Craig Mundie’s infamous speech

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I haven’t said anything about Microsoft Executive Craig Mundie’s speech yet. Everyone’s heard of it, of course, and the typical response has been something along the lines of “Now we know Microsoft’s stance on Open Source.”

No, we’ve always known Microsoft’s stance on that. They’re scared of it. Remember the stereotype of open-source programmers: college students and college dropouts writing software in their basements that a lot of people are using, with the goal of toppling an industry giant. Seem far-fetched? Friends, that’s the story of Microsoft itself. Microsoft became an underground sensation in the late 1970s with Microsoft Basic, a programming language for the Altair and other kit computers and later for CP/M. And while we’ll probably never know the entire story of how and why this happened, when IBM decided to outsource the operating system for the IBM PC, they went to Microsoft and got both an OS and the must-have Microsoft Basic. Ten years later, IBM was just another hardware maker–really big, but getting squeezed. Today, 20 years later, IBM’s still a huge force in the computing industry, but in the PC industry, aside from selling ThinkPads, IBM’s a nobody. There may be hardware enthusiasts out there who’d be surprised to hear IBM makes and sells more than just hard drives.

Ironically, Microsoft’s response to this new threat is to act more and more like the giant it toppled. Shared Source isn’t a new idea. IBM was doing that in the 1960s. If you were big enough, you could see the source code. DEC did it too. At work, we have the source code to most of the big VMS applications we depend on day-to-day. Most big operations insist on having that kind of access, so their programmers can add features and fix bugs quickly. If Windows 2000 is ever going to get beyond the small server space, they really have no choice. But they do it with strings attached and without going far enough. An operation the size of the one I work for can’t get the source and fix bugs or optimize the code for a particular application. You’re only permitted to use the source code to help you develop drivers or applications. Meet the new Microsoft: same as the old Microsoft.

Some people have read this speech and concluded that Microsoft believes open-source software killed the dot-com boom. That’s ludicrous, and I don’t see that in the text. OSS was very good for the dot-com boom. OSS lowered the cost of entry: Operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux ran on cheap PCs, rather than proprietary hardware. The OSs themselves were free, and there was lots of great free software available, such as the Apache Web server, and scripting languages like Python and Perl. You could do all this cool stuff, the same cool stuff you could do with a Sun or SGI server, for the price of a PC. And not only was it cheaper than everybody else, it was also really reliable.

The way I read it, Microsoft didn’t blame OSS for the dot-com bust. Microsoft blamed the advertising model, valuing market share over revenue, and giving stuff away now and then trying to get people to pay later.

I agree. The dot-com boom died because companies couldn’t find ways to make money. But I’m not convinced the dot-com boom was a big mistake. It put the Internet on the map. Before 1995, when the first banner ad ran, there wasn’t much to the Internet. I remember those early days. As a college student in 1993, the Internet was a bonanza to me, even though I wasn’t using it to the extent a lot of my peers were. For me, the Internet was FTP and Gopher and e-mail. I mostly ignored Usenet and IRC. That was pretty much the extent of the Internet. You had to be really determined or really bored or really geeky to get much of anything out of it. The World Wide Web existed, but that was a great mystery to most of us. The SGI workstations on campus had Web browsers. We knew that Mosaic had been ported to Windows, but no one in the crowd I ran in knew how to get it working. When we finally got it running on some of our PCs in 1994, what we found was mostly personal homepages. “Hi, my name is Darren and this is my homepage. Here are some pictures of my cat. Here’s a listing of all the CDs I own. Here are links to all my friends who have homepages.” The running joke then was that there were only 12 pages on the Web, and the main attraction of the 12 was links to the other 11.

By 1995, we had the first signs of business. Banner ads appeared, and graduating students (or dropouts) started trying to build companies around their ideas. The big attraction of the Web was that there was all this information out there, and it was mostly free. Online newspapers and magazines sprung up. Then vendors sprung up, offering huge selections and low prices. You could go to Amazon.com and find any book in print, and you’d pay less for it than you would at Barnes & Noble. CDNow.com did the same thing for music. And their ads supported places that were giving information away. So people started buying computers so they could be part of the show. People flocked from closed services like CompuServe and Prodigy to plain-old Internet, which offered so much more and was cheaper.

