MLK

It's the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday today in the US. So as with most holidays, I'm at home. I've said it before but I'll say it again, Dr. King was not perfect. He knew it. His wife knew it. The FBI knew it. And more importantly, God knew it. But in the words of Dr. King:

We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The next day, April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was struck down by an assassin's bullet. He did not get to the promised land with his brothers and sisters. But he did do God's will. And now, he is free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty he is free at last.

Aloha!

Two Step Hat Trick

One of the other birthday gifts my wife got for me was a copy of Red Hat Linux 7.2, Standard Edition. Red Hat seems to be the de facto standard to which many people write their install programs, and create RPMs for so I was happy to give it a whirl (although I'm still partial to SuSE). While some would say Red Hat is trying very hard to become the Evil Empire standard, much as a certain software company in the Pacific Northwest whose initials are Microsoft MS, I will let others debate that point.

My comments will be based on my Linux box at home. This PC has an Intel D815EEA2 and 850MHz Celeron. There's 256MB of Crucial memory and Maxtor 2GB hardrive in an Ethernet network environment. The mid-tower case and power supply are by Antec. I will report later when I try installing it at work in a Token-Ring topography.

The graphical install ran without errors (except for a bad second install disk which I had to return to CompUSA). Unfortunately, the scroll wheel on my MS IntelliMouse was not supported nor the embedded audio on the motherboard. Otherwise, I have a working installation using the 2.4.7-10 kernel (there is an update RPM to take it to 2.4.9).

The default desktop was Gnome but I had it also install KDE, which I use as a default. Star Office 5.2 is on a separate CD and must be installed after the Red Hat installation is done. The kitchen sink installation includes the Mozilla and Galeon browsers so now I can finally take a look at Galeon. So far, Galeon seems to do a better job of rendering sites than KDE's Konquer (which Galeon should, given it is using the Mozilla Gecko engine).

I haven't had a whole lot of time to work with this distribution yet but my first impression (other than the scroll wheel not working, which is a Big Deal, and the audio) is generally positive.

The updating process, once you register, is as easy as clicking on Update Agent and letting the program download all the patches.

While there are a fairly wide range of programs included with this package, most are not the most recent. This may or may not be a Good Thing, depending on how bleeding edge you want to be. But given the relatively wide support given to the Red Hat distributions, you should have a reasonable shot at being able to update to your hearts content.

Mail Call

From: Ken Scott
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 7:53 AM
Subject: RedHat 7.2

Aloha Dan,

Just read your entry about RedHat 7.2 not supporting your Microsoft mouse with scroll wheel. This surprises me, as I have a Microsoft scroll mouse, and it works fine with RH 7.2. I chose to use the IMPS/2 mouse (I don't remember the English name that the installer gave to it), and made sure to tell it to NOT emulate 3 buttons (because the scroll wheel is the third button).

You might want to run mouseconfig as root (from the command line) and see if you can rechoose the mouse. If you can get to a pure command line (rather than a terminal in X-Windows), it might be better. I don't know if X-Windows would get upset about the mouse changing underneath it or not.

Also, for your sound problems, I don't recall if the installer actually tried to set up my soundcard when I installed. Again, get to a command line as root (inside a terminal should be OK this time), and run sndconfig and see if that does the trick.

HTH,
Ken

--
><>   Ken Scott
               kscott at pcisys.net
               http://www.pcisys.net/~kscott

               This is the day that the Lord has made;
               I will rejoice and be glad in it!
                                      -- Psalm 118:24

From: Dan Seto
To: Ken Scott
Subject: Re: RedHat 7.2
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 08:01:34 -1000

Ken,

Thanks for the info. I'll try both your suggestions when I get home. I hope my mini-review was not too negative because I really do like this distribution (so far, anyway) and I had intended to do some research into why the scroll wheel and sound did not work. For what it's worth, the SuSE install had problems with the sound also (although the mouse worked fine, so go figure).

