Steve's Current Notes

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Sunday, January 23, 2000

There might be a brouhaha going on in NASCAR land.

It seems the racing sanctioning body may be trying to flex its muscle over who owns the rights (as in marketing and the ability to make money) to the sport and everything that happens within the sport.

I first got wind of this last week when I heard some reporters were questioning the language on the application NASCAR provides to the media for their annual credential.  This is the credential, some call a hard card, that allows easy access to the race tracks and the restricted areas therein.  It appears that NASCAR had added wording to the application that said they owned everything and some newspaper men were questioning this new additoin.  There's some questions as to if some of them would continue to cover the sport.

I think Eric Mauk was the first to let this word out to the public in a story he published on the Speedvision web site.  

And then I noticed some similar language on the back of a ticket re-order from for the 2001 Daytona 500.  It reads like this and happens to be about the only thing on the flyer in bold print:

Mike Mulhern published this story in yesterday's Winston-Salem Journal, effectively saying the same kind of language had been inserted into the Daytona 500 entry blank, which has raised the hair on the back of the necks  of some of the top Winston Cup teams.

As Mulhern mentions in his story, it puts an interesting twist to who owns the marketability of the NASCAR drivers.  There is an entire industry that has blossomed by buying these rights from the drivers, oweners, sponsors, etc. and then marketing collectable souvenirs to all of us.

It's going to be interesting when I head to Daytona Beach in a few weeks, to say the least.

I now have barney the Linux box running in a variety of resolutions and color depths.  This was Brian Bilbrey's lesson to me yesterday.  I also have the x system coming up in 1024x768 mode.  Before when the x system loaded I and to use ctrl-alt and keypad plus or minus to scroll through the different resolutions.

With Brian's help here's what I added or changed:

The first thing I did was to make a copy of my XF86Config to be named XF86Config.works.do.not.erase  

And since I wanted to start testing my system in the 1024x786 mode I made these changes in the screen section of the XF86Config.

In the 8 bit section commented out Modes
added Modes    "1024x768"
and then under the line ViewPort 0 0 I added this line
Virtual     1024 768

I did the same thing for the 16 and 24 bit color depths.  I tested each of these color depths in all resolutions before adding the Virtual line to the 16 and 24 bit color depths.

Before I was only able to get my system up in the 8 bit mode as a default.  When ever I would issue the command startx -- -bpp16 or 24 the x system would fail.  Bob Thompson had given me a call last night and we were talking about my Linux system and its future and the color depths, etc. and he said something about starting in different color depths that made me go back and try again.  I found my dumb little mistake.  I had been leaving an all important space out in the command line.  The new command startx -- -bpp16 brought up the 16 bit server and the same was true when I tried startx -- -bpp 24.  Success on all levels.

Barney the Linux box will now run in 640x480, 80x600, 1024x768 and 1152x864 in all three color depths.  My monitor and the i810 video system are both capable of running in 1280x1024, but my eyes aren't good enough to see that small, so I have left that option out of the picture.

I sent Brian an email this morning that I am ready for the next lesson.  Maybe he can send me some ideas via email that I can play around with so I don't take up so much of his time in a chat session.

Jonathan Hassell [jon@hassell.com] keeps encouraging me on the Linux install.  He's doing the same thing about an hour and half down the road:

It looks like you've got your Linux install working nicely now.  This is something I'm going to attempt to do today in a virtual machine under Windows 2000.  Have you thought about giving GNOME (another UI) a try as opposed to KDE?  I personally like GNOME better, but to each his own.  :-)

I'm taking this thing one step at time.  Today Brian Bilbrey and I spent some time trying screen different configurations in my XF86Config file.

Brian also shared another neat trick.  I have often used cat filename.ext | more when I wanted to display the contents of a file and the file was more than one screen full.  Try less filename.ext in a terminal session to accomplish the same thing with fewer keystokes.