Now the party’s ending as dot-coms close up shop, often with their content gone forever. To me, that’s a loss only slightly greater than the loss of the Great Library. There’s some comfort for me: Five years from now, most of that information would be obsolete anyway. But its historical value would remain. But setting sentiment aside, that bonanza of freebies was absolutely necessary. When I was selling computers in 1994, people frequently asked me what a computer was good for. In 1995, it was an easier sell. Some still asked that question, but a lot of people came in wanting “whatever I need to get to be able to get on the Internet.” Our best-selling software package, besides Myst, was Internet In A Box, which bundled dialup software, a Web browser, and access to some nationwide provider. I imagine sales were easier still in 1996 and beyond, but I was out of retail by then. Suddenly, you could buy this $2,000 computer and get all this stuff for free. A lot of companies made a lot of money off that business model. Microsoft made a killing. Dell and Gateway became behemoths. Compaq made enough to buy DEC. AOL made enough to buy Time Warner. Companies like Oracle and Cisco, who sold infrastructure, had licenses to print money. Now the party’s mostly over and these companies have massive hangovers, but what’s the answer to the Ronald Reagan question? Hangover or no hangover, yes, they’re a whole heck of a lot better off than they were four years ago.

I’m shocked that Microsoft thinks the dot-com phenomenon was a bad thing.

If, in 1995, the Web came into its own but every site had been subscription-based, this stuff wouldn’t have happened. It was hard enough to swallow $2,000 for a new PC, plus 20 bucks a month for Internet. Now I have to pay $9.95 a month to read a magazine? I could just subscribe to the paper edition and save $2,500!

The new Internet would have been the same as the old Internet, only you’d have to be more than just bored, determined, and geeky to make it happen. You’d also have to have a pretty big pile of cash.

The dot-com boom put the Internet on the map, made it the hot ticket. The dot-com bust hurt. Now that sites are dropping out of the sky or at least scaling operations way back, more than half of the Web sites I read regularly are Weblogs–today’s new and improved personal home page. People just like me. The biggest difference between 1994 and 2001? The personal home pages are better. Yeah, the pictures of the cat are still there sometimes, but at least there’s wit and wisdom and insight added. When I click on those links to the left, I usually learn something.

But there is another difference. Now we know why it would make sense to pay for a magazine on the Internet instead of paper. Information that takes a month to make it into print goes online in minutes. It’s much easier and faster to type a word into a search engine than to leaf through a magazine. We can hear any baseball game we want, whether a local radio station carries our favorite team or not. The world’s a lot smaller and faster now, and we’ve found we like it.

The pump is primed. Now we have to figure out how to make this profitable. The free ride is pretty much over. But now that we’ve seen what’s possible, we’re willing to start thinking about whipping out the credit cards again and signing up, provided the cost isn’t outrageous.

The only thing in Mundie’s speech that I can see that Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox and Dan Gillmor should take offense to is Microsoft’s suspicion of anyone giving something away for free. Sure, Microsoft gives lots of stuff away, but always with ulterior motives. Internet Explorer is free because Microsoft was afraid of Netscape. Outlook 98 was free for a while to hurt Lotus Notes. Microsoft Money was free for a while so Microsoft could get some share from Quicken. It stopped being free when Microsoft signed a deal with Intuit to bundle Internet Explorer with Quicken instead of Netscape. And there are other examples.

Microsoft knows that you can give stuff away with strings attached and make money off the residuals. What Microsoft hasn’t learned is that you can give stuff away without the strings attached and still make money off the residuals. The dot-com bust only proves that you can’t necessarily make as much as you may have thought, and that you’d better spend what you do make very wisely.

The Internet needs to be remade, yes, and it needs to find some sustainable business models (one size doesn’t fit all). But if Mundie thinks the world is chomping at the bit to have Microsoft remake the Internet their way, he’s in for a rude awakening.