Aloha!

My Aching Back

My back acted up again on Sunday but I've been trying to tough it out by taking aspirin. This morning I decided to listen to SWMBO and will stay home.

In the mean time, there a couple of local notes relating to politics so if you aren't interested, feel free to come back tomorrow. For those intrepid enough to continue, please remember these are my opinions alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employer, or anyone else (see disclaimer here).

Dirty Politics

Wags would say there isn't any other kind. And perhaps they are right. But that doesn't mean we can't point it out when it happens.

For instance, there is a special election being held this Saturday. The reason for the election is the incumbent City Councilman was found guilty of a felony (he gave his staff bonuses with the understanding that they would in turn donate part of the money back to him).

As is sometimes the case, when someone running for office sees they are no where near the top in the poles, they will do desperate things because they want to win, no matter what the cost.

A Republican running for the seat decided to send out absentee ballot request forms. Well, what's wrong with that? Nothing. Unless you include campaign brochures asking people to vote for you. Even then, what's wrong with that? Absentee ballot request forms are government documents. The forms include the imprimatur of respectability. Hence, it is not only illegal to campaign with the forms, it is unethical.

So when confronted with the fact that he had broken the law the candidate did what any self-respecting politician would do, he denied it. Then he immediately attacked his opponents as being crooks and all he was doing was trying to get elected so he could clean house. Hmmmm. So, not only did he deny wrong doing, he then used innuendo to attack his opponents. And even further, he was trying to say even if he did do it, the ends justifies the means.

He later clarified that okay, maybe he had broken the law but that he had done a similar mailing before so why get upset about this one. He also further clarified that when he called his opponents crooks, he was actually referring only to the leading candidate. Oh. Well, that makes it all better then.

Do we really need his kind in public service?

Tali-Vans

A quick update on the state's use of a private firm to provide speed enforcement services. The state revealed yesterday that they are randomly altering how far over the speed limit they will "allow" before issuing a ticket.

As you may remember, the state at first said they would allow a 10 percent margin of error. They then "corrected" their statement and said there would be a zero tolerance on speeding. Now we learn they are varying the allowance to see how it affects the number of tickets issued, and the amount of revenue received. Note here once again that they don't care about how this affects the rate of accidents per mile driven, they are just concerned about how much money they can raise and that you vill obey de law. Heil Hitler!

SOS

The Governor gave his last State of the State (SOS) speech yesterday. Being it's his last (term limits prohibiting him from running again, thank God for small favors), he spent a lot of time going over his past accomplishments.

But what I felt was the strongest part of the speech was what he called his philosophy of service - Do your job. I will excerpt below a few paragraphs:

You know, recent polls show that after September 11th, there was an upsurge in the public's respect for public officials. I suppose some of that was due to the fine leadership shown by President Bush and Mayor Giuliani, but I can't help but believe it was mostly because the American people were awed by the courage and sacrifice of the firefighters, police and rescue personnel who lost their lives at the World Trade Center.

Those firefighters, police officers and rescue personnel were public servants - like you and me. And they lost their lives because they did their job.

Senator Warren Rudman, a Republican, when asked by Time Magazine about his retirement from the United States Senate said that when he was a marine captain serving in Korea, he commanded young marines who were ready to risk their lives for their country, and many lost their lives. But he was disappointed with his colleagues in the U.S. Senate he said because too many of them were not even willing to risk their political lives for their country.

So for once, put politics aside. Let's discuss the issues frankly and truthfully so the people know what's at stake. We owe them the truth. We owe them the courage and wisdom to make wise decisions. We owe them hope. We owe them a better and greater Hawaii.

Do your job to make Hawai'i better – even if it means you may lose your job. You owe it to the people, and most of all, you owe it to yourselves.

Aloha.

Dark Skies

There is a move over on the island of Mau'i to make the skies safer for telescopes. As you may know, Mau'i is home to some of the larger telescopes in the world and as the population on Mau'i continues to increase, the numbers of sources of light pollution, that is nighttime light sources, continues to spread.

