Category: General

Today is a good day … besides the sore throat …

Sick again … for almost over a week … it started last Friday bad … I ended up going home Saturday night before Steamroller started … Just surviving Sunday night and then Monday I slept all day … Of course I was supposed to be finishing the Out On the Town at this point, I had hardly started … Tuesday was shot for many reasons, and I may return to why later … I went home after The Interns 1st set … I also had a replacement Wed & Thu nights … Wednesday I finally got drugs … I had spoke to Mike about the paper and I was about half way done … I woke up about 3PM Wednesday and went in front of the computers … 2 hours of going through all the accumulated email and telephone calls, the cough syrup was taken about 5PM … a double dose that had me staring into space for 3 hours … The wife told me to lay down and I finally gave up trying to fight it as I was getting absolutely nothing done … About another 2 hours of sleep and when she tried to gove me more cough syrup, I held up the cross … She hissed and I went back downstairs and slowly but surely got through the remaining ads to the paper to finish about 4am Thursday morning … I then slept, took cough syrup, amoxicillun and slept … and slept … I had to go in Friday night so I had Last Man’s guy mix the opener and I did lights … at 2AM I ran out the door … and slept … Got up a little earlier on Saturday night and cleansed myself from head to toe, every nook and cranny … Felt a little okay, but still had a cold … Sweat up a storm setting up the band, Flavor … After their 1st set I felt a little bit better and several people also commented that I looked better … I still couldn’t hear too well being the “cold” was in my head and my right side feels “open” … It’s hard to describe, but that stuffy open feeling you get in your head when you have a cold … Whomever I asked said it sounded okay, so I was confident that it was a passable mix for the evening … While I thought it sounded very LOUD, the meters didn’t show me that it was, so I guessed and got through it … I felt pretty good throughout the evening … but I still have that lingering cold … Hopefully that will trail off …

Lot of things all going on at once here … but I realize I haven’t made an update and I am getting sick of looking at the last couple entries … Of course the Out On the Town is looming for this week and this limits my time … My father wants a W2K installation at home as well as a pcAnywhere install at his home and office location … If I want a sound job, I have to “audition” for it, and I am having serious issues with making the audition date/time … I am still working 6 nights a week, and this past Sunday (Aug 1st) I came off of the benefit/W@B Reunion where I worked about 14 hours which shot my Monday … after recovery? I went back to work Tuesday … The launch of The Interns web site had most of them in the booth that night and I don’t know know … It just seems to be one thing after another … bam, bam, bam … getting hit from all sides … and it’s so very hot these last couple days … Where there’s a will, there’s a way … bah!

I posted a message in a forum about Microsoft software, I figured I would post it here as well to share it with anyone else who comes here:

For us end users that live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have the extra money to rent videos or order in very often can’t really afford to go out and spend thousands of dollars on Microsoft software and the hardware necessary to run it … We have to find other alternatives … I think the majority of these people sink a bunch of money into robust hardware and then look for the “copy that floppy” solutions for the software … In my case, “copy that floppy” isn’t going to fly running on the public side of the Internet, so I looked for other solutions that didn’t break my wallet and weren’t illegal …

When I started, I wanted to be “legal” so I purchased NT4 in November 1999 for $799 … 2000 came out in February, and guess what? I wasn’t eligible for the “upgrade” so I had to pay for that as well …

Shortly after Microsoft had an offer if you ran 25 domains (hosted) that you could join their Web Hoster Program … It included a FREE copy of Windows 2000 Advanced Server … so I took advantage of that, and this is what my Windows hosting is based on now …

Over the course of the last 3-4 years, I have had the trials and tribulations of running Windows in hosting environment, and getting the most out of their servers … Every other piece was a 3rd party piece of software because Windows didn’t support it in a hosting environment or it was too damn expensive …

The mail server I ran was $1495 for unlimited accounts/users and allowed the end customer to manage their mail server … Now, with the SPAM and virus stuff, the price has gone astronomical … That’s when I started into the FreeBSD for the mail solution … before that, it was just something to dabble with … but the attraction of the MySQL server vs. MSSQL server was there too … I have (and still) been using Access Databases on the Windows Servers … (Which I bought Microsoft Office ($600) just to get Access) …

Running Counter-Strike, I couldn’t afford the lag that the software firewalls put on that much of a demanding server, so I brought up a Mandrake box and ran the CS Server on that … No worries of meanies getting into there on a machine with no firewall … Actually, Mandrake ran Shorewall, but it really wasn’t necessary … It did stop portscanning though … Which is 24/7 …

The Windows boxes started failing in February 2003 so I had to move the DNS off of there cause when they went down, there was no access to anything here … Finally with your help [person who this message was directed], the cause of the “crashes” were determined to be ZoneAlarm, so I have built a FreeBSD Firewall … to maybe remove the ZoneAlarm firewalls from all of my Windows machines …

