reasonably complete, understandable tutorial that would allow you to make a usable Linux computer lab out of an applications server (anything over 600 MHz would do) and a pile of obsolete PCs. I’ve seen many of these over the years; this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone explain enough for you to create something useful without looking 47 other places for information.
It’s a five-parter that I’ve been following since inception; I don’t agree with the order they’ve been posted but they’re deep enough into the series now that you can read in whatever order you want.
See the latest installment.
Some proper, original content will follow later.
An easy DIY mailserver
Mail the easy way. It figures that I would find this now, after blowing most of a Saturday trying to get a mailserver set up. This won’t give you any nifty spam filtering, but if you want a fast, reliable, secure, mail server with every other nifty feature you could want, run to Qmail the Easy Way. There, you can download a script that goes and gets all the sources you need and compiles them for you. You get Qmail for SMTP (the fastest and most secure mail server available for Linux), Courier IMAP and POP for receiving, DJBDNS for name resolution, and a nifty Webmail interface. Combine that with your favorite Linux-from-sources distro, and you’ll have a rock-solid, fast-as-possible mail server for a whole lot less money than an Exchange server. And the hardware requirements are far lower. Dan Bernstein, the author of Qmail and DJBDNS, claims Red Hat used a 486 to test Qmail and it performed so well they just threw it into production.
If I had a lot of IMAP clients connecting I know I’d want a Pentium-class machine, but I remember back in the day running Domino under OS/2 on Pentium-90s. When we moved to Domino on NT running on a 533 MHz Alpha, it made our heads spin because we thought 90 MHz was good enough. This was with about 200 people connecting to it. This qmail setup would be a whole lot more efficient than Domino running under NT.
And if you want it all? All you’re missing (possibly) is fetchmail for grabbing mail from foreign mailservers, procmail for a filtering language, and a spamfilter package.
Incidentally, Bernstein writes highly secure, highly efficient software, and he’s really dictatorial about what changes go in it. That’s partly because he guarantees its security–he’ll pay you $5,000 if you can compromise it and he can replicate what you did. Yes, it’s open source, and he gives it away, but since you can’t modify it unconditionally, the BSD people hate him. And since you can’t do anything you want with it except close it, Stallman and his FSF hate him. Since I try to offend the BSD and FSF zealots any time I can, I think that would be reason enough to use Bernstein’s software, assuming it was capable. But it’s not just capable. It’s smaller, faster, and more secure than any alternative and he’s even willing to warrant it–something the likes of Microsoft and Oracle will never do–and you can compile it on any architecture with whatever optimizations you want, and it’s free, so I say you and I are fools not to be using it.
Time to be offensive. It’s been a really long time since I’ve offended people by talking about religion. I was talking with one of my good friends from church (and another part of the conversation reminded me that if I ever decide I want to try to make a living by writing, I need to offer him a job as beg him to be my agent) and we were talking about God’s will. His son had been having some problems, and he was questioning his attitude a little. I understand. My attitude would be similar, and I’d be questioning it afterward too.
I don’t remember what he said, but I paraphrased it back to him to see if I understood what he meant: “I ask for God’s will, but I admit that a lot of times I’m afraid of what God’s will is, and that it might be different from mine.”
“Perfectly said,” he said. (He always says I state things perfectly. I’d better not ever read him that e-mail I wrote at around 9:30 on Wednesday that I’ve been regretting ever since…)
“I know where you’re coming from,” I said. “I’m afraid of it too, most of the time.”
He stopped for a minute and asked if that was OK. I thought about it for a minute. It’s definitely natural to want something different from what God wants. And if you think you might be wrong but want to be right, sure, you’ll be afraid of God’s will. And that’s certainly preferable to being hostile to God’s will, insisting on your way or the highway. You have to reach a certain level of maturity to be willing to ask God’s will, even when you’re afraid of it.
But that’s not all there is. God will take that if it’s all He can get, but what God really wants is unconditional surrender. The Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy will be done.” No strings attached. Jesus prayed, “If it’s possible, take this away from me. But not my will, but Yours be done.” No strings attached there either.
