Re: CD/DVD is obsolete or deprecate at 2025?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 6/18/24 10:01 AM, John Hasler wrote:

JHHL writes:

Some of us still prefer physical media


Do you mean read-only media?  All media are physical.


No, I mean physical media as opposed to downloads.

Application software, I've resigned myself to downloads, although as I 
said, I am not happy with software that installs updates of dubious 
value without so much as a how-do-you-do.


Even operating systems, when there is no other choice available.

But I prefer my books to be in a form made from an eminently sustainable 
and recyclable resource, a form requiring (at least for the sighted) no 
auxiliary hardware other than maybe a pair of reading glasses (which I 
now need even to read screens). A form that can also be adapted to those 
who read with their fingertips. A form that a publisher cannot yank away 
from those who paid good money.


As for recorded music and audiovisual content, I again prefer something 
that cannot be taken away without physically carrying it off. And I have 
the additional objection here that the most common digital music formats 
use lossy compression. *VERY* lossy compression. And I find it 
thoroughly laughable when vinyl-snobs listen to homemade MP3 dubs of 
their records (surface noise, compression artifacts, and all).


But this is veering far off-topic. My previous message was mainly to 
point out that the thread title can scare the  out of people, 
and seems to have very little to do with what the thread is actually 
*about,* i.e., it appears to be about delivery forms other than optical 
or magnetic media for OS and application software, and compatibility of 
disk-images with those forms. Not about *getting rid of* optical media 
(or magnetic media, for that matter).

Re: CD/DVD is obsolete or deprecate at 2025?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 6/17/24 7:44 PM, Thomas Dineen wrote:

No! Some of us want to keep using DVD and not be pushed away


What he said.

Might I humbly suggest that this whole thread title is provocative, 
alarming, and maybe even a little inflamatory?


Some of us still prefer physical media, whether in the form of printed 
books, CDs, tapes, DVDs, vinyl,  Most of my computers have at least 
one drive capable of handling physical media, and most of those that 
don't can talk to my USB optical drive. And I regularly "sneakernet" 
files between two of them, on a Zip Disk. And my stereo system still has 
a CD drive, a CD-R drive, and a tape deck . . . but NOTHING that can 
deal with downloaded recordings unless burned onto physical media. And I 
LIKE IT THAT WAY.


I will note that when my previous DOSbook failed, I needed PC-DOS 2000 
on physical media in order to do the OS-install.


And I'll also note that at present, the Linux subsystem on my Chromebook 
is, in a word, hosed, and I blame that on unasked-for "updates" (of 
dubious value at best) being foisted upon me.


--
JHHL

Re: [ SOLVED] Re: Yet ANOTHER ThunderTurd ( Thunderbird ) topic... Text Size

[James H. H. Lampert]

I will say that one should probably not expect perfection from an email 
reader that's named after a cheap wine.


In my experience, T-Bird is the worst email reader I've ever used . . . 
except for *every other* email reader (without a single exception) I've 
tried. I'm particularly irritated with those that have no way to disable 
HTML rendering, and those that have no way to send properly formatted 
plain-text-only emails, those that try to trick you into top-posting, 
and (especially) those mobile email readers that waste finite processor 
resources by insisting on checking your email even when closed.


Compared to that, dealing with T-Bird's imperfections is a walk in the park.

--
JHHL
(who still hasn't figured out why Ford named a car, and the Air Force 
named its demonstration team, after that same cheap wine)

Re: OT: Top Posting

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 5/15/24 6:46 AM, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
. . .

No its not, its your refusal to use the down arrow in your reply editor
to put your reply after the question. It really is that simple. If your
choice of email agents cannot do that, its time to switch to an agent
that can. There are dozens of them.

. . .

Actually, it isn't necessarily the user's fault. Thanks to the "business 
standard," (and think about the initials) of top-posting over the 
complete, unpared quote of the entire thread, there are an awful lot of 
email readers (and especially webmail interfaces) that make it difficult 
to follow any other convention, and a few that make it damn-near impossible.


Just as there are an awful lot that make it difficult or impossible to 
send a plain-text email.



Incidentally, regarding the Hollerith card origins of the 80-column 
standard, the very first Hollerith cards, from the 1890 U.S. Census, had 
24 columns and 12 rows of round holes, and were punched with a 
pantograph punch. In 1928, IBM introduced rectangular holes, in an 
80-column, 10-row format, later expanded to 12 rows.


--
JHHL

Re: OT: Top Posting

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 5/14/24 10:41 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:

We have a clash of two cultures here.


More than just *nix vs. M$.

In business communications by email, the norm is to quote the *entire* 
thread, every time, without paring anything down, purely for the sake of 
CYA. As such, top-posting is the only reasonable alternative, given that 
recipients would otherwise have to scroll through hundreds, perhaps 
thousands of lines of quoted material to find a bottom-posted reply, or 
worse, *actually read* through all that quoted material to find an 
inline-posted reply.


In list-server communications (and to a lesser extent, BBS posts), the 
norm is to pare down quoted material to the barest minimum needed to 
provide context (originally to save bandwidth and storage, both of which 
are *still* finite resources), and to bottom-post or inline-post one's 
replies, in order to give them a more natural flow. CYA doesn't factor 
in at all.


--
JHHL

Re: NextGov: Linux XZ Utils Backdoor Was Long Con, Possibly With Support

[James H. H. Lampert]

I will note that open source software has, by definition, a lot more 
eyes looking at the source. Which is probably why (as Tomas said) 
"proprietary software tends to fare significantly worse."


--
JHHL

Re: What use can i give to linux?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 4/5/24 12:12 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote:
. . .

Most of the time the platform is dictated by the application(s) a
user wants to run. . . .


Indeed. Which is why I still have DOS boxes  (running IBM PC-DOS 2000, 
with DOSShell, and no WinDoze whatsoever: Xerox Ventura Publisher 
(DOS/GEM Edition) is *still* my typesetting software of choice, and I 
still use WordPerfect 5.1+ and Quattro Pro SE.


