Travels and Thoughts

Travels and Images

WEEK 36 2007

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Saturday 8 September 2007

Saturday - still TDY.

A rather creepy display at the fair.

Friday 7 September 2007

Friday - the 10 smartest and stupidest dog breeds. Oddly I don't see pictures of my brother's or my dad's dogs in the 'stupidest' category.

I have to agree about the smartest breed though - border collies are smarter than some people I've worked with.

Uh, I should say, not recent co-workers.

Thursday 6 September 2007

Thursday - On the road.

Taught myself how to install thttpd, so as to check out a server link. It works, at least locally. We won't actually be using it, but it's quicker to set up & configure than some of the other big servers.

Kubuntu and Synaptic are pretty awesome.

I also picked up a couple books on ASP. They were at 1/10th price at Frys, because they are old old old. Generally Windows 2000 old. Still, they had good info. It doesn't look all that hard, but I doubt I'll much time for that stuff, really, and it isn't required for what I'm doing right now.

Wednesday 5 September 2007

Wednesday - on the road, down to Oxnard. I need to get together and make some progress on work down there. Bringing the Kubuntu box.

Tuesday 4 September 2007

Tuesday - back to work.

I'm trying to set up a PC for remote access. I decided a TELNETserver was the easiest (if very insecure) server to set up. I decided to use Linux because I'm more at home with that than a Windows server.

First I tried one of the old Hobbiton Cluster boxes, but ran into problems because they have a fixed IP address and the router wants to use DHCP. Well, OK. I didn't want to mod the cluster boxes, so on to Plan B.

Plan B was to install Kubuntu 6.10 on an old $35 P-120 laptop, and see if people could TELNET in. The decision to use Kubuntu 6.10 was because it's fairly recent version, is a stable distribution, and is used a lot so there should be help and documentation out on the web.. Also I'd already burned a disk earlier in the year, so I didn't have to do that.

But I couldn't even get the old laptop to boot from it's own Win98 disk or the Kubuntu LiveCD- no video. Well, OK. On to Plan C.

Plan C was a lot like Plan B, but involved putting a new disk drive (I have several laying around) into what used to be my main desktop computer, installing Kubuntu, and seeing if people could TELNET in. Things went pretty well, but after install I couldn't TELNET in, even locally. It turns out that the TELNET server isn't installed, though the TELNET client is. That's all part of a push to make Linux more secure "out of the box", laudable but annoying sometimes. And the telnetd "package" wasn't in the default repositories list. So I had to search the Internet to find out how to add repositories - add them, then download and install TELNET (and in fact I went and got Synaptic, since a lot people seemed to think it the better repositories manager). And it still wouldn't work. Investigation showed that the inetd server wasn't running, or even installed. A search of the web turned up that fact that you needed to download and install the netkit-inetd package. So I did that.

And it worked, locally. So I set up my router to forward TELNET requests to that particular internal IP address. And then realized: it's 11:00 pm, nobody is answering their phones, there is no way to test it from outside my router/firewall. So I turned off the forwarding, turned off the PC, and went to bed.

What I still need to do, assuming the above external access works tomorrow, is to try out dynamic IP addressing at someplace like DynDNS. But it means I have to get another domain.

I pulled another three slugs off the tomato bushes this evening, big ones that I'd missed yesterday. I also tied a sun cloth over the tops of the cages, to reduce the amount of sun they bushes are enduring these days.

Monday 3 September 2007

Monday - Labor Day!

I celebrated by picking horned slugs off my tomato plants.

In two or three days they pretty had much destroyed my six plants. One day I'm thinking "Hmmm, I might have a slug..." and then next, "OMG, they've destroyed my plants!!" They eat a lot, fast.

The slugs green coloring is the same as the plants, or very very close, so they are hard to see, but the slugs also have a spiral stripe that has a mild glow under a black light. So I went out at night with a UV bulb in an automotive drop light.

There were twenty odd that I pulled off, big ones too. It's weird, I loath touching them, even with gloves, so I have to force myself to even look - but I hate them and want them gone. They hold on to the plant with all their might and make a little "scritch" noise, like velcro, when you pull them off. Ugh.

I've attached a pic, in case you wanted to see:

The largest are perhaps five inches long.

Sunday 2 September 2007

Sunday - not a lot to say. Did some work around the house, a little cleaning, a little programming.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Preparing the Llama's (?) for judging at the Fair.

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