Everyone has gone home. Jared called a few minutes ago to let us know he’d arrived safely and uneventfully in Denver. The coeds, Ashlyn and Maren (a now correct spelling of her name), are back in Rexburg at BYU-Idaho. They all helped put up a couple of Christmas Trees yesterday and get them decorated. Their good work deserved a picture and immortalization on my blog! It’s now just Nina, Bradica (the dog), and me at home. It is very quiet in the house! Even though none of the kids make very much noise, their presence is missed.

I drove Jared down to Salt Lake to the airport. The roads on the way down were wet with some slick spots in the passing lane. By the time I came back, the roads were mostly dry with just a few wet spots. Moving at the speed limit was not problem. Jared was at the gate in plenty of time, particularly since his flight was delayed by about a half hour. Nina drove the girls the opposite direction to Rexburg. She left about an hour and a half after Jared and I left and we both got back home within a half hour of each other. It sure was nice to have the kids around the house for a few days.

Coming back I listened to a couple of podcasts. The first, titled Core Values from BloggerCon III was interesting for the first 45 minutes before the session lost its focus. Dave Winer, one of the luminaries and responsible for the Scripting News blog, talked for a couple of minutes about web logs and links in these blogs. He was pretty adamant that whenever anything from any other source on the web is referenced, it must be linked. I haven’t been very good about that, so I’ll try to repent and make sure that anyone reading this can go to the source to find out if there is anything else interesting there.

The second podcast was also from itconversations.com and is part of a regular series called The Gillmore Gang. Steve Gillmor gets a group of folks together, either in person or on the phone, and they talk about current information technology topics. This particular podcast focused mainly on Sun, the impending open sourcing of Solaris 10, and Sun’s future direction. It was an interesting discussion and I’ll be watching to see what really happens over the next couple of years. Sun, in my opinion, has been impacted the most severely by the Linux revolution. They definitely have to resurrect themselves Phoenix fashion and become a new company. The discussion featured Jonathan Schwarts from Sun Microsystems who was certainly an able representative of the company. One other regular participant on The Gillmor Gang is Doc Searls, a Senior Editor at Linux Journal (and also runs the IT Garage blog). I’ve been fortunate to have been acquainted with Doc Searls for a couple of years. I met him on a Linux Lunacy cruise put on by Neil Bauman at Geek Cruises and have had a couple of conversations since then with him. He’s definitely worth listening to in the Linux world.

So, the ride home from the airport was time well spent as I caught up on a few interesting things in my work-a-day and play-away world. Besides that, it gives me ample opportunity to put those all-important "links" in my blog!

I’ve started building a new web server that will eventually replace my current web server. That box will become the development server, and I’ll be able to retire two computers from the home network. I’ve decided to build the new server using SuSE Linux. It’s a whole lot more stable than Red Hat’s Fedora distribution and much easier to install and configure. I’m hoping that everything will be ready to migrate into production by the end of the year. It’s time to revamp the whole web server process. This time I’ll put up a couple of virtual web servers so that I can serve up more than one web page and eventually segue into podcasting as well. Updates on the progress to follow. Meanwhile, the evening is about finished and I’ve got a couple of work items to catch up on before heading to bed. It’s back to work tomorrow….

I took the earlier picture a little before noon. This picture was taken about four hours later. It has continued to snow lightly all afternoon and the National Weather Service has extended its snow advisory alert:

The National Weather Service In Pocatello Has Issued A Snow Advisory For The Eastern Magic Valley And The Lower Snake River Plain Until 12am Tonight. A Winter Storm Moving Through The Region Today Is Generating Widespread Snow Over The Intermountain Region. So Far Today… Most Areas In The Snake River Plain And Southeast Highlands Have Received 1 To 2 Inches Of Snow. Widespread Snow Showers Will Continue This Evening… Becoming Scattered After Midnight In The Snake River Plain. Additional Snowfall Of 1 To 3 Inches Is Expected Over The Snake River Plain This Evening With Total Accumulations Of 3 To 5 Inches… Mainly South Of A Line From Blackfoot To Burley. Scattered Snow Showers Will Continue Through Sunday With Local Accumulations Up To An Additional 2 Inches.