And as to Ventura and WordPerfect, well, Corel can go to . . . (rhymes 
with Corel), for turning perfectly good DOS apps into bad, bloated, 
WinDoze apps.


--
JHHL

Re: What use can i give to linux?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 4/5/24 11:35 AM, John Hasler wrote:

Desktop Linux is widely used in physics and mathematics.  NASA uses
Linux extensively, including on Mars and on the ISS.  SpaceX uses Linux
on their rockets and spacecraft.  Over 90% of the top 1 million Web
servers run Linux, including Yahoo, X, and Ebay.  Almost all
supercomputers use Linux. Linux has a large and growing share of the
automotive market.  Your router almost certainly runs Linux.


Not to mention people like me, who refuse to use WinDoze, in order to 
avoid paying "The Bill" (hasn't Gates gotten rich enough already, 
selling ill-behaved bloatware and deliberately driving competitors out 
of business?), and who have become increasingly disgusted with Apple's 
"we know what you want better than you do" attitude, and with the fact 
that their upgrade treadmill is getting to be almost as bad as 
Microsloth's (I'd use a stronger dysphemism, involving a very rude 
Yiddish word, but this is presumably a family list-server).


And of course, every Chromebook in the world has a variant of Linux at 
its core (just as every Mac that runs a Mac OS later than 9 uses a 
variant of BSD), and a *good* Chromebook will run Linux apps.


--
JHHL

Re: what keyboard do you use?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/4/24 9:56 AM, Michael Kjörling wrote:


If you contact them and ask, they can probably tell you whether the
key caps . . . can be flipped physically.


Unicomp can and will make custom keycaps.

--
JHHL

Re: what keyboard do you use?

[James H. H. Lampert]

I also wouldn't mind one bit if somebody came up with a computer 
keyboard that exactly duplicates the key arrangement and feel of a 
Linotype keyboard.


Not for practical daily use, mind you (I'll stick with my Unicomps); 
rather, as a practice instrument for those who occasionally run Linotype 
and Intertype machines, and for interpretive exhibits in graphic arts 
museums (given that I spend my Saturdays docenting at the International 
Printing Museum, I'd find both useful).


"etaoin shrdlu"

--
JHHL

Re: what keyboard do you use?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/2/24 5:25 PM, Lee wrote:

I figure there's a high percentage of keyboard jockeys here so ..
which keyboard do you like and why?


Unicomp. They acquired the rights and the tooling for the IBM buckling 
spring technology.


If only they also offered mice that were as rugged as their keyboards.

--
JHHL

Re: Home UPS recommendations

[James H. H. Lampert]

I, too, have always used APC.

I've heard people swear by APC, and I've heard people swear *at* APC. 
I've had reason to do both, myself (and I won't elaborate on either).


--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: Mouse single click handling?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 12/20/23 1:06 PM, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:

I finally switched tactics last year and tried gaming mice. I thought
about the way they're used. It's comparable to how much I click for
emails and research related to ongoing Life.. shtuff.


The main reason why I avoid gaming mice is because they tend to be 
loaded down with unnecessary bells and whistles.


Again, if only Unicomp offered mice that were built like their 
keyboards. . . .


--
JHHL

Re: Mouse single click handling?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 12/20/23 11:30 AM, Jeremy Nicoll wrote:

Until about a year ago my experience with Logitech mice had been
good.  Those that had died normally did so after falling off a desk,
which I don't really see as a manufacturing fault.

But since then several I've bought have all failed with the problem of
LMB sending double-clicks when pressed once.  That includes two
separate "Pebble" mice.


I've also been sticking with Logitech mice for many years. Specifically, 
M100/B100/M110, 


But my brand-loyalty has been eroding, because they've been cheapening 
their product. In particular, it wasn't that long ago that, without 
changing the model number, or making any public announcement, they 
pulled support for PS/2 (and therefore for passive PS/2 adapters) from 
what had been, up until then, dual-mode mice. Not a major problem for 
Linux, running on current hardware, but a *very* major problem for me, 
because I also run DOS (IBM PC/DOS 2000, with no WinDoze whatsoever) on 
antique hardware.


Fortunately, I live and work near what can only be described as a 
computer junk shop, where finding antique hardware, some of it still 
new-in-box, is not terribly difficult.


But I can definitely confirm that Logitech is NOT making mice like they 
used to.


If only Unicomp made a mouse as good as their keyboards . . . .

--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: dedicated IP

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 11/27/23 1:59 PM, Maureen L Thomas wrote:
I would like some advice.  I have been offered a dedicated IP through 
NORD.  Is it worth it or is it not needed?  Pros and cons would be very 
helpful.  Thank you.


Assuming you mean a static IP address:

Useful if you need to self-host something (assuming outsiders are even 
able to get in).


Also useful on both ends, if you have customers for whom you need to 
regularly get direct terminal access: having a static IP address at 
their end makes it easy for you to reach their box, and having one at 
your end makes it easy for them to allow you in, while keeping the rest 
of the world out.


--
JHHL

Re: Acer Monitors

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 10/18/23 5:09 AM, Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
. . .

I'd be interested in hearing any comments from users of Acer products.


I have a pair of their VL270U monitors hooked up to my work Mac Mini. 
The biggest challenge I had was building a "portrait mode" stand for one 
of them. They've been working quite well over the months they've been in 
service.


--
JHHL

Re: REeLooking for a good "default" font (small 'L' vs. capital 'i' problem)

[James H. H. Lampert]

Hmm. IBM Plex. Not bad-looking, and it does solve the stated problem.

I will note that like Bistream Swiss Monospaced, it's only *nominally* 
sans-serif, in that it has slab-serifs (Stymie-style, rather than 
Clarendon-style) on the capital I, and one small slab-serif on the 
lowercase l.


--
JHHL

Re: Looking for a good "default" font (small 'L' vs. capital 'i' problem)

[James H. H. Lampert]

What Herr Rönnquist said.

And given that I actually *do* set type with some regularity, I can say 
from experience that, with the exception of some monospaced examples 
that are only *nominally* sans-serif (e.g., Bitstream Swiss Monospaced), 
sans-serif fonts in which uppercase I and lowercase l are readily 
distinguishable are about as scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth, 
whether you're talking digital, photo, hot metal, foundry, or wood.