More Like This: Microsoft Linux Weblogs Internet Commentary

Randomness for Sunday

Dave Farquhar General

Fairly busy day yesterday. I took care of some things around the ol’ crib yesterday morning, started writing up my take on Craig Mundie’s now-infamous speech. I think it’s ok but I’ll save it for tomorrow so I can give it another once-over–if you’re wondering what I have to say, I think Mundie missed the boat, and I think most of the other commentaries I read on it did too. Then I went to a friend’s graduation party. She walked this morning, so once the diploma comes in the mail, she’s officially edumacated. It’s hard to believe I graduated college four years ago this month. I’ve been out of college for as long as I was in.
So now I’m staying up late, watching ESPN’s MLB GameCast to see if the Royals can snap their four-game losing streak in extra innings, even though I have to be up early in the morning to do projection at the early church service. The Royals are like a pretty girl: They break my heart again and again, and I just keep coming back. That’s not very healthy, is it? But I’m smitten. I don’t want to get better.

Clustering for Linux. I’d lost track of this project. Mosix allows you to combine a bunch of PCs into one Linux cluster. Unlike Beowulf, any Linux app that doesn’t use shared memory will run on the cluster, finding the least-busy CPU.

I’d been planning to turn my now-idle 486 into a backup Web server; now I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be better off clustering it with my P-120. If I knew Mosix did failover, I’d do it in a second.

I’m sure there are tons of other applications for this. I probably should get some stuff together and play with it.

You’ll find it at www.mosix.org.

Another Greymatter site. And I see Jon Hassell’s had Greymatter up and running on his site about as long as me. That’s good to see. I’m sure it’ll save him buckets of time. I’m glad someone else is free from the Evil FrontPage Empire. From reading his recent stuff, it sounds like he’s fed up with more Microsoft products than just FrontPage. I hear ya, Jon.

I’ve had this going here about a week, and I’m extremely happy with the response. Everyday, non-search engine traffic is around its usual level. Discussion traffic is way up. And I see from the karma voting that I’m eliciting some reactions (yes, I know how many positives and negatives were cast). Speed on Friday wasn’t so good, but I came home to find my text editor had a runaway process that was chewing up 95% of available CPU time. That’s what the top and kill commands are for… So now that’s cleared up, with CPU usage hovering at a fairly constant 4 percent.

Just added: More Like This

Dave Farquhar General , ,

New feature: More Like This. It took me several hours to implement this one. It should have taken me less than thirty minutes. Hot tip: If you try to run a CGI script and you get Internal Server Error messages, try re-uploading the script in ASCII mode rather than the default binary. Betcha it works after that. When running under Linux or Unix, Perl hates extra carriage returns, and Windows often inserts them.
I think this is the next trend in Weblogs sites. If it’s not, it should be. The idea is this: You assign some keywords to each entry. And at the end of the entry, you put a line that says More Like This and some hyperlinked keywords. So if you like it when I write about baseball or music and you want to see more, click on the baseball or music hyperlink at the end of the entry, and the search engine I stole will go fish around for other entries I gave the same keyword to.

For sites that always write about the same thing, this isn’t very useful. For sites with eclectic content, this is a boon. You can quickly find whatever writings of mine tickle your fancy and skip over the subjects that bore you. How cool is that?

My goal is to put together the best site in the Daynotes circuit. I’ll never have the best content, but if I have reasonably good content and you can quickly find a whole lot of what you’re looking for (be it entertainment, stuff that makes you think, or technical content), I stand a ghost of a chance of reaching that goal.

I actually managed to implement More Like This without modifying any Greymatter code. First, I grabbed Meta Tag Search, a simple CGI script that searches on meta tags, from http://support.cws.net/hosting/cgiscripts.html. I followed the installation instructions. Like I said before, upload it in ASCII mode. You’ll save yourself a few hours and a lot of gray hair. Now, whenever I make an entry in Greymatter, I put a keywords meta tag at the very beginning of the entry. I don’t know if other search engines will find the tags there, but Meta Tag Search will, and that’s my primary concern. Then, at the end of the entry, I add collection of hyperlinks that call Meta Tag Search.

So now it takes a couple more minutes’ effort to make each post, but I think it’s worth it.

More like this: Linux Weblogs HTML CGI
Greymatter

It’s time for Tony Muser to hit the road

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

You lost me, Tony Muser.
I used to think you were an OK guy. I have a quote from you hanging on my cubicle wall at work. Last summer, you said something about how energetic, outspoken people who smile a lot bring everybody up and energize the people around them. I copied and pasted it into my word processor, put it in a big, obnoxious font, and hung it where I’d see it a lot. I figured those would be good words to live by.