The storm shows on radar as a fairly long line across this region and is moving slowly to the east. There appears to be another wave of the storm behind it. All in all, this is very good news. We would like to get a lot of snow so that the drought around here can abate somewhat. This picture was taken of the back deck showing the inch or so of snow that has accumulated during the afternoon. According to the weather service report, we’re right on schedule with the rest of the region for snowfall accumulation.

I’ve been designated as the driver to take Jared to the airport tomorrow afternoon. His airplane leaves around 4:30 p.m. so we’ll leave directly after church — or if it is still snowing, we may leave a little bit earlier. About forty-five minutes south of here is the infamous Malad Pass which is just enough higher and situated in just the right position to get a lot of miserable weather. I’ll take the Tracker and Nina will drive the Toyota up the Rexburg, giving me the four wheel drive vehicle to take over Malad Pass. By the time we go through there tomorrow, I expect that the road will be plowed to the bare pavement.

I may also need to go buy some gas and oil for the snow blower!! Who knows — I may have to get some snow out of the way before we can leave in the morning! The "investment" may yet prove its worth. I’ve put the machine together, but haven’t put any fuel or oil into it or read the directions. I’ll go out to the garage in a few minutes to get the book and figure out what I need to do in case using the machine turns out to be worthwhile. Keep it up, snowstorm!

I’m trying a new method of including pictures with the web log. There’s a category of web logs called "picture blogs" where the image is the most important part of the entry. Often there aren’t any words associated with the picture, banking on the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures do add to a posting, but in my case the pictures are seldom worth a few hundred words, let alone a thousand!

It is finally snowing today. Not anything substantial, just a very light, steady snow. If it keeps up we may have some real accumulation later this evening. The current weather is 27 degrees with a light 5mph wind out of the northeast. The radar shows a light snow in the area of Pocatello but nothing anywhere else in the southeast corner of the state. Chances are that this is a local storm and will soon blow away to the west.

It was enough snow that the framers working on a new house just north of us (on the left in the picture) stopped working about an hour ago and headed for home. It’s got to be miserable trying to do framing work in this weather as everything would be very slippery making conditions dangerous. There are three houses being built in our immediate neighborhood. The view in the picture above is looking to the north-northeast. There is a house being built behind us to the south and another house being built just outside of the picture to the left. There are seventeen lots to the south of us, four of which are reputed to have been sold. Within a few years we’ll be surrounded by homes and will be in a real neighborhood. It will be interesting to watch.

Yesterday’s weather was good enough that we put the lights up along the front of the house. Jared climbed up on the roof and did most of the work to string the lights. Daryl, Ashlyn, and her roommate (I need to ask her how she spells her name. It’s something like Marrin) helped get the lights ready to be put up on the house. Jared bought some clips that made attaching the lights to the house much easier to do. We got all finished, plugged them in, and … nothing. It turns out each string of lights is fused with a three-amp fuse. Six strings had gone up pulling a total of about 4.5 amps. The fuses had blown in the first string. Jared pulled up some additional extension cord, broke the string of lights in the middle, and after changing out the fuses in the first string, everything is now working and are on a timer. I think I’ll look around for some more stuff to put in the yard to make things a bit more festive. Since the weather is inducement to staying inside today, the artificial trees will come out and decorating will start. It’ll be looking a lot more like Christmas by the end of the day. Daryl drove back home last night (good thing given today’s weather). One of us will drive Jared to the airport in Salt Lake tomorrow afternoon and the other one will drive the two girls the opposite direction back to Rexburg. This lovely holiday weekend will then come to a close. It’s been a very nice Thanksgiving. Let it SNOW!