--
James H. H. Lampert

(And for the record, my "go-to fonts" are all versions of Garamond.)

Re: [OT] connect to Amazon AWS service

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 7/28/23 8:46 AM, Haines Brown wrote:

I've used an on line validation servce to which I submit code. It
terminated with the note that it has now become a web service on the
Amazon EC2 Web Service. I registered for this cloud sercice, but have
no idea how to access an instance created by someone else.


Just because a service is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance doesn't mean 
that having an account on AWS is necessary for access to it. Neither 
does it mean that having an account on AWS will automatically get you 
access to it. We offer a SAAS version of our CRM application, hosted on 
AWS; having an AWS account is neither a necessary condition for access 
to the product, nor a sufficient condition.


You probably need to contact the owner of the service for instructions 
on how to proceed.


--
JHHL

Re: Convert PostScript .pfa to .pfb?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 7/13/23 2:28 PM, Tom Browder wrote:

I know the binary version of the PS fonts can be converted to TrueType by
FontForge.

However, is there a way to convert from the PS ASCII version .pfa file to
the binary .pfb file?


I have a very old font editor, that I used briefly (on a neighbor's 
WinDoze box -- I don't allow WinDoze in my house), circa 20 years ago (I 
don't recall of the top of my head what it was called), and I think it 
could convert PS Type 3 to PS Type 1.


So assuming my memory isn't playing tricks on me, it's been done. No 
idea, however, what will do it, that's currently available. You don't 
see much PS Type 3 any more, I'm afraid.


--
JHHL

Re: Cable colors and urban legends (was: Error Messages)

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 6/2/23 11:33 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:


This is very hard to believe.  I'm willing to believe that there have
been insulation dyes that have proved problematic, but if you've
encountered those problems in the 70s I find it *really* odd that it
would still affect cables from this century (e.g. sata cables).


Yes, and red-insulated wire has been in common use for many decades, on 
everything from primary power wiring for buildings (when the "hot" wires 
for multiple circuits, or for both "hot" wires of a 240VAC circuit, are 
run together), to automotive wiring, to model train wiring, and I've 
never heard of red (or any other particular color) insulation (or cable 
jacketing, heat shrink, split-loom, or spiral-wrap) causing damage to 
conductors. More likely, it was a particular material, possibly 
containing a plasticizer that turned out to react with copper. And it's 
rather unlikely that any such material wouldn't be "deprecated with 
extreme prejudice" as soon as the problem was discovered.


--
JHHL

A case for supporting antiquated hardware, was Re: A hypervisor for a headless server?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 6/2/23 8:34 AM, Mario Marietto wrote:

You may argue that developing for a small number of old computers
isn't worth trying. But,first of all,I think that there are a LOT of
old PCs in the world,since poor people aren't only a niche.


Nor are they the only ones using antiquated hardware, or expecting new 
hardware to remain in service until it physically deteriorates to the 
point of unreliability.


Some of us are Luddites, and damn proud of it. Earlier this year, I 
finished a months-long project of obtaining a notebook computer old 
enough to be viable as a DOSbook (IBM PC-DOS 2000, with no WinDoze 
whatsoever), and configuring it as such, precisely so that I would once 
again have backup hardware, and mobile capability, for my DOS 
applications. As a replacement for my dying "bionic desk lamp" iMac, I 
eschewed both WinDoze and Mac, in favor of a System76 Meerkat, precisely 
because a state-of-the-art Linux system would presumably have a nice 
long lifespan.


I don't trade in my automobiles for new models; I keep them until it's 
time to have them hauled off to their final rusting places. And I spend 
my Saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum, where I 
frequently operate presses and linecasting equipment that is nearly as 
old, or older, than I am, some of which was already decades old before I 
was born.


Luddites of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your upgrade 
treadmills, and Linux and DOS are your friends!


--
JHHL

Re: OT: Charities (a rant)

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 1/31/23 11:38 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
. . .

Because SPI is a US registered charity, it is covered by
charitynavigator.org:

. . .

And its numbers are impressive. Although it appears to have been rather 
lavishly overfunded in 2018.


--
JHHL

Re: running outdated software

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 10/13/22 11:05 AM, DdB wrote:


But i am very used to running outdated software, as i am living the old
recipe to "never change a working system".
I've got you beat: I still have a DOS box. And I'm in the process of 
configuring and loading a replacement for a worn-out DOSbook. And I 
still run Xerox Ventura Publisher, DOS/GEM Edition, WordPerfect 5.1+, 
and Quattro on it.


There's a BBS for this: it's called the Vintage Computer Federation.

--
JHHL

Re: Color of the active window title bar in ubuntu-mate?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 8/22/22 4:07 AM, Nicolas George wrote:

. . . A manifestation of the “we know better than you” mindset of the
GNOME people. . . .
*JUST* the GNOME people? I've found that, in general, the "we know 
better than you" mindset is even worse with Apple and M$. And getting 
worse still, especially with Apple.


My choice for volume icons, for example, has always been a vintage disk 
pack for an old IBM 3330 "Merlin" drive, sitting idle, in a pack-cover. 
And my choice for a desktop background has always been a brick wall 
(ever since I first had a chance to play with ResEdit on a Mac Plus, 
more than half a lifetime ago). Do I shove this down anybody else's 
throat? No. But neither do I care to have somebody else's look-and-feel 
elements shoved down my throat.


--
James H. H. Lampert
(I also like a garbage can icon to look like a garbage can. With a 
WinDoze logo on it.)

Re: OT, Recommendation for low cost laptop

[James H. H. Lampert]

Another place to look is your local laptop store.  My current laptop,
as well as its predecessor, are refurbished ThinkPads I bought there
for about $300.  They run Linux just fine.


"Local laptop store?"

Not quite sure I've heard of such a thing, at least not recently. My 
Chromebook came from BestBuy.