Update 05/04/02 09:44 AM :  I originally posted today's notes early this morning.  When I went in to look at them this morning I noticed I had inadvertently pasted something from another document I was working on right in the middle of these notes.  I am sure it didn't make much sense to anyone.  Anyway, I went back in and cleaned things up and added the bit about working on the color depths and resolutions on barney the Linux box. I normally would have added those words to the end in an update, but since I was in the middle of this page, decided to add them there.  Hit me with a wet noodle.

We received another gifts from the snow gods last night in the form of about 2 inches of fresh snow.  However, it doesn't look like we got the freezing rain or ice that had also been predicted.  That's a good thing.   I am sure the kids will want to venture back out into the snow today at some point, but for now they are content inside amusing themselves with the normal kid activities. 

They count, sort and recount their Pokemon cards on a constant basis.  Why couldn't I come up with something like Pokemon? 

I guess the newness of the snow has worn off on them as well.  And they're calling for more snow possibly mid-week.  Did we move to Canada or something?

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Monday, January 24, 2000

I don’t usually pass along jokes I get in emails, but deemed this chuckle worth the forward. Hopefully our friends across the pond will have some insight into American humor, or lack thereof.

NOTHING IS FUNNIER THAN THE TRUTH.

1. Only in America......can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.
2. Only in America......are there handicap parking places in front of a skating rink.
3. Only in America......do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.
4. Only in America......do people order double cheese burgers, large fries, and a diet coke.
5. Only in America....do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.
6. Only in America......do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.
7. Only in America......do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won't miss a call from someone we didn't want to talk to in the first place.
8. Only in America......do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.
9. Only in America......do we use the word 'politics' to describe the process so well: 'Poli' in Latin meaning 'many' and 'tics' meaning 'bloodsucking creatures'.
10. Only in America......do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.

Want race again the best drivers? The NASCAR racing game is up to version no. 3 and is available for download from the PC magazine site, but maybe you shouldn’t plan of collecting any marketing rights. If you’ve been reading these pages the last couple of days you know what I mean by that smart alec comment.

I remember when this game first came out in the very plain dos version. 

I am going to give us my Palm Pilot another good faith effort this year. I originally purchased a Palm 3 (and still have it somewhere) but quit using it when the sync process between Outlook and the Palm wasn’t that smooth. I now have a Palm V and find myself using it everyday. The first project I tackled was to put all of my contacts into Outlook. I had been using a simple text base contact manager. I now have my contacts available on my desktop and PDA, the way life was meant to be.

If I remember correctly the Palm 3 didn’t handle "double booked" meetings very well either. That, unfortunately is a fact of life for me. I am double booked into meetings quite often and have to choose which one I will attend. I try to take the most important one. The Palm V seems to have fixed that.  Yes, most days in American business are spent in meeting, deciding not to do something constructive, but when the next meeting will be held.

Of course one of the first things I did was to download some games, then upgrade the operating system for the Palm and the software for the desktop program. Of course I took the dangerous route and did it all at one time.

There are many Palm links on the web almost every software download portal has palm software. A couple resource centers for the Palm I have visited include www.palm.com and Affinity Publishing’s resource guide for the Palm computing platform . 

I have been using Photoshop since I got my first scanner (I say first, I still have only one scanner) and Photoshop was bundled with the Envision 24 bit scanner.   I have never used all of the power this program offers, but like a good soldier I marched into the Photoshop 5 upgrade. Remember I am one who doesn’t do well at reading directions, especially the online manuals, so I learned just enough to fire up photoshop, import an image and do some very minor tweaking.

ZDTV must have had users like myself in mind when they published their page on PhotoShop 5 tricks. I think I will end up reading all of the 10 Dynamite Photoshop Tips and tricks 

I believe I am quickly learning that I am in over my head with Linux, although I have learned quite a bit the last couple of days. My thanks to Brian Bilbrey for his patience.

