I have been spread thin the last couple of days. I have been trying to finish up the annual and quarterly employer reports and W2s. Its not a hard job but I had to squeeze it in between videoing horses, juggling bank accounts, holding horses for the farrier, and going to my son's wrestling match. The good news is that I was able to file all of the state reports online. The last report to finally make the cut was the school district tax report. That is much easier for me and I am sure it must be much easier for the state. Tommorrow should be a little easier. I plan on finishing up the reports, W2s, and 1099s for Habitat.

Today I decided to try out knoppix. A couple of day ago my son told me he could not install the Age of Mythology game I got him for Christmas because he did not have enough disk space. He had already installed another Christmas present, Medieval Total War, and it requires 1.7 GB of disk space. A couple of weeks ago I bought the fedora core 1, openoffice, and knoppix cds from www.cheapbytes.com. I bought Knoppix because I heard you can boot from the cd and you can use it as a rescue disk. I booted from the cd and everything came up. Some of the plethora of open source packages that comes with knoppix is a partition magic clone and a Ghost clone. This is really cool! My plan is to buy a new disk drive and use the utilities that come with the drive to move the stuff to the new drive. Plan B is to try and fix the problem with these utilities. Plan C is to re-install.

Developer Toolbars. Wouldn't it be nice to have one-click access to the validators? And surely there's an easier way to snap your… [Web Standards Project BUZZ]

The article leads you to a very nice toolbar for the web developer who is interested in validating web pages.

I reconfigured my Fedora1 box to use a static address and hostname that is different than the one that is used when it boots as a W2K workstation. This should keep my son and my active directory happy. By using a different IP address I can limit when I expose open ports to the internet.

I mounted a shared directory on my SBS server using the instructions in www.sbslinks.com/Linux.htm.  I am working through an article by Vitor Feitosa, Authenticating Windows 2000 users on a Linux Workstation. Once I get all of this to work I will have a single signon for my network. I will wait until I get my copy of Microsoft Services for Unix. I picked up a copy last week for the cost of shipping. I could use a copy of schema extension I got off the Internet but I have opted to wait.

I just finished downloading the new version of TortoiseCVS. A little earlier in the week I downloaded Filezilla. They are both bug fixes that I may update. I do not use either program actively.

I downloaded Eraser from Sourceforge last week to check it out. The problem is how to clean the hard drive on a PC being donated. Killdisk is a fine program that works from a bootdisk. I tested it on my son's PC when I installed W2K/Fedora(dual boot). The free version will rewrite the disk partition with a single pass. The Professional version gives you DoD and Guttman rewriting options. Eraser gives you an Explorer extension that will rewrite a selected file with the DoD and Guttman options. Using just free programs you can use Eraser to selectively erase sensitive files and the killdisk bootdisk to rewrite the partition.

I am hoping to finally download and install phpwebsite on Fedora next week. I think this software has a lot of potential for non-profits and small businesses. I would like to use it for my consulting website.

Today I got the Fedora computer to talk to my Active Directory. I used Scott Lowe's article(Techrepublic and elsewhere) as the guide. The biggest problem I initially had was trying to find kinit. I figured out that it is not part of the standard Fedora distribution. Once I confirmed that Kerberos was properly configured, I joined the computer to the active directory. My test with smbclient was successful so I rebooted the machine since my son had gotten home from school. I promptly got a logon message complaining about “the system's computer account in its primary domain is missing…”. I tried to fix it on the server without success. Finally I logged into the local machine as an administrator and joined it back to the domain. I think the problem occured because I used the same computer name for Linux and W2K but I will have to research the problem more.

I finally got Fedora up to date. The kernel update was my last update for awhile. Openoffice and Ximian are very nice and strong competitors to Office and Outlook. I will start reading the Samba documentation tommorrow. I would like to authenticate with my W2K server.

I installed Fedora on my son's computer on Sunday and for the last two days I have been trying to update the files. I have not gotten the up2date program to work consistently for me. It appears to hang up while trying to download the first 30~50KB. It was giving me gpg errors yesterday. I have had more success with yum. It gets an occasional bad header and restarts but it typically will run to completion if I am upgrading only one package. Fedora is very nice but not quite ready for prime time.

In a globalized world, governments become more important than they used to be. You have to think of them not as air traffic controllers but as airport builders.

Lester Thurow

“The big telephone and cable companies see the rural fiber trend and they don't like it. They want to wring the last drops of profit out of their old lines before spending anything more.“

This is fascinating and sobering article on the progress of updating the telecom infrastructure. Since I live a quarter of a mile from the road and the telephone lines and over 6000 ft from the local exchange, I am still on dialup. I have been looking at installing cable from the road but that is an expensive job. Satellite is an option but I believe it is doomed to be just slightly better than dialup. The sad thing is that if I could get local telephone and internet access via cable I would drop my telephone service in a heart beat.