As it happens, my beat-up old DOSbook (an old Compaq Contura 486) 
crapped out on me, a couple months ago, and I'm looking for something of 
about the same physical dimensions (or a bit smaller and lighter) to 
replace it. Something old enough to have a floppy drive and/or a PCMCIA 
slot, and to run DOS and DOSapps without a problem.


--
JHHL

Re: [SOLVED] Re: One-user system.

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 5/6/22 1:11 PM, Charles Curley wrote:


Maybe, maybe not. I got started with a KIM-I: 6502 running at 1 MHz,
just over 1 kilobyte of RAM. Six seven segment displays and a hex
keyboard for data entry. I still have one.


I remember *reading about* the KIM-I (and the Altair, and a few others) 
in electronics magazines; I started with a TRS-80 Model I myself (and 
with high school programming classes on an IBM 370/135 at the District 
Office, with terminals connected over a pair of multiplexed phone lines 
[and a maximum terminal speed of 300 Baud]).


--
JHHL

Re: system76

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 1/15/22 7:38 PM, Yamadaえりな wrote:

hello list

I have thought about buying a laptop from system76 with linux pre-installed.
What do you think of this manufacturer? Glad to hear from you.


I've had a Meerkat for several months, and except for an occasional OS 
crash within 2 minutes of power-up (but never once the system was up 
long enough to actually do anything), it has performed well.


--
JHHL

Re: [SOLVED] Re: Firefox: Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead for the USPS.com

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 1/4/22 11:33 AM, David Wright wrote:


In fact, I was quite shocked when I just tried
DNS over HTTPS for a couple of minutes. The 10-day weather
profile that I screenshoot every day was plastered in popups.

Anyone know how to combine DoH with resolving 14,000 addresses
to 127.0.0.1? Also, does that mean that DoH attempts to resolve
my local hosts before consulting /etc/hosts? I didn't stick
around DoH long enough to find out.


Yeef!

Thoughts of the Homer Simpson catchphrase, and the boss adversary from 
Arkanoid (and its sequel, Revenge of DOH), come to mind.


--
JHHL

Re: [SOLVED] Re: Firefox: Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead for the USPS.com

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 1/4/22 10:19 AM, Michael Stone wrote:
And this is why putting stuff into /etc/hosts is basically never the 
right answer. :)


Au contraire!

Among other things, the host table is the best possible place to block 
access to certain unwanted domains. For example, if you add these entries:


> 0.0.0.0 facebook.com
> 0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
> 0.0.0.0 hi-in.facebook.com
> 0.0.0.0 gl-es.facebook.com
> 0.0.0.0 twitter.com
> 0.0.0.0 www.twitter.com

you can never be tricked into accessing Facebook or Twitter (for me, 
ONCE is far too many times), and if you add


> 0.0.0.0 bing.com

then bing-redirections will fail every time (and alert you to their 
noisome and  all-too-common presence).


And likewise, you might want to access other machines within your LAN by 
name, but your operation is not big enough to warrant bothering with an 
internal DNS, or you might need to access outside systems that, for 
various perfectly legitimate reasons, are kept off the public DNS.


--
JHHL

Re: Don't try this at home kids

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 11/29/21 2:41 PM, Jeremy Ardley wrote:
P.S. I am totally unconvinced about the arguments for using sudo rather 
than running as root. You can do exactly the same damage with sudo as 
being root user.
P.P.S The conventional instruction is to use visudo to do the edits. 
Which means using Vi, which is another anachronism that should be 
humanely put down.


That's about the size of it. I've used forty-year-old non-full-screen 
editors that are a hundred times more intuitive than vi is. And the only 
reason ROOT access is more dangerous than, say, QSECOFR access on OS/400 
(or whatever IBM is calling it this week) is because there's nothing 
stopping a Linux ROOT from doing things *nobody* should be allowed to do 
without putting the system into some kind of maintenance mode.


I have access to a number of Amazon Linux virtual boxes, that don't like 
password authentication in general (preferring certificate 
authentication . . . which authenticates the BOX that is ssh-ing in, but 
not the WARM BODY between the chair and the keyboard).


And if you have a system that doesn't allow ROOT to sign on, and doesn't 
allow you to SU, then you can achieve the same result by doing


  sudo bash

--
JHHL

Re: Leibniz' "best of all possible worlds" ...

[James H. H. Lampert]

>>> I also wonder how Leibniz is relevant to this scenario ...

 When I think of Leibniz, I think of calculus (and rejoice in the 
fact that the only calculus I still have to deal with is what the 
dentist has to jackhammer off my teeth [before it turns into partial 
differential equations]).


When I think of "the best of all possible worlds," I think of Candide 
(take your pick: Voltaire, Bernstein, or both), and I think of the old 
chestnut that "an optimist believes we live in the best of all possible 
worlds, while a pessimist fears that the optimist is right."


When I went to Long Beach State, we used CDC Cybers. Which was a major 
culture shock after using an IBM 370/135 (running McGill University 
MUSIC), going from 8-bit EBCDIC to 6-bit CDC Scientific (with no room in 
the character set for any control characters!)


Still, if I were going to a school where WinDoze was compulsory, I'd 
find another school.


--
JHHL

Re: Write *once* storage (was Re: write only storage)

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 9/21/21 10:21 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
. . .

   WORM is Write *Once* , not Write *Only*

"Write only" storage is easy and fast - just throw things at /dev/null
and they can never be altered (or read back).


Quite.

Or to paraphrase something I said, that actually got published in some 
magazine dealing with IBM Midrange systems, "A data Roach-Motel: data 
goes in, but it doesn't come out."


--
JHHL

Re: Your Thoughts on Printer Replacement

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 9/18/21 2:19 AM, Jeremy Ardley wrote:
My experience is that toner does degrade over a period of years. To get 
full life you need to use your advertised pages within a year or so.


Agreed. I've seen toner cartridges go bad. Of course, they had been 
sitting on a shelf for *many* years.


--
JHHL

Re: Your Thoughts on Printer Replacement

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 9/18/21 2:00 AM, Jonathan Dowland wrote:

The direction of travel for printing is entirely driverless, so this is
less important than it used to be.