You’re a hard-nosed, old-school baseball guy. I like old-school baseball. A lot of the players today are more concerned about looking like supermodels than they are about playing baseball. You’re gruff, but my best baseball coaches were gruff.

But you couldn’t manage your way out of a paper bag. You inherited a terrible Royals team, I’ll admit that. Your biggest offensive weapons were Jeff King and Jay Bell. You only had two starting pitchers, Kevin Appier and Jose Rosado, who would have been starting pitchers for another team. The team was going nowhere.

Under your leadership, that’s changed. Jay Bell signed with Arizona. So much for loyalty. Jeff King retired suddenly. Dean Palmer, a hard-hitting third baseman, came and went under your tenure. But you showed confidence in Jermaine Dye and he became an All-Star. Joe Randa came home to play third base, and while Palmer put up better power numbers, Randa’s proven to be the better all-around player. Johnny Damon blossomed into the best leadoff hitter in the game under your watch, and it wasn’t your fault that he left for money. And Mike Sweeney, the backup catcher you said would never catch for you again, got a second chance as a DH under your watch because you were out of options, and he started hitting like George Brett. Then he got a third chance as a first baseman because you were out of options, and he became an All-Star. You pulled Rey Sanchez off the scrap heap and turned him into a respectable everyday shortstop. And three young hitters, Carlos Beltran, Mark Quinn, and Dee Brown, are now making names for themselves.

Yes, you’ve turned this team around. On paper, this is a much-improved team.

But that much-improved team isn’t winning games. Your career winning percentage is .430. Your predecessor, Bob Boone, was a terrible manager. But during his worst season with the Royals, he had a .444 winning percentage. I’d love to know what he’d do with what you have to work with.

After a series in Cleveland where the Royals were outscored 30-10, you lost your cool, and you took a rip at Mike Sweeney, your best player. “Chewing on cookies and drinking milk and praying is not going to get it done,” you said.

Yeah, Mike Sweeney only batted .182 during the series and only drove in one run. But it’s not like anyone else was getting on base ahead of him. Even if Mike Sweeney had driven home those four runners he left on base, the Royals still would have been outscored 30-14 and would have lost all three games. And Sweeney’s hitting .280 for the season. Just two years ago, Mike Sweeney hitting .280 was a miracle. Now it’s a slump. What’s going on? Mike Sweeney hitting .280 isn’t the reason the Royals are 10-18.

The Minnesota Twins are in first place. Statistically speaking, their lineup reads like this: .273, .198, .275, .293, .287, .239, .407, .190, .264. Now here’s the Royals’ lineup: .283, .255, .310, .260, .280, .300, .185, .183, .250. Aside from one hot bat, it doesn’t look too different, does it?

The Royals won the World Series in 1985 with a lineup that looked a lot like this year’s. Granted, that team may have had better pitching. But without comparable coaching, it’s impossible to know.

I used to be a believer, but now the only thing I believe is that you’re mostly interested in appearances, and looking right doesn’t necessarily translate into winning.

A number of replacements have been suggested for you. Your predecessors Bob Boone and Hal McRae have jobs elsewhere. McRae used his last-place team to mop up the floor with your next-to-last-place team earlier this week. John Wathan is available, and his career record was better than yours. But my pick would be Cookie Rojas, an old fan favorite with a little managerial experience, tons of coaching experience, and plenty of leadership.

But I’m not sure I care much who replaces you. Just as long as it’s someone. It’s time for you to go.

More like this: Baseball Royals

And we’re registered!

Dave Farquhar General

Tired of that 208.something.something address that could go away on 30 seconds’ notice? Here’s your fix. Please update your bookmarks to https://dfarq.homeip.net. This registration comes from DynDNS, a dynamic DNS service that’s pretty highly regarded.
Down the line I may go ahead and get a fixed IP address and register a domain name, but this is a quicker fix. It could take a week for that stuff to take effect; this literally took me a minute once I got around to it.

