E. F. Schumacher. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” [Quotes of the Day]

My son has been spending his allowance on Yu Gi Oh cards on Ebay. I have been coaching him on his bidding and he has gotten pretty good at it. He picks the highest price he is willing to pay for something and we stick to it. Tonight he got sniped! He was pretty mad but I found it pretty funny. We got outbid in the last two minutes of the auction by $.01.

I finally got Mozilla 1.4 to work for all users on the Linux box yesterday. I think the problem was the shell script I was running for the final setup wasn't working correctly. I didn't find out until I tried to debug the script and noticed it was evaluting a function incorrectly. I hardcoded the answer and ran the script again. I had to kill the vncserver session for it to take effect.

Since I was using mc on the redhat box I decided to install mc on my cygwin installations. To get it to display correctly I had to add codepage:oem on the cygwin environmental variable. To fix the annoying cannot create temporary directory … problem I had to change the read-write privileges on the tmp directory in the cygwin folder.

I updated to the latest version of Mailwasher Pro. As I have said previously in “Spam Management V1.1”, Mailwasher Pro is my first line of defense. This version adds some more spam management techniques and statistics. The statistics section confirms what I thought was happening. Spam composes about 80% of my mail. User defined filters identify most of my spam. Friends list and filters identify 10% of the mail. The remaining gets picked out from the spam databases. The biggest problem I have is a legitimate mail being flagged as spam. It doesn't happen often but it is really annoying. The most common problem is that it is flagged as having a wide distribution or from yahoo or aol. It is not as elegant as Bayes but it works and I understand how it works.

I have continued updating the redhat box to fix some minor problems.

The first problem was with Nautilus not appearing in VNC. I found that some people had already experienced the problem and recommended going to gnome2. Instead I updated gnome1 to the most current version. I get nautilus now but with some error messages about some windows.

The second problem was the lack of java support. So I downloaded the latest JRE.

The third problem was an old flashplayer. I updated to a new flashplayer and it crashes anytime it finds a page with flash on it. Wow! So I downloaded a newer Mozilla.

“I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I'm Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech.”

This story actually occurred although the parody of the “Switcher” commericial did not. Its a pretty impressive story of how product delivery times alter the path of research. Mr. Varadarajan wanted to build a supercomputer this year and Apple could deliver. He made the adjustments and he has a G5 cluster pushing 9.8 teraflops. By the end of year he believes he can another 10%. Hey, did I mention I graduated from Virginia Tech.

I decided I needed some time away from the problem. I knew I needed to get vncserver working locally but I thought the firewall rules were getting in the way. I could not tell from the error message who was refusing the connection since it looked like the same message I got when I was using ssh. After playing with vncserver on my xp box I decided to try and start the vncserver manually on the linux box. First I setup a password using vncpasswd. Then I started vncserver with the command, vncserver :1.  I was surprised to see a message saying it had created my profile in .vnc. I ran the vncviewer locally and it worked. I ran the vncviewer remotely through the ssh tunnel and it worked. The only problem was the twm display manager. I have a fondness for gnome.

Today I finished loading up my new linux box with updates. Then I started adding a couple of applications to make my life easier. I installed apt and Synaptic to make upgrading easier. I used Synaptic to install Mysql. I could not find a Webmim in the rpm's so I downloaded from the website and installed it. I am still working on a bug with ssh connections. I can make outbound connections but not inbound connections. I think I have it narrowed down to a problem in the hosts_allow file. I really want to use VNC to the box.