Really? If true, that is exceptionally good news. The last time I looked 
at new printers, the "direction of travel" was entirely 
driver-dependent, RIPping the PostScript, PCL, or straight ASCII in the 
driver, rather than in the printer's own processor and firmware, and 
anything that could RIP a PostScript data stream directly would have 
cost a fortune.


--
JHHL

Re: Your Thoughts on Printer Replacement

[James H. H. Lampert]

Personally, I wouldn't accept an inkjet as a gift. You use them like 
crazy, and you go through absurdly overpriced cartridges like crazy. You 
*don't* use them like crazy, and those absurdly overpriced cartridges 
clog, and you still go through them like crazy. And the pages come out 
soggy, and are even more vulnerable to water damage than what I write 
with my fountain pens. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing they're 
good for is edible printing, and for what little of that I do (typically 
one page every few months), it's far cheaper to email an image to the 
local cake supply, and have them do it.


(The first rule of edible printing is you don't run anything but edible 
ink in that printer. The second rule of edible printing is you *DO NOT* 
run anything but edible ink in that printer. And you still don't talk 
about Fight Club.)


I have had three monochrome laser printers (an HP 4ML, followed by an HP 
2100M, which I then replaced with a rebuilt 2100M, which I still have. 
And I've had two color laser printers, a Samsung CLP-315, bought new and 
used until it wore out, followed by a rebuilt Samsung CLP-415, which I 
still have.


And I have an ALPS MicroDry, that I bought used, after they'd been 
discontinued.


Before the Samsungs, bought a Xerox color laser. It went back to Staples 
the day after it arrived: It was a lot bulkier in real life than it was 
in the pictures, it made the devil's own noise when it was running, and 
it claimed to be a PostScript machine, but curled up its toes and said 
"helll meee" if I actually fed it a PostScript data stream. 
That's not to say that the Samsungs will do anything if fed PostScript, 
but at least they were relatively inexpensive, as well as being almost 
as compact and quiet as my 2100M.


What I've seen of HP lasers more recent than the 2000-series has not 
impressed me. That's a major reason why I went with a rebuilt 2100M, 
instead of something more recent. That and the fact that being able to 
accept and RIP a PostScript data stream, fed through a Centronics port, 
is a non-negotiable requirement for me: it's either that, or I have to 
dump the data stream to a file, distill it into a PDF, and print that.


--
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante

Re: Hardware life expectancy

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 7/25/21 6:38 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
. . .

Nowadays, I'm still planning to use that same Thinkpad X30 to display
PDFs in the classroom (when I get to meet students physically again),
and more than half of my machine are older than 10 years old.
Better yet, they don't seem significantly slower than my newer machines.

So, yes, 10 year old machines and still very much relevant.


I'm still making productive use of a G4 "bionic desk lamp" iMac, and of 
a DOS/Linux dual-boot that I built from mostly cast-off parts, a few of 
them even older than the iMac. And I will continue to do so even once I 
get my new Meerkat fully deranged to suit my tastes.


But on the other hand, computers are not Linotype machines (I regularly 
operate one from 1954: that's eight years older than I am), and aren't 
built to last forever. (The speaker on the iMac quit some months back, 
and it now has a chronic overheating problem.)


--
JHHL

Re: MDs & Dentists

[James H. H. Lampert]

"Immutable backups." Interesting concept. But how? Optical media? 
Enormous decks of Hollerith cards? Enormous reels of punched paper tape?


So far as I'm aware, there is *only one* operating system currently in 
wide use, that has never been successfully infected with malware outside 
of laboratory experiments: the IBM Midrange operating system that goes 
by such names as OS/400 and i5OS (among others, and although I work with 
it on a daily basis, I've long-since given up keeping track of what IBM 
is calling it in any given week).


But Linux comes a lot closer to being malware-secure than WinDoze, or 
even Mac OS, which is one reason why, with my "bionic desk lamp" iMac on 
its last legs, instead of buying another Mac, or a WinDoze box, I bought 
a Meerkat.


As to MDs and Dentists making poor decisions where computers are 
concerned, it's not just healthcare professionals: over a quarter 
century ago, I spent about a year trying to fix the hidden flaws in a 
small business accounting program. It had been written, not by a 
programmer, but by an accountant. In C. It was his first non-trivial 
program in a language other than BASIC. And it ran on the Amiga. 
Aggressively multitasking within itself, on a platform where there was 
no memory protection, and nothing but "good intentions" to keep one task 
from stomping all over another task's memory. It nearly killed me.


--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: Offensive variable names [was: Cool down ...]

[James H. H. Lampert]

I know people who associate the time-honored metasyntactic "foobar" with 
the military slang acronym FUBAR.


--
JHHL

Re: Hi there, test only, please ignore

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 6/17/21 1:25 AM, Grzesiek wrote:

test


I got your test message. As it happens, we just went live with DMARC, 
and have reason to do some testing ourselves.


--
JHHL

Slightly off-topic: anybody know of a way to keep one's Debian User List posts from failing DMARC?

[James H. H. Lampert]

Please excuse the off-topic post, but I'm hoping this has come up with 
others here:


I've been tasked with implementing DMARC on our domain. And I'm told 
that the Debian List Server doesn't rewrite "From" headers for 
DMARC-enabled senders, and neither does it do anything else to handle 
DMARC-enabled senders.


--
James H. H. Lampert
Touchtone Corporation

Re:  Sponsored post on https://debian.org

[James H. H. Lampert]

The price is our souls, and we all agree that's too high.


Hmm. Isn't that also the price of anything sold at Wal-Mart?

* * *

At least the OP was polite enough to *ask* about posting ads, rather 
than just *doing* it.


--
JHHL

Re: How to capture composite video

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 5/17/21 9:39 AM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I have a number of VHS tapes which I'd like to digitize, and I'm
trying to figure out where to start, hardware- and software-wise.


Do you have a DVD-R video recorder? Simplest way I know is to dub the 
VHS to DVD, at which point accessing the video from your computer should 
be absurdly simple.


--
JHHL

Re: Social-media antipathy (was Re: How i can optimize my operating system?)