R.I.P.: Free Brightmail

Dave Farquhar General

Brightmail, we hardly knew ye. I got notice last week that Brightmail’s free service is finito, as of the end of this month. Another effort to sell product by giving it away for private use goes away. That’s kind of a shame, because Brightmail did a decent job of filtering spam. I got one of my last Brightmail reports this afternoon, and it blocked 14 pieces of spam. Thanks guys. I’ll miss you.
So… I’ve got about three weeks to get something else going. The combo of Fetchmail, Procmail, and a nice anti-spam Procmail recipe on my Linux server ought to do the trick. I’ve done some reading up on it. Of course I’ll be letting you know how that goes. Configuring that stuff isn’t necessarily for the timid, but the price is right and many people report blocking about 95% of spam with their setups. Brightmail, by contrast, blocks about 70%.

Of course I’ll let you know how it goes.

So Dave, how do I use this site?

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve tried to make this look as much like the old one, but there are some new features here. Please give the Comments feature a look. If you’ve got something you want to say, just click Comments and write away. No registration required. Punch in your name, and if you want, your e-mail address and Web address. Spam-filter your e-mail address if you want. Or leave it out entirely. Use an assumed name if you want. I think my system logs an IP address somewhere, so don’t go posting death threats, but aside from that, comments can be anonymous. For privacy hounds, e-mail is a greater threat to your privacy than the Comments section. I can find an awful lot about you from your e-mail headers. (Not that I bother–who’s got time for that?)
So when should you e-mail me? If I’m not talking about what you want to talk about. I read all my mail, but I can’t always be timely about it. There are days when I leave here at 7 or 7:30 a.m. and then I don’t get home until after 9 p.m. On those days, the last thing I feel like doing is reading a ton of e-mail, so it sits while I fix something to eat or listen to music or read a book (or all three). I don’t read my personal mail from work. But I have been known to take a quick peek at the site from work during breaks or slow periods. I’ll read the comments and sometimes fire off a response.

Basically, I’m trying to encourage you to use the Comments section. It’s getting harder and harder to deal with all the e-mail. Comments will get a faster response from me, if they’re necessary. And it saves me the time of posting them, which is good. Lively topics can quickly bury me in e-mail; I’ve started to avoid such topics for exactly that reason. But I do like lively discussion, so this is a nice solution to that problem if people use it.

One last thing on Comments. Please keep it clean. I can’t imagine 11-year-olds being interested in the topics here, but I want the content to be appropriate for all ages. I know I’ve dropped an F-bomb here and there, especially really early on back on my original site whose contents are temporarily unavailable. I started to watch that after a schoolteacher commented about that. Greymatter can optionally filter words out. For the time being, I have that turned off. I’ll turn it on if I have to.

You’ll also notice a Karma rating. If you read something and really like it, click the little plus sign. If you hate it, click the minus sign. If you’re neutral or indifferent, leave it alone. It may be possible down the line to write a script that tallies up the karma and gives a “Best of” based on your votes. I haven’t looked into it yet, but I think I’d like that. Short-term, I look at that to see how I’m doing. If certain topics consistently get me negative votes, I’ll probably avoid them. If a topic gets tons of positive votes, I’ll probably head that direction some more. It’s just a quick, easy, anonymous way to give a little feedback.

The search engine works, but there isn’t much to search yet, obviously. Performance may lag once there are a lot of entries, but that’s curable. Down the line I can always throw more CPU at that problem. On the plus side, the search engine searches both my entries and my comments.

The site’s very unfinished, as you can see. I plan to add more features as I think of them. I’m open to ideas of course. This is a community.

Not sure what we’ll get back to tomorrow. I’ll come up with something.

My apologies to those whose e-mail I haven’t answered yet. I just haven’t been up to it. See Sunday’s post. Later this week, I hope, I’ll get caught up.

Treat wrist pain naturally

Dave Farquhar Health , , ,

Do you have a weird pain in your lower arms? Do your wrists tingle? Are your wrists tight? It’s possible to treat wrist pain naturally.

I’ve heard two people describe these things in the past month, now a friend’s written the same thing on his Web site. Of course, my wrists are notorious. They effectively ended my book writing career. Our problems came from typing.

First things first: Make some adjustments. Sit down and put your hands at your keyboard. Lower your chair until your legs make an upside-down L. Now do your arms make an L shape? If not, you absolutely need to get a keyboard drawer and/or another chair. Get one with adjustable armrests so you can support your arms. Rest them on your armrests lightly. Trust me: It’s cheaper than treatment.