One of us cited Abraham as the human who got as close to that ideal as is humanly possible. But I pointed out how Abraham got there. For 99 years of his life, Abraham didn’t trust God completely, and he did things on his own. At least twice he felt his life was in danger, and he lied to protect his skin and nearly forced his wife into adultery in so doing. We can look back and say, “Abraham! God said he’d make you a great nation! You’re sitting there childless, and Sarah’s not pregnant yet either. Are you a great nation yet? No way! And God’s at least 9 months away from being able to deliver on that promise. You know what, Abraham? You’re invincible! Those guys could try to kill you and they absolutely would fail.” But we’ve got the advantage of hindsight.
At some point, Abraham must have looked back over his life and come to that conclusion himself. Because by the time he was about 110, he unconditionally did anything and everything God told him to do.
I’m convinced that Abraham became the superhero of faith by looking back over his life objectively and being observant enough to see God’s hand in everything, and being far enough along in years to be able to see a whole lot of God’s work, and see that God’s way was good, better than anything he could have possibly put together on his own.
So yeah, I feel bad about being 26 and attaching strings to my surrender. I’ve got a whole book of God’s made-and-kept promises, and I have read the whole thing, cover to cover. But nothing’s more convincing than your own experience, and at 26 I’ve still got some of that to gain. He’s further along than I am in the experience department and in the miracles department–he’s got two kids that no doctor can explain. The second is less than a year old, but if he’s like a cat and has nine lives, he’s already used up two or three.
Hopefully neither of us needs a whole lot more convincing. I think we’ll both get there before we turn 110, but I’m not surprised that neither of us is there yet.
Short Shrift Thursday…
Sorry about the short shrift again. I’m caught up in a whirlwind. Two of my friends are getting married Friday, and I’m doing my small part to help out in the ceremony. And my philosophy on friends is really simple. I have no idea where I stole this from. I may have come up with it myself, but I doubt it. There’s only one thing you can accumulate here on earth that you can take with you to heaven after you die, and that’s your friends.
And let me tell you, I’ve got some real blue chips in my portfolio. Including these two. So if I had to close up shop here for a month to help them, I’d do it.
A Linkfest for Wednesday
Sorry, I didn’t feel much like writing at all last night. I stayed up too late configuring my new fetchmail-procmail-courier-exim mailserver, so I felt fried all day. So I’ll just say this: The common UW-IMAP server that comes with most Linux distros is junk. It just works, yes, but it’s dog slow. Courier-IMAP is a pain to compile, but if you can find a binary for it, configuration isn’t too painful, and it absolutely flies. With my mail served off a Courier-IMAP server, reading it with Sylpheed, the speed is much higher than that of Outlook Express with the mail stored locally. Connecting to my UW-IMAP server was painful.
With that said, here are some links.
Gentoo Linux. This is another Linux-from-scratch-type distro. This one’s headed up by Daniel Robbins, who’s written a number of good Linux articles for IBM developerworks. I haven’t checked this one out just yet but I intend to–as big as Sorcerer is, Gentoo’s bigger still, and has been in development longer.
Tinyapps.org is a site dedicated to small, useful programs and utilities, mostly for DOS and Windows. There’s some good stuff there.
I had a couple of other things I’ve been meaning to post but they’ve slipped my mind. So I’m outta here.
Mail server successful!
A lightweight Windows web browser. Windows!? What’s that? Yes, I still use it at work, even though my Windows time at home is dwindling. A couple of weeks ago I told you about Dillo, a superfast, minimalist Web browser for Linux that’s in development. It’s still considered alpha-quality; I’ve had absolutely no trouble with it but some readers report it crashes on them occasionally. I’ve had enough success with it that I want it at work.
Well, I didn’t get my wish exactly, but yesterday at work after following a link to a link to a link while looking for something else (you know how that goes–you never find what you’re looking for when you’re looking for it, on the Web or in real life) I found Off By One a free standards-compliant HTML 3.2 browser. Its executable is a full 1.1 megs in size. There are sites it won’t render quite right, because it lacks Java and JavaScript and it’s an HTML 4.0 and CSS world out there these days, but it’s the fastest browser I’ve ever seen on Win32. If I had to live with Windows 9x on a 486 or a slow Pentium, this is the browser I’d want.