[James H. H. Lampert]

Suffice it to say that the only Social Media outfit I trust less than I 
trust Facebook or Twitter (neither of which I trust any further than I 
can throw the U.S.S. Hornet) is LinkedIn. Which I have loathed since 
*before* they became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsloth.


--
JHHL
(I'd use a stronger dysphemism for M$, but I don't know this List's 
policy about Yiddish profanity.)

Re: Social-media antipathy

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 3/13/21 1:17 PM, Andrei POPESCU wrote:

Unfortunately the way Facebook gained it's huge user base was by creepy
stalking of people in any way it could, in order to get them to sign up,
which is exactly why a privacy respecting social network will have a
tough time to compete.


Not even remotely to the extent that LinkedIn did. There was a time when 
hardly a month went by, that I didn't get at least one piece of LinkedIn 
spam, all from new users' email address books being mined for contact info.


And Mr. Gibbs, RIGHT ON! And I, too, carry a clamshell. A fairly new one 
(my old one was falling apart from age, and on my first vacation in 
Canada, it turned into a paperweight from the moment my bus crossed the 
border into British Columbia to the moment my flight out of Toronto 
landed in Boston). Its browser is barely sophisticated enough for 
rudimentary web browsing and checking my email. And I like it that way.


But I tried DDG last week, and it appeared incapable of helping Boy 
Scout find a candy store.


--
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante

Re: Social-media antipathy (was Re: How i can optimize my operating system?)

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 3/12/21 8:09 AM, Larry Martell wrote:

I did the same thing - I resisted being on FB for a very long time,
but eventually I had to get on because it was how my family was
communicating and I was being left out of the loop. I joined as my dog
only my family knew how to find me. Even to this day I am only
connected to family members.


If they shun or ostracize you for not being on Facebook, they are 
neither your friends nor your family.


The very first thing I do when taking possession of a computer is to add 
host table entries to interdict any attempt to access Facebook or 
Twitter (by mapping them to 0.0.0.0). That way, it becomes impossible 
for me to be tricked into accessing them by disguised links (I have 
received such links a number of times).


I have real friends. And a real web site. And list-servers and boards. 
And a life.


--
JHHL

Re: is it possible to add a secondary disk to an existing debian systems and install programs to the secondary disk

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/23/21 8:13 AM, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:

You can always add more filesystem space later. It's easier if you're using
LVM but that isn't required. You just build another filesystem on the new
drive after it's installed and mount it into your filesystems, at the
appropriate mount point.


Indeed, and on my DOS/Linux dual-boot at home, I have the Linux side set 
up to mount all five DOS volumes.


--
JHHL

Re: Serifed, variable-pitch font.

[James H. H. Lampert]

FWIW, "proportional" or "typographic" would be more conventional terms 
than "variable pitch."


--
JHHL
(Feel free to visit me some Saturday at the International Printing 
Museum. After COVID-19 is no longer an existential threat, but merely a 
minor nuisance.)

Re: SanDisk USB stick problem

[James H. H. Lampert]

Hmm. When I put a new flash device into service, at the very least, I 
wipe all bundled content from it, and may completely reformat it, 
depending on my needs, just as a matter of course.


--
JHHL
(I vaguely recall that at one time, if you bought a new wallet, the 
card-and-picture section would contain a fill-in-the-blanks ID card and 
a picture of Sandra Dee. I'd put bundled software on a flash drive into 
that same category.)

Re: Very old hardware...

[James H. H. Lampert]

David Wright wrote:

Why do I keep mine? 1) Sentimentality, as it was the one on my work desk
when I retired. 2) Being a tower, it has room for up to 4 PATA drives.
The loaned Optiplex only holds one—after that, I'm down to an old PATA
caddy. 3) There's no WEEE here, so I'm not sure exactly how one gets
rid of it anyway.


Some years ago, I tried ordering a box from a local custom-builder. The 
fact that the BIOS and/or FDC on it would not accept dual floppy drives 
was an annoyance. The fact that Xerox Ventura Publisher (DOS/GEM 
Edition) would not run on it *at all* was the show-stopper. It went back 
about 24 hours after I took delivery.


I've since learned that there is at least one custom-builder that 
specializes in DOS boxes optimized for legacy apps, but with my "spare 
parts" dual-boot, I haven't had a pressing need to determine whether 
their boxes will run VPGEM (and they are not certain themselves).


--
JHHL

Re: Very old hardware...

[James H. H. Lampert]

My DOS/Linux dual-boot at home was constructed from spare parts, 
including a cast-off Dell motherboard from work that is old enough to 
support two physical floppy drives (it has a 360k and a 1.44M).


It runs IBM PC-DOS 2000 (lightning fast), with DOSSHELL, WordPerfect 
5.1, Quattro, and Xerox Ventura Publisher (DOS/GEM Edition).


And it runs Ubuntu Hardy Heron, with a fairly old version of Gnome. 
Perhaps if I were configuring the Linux side of it today, I might have 
used Debian, and consulted this List for guidance.


It does NOT run WinDoze, and neither does my PC-DOS 2000 notebook (a 
486). I don't allow WinDoze in the house.


And as to computer museums, I highly recommend the CHM, in Mountain 
View, CA. The only real fault I've ever found with it is that they did 
not see fit to include an IBM Merlin (neither a drive, nor even a pack) 
in their early removable-pack hard drive exhibit.


--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: new camera

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 6/26/20 1:20 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

But this stretch machine can't find it amongst all the other usb stuff.
It doesn't have cheese, and vlc doesn't recognize it.

. . .

Anybody have an idea of what driver this camera needs?


Would transferring images on memory cards be a workable solution?

--
JHHL

Re: technical terms overhaul

[James H. H. Lampert]

Personally, if I were a moderator on this List, I would order this 
thread terminated with extreme prejudice.


--
JHHL

Re: waaay offtopic

[James H. H. Lampert]

Personally, I have a clamshell.

It's my second clamshell, an LG VN220. It replaced my previous 
clamshell, after my first vacation to Canada: the previous clamshell was 
a paperweight from the moment my bus from Seattle to Vancouver crossed 
the Canadian border, up to the moment my flight from Toronto landed back 
in the U.S.