We’ve finished the meal, cleaned up, and most folks are now right bored. The evening is yet young and everyone is on their own for food the rest of the day and night. We had a total of eight souls for the feast this afternoon. My mom and dad came over from Soda Springs. Daryl drove up from Salt Lake and Jared flew in from Denver last Saturday. Our niece Ashlyn along with one of her roommates came down from Rexburg to round out the group. We had far, far too much food. It’s a good thing that we have another fridge out in the garage! Much of the leftover food is now stored out there while we hope the young folks will graze until their hearts are content and the food is gone. Fat chance — pun intended.

We have much to be thankful for. We are living in a nice place, have a wonderful house, a great job, and are living very comfortably. We are close to family and enjoy their company often. We have good health and access to all of the best health care necessary. Life continues to be very good. I’m sure that we’re far better off than much of the rest of the world and I’m also thankful for that as well.

Tomorrow is one of the biggest shopping days of the year. We will be minor participants. Dad wants to go over to Harbor Freight and I’ll go with him. I don’t think I need to buy anything there, but it’s an interesting store and worth looking through. Most of the Christmas shopping is done, so we don’t need to battle the holiday shopping crowds. I think we’ll spend some part of the day putting up Christmas lights on the front of the house — Daryl and Jared will do the putting up, I’ll do the supervising. The holiday season is hard upon us. Happy holidays!

There is some set of idiots out there in Internet space who are spamming web logs. Somehow their software is looking for web logs with the ability to post comments. So far, all of the comments have been advertisements for online gambling. Nevertheless, they take up time and space and require effort to get rid of their crap out of my system. These things are coming from a variety of IP addresses with a variety of spoofed e-mail addresses. I’ve got to figure out a way to catch these things and reject them rather than me having to disapprove the comment and causing it to be deleted.

RSS Syndication is one of the other interesting parts of web logs. Now that Firefox is released and generally available, RSS has become much more useful. RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is a method for people to keep up-to-date with a large number of weblogs. RSS Readers (sometimes called RSS Aggregators) take a list of web sites that make RSS available and periodically check each of these web sites to see if anything new has been posted since the last time the website was checked. I have been using a stand-alone RSS reader for a couple of months. The new Firefox web browser has a couple of RSS extensions that can be added in that does all the RSS work inside of the web browser. I’ve tried out two of these addins and have found that I really like the Habari Xenu news aggregator. It is definitely worth downloading and then importing all of the sample links (just follow the directions after download).

So, I’ve set my weblog up for RSS. If anyone wants to add the weblog to their RSS Aggregator, simply load in this URL:

https://www.rnsmith.com/cafelog/b2rss2.php

That page is set up to do RSS v2.0 aggregation. If you’d rather have RSS v0.92 aggregation (and only the true geeks would know the difference..!!), then use https://www.rnsmith.com/cafelog/b2rss.php as the link.

I’ve also got almost all of the kinks worked out in the email process. Only one more bug to fix and that is the process sends out a notification email everytime an email is received and loaded. It is supposed to only send out one notification per day so that I don’t flood people’s inboxes with irrelevant messages. Perhaps I can get that fixed tonight and then I’ll be done with updating the blogging software for a while. For source code management I’ve been using CVS (concurrent versioning system). CVS has great capability, but it’s also quite arcane to administer. You kind of have to know what you’re doing in order to be able to do anything, and the documentation for CVS is pretty sparse as well. For instance, one of the important tasks that I need often is to revert to an earlier version of a program. All of the literature talks about how important this feature is and the CVS liberature itself makes a big deal out of this capability. However, nowhere does it tell you exactly how to revert to an earlier version! It can be done, but you have to know how to do it before you can actually do it.

That problem is rife in the Open Source community. There’s lots of good stuff available, some of which I’d actually like to use. However, all of it assumes that the user is an alpha-geek that disdains actual documentation and considers it a badge of honor to be able to figure it out all by himself. That’s one big difference with the Microsoft Windows community. The source itself is hidden. There’s often only one program that will do the job and it costs real money. However, there is almost always good documentation and instructions. I guess with Open Source the trade off is no documentation and no money versus documentation and paying money. Often I’d rather pay some money and get some documentation!