Go see your doctor. Make sure he’s not knife-happy. He can recommend wrist supports, splints, and other treatments that help. You should always try that stuff first. The surgery can have side effects. To my way of thinking, it’s better to leave your body how God designed it and try to help it heal itself.

There are no effective drug treatments for repetitive stress injuries, other than painkillers. Talk to your doctor about vitamins.

Check all this stuff that follows out with your doctor first. This was the advice I got from reading several different books, and it worked pretty well for me.

The standard treatment for repetitive stress injuries is vitamin B6. Don’t take more than 200 mg of it a day–that may have harmful side effects. 100-125 mg is a good dosage; it leaves enough leeway that you can still take a multivitamin and/or a B complex, plus whatever small amounts of B6 you get from diet.

B6 works best in the presence of the other B vitamins, so you should also pick up a B complex. Precise dosage doesn’t seem to matter much. I buy whatever B complex I can find and take one capsule.

You can also complement B6 by taking a source of Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 is “good fat,” while Omega-6 is “bad fat.” Omega-3 is used for, among other things, nerve regeneration. The best sources of Omega-3 are fish oil or flaxseed oil. I take 1000 mg of either of them daily. Dietary sources of Omega-3 include eggs from free-range chickens and fatty fish like salmon. But a free-range egg gives you 100 mg. So it would appear that two eggs for breakfast and salmon for lunch and dinner would still leave you a bit short. Plus eating all those eggs will give you other problems. Buy the free-range eggs anyway, because of the improved nutrition over the cheap caged eggs, and eat more salmon, but don’t expect miracles from them.

Some people add 400 mg of magnesium to the mix. Magnesium is an anti-inflammatory.

In addition to the standard-bearers (B6, B complex, Omega-3, Magnesium) I’ve also used alfalfa and MSM. Alfalfa’s a good source of a large number of vitamins and minerals, which is why that works. MSM is also a good anti-inflammatory, and some people believe the body uses MSM to regenerate nerves and other tissues. I don’t think anyone totally understands how or why MSM works. The first bottle of MSM I got billed it as a natural painkiller, and while its effect wasn’t like, say, aspirin, it did seem to calm down the nerve that RSI irritates.

As far as exercise, there are stretches your doctor should be able to show you. A friend I know who’s a physical trainer says the first thing you should do any time you feel pain is to figure out what hurts, then do the opposite. I used to keep a baseball bat next to my computer. When I’d tighten up, I’d take the bat, walk into an open area, and swing the bat around for a while. If you swing the bat with proper technique, where you rotate your wrists and at the end of the swing your right hand is actually out front (or your left hand, if you bat left-handed), you’ll loosen your wrists up pretty quickly. People gave me funny looks when they saw the bat next to the computer, and funny looks when they saw me swinging a bat in the hallway or in the living room, but it helped. Find an exercise that tends to make your wrists pop. It’ll help.

How I set up Greymatter for Weblogging

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

How I set up Greymatter for Weblogging. First things first: I’m sure everyone’s asking how much hardware you need. I’m using a Pentium-120 with 64 megs of RAM, and it’s plenty fast most of the time. It takes a little while to regenerate all the templates, but other than that it’s mostly sitting idle. Any Pentium-class machine should be plenty. I’d be hesitant about using a 486 because the templates will take an awfully long time to rebuild. Remember, Greymatter’s written in Perl, and Perl’s an interpreted language. Interpreters are slow for the same reason emulators are slow–the translation is real-time.
But Greymatter offers advantages. You can control your destiny. You have total control over your site–it’s running on your Linux box. And you’re free from FrontPage’s tyrrany. Did I hear cheers? Most importantly for me, I set the clock. I can set the clock ahead a couple of hours, make my post at 10 p.m., and it’ll be dated the next day. That can only mean… The return of the infamous Farquhar Time Machine. I can start sleeping in again! Or go to work earlier… Hey, I can start sleeping in again!