However, the task I am trying to accomplish is rather difficult and I don’t have enough computing or networking experience to jump into this pit of quicksand without some heavy over the shoulder hand holding. Brian suggested some great reference material yesterday, so I bravely starting changing files and creating ones that hadn’t existed before.   Before you knew it I had the Linux box where it wouldn’t talk to anybody or anything. Luckily I had printed this material so I carefully went back and unchanged everything I had done, including taking the ip out for eth1. I got my system back to where it would see the world.  Want to take about a scare!  I thought I might have to start back from ground zero there for a while.

I am not giving up, just regrouping. I need more time, captain.

Here’s some of the material Brian suggested in an email yesterday:

Aside from the lessons I learned from figuring out what to do from Mark Roberts pages, I can also commend to you some of Moshe's past articles, archived at www.moelabs.com, and Trevor Marshall's work for Byte.com.

If you decide to do the LNSG thing, I have included my pfilter and rc.local files for your consideration.

Also have a long look at www.linuxdoc.org, explicitly http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX-3.html#ss3.1 pay attention to the Networking HOWTO, Networking Overview HOWTO, Firewall HOWTO.

For proxying, you will probably look to Squid.

Bear in mind that much of the stuff that I have working here is tab-A, slot-B stuff, mostly implemented from the pages of LNSG. I don't yet fully understand what it is I am doing, but it works. 

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Tuesday, January 25, 2000

We were once again visited by the snow gods last night and the kids were out of school for yet another day.  When I came home this evening Andrew was quietly reading at the kitchen table, so I quietly went over to Suzy to ask if he was in trouble or something.  No trouble here.  Andrew, who enjoys reading, is just trying to keep up with his homework.  Is this kid from my loins?  Gladly doing some homework without being threatened?  Must be his mother's influence.

Suzy got a small escape from her cabin fever today with a quick trip to the mall.  I say it was quick because she was able to make the trip sans kids.  A friend stopped by and kept the kids for a couple of hours.  The kids were rewarded as she came home bearing Pokemon cards.  She also found some kids' clothes on sale.

The tract of this snow was very weird.  We only got a dusting, while the town just to our east, Kernersville, got socked with about a foot of the white stuff.  The further east you went the more snow.  Raleigh, about 2 hours east was clobbered with +/- 20 inches.  It even snowed at the North Carolina beaches!  And when Eastern North Carolina gets this much snow, life is brought to a stand still.  Our governor called a state of emergency and activated the National Guard to assist in clearing the roads and helping the power companies restore service.  It was the largest snowfall on record at the Raleigh Durham airport.  

The same areas in Eastern North Carolina that were devastated by flooding this summer are the same places that were walloped with more than a foot of snow.  I hope the meltdown doesn't cause more flooding problems.

Bo Leuf, one of the DayNotes gang, emailed from Sweden to make sure we were surviving.  Thanks, Bo.

I played around with Linux for a little while tonight, but continued to be frustrated.  Bambam can ping the no.2 ethernet card in barney (192.168.2.1) but can not get to the outside world.  Bambam can also ping ethernet card No. 1 in barney (192.168.1.6), but nothing past that.  I just get the request timed out error message.  I know it is something simple that I am not doing or maybe even doing and needless to say it's sending my frustration level sky high.

Currently I have eth0 connected to a 10 MBps hub which is connected directly to my ISDN router.  I have a 10/100 hub connected to the 10 MBps hub and barney, bambam and the rest of the network connected to the 10/100 hub.  I even tried taking all other machines off the network (physcially unplugging them from the hub) just in case there is an address conflict.  And here's something weird.  Barney (the Linux) box will not boot unless the other machines on the network are connected.  Linux stops booting at sendmail.  As soon as the remainder of the machines are connected to the hub, Linux continues to boot normally.  The same scenario happens when eth1 is unplugged from the hub and as soon as you plug it in to the hub, Linux continues to boot normally.  And you wonder why I have gray hair? 

There has been some private discussions among some of the Day Notes gang about their exact location in this world.  This sent me off on a the internet chase to attempt to find the longitude and latitude of our house.  I was successful in a matter of minutes at the US Census mapping site.  I entered my zip code and then with the knowledge of how our streets lay out on the map, was successful in locating my house and it coordinates.  Our zip code puts us at 36.142762 N, 80.306866 W.  I was able to refine our house even more.