All of this happening over the course of the last years, and I came in very Windows proficient … Born of the IBM Mainframe and the early IBM compatibles … Coming from an environment where I was doing networking and C programming at home where the business I worked at had XTs and ATs, I had a lightning fast 386 … DOS was my utter friend … I was a BAT file master … I was also the communications specialist … getting leased lines up and modems talking to mainframe, minis and micros … and putting the VTAM entries in for all of them … Windows was fun to mess around in, but I really lost interest when they took away my booting to DOS, and running C:\>win when I wanted to … I was now forced …

I think realizing all of this makes me understand why I am so comfortable in a FreeBSD environment … although I could probably mop the floor with most MCSE’s certificates … I thought about getting one of my own, but I figured what’s the point? I am not up for a job or anything [that requires or demands this cert] … and knowing what I know about the value that an MCSE Cert holds, I would figure most employers would know this too … And, as we’ve already determined, I’m cheap … But I do have the Core 4 Sybex books and did plan on pursuing it …

So why do I type all of this? For [person with FREE access to MS software] … Realize that we don’t all have an MSDN subscription, and anything we want to “play” with we have to purchase … Free trials are bogus cause they’re never long enough … and if it works, and we’re into it, we have to buy it, and then, it’s a couple grand we’re looking at again … Not to mention the fact that we’re limited to one operating system, and for some, this isn’t acceptable … It’s why I chose C way back in 1991 … Mostly ANSI except for operating specific file system structures …

So this defines my “outperforms” statement in that Linux/FreeBSD is FREE to download, FREE to install and FREE to run … You’re also FREE to delete it and not feel a loss … It runs lightning fast on lesser hardware … To me, this is a very good product not to mention the stability that it brings my network … So much more so than the Windows machines … Maintenance goes on … “apachectl graceful” no downtime …. IIS? about 5-6 minutes of downtime … If a patch goes on something else, Windows = Boot … BSD? rehash; restart service … I am just seeing way better benefits in my line of work for the FreeBSD machines …

Corporate American can afford the inflated price tags and inflated hardware requirements … Americans can’t …

My son James asked me the other day what was with the title on this web site, specifically “Com/Net/Org” … What this means is that this site is available at www.davidpierron.com, www.davidpierron.net and www.davidpierron.org … I have run the gamut on this particular domain … I wasn’t interested in the other TLDs that are available … (.name, .us, .biz etc.) … Well, that’s about it …

It was pointed out to me that the feeds here were returning 404s … I upgraded to the lastest stable version and it still didn’t work … After some thinking etc, and some forum searching, I determined it was the absence of a valid .htaccess file … Even after putting that in place, it still didn’t work … So then I started to edit the file manually to explicitly add the redirects (cause it’s a bunch of regex in there now) and stopped myself thinking that it may be in the site’s configuration not to use the .htaccess file … lo and behold, that was the case … So even though mod_rewrite is enabled, etc … Still had to go in there and make the changes for the virtual site … I thanked the person who told me this and I now continue on my merry way … The only thing I lost in the upgrade was the CSS file for the site … I had a temporary backup which is in place now but some little tweaks don’t exist in this file … What is very upsetting is that I backed up the directory before I performed the upgrade, but wouldn’t you know it, that file wasn’t there for some reason? Must have done things too fast for my own good …

Being I wrote him a long message, and he simply answered the direct questions, I’ll share it here:

Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 18:11:51 -0400
From: “Eric S. Raymond” To: David Pierron
Subject: Re: One Simple Question, Well, Two
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs X-Eric-Conspiracy: There is no conspiracy

David Pierron:
Question #1: I learned of you directly from a movie called “Revolution OS” as well as everyone else in that movie besides Linus Torvalds … As I watched it again recently, I started poking around the Internet and found web sites, etc … But I have noticed that on these sites, I really see no reference to that movie. Is Revolution OS not held in any sort of high regard?

A lot of people like it. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be mentioned everywhere.

Question #2: Why didn’t the GNU project ever finish their project (kernel) even after the availability of Linux?

Conflicting objectives, poor leadership, and a development group that was too small and inbred.
—
Eric S. Raymond

I still wonder why no one picked up on that project … If not for the simple fact to have a choice between a monolithic GNU and a GNU micro kernel? Then again, I can picture Linus in his smug way saying ‘why bother when I have already written a more efficient kernel?’ … Not to say he’s a smug individual, but he does have a way about him that I think you know when he’s answering a question that he thinks he need not be answering … Anyway, now I have something to say to Letterman when I make the trek on up to New York City … but, I will never go … so … it remains here …

As I mentioned in another item, I watched Revolution OS again recently .. well, yesterday. I have decided to put together a page somewhere to “honor” these individuals … I myself don’t think I am of the abilty to contribute to their source tree, so I at least can honor them by educating people, however much I can, in the ways that these things came about and why it is how things came to be in the online world. It is of my opinion that the World Wide Web exists due to the government, universities and Unix hackers. Either that or Al Gore … It is a great story how hobbyist hackers influenced mainstream corporate America … and this took place world-wide … But after all, Linus Torvalds moved to America …

I am officially a grandather … Around the time I was typing in that message last night, Kevin James Pierron was born into this world weighing in at 8 pounds 7 ounces and measuring in at 20¼ inches …