Anyway, I had the Pentium-120 already configured with Mandrake 7.2, but I discovered Mandrake 7.2 in high security mode doesn’t seem to allow Web traffic from the outside world. So I installed Mandrake 7.2 again in low-security mode. I used a server installation. The only things I really cared about were Apache and Perl, but I didn’t feel like de-selecting everything. Both will be in there by default. I think Perl’s part of the Development group during installation. I’m not sure what group Apache is in. I don’t recommend running XFree86 on your server. Those memory resources are better used for server purposes. Oh, and one last thing: Don’t use DHCP. Give your Web server a local, static IP address.

Once I was up and running, Apache wasn’t running by default, so I dinked around with a cp /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S45httpd so that Apache would start on boot. Then I started Apache by executing /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S45httpd start. Of course there are plenty of other ways to accomplish the same thing. It was close to midnight and I just wanted the thing open to the world at that point.

Then I pointed my Web browser at the server’s address, and my embryonic Weblog came up.

It won’t happen that way for you, because I already had Greymatter installed and configured before I did all that. In other words, I did things bass-ackwards. You should do it differently. Get Apache working right first. It’s less frustrating that way.

With Apache installed and running, point a Web browser at it. You should see some kind of Apache welcome screen–it’ll vary based on your Linux distro, but it’ll basically be some kind of show-off screen. You see it? Great. You don’t? Get Apache working. How? I dunno. Make sure it’s running, first of all. Type the command pidof httpd. You should get a couple of numbers. Maybe a lot of numbers. If all you get is a blank line, then Apache’s not running. If it’s running but not responding, you’ve probably got a problem with the configuration file. The default configuration file for Apache, unlike the default configuration of a lot of programs, does work reasonably well. The defaults will certainly do for a Weblog. Start with the default config, get it working, then get fancy later.

Working? Great. Open up port 80 on your DSL router and point it to your server’s address. Don’t expose any other ports. This improves security immensely. Now go to www.grc.com and run Shields Up!, then Probe My Ports. Port 80 should be open. If it’s not, either your Linux box is too secure (I wish I could offer some advice there but I don’t know much about un-securing a Linux box) or your router’s not forwarding the port right.

By default, in Mandrake at least, Apache puts its HTML files in /var/www. So, first, clear out /var/www/html. Next, I put all of the Greymatter files in /var/www/cgi-bin. Then I created directories named Archives in both /var/www/cgi-bin and in /var/www/html. The documentation is pretty good about what files need permissions of 755 and what needs 777 (yuck!) and what needs more restrictive settings, like 644 or 666.

As an aside, the archives directory being chmodded to 777 makes me nervous. That means that if I install Greymatter to a server that shares space with someone else, the entire world can see that directory. They can’t manipulate anything inside there as long as the files inside have more restrictive permissions, but I always cringe every time I see anything with 777 permissions. I knew people in college who’d just chmod everything to 777 because then it meant everything just worked all the time. Unfortunately, anyone who had telnet access to the machine could then go into that directory and change anything. I’m not as concerned about that, since I don’t share this PC with anyone. But 777 still doesn’t give me warm fuzzies. Unix ain’t Christianity. In Unix, 666 is ok (but 644 is much better), and 777 is a hacker’s delight, and therefore, pure evil.

After you chmod all your files, assuming your server is at 192.168.1.2, go to http://192.168.1.2/cgi-bin/gm.cgi. Greymatter should pop up. Go to the configuration screen and run down the line:

Local log: /var/www/html
Local entries: /var/www/html/archives
Local CGI: /var/www/cgi-bin
Website log path: /
Website entries path: /archives
Website CGI path: /cgi-bin

Set the other stuff the way you want it. Now hit Save Configuration. Now, immediately run Diagnostics and Repair. This will ensure that all files are where they need to be and permissions set correctly. If it can’t find something, do what you have to to satisfy it.

Now you’re ready to start editing templates and adding entries. You’ll need to exercise your HTML skills for that, or rip off someone’s templates. I didn’t look too hard, but I’m sure there are people out there offering Greymatter templates. If you have to, use an HTML generator to draw what you want, then take the code and put it in the template. I know HTML, so I coded mine by hand. That’s why they’re still sparse. The basic layout is there; I need to flesh it out. And I haven’t entered every template yet myself.

Now, for backups and stats… Backups are easy. I use the command tar -c /var/www >/home/dave/backup.tar. It only takes a second. You can compress the tar file and throw it on a floppy with the mcopy command. Or if Samba’s also configured and running, backup to a network-accessible directory and pull the file over to another machine.