So, back on topic of source code management: A newer version of source code managment called Subversion is now available and as soon as I get the final problems worked out with the email program, I’ll implements Subversion and migrate to that system. Source control has been very beneficial and I’m definitely a believer. I’ll be building a new web server in the next couple of weeks to take advantage of a lot of new software as well as to clean up half-finished stuff in the current web server. I intend to implement Subversion control on all the configuration files on the new web server. It’ll be interesting to see how well this process works!

We drove down to Orem yesterday afternoon to go to the high school play
that our granddaughter Stephanie was part of and to pick up our son Jared
who was flying in from Denver for Thanksgiving. We’re right now in the Park
and Wait area at the Salt Lake City airport. Jared’s flight should have
arrived about fifteen minutes ago. A sign in the waiting area tells which
flights have arrived so those waiting know when to drive over and pick up
arriving passengers. It’s a good system, but flawed. The passenger is
through baggage claim before the arrival is posted. But, if the passenger
only had carryon, then it is a long wait before the folks in Park and Wait
see the flight arrival info. So we usually end up driving around the loop
“just to make sure.”

The play at Timpanogas High School was cute. The kids did a great job and a
couple of them had very nice singing voices. Most of the technical stuff
worked last night (as opposeed to the night before). The kids are so
intense and some of the performers are over the top. Granddaughter played
her part very well and had a great time.

It did remind me of participating in the high school plays in Soda Springs
almost 45 years ago. The school had a one-act play festival in the fall and
a full production play in the spring. In addition, the Church put on a
musical each year. I participated in all these productions and played the
male lead in the spring play my senior year. We thought we were great
stuff. Nothing has changed in the intervening years. These kids are indeed
“great stuff”!!

Today is supposed to be the nicest day of the week. We’ll have snow
(I’ll believe that when I see it) by Friday. Nighttime lows will be in the
very low ‘teens. Meanwhile the National Weather Service is forecasting a
warmer than normal December meaning that the drought continues. I’d
like to see some real severe weather! Snow until we cry “Uncle, uncle.”
Rain until we start growing gills. I could do without wind, however….

At lunch today, the discussion turned to the current political scene.
Four Cabinet ministers have resigned and are being replaced, chief among
them Colin Powell. I have been somewhat disappointed and a bit dismayed at
how ineffective one of our premiere generals of the past decade has been as
Secretary of State. Perhaps he wasn’t allowed to be effective. Time will
tell as the truth will always out. However the turnover in this cabinet is
not at all unusual. Clinton asked for the resignation of his entire cabinet
(he didn’t accept them all, however). Ronald Reagan turned over almost his
entire cabinet. New blood is good and this type of change will be good for
the current government.

As we were driving through the old city in Pocatello, we passed a nice
looking building that was empty and for sale or rent. Nina and I both asked
each other at the same time, “What kind of a business does Pocatello need?”
We discussed several options and didn’t come up with anything particularly
satisfying. Either the town is too small to support the business, such as a
good computer store, or the cost of entry is too high, such as a good
restaurant. The idea is worth more thought. Quality of life is one things
that draws people and the variety and quality of goods and services
available is part of that equation. I’d like to know if the city has any
kind of a master plan that quantifies what kinds of businesses and what
types of goods and services the city needs to attract and keep vibrant. I’d
expect that there is such a plan, but wouldn’t be too surprised if it
didn’t exist or was superficial. The town seems to have a lot of
restaurants, but my perception is there are only a couple of really
outstanding restaurants. We are very poorly served in the computer area.. In
every case, I can do far better on price and capability by buying it over
the Internet. How much demand is there for a good, competetively priced
computer store? It’s an interesting thought.

We went over to Soda Springs on Sunday to visit. My brother Perry and
his wife Chris came over from Green River as well. We always have a great
time with Perry and Chris. Thanks for coming over. We should do this more
often!