I cannot reach you daynotes at http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/www.wakeolda.com
/notes/2000/01232000.htm

I get an address not found error.

That shouldn't be a problem once in a wile but it is happening the last two weeks.

Did I miss a change or is there something actually wrong somewhere?

I assume you are trying to reach these notes from the page http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/previous.htm .  It looks like I goofed when I inserted the hyperlink for the 2000 dates, leaving out the http://, which in turn added it twice. Please let me know if I "fixed" the wrong page and have more work to do.

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Thursday, 

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Friday, January 28, 2000

Today is the day we remember those who lost their life in the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986.

I have my own story about  the Challenger disaster.

I was working for STP Corporation at the time and my duties were to coordinate the activities between Richard Petty, his team and our company.  These assignments included everything from some light public relations activities to interfacing with NASCAR officials, other sponsors and teams, the media and our customers.

Each year several of Richard's sponsors got together and produced a poster calendar, featuring Richard and his STP sponsored race race car.  We went for a unique shot every year.  

In 1985 we had begun discussions with NASA about using the space shuttle as a background for the Richard Petty shot in 1986.  With the shuttle program in its early deployment stages, NASA naturally was interested in the positive PR Richard could bring to their program and we liked the unique idea for the poster.  We began weaving our way through the sea of government red tape and eventually got approval to use the Shuttle Enterprise, which was parked at Dulles International Airport and had earlier been donated to the National Space and Aeronautical Museum.  I think the Enterprise was one of the first shuttles built and was never flown.  Have to check that fact out with NASA if you like.

We headed to Dulles on a cold January day for the photo shoot.  It was cloudy in the morning, but the skies cleared to a beautiful blue in time for the shoot.

We went our on the tarmac and place Richard's car in front of  the Enterprise and we were rocking.  Richard took a Chuck Yeager like pose and we got some beautiful shots of his STP Pontiac in front of the shuttle and headed back to North Carolina.

An added benefit to our day was when the British Airways Concorde landed on a trip in from London.  Our escort from the airport took us on a ground tour of the Concorde plane and then when the plane taxied out for it departure we got an extra treat.  We were escorted to the very end of the runway and the Concorde flew right over our heads on takeoff.  The most unusual sight was the yellow smoke pouring out of the engines as the pilot kicked in the after burners on its ascent.  I have some photos of this somewhere around the house.

It was a couple weeks later and the posters were on the press being printed.  The Winston Cup media tour (a collection of reporters and photographs who cover Winston Cup racing) were congregated at Petty's shop for press conference and photo session when someone ran into the shop and said the space shuttle had just exploded.

My heart sank and I immediately ran to a television.  The shuttle launches had become so common place that not many television networks carried the launches live anymore, but CNN had remained faithful to collecting news and had the only footage available of the disaster.  Luckily, CNN had provided this footage to the broadcast networks and right before our eyes, this disaster was unfolding over and over and over again.

I knew immediately we had a decision to make.  There was NO way we could now use the shuttle shot in a promotional campaign.  Our nation would be mourning the loss of the heroes.  I did not want it to appear like we were taking advantage of this tragedy.

My first call was to the printer who had the responsibility of printing the poster.  Our job was just about complete and the last copies would be rolling off the press by the time we finished our telephone conversation.

My next call was to my management in Florida and then to the other sponsors.  We quickly decided we would shelve these posters and quickly prepare another shot.  Maybe we could find a use for these posters in a year or so or maybe we would just destroy them before they got into circulation.  

Long story short, we were able to use the posters a year later and quickly scrambled to get another shot and a new poster readied for our arrival in Daytona Beach for the Daytona 500, which was now just a few weeks away.

I still remember this day like it was yesterday.  Still remember the television networks and their memorials to the astronauts and President's Reagan eulogy to these brave men and women.