It has a camera, a rudimentary web browser, and a totally useless email 
reader that will not connect to my ISP's mail server AT ALL. 
(Fortunately, the web browser works just fine with my ISP's web-mail 
interface.)


And if I need to go online with my tablet, my phone can provide a WiFi 
hotspot for it. (I flatly refuse to accept a home broadband connection 
until such time as Net Neutrality is legislated, court-tested, settled law.)


Before my first clamshell, I had "candy bar" phones. Then, while on 
vacation, I chest-dialed home, and nearly put my mother in the hospital 
with worry.


--
JHHL

Re: This is weird: I can ssh into a box, but I can't access it directly

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/26/20 8:52 AM, Dan Purgert wrote:

Are you ssh'ing in as root?  If not, is your user's $HOME on the
machine's failing disk, or another (remote?) drive?


and I replied (off-List, and *not* intentionally so):

Yes. As root.

Oh, and one other thing, the thing that brought this to my attention in the 
first place: something in the server cage is emitting a faint beep (or perhaps 
a faint squeak of a dying hard drive), every second or so. I think it's coming 
from that selfsame box.


I signed on again via ssh, intending to just shut the thing down for 
good, and noticed two things:

1. "shutdown" didn't work
2. It was telling me I'd last signed on sometime in January, when in 
fact, I'd signed on yesterday.


Further investigation of #1 led me to find out that it was getting a 
disk error just trying to shut itself down.


It's clearly toast. So I did a hard shutdown (and disconnected the 
power, for good measure.


And it *was* the source of the faint beeping.

--
JHHL

This is weird: I can ssh into a box, but I can't access it directly

[James H. H. Lampert]

One of our Linux boxes is behaving oddly. If I ssh into it, I can 
connect easily, and I get:

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Wed Jan 29 08:32:12 2020 from 192.168.1.15


But if I go into the server cage, and punch it up on the KVM switch, and 
try to sign on as root, I get:

Debian GNU/Linux 8 Titan tty1

Titan login: root
[10371235.533392] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 105228592


and after a few seconds, the screen clears, and goes back to

Debian GNU/Linux 8 Titan tty1

Titan login:


Or, at other times, when I punch it up on the KVM switch, I get a whole 
screen full of hard disk error messages.


It's pretty clear to me that the box is more-or-less shot anyway (even 
from the ssh session, if I try to "cd home," I get an error message), 
but can somebody tell me why I'm getting one behavior through ssh, and 
completely different behavior through a direct connection?


--
JHHL

Re: Top 7 Programming Languages That Employers Really Want

[James H. H. Lampert]

The OP wanted this treated as a survey, and so . . .

Many dialects and derivatives of BASIC, including (but not limited to) 
IBM VS-BASIC (ran on 370 and compatible mainframes), TRS-80 Level 1, 
Level 2, and Mod I Disk BASIC, GWBASIC, and the various QBASICs 
(QuickBASIC and QBX). (I took one look at VisualBASIC, and swore off any 
further M$ development tools.)


FORTRAN (mainly FORTRAN IV: IBM G1, WATFIV, and TRS-80 FORTRAN).

Pascal (CDC Cyber Pascal).

COBOL (also on a CDC Cyber).

PL/I (CDC Cyber PL/I; CDC ANSI PL/I; IBM AS/400 PL/I).

Assemblers (DEC Macro-11, 8086).

(LISP)   <-- the parentheses are an inside joke.

C (mainly on AS/400s). I must go down to the 'C' again, to the loony 
'C,' and cry.


Modula-2

MI (it's the closest you are allowed to get to a true assembler language 
on an AS/400)


RPG/400 (both OPM and ILE)

CL (on AS/400s; it's like a shell script, only compiled).

Java

I've forgotten just about all the SmallTalk I ever learned.

I can get by in SQL.

The more programming languages you know, the easier it is to pick up 
additional programming languages. And the less likely you are to treat 
your favorite language (or the only one you know) as a panacea. And if 
you have good linkage capabilities, mixed-language work is not difficult 
at all.


Not much that's on the published list. But then again, when I leave my 
present employment, I'm probably never going to write a single line of 
code professionally again.


--
JHHL

Re: 3 phase power (was Re: Wireless home LAN - WiFi vs Bluetooth?

[James H. H. Lampert]

Hmm. And as anybody old enough to have grown up on "Emergency!" (and to 
remember a rescue involving a worker caught in a vinyl record press), if 
you reverse any two of the three hot wires on a 3-phase motor, you 
reverse the direction of rotation.


Which caused a rather amusing malfunction at the International Printing 
Museum, where I spend my Saturdays docenting: our Heidelberg cylinder 
press was not feeding paper, and we eventually realized it was running 
backwards, because somebody working on the wiring had gotten two wires 
switched. Thank God it wasn't the Heidelberg Windmill: you run those 
backwards more than 1 or 2 degrees, and they shred themselves.


--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: Debian Programming languages

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 5/24/19, 11:00 AM, ghe wrote:

I forgot about LISP too. LISP was the first high level language I
learned. Thought I was going to die...


(CLUTTER CLUTTER (CDR CLUTTER)) is probably the only s-expression I 
still remember from over half a lifetime ago. (It's a line of code from 
the "Blocks World" exercise in my old (LISP) textbook).


--
JHHL

Re: Debian Programming languages

[James H. H. Lampert]

Just out of morbid curiosity: what about a full ANSI PL/I?

--
JHHL
(And the mere fact that I'm asking ages me.)

Re: Your Password Reset Link from CorrLinks

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/21/19, 8:27 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:


Never received bounce spam aka backscatter spam? Remember that time
(perhaps 1-2 years ago) where this very list was plagued by an
especially evil form of backscatter involving the useful idiot at
the other end of some smartphone?


No question, I've definitely received it. Just as I've received phone 
calls from victims of phone-spam with same-prefix caller-ID spoofing 
(given that I know for a fact that there is nobody with the same prefix 
as my cell phone who has any business calling me on it, I treat all 
calls with my own prefix as either phone spam or attempts to call a 
spammer who spoofed my number).