For stats, I use LiveWebStats, but I don’t like it. Any Apache log analyzer will work.

There’s one other issue with Greymatter. It sends passwords plaintext, and thus, they’ll show up in your logs. So don’t make your stats public, at least not your referrers. If you’ll have remote editors, you need to consider that vulnerability–an editor’s password can potentially be intercepted.

Setting up Greymatter is a lot of work, but it’s a one-shot deal. You make your design, then it’s content-driven. Change your design, and it applies to the whole site. Nice. And when you publish, you only publish your new stuff.

But overall, I like Greymatter an awful lot.

Time to come clean

Dave Farquhar General ,

And now the torch
And shadows lead
Were it not so black and not so hard to see
How can it help you when you don’t know what you need
How can anybody set you free?
Would he walk upon the water
If he couldn’t walk away?
And would you
Would you carry the torch
For me?

And what if I gave you the key
To the doors of your design…
Lit the corridors of desire?
Where if not so black
And not so hard to see
What use to you then any fire?
–The Sisters of Mercy, “Torch” (Floodland, 1987)

I don’t bare my soul on my web page too often. Not that I’m unwilling to do that; I made a brief career of baring my soul in a newspaper column a few years ago. This weekend, as I visited weblog after weblog, looking for elements to steal and possibly improve upon, I realized that that’s mostly what people read weblogs for. At least the cool thing about Greymatter is I can make my postings in such a way as to serve whatever audience comes this direction. But I’ve become sidetracked. That happens a lot lately.

Very obviously, something’s bothering me, and I’m trying to figure out what. I see the symptoms. I sat down Friday night to write a manifesto. What I ended up with was a shotgun blast followed by a couple of quotable paragraphs. I get irritated easily. I flew off the handle last week about rankings on the Daynotes.com/org/net portals. I get irritated when editthispage.com crashes. I know what service delays do to readership. I know it far too well.

One of my very best friends is moving to Colorado in a couple of months. He’s talked to me, his boss has talked to me, and I kinda sorta understand where each is coming from but not really. Not that my opinion matters. I think the guy walks on water, but it looks like I’m the only one. Both of them want me to understand, and now he and the members of his Gen X ministry are looking to me to pick up his torch and lead. Given six months, I might be ready to do that. I don’t have six months. Meanwhile, I feel for him. He doesn’t feel like his contributions are valued. All of the communication he’s received indicates–to him at least–that it isn’t. I totally understand the desire to be valued. Maybe that’s a Gen X thing.

Another one of my very best friends is moving to Kansas City as soon as he finds a job there. Then he’s marrying my sister. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just really weird.

Another friend isn’t making plans to leave town–yet. She’s alienated. She’s just like my other friend I mentioned before–she feels like no one values her or the things she does, and I see her point. Will she leave? It probably comes down to how good the offers are and how mad she is the day they come in. I want to help her but I know there’s nothing I can do.

I probably shouldn’t be writing any of this because yesterday at the grocery store, I struggled to keep a proper grip on my grocery bags. It wasn’t that they were heavy–it was that my hand just wouldn’t do what my mind told it to do. The startled cashier asked if I needed help.

At work, my department’s getting cutback after cutback. I know I’ll be the last one cut. I’m not popular because I’m not a Microsoft lackey and I’m not a yes man. But I solve the problems no one else can solve, and I solve the normal problems much faster than anyone else in my group. I don’t want to be the last one cut, because the number of problems and the expectations of your clients don’t fall just because your staff numbers fell.

So I guess I know where my recent tendency to always assume the worst came from. None of this is insurmountable. Frankly most of it’s similar to things I’ve dealt with before.

At my worst, I fall into overdominant overanalysis, and I caught myself in there today. Then I realized I’ve been doing it all week. Then the question that song raises hit. “How can it help you when you don’t know what you need?” What’s “it?” Who cares? How can anything help you when you don’t know what you need?

Well, now that I see the problems, I know what I need. I can lapse into poor-me, or I can do what needs to be done and learn what I can from it.

Please be patient with me. This isn’t quite like setting up a two-computer TCP/IP network. Or like setting up Linux, Apache, and Greymatter and forwarding port 80 on my router to it, for that matter. Those things are a lot easier.