It's funny how you remember things.  I was reading James Michener's book, Space, at this same time.  His accounts of a previous accident gave me some insight into how lengthy the investigation into this accident would be and some idea of how long it would be before another shuttle mission was airborne.

NASA has these photographs available on their web site from the Challenger accident:

It appears things aren't so rosy at Amazon.com after the big holiday season.  Amazon announced today it was laying people off.  Amazon may be one of the first high flying dot com stocks to be signaling weakness.

We're bracing for another round of winter weather here in North Carolina and this time the forecasters are indicating it may be the worst kind of winter weather -- ice.  It should also be factored in here that they really don't know what we're going to get, but from look at the forecast maps, it looks certain we will get "something."  I would much rather have the snow than ice.  But there is good news on the horizon.  It looks like it is going to finally warm up around here next week, so maybe the ice pack in our driveway will finally melt away. I hope. I hope.

This is the same storm that is going to pelt Atlanta and the Super Bowl over the weekend.  In fact, I think there have already been a considerable number of flight delays or cancellations at the Atlanta airport.

And this storm has an opportunity to build some energy from the Gulf of Mexico, which is when we get our worst storms.  I am sure you can't tell the folks in Eastern North Carolina this, as they got pelted from a storm earlier this week that did not come out of the Gulf.

Actually, I've looked at the forecast fro several different sites and oddly enough, none of them agree.

Earlier this week, Jan Swijsen [mailto:sjon@svenson.com] had told me he was unable to reach these notes pages through my autoforward.  The message he sent to me appeared that I had flubbed the refresh line in the page setup.  However, after a couple days of testing it looks like the quotes that front page puts around the address were what was giving him a problem:

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Swijsen [mailto:sjon@svenson.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 3:39 AM
To: Steve Tucker
Subject: Re: can't reach you.

I get from the Daynotes.com to http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/current_notes.htm. Auto forwarding from there gives that error, with :
http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/"http://www.wakeolda.com
/notes/2000/01232000.htm"
displayed in the address line.
The quotes ( in " format) that surround the address must be removed. 

I got the same errors from the http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/previous.htm page but that seems to be solved now. So now I have got some catching up to do.

I have removed the quotes from the refresh command for my current notes page. Please let me know how this works.

Are you using IE? I have no trouble getting transferred with IE?

Just for kicks, here's the value of the refresh command:
  2; URL=http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/2000/01232000.htm

I will be interested to see if the double www.wakeolda.com still comes up for you.

Thanks for helping me debug. I haven't heard this from anyone else.

 

And the follow-up from Jan Swijsen [mailto:sjon@svenson.com] confirming my suspicion of a misbehaving browser. 

Now it works, autodirect to the current notes.

I had the problem with all my browsers (Opera, Netscape and IE). That is why I think it strange that nobody else seemed to have a problem.

I would appreciate a note if anyone is having similar problems, but then when I think of it, if you're having this problem you probably won't see this note.  Oh well.

I hear the post office may be thinking of assigning everyone in the USA an email address.  Now that's scary.  The internet works.  Let's keep the government's hands out of the pie.

Something on your current web page (I assume in your Friday writeup) makes the page very wide in IE5.  Wider than my 1024x768 display can show.

Probably it’s that line in Jan’s message with the “&quot” stuff in it.

That’s about the maximum width.

Don Armstrong [darmst@yahoo.com.au]

Steve, your page has become about 50% too wide to display on a 600x800 video, let alone poor old VGA. It is a pure pain scrolling back and forth to read every line.

This, I've learnt, is typically caused by things wider than the line ought to be, and which can't be automatically re-arranged. Two things Mr Thompson had these problems with a couple of weeks ago were a table (like your Challenger photo titles) and a link address (like the very long one from Jan Swijsen which you printed on Friday). 

A quick fix might be simply to reformat them with a smaller font. You would probably have to do that for the address; although you could reformat the table to have two columns by three rows, rather than vise versa as at present.

Thanks to both of you for pointing out the error of my ways.  Hopefully it has been fixed now.  Please let me know if you more problems