A nice-looking Weblog package. I found a blogger on Freshmeat called Supasite. It doesn’t look like it does a nice calendar by default like Greymatter, but it does categories, natively. And it looks like nothing would stop me from changing the system date and putting in entries from way back when, so I could start moving content in from this site’s previous incarnations (including some stuff that hasn’t been online for most of this year). Greymatter breaks when you try to do that.
The downside? Setup is much more difficult, since it relies on PHP and MySQL, in addition to Apache and Perl.
Local mail server revisited. I figured out what I was doing wrong. To get exim, procmail, fetchmail, and courier-imap all working together, I had to do a couple more steps. First, I had to create a maildir for my non-priveliged account with the maildirmake command. Next, I created a .forward file:
# Exim filter
save $home/Maildir/new/
Next, I created a .procmailrc file:
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/new/
LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/Maillog
Then I ran fetchmail manually. It pulled down three messages from my SWBell account. I connected to the experimental server with Sylpheed and… I had mail! Suh-weeet!
Now if I can just get one of those canned spam filters running, I’ll be a very happy camper…
More of the same.
As I watched my Royals’ parent club, the Oakland Athletics, play the Yankees, I burned a CD under Linux for the first time. I honestly don’t remember when I last used my old Sony CD-R (it’s so old it’s a 2X burner!) but that was under Windows.
But burning an ISO image is insanely easy, at least if you’ve got a SCSI drive. Here’s the voodoo I needed:
cdrecord -v speed=2 dev=0,0 binary-i386-1.iso
By the time I could have pulled up the ISO image in Easy CD Creator, I’d typed the command line and cdrecord had already burned a meg.
How do you know the numbers? cat /proc/scsi/scsi.
And I know now why my people at work who are in the know on Linux love Debian. How big is a default installation of the current release? 141 megs. Including XFree86 3.36. It’s definitely not a distro for those who like the bleeding edge or even the leading edge, but if you’re wanting to build a Firewall, Debian looks like the distro of choice, and it’ll fit on a discarded 170-meg drive with room to spare.
I reformatted my experimental mail server, then I installed Debian. Then I made it a mailserver. Exim, a sendmail replacement, was already installed. So was procmail. So here’s what I did to make a mail server:
apt-get install courier-imap
apt-get install fetchmail
I created a .fetchmailrc file in my home directory:
poll postoffice.swbell.net with protocol pop3
user dfarq password noway is dfarq
Then I made the file secure:
chmod 0710 .fetchmailrc
I configured courier-imap. I had to scroll down to the bottom of /etc/courier-imap.config and uncomment the last line to activate it. Then I configured exim. I searched for the phrase “maildir” and uncommented the line that enables maildir format (courier doesn’t work with the default mbox format, and maildirs are more efficient anyway).
Then I ran fetchmail: fetchmail -d.
That should have worked. It didn’t. Exim continued to use mbox format. So I can connect to my IMAP server, which is populated by fetchmail, which is in turn served by exim, but since exim doesn’t put the mail in a format the server understands, I’ve got nothing to read.
So I guess I’m going to think about ditching exim for qmail. I have no great loyalty to exim except that Debian put it there by default.
And the Cardinals are eliminated (I’m furious with the way LaRussa handled Matt Morris; he won’t win 22 games next season, that’s a given now) and the A’s are going to have to play Game 5 without Jermaine Dye. I see the Royals have problems with the Yankees even when they’re wearing another uniform. Hopefully they can pull it off today. I’d have liked to have seen Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Jeremy Giambi and Mike Magnante go to the Series in Royals’ uniforms, but if they get there in someone else’s, I’ll take it.
Just had a conversation with Dan Bowman to confirm my feeble grip on sanity (but I was afraid I may have let go, so that is good news), and now it’s way late. It’s actually about 11:30; this server runs on Farquhar time. I’m gonna go make friends with my pillow. Apologies if this is poorly edited.