These sources, typically street and sports stadia lights create a curtain of interference through which the telescopes are having an increasing difficult time of seeing through (see the homepage for the International Dark Skies organization here for more info on the subject).

Hence, a proposed county ordinance to convert street lights to low-wattage, low-pressure sodium lights that direct light downward. As in any change, there are those who oppose it. The opponents say the new lights give off a strong yellowish light that make it difficult to distinguish colors. Others say the lower wattage will create dangerous dark areas which may lead to higher accident rates.

So, the Mau'i County Council will have do a balancing act and decide whether the benefits of a dark sky are worth the possible safety costs. Personally, I think things can be worked out so that safety concerns can be addressed while at the same time preserving one of the things that draw people to Hawai'i, our beautiful dark skies.

Aloha!

It's Friday!

Black Hat

First, the good news. I successfully installed Red Hat 7.2, Standard Edition on my PC at work. This PC is a Dell OptiPlex GX1 with an Intel PII (Deschutes) 333MHz CPU, 384MB of Crucial RAM, 6MB and 15MB Maxtor hard drives (Windows 2000 Pro on the first and Linux on the second), embedded ATI video, embedded audio, and IBM Token-Ring network interface card.

So, both SuSE 7.3 and Red Hat 7.2 recognize and work with the Token-Ring card. I even got my MS IntelliMouse mouse to work (by choosing it from the drop down list during the install rather than accepting the probed default). As usual, the sound didn't work but I've gotten used to that (and now seems fixed - ed.). But that's not the bad news.

The bad news is the automatic update feature, Update Agent, which accesses the Red Hat Network, is free only for the first installation. Any additional installations will cost you $60 per seat for the service. For those who have not used Red Hat 7.2, the update service allows you to automatically download and install all updates/patches. This is a very time saving feature and is something that SuSE, and I assume, some other distributions have. But as far as I know, Red Hat is the only one that is trying to make this a profit center by charging you on a per seat, per year basis.

Yes, I could just buy another copy of Red Hat. Or perhaps I could download the ISOs and install a fresh copy. Or do what I did, just for academic purposes mind you, create another profile and register under another email address. This is a show stopper for me so if I can't find some easy workaround, this distribution will quickly be deleted and I'll try something else.

As an aside, I note that access to the Red Hat Network yesterday was so slow that they eventually kicked me off the system (after downloading the updates for 2.5 hours at between 10 to 20 kbs on our T-1 line) with a notice saying too many people were using their system so try back later or upgrade to their pay subscription service. I'm really trying to like this distribution but they seem to be trying to be the Microsoft of Linux. And this is not a Good Thing. Sigh

Mail Call

From: J H RICKETSON
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 7:10 PM
Subject: Sodium Vapor - Wattage

Dan -

Those people who are concerned over the lower wattage of SV lamps are using an erroneous measure. Wattage is a measure of power consumed, not light emitted. Lumens is the measure of light emitted. Actually, SVs usually provide _more_ Lumens per watt than incandescent, for an overall power (and tax!) saving. I use SV for my front & back yard lights. Delighted with them. Now I only climb the ladder ~every couple of years to replace bulbs - not every few months. And the light is ever so much softer and gentler than the harsh blue-white of mercury vapor.

Regards,

JHR
--

From: Dan Seto
To: J H RICKETSON
Subject: Re: Sodium Vapor - Wattage
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 06:39:42 -1000

JHR,

Thanks for that. I'll post it to help clarify the situation. It looks like a win-win situation to me. If you get more illumination, while at the same time saving money (estimated at ~ $500,000 per year on Mau'i) due to lower energy costs, what more could you want ?

Also, just wondering when you might be able to start posting again. I miss your irrepressible point of view and don't feel like I start the day off right without one of your posts to get my brain working!

Aloha!