But even when I had an ISP whose server-side spam filter allowed 
bouncing as an option, I used that option only when it was obvious the 
sender address was not spoofed.


--
JHHL

Re: Your Password Reset Link from CorrLinks

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/21/19, 12:38 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

You shouldn't /bounce/ spam anyway: where are you going to bounce it
to? To a most probably spoofed address, i.e. to a totally innocent
victim? Thus generating reflected spam, aka Joe Jobs?


That depends. Some spammers don't see themselves as spammers, and
therefore aren't spoofing other addresses. They just either (1) fail to
honor unsubscribe requests, (2) don't put unsubscribe links in the plain
text, or (3) omit either the unsubscribe link or the plain text (or
both) entirely.

--
JHHL

Re: USB hard drives -- recommendations?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 2/3/19, 2:22 AM, Alexander V. Makartsev wrote:

The only problem with external disk drive enclosures from well known
brands like WD or Seagate is they don't offer a way to open them e.g. to
switch the disk drive inside.


That and the fact that, judging by the price tags (and this also seems 
to be the general consensus both hear and on the OCLUG list server) 
those things have the cheapest consumer-grade hard drives the vendor 
has, whereas making your own, you can make it with a server-grade drive, 
or even (and this is built in at least one enclosure I've seen) a 
mirrored pair of them.


--
JHHL

Re: Disable left-ctrl?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 1/28/19, 3:16 PM, Boyan Penkov wrote:
> To this end, I’d like to disable the left ctrl key only, and force my
> brain to use the right one.  Better yet, I’d like the screen to flash
> or something then I inadvertently hit left-ctrl.

Just two thoughts occur to me:

1) On a 5250 data stream terminal tied to an IBM Midrange system, 
(AS/400, iSeries, System i, or whatever IBM is calling it this week), 
"Error Reset" is in the left-ctrl position, and "Enter" is in the 
right-ctrl position. I've written most of the user-interface code for a 
Java-based 5250 emulator. It's certainly possible to write code that 
accesses the keyboard at a low enough level to completely remap it. But 
for your purposes, the place for such low-level remapping code is 
probably in a keyboard driver.


2) When I was still using a WinDoze box with any regularity, and had a 
keyboard with "WinDoze keys" connected to it, I stuffed rolled up pieces 
of paper under those keys, in order to physically interdict them.


--
JHHL

USB hard drives -- recommendations?

[James H. H. Lampert]

Fellow List members:

Would anybody care to voice an opinion on USB external hard drives in 
the 2 terabyte size range, for automated backup purposes?


We've been looking at the Seagate "Expansion" and the WD "Elements"; 
I've noticed that on Amazon, both have a fair number of negative reviews 
citing reliability issues. (We recently discovered that our current 
Seagate had apparently failed on us.)


Any opinions? Seagate? WD? Toshiba? Something else?

--
JHHL

We've got a problem. Debian "Jessie" box won't launch X or Tomcat, and USB drive won't mount

[James H. H. Lampert]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We've got a Debian 8 box (an old Dell 400SC) that won't launch X (it 
boots to a command line) or Tomcat, nor mount a USB hard drive that we 
use for backups.


It will, however, accept ssh connections.

In the boot sequence, I see "Failed" where it tries to mount the USB 
drive. I also can't seem to get that drive to mount on anything else, 
which suggests that it has been corrupted.


Can somebody suggest where to start looking for the problem?

--
James H. H. Lampert

Installing Java 8 on a Google Compute Debian (Jessie) instance

[James H. H. Lampert]

I'm endeavoring to get Java 8 onto our development instance, so that the 
Tomcat environment there matches that of our cluster nodes, and apg-get 
is not cooperating.


This particular instance is a Bitnami SVN/Trac server, with Tomcat 8 
added to it, and running independently of the Apache server that came 
with SVN and Trac.


I tried what was given at
https://stackoverflow.com/q/50919305/3654526
and it didn't work. Even after doing the recommended

sudo apt-get install dirmngr
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys EEA14886
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk -y --allow-unauthenticated


I still get

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 openjdk-8-jdk : Depends: openjdk-8-jre (= 8u171-b11-1~bpo8+1) but it is not 
going to be installed
 Depends: openjdk-8-jdk-headless (= 8u171-b11-1~bpo8+1) but it 
is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.


which is what I was getting before.

--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: that other OS

[James H. H. Lampert]

mick crane wrote:

"Windows is a service..."


Actually, I'd call WinDoze a DISservice.

(I don't allow WinDoze in my house.)

--
JHHL
(Currently using PCDOS-2000, OS/400, MacOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and 
occasionally, at work, CentOS and WinDoze XP.)

Re: Getting rid of Wilber

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 9/3/18, 5:22 PM, David Niklas wrote:

Quick, where can I find the "eponymous fox chewing on a Microsloth
Imploder logo"?


You ought to know Murphy's Law of the Internet by now: nothing posted to 
the Internet ever goes away . . . . unless you're looking for it.


--
JHHL

Re: Getting rid of Wilber

[James H. H. Lampert]

Hmm. I'm all for customizing UIs (my preferred Open Office icon is a 
manual typewriter, my preferred Firefox icon is one I found with the 
eponymous fox chewing on a Microsloth Imploder logo, and my preferred 
Thunderbird icon has the eponymous bird carrying a bottle of T-Bird), 
but what have you got against Wilber?


--
JHHL

Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[James H. H. Lampert]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 05:39:36PM +, tech wrote:


Should'nt be time to move away from an old mail-listing to
something more modern like a bugzilla or else ???


On 8/9/18, 10:47 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:


No.



What? A list server isn't good enough for you? It's good enough for the 
Tomcat community, and for the IBM Midrange community, not to mention the 
thousand-odd organ geeks subscribed to PIPORG-L.


--
JHHL

Re: which blend caters to TaL computer programming? . . .

[James H. H. Lampert]

Exposing children to C and/or C++ should be considered abuse.  :)


No need for an emoticon there! C in the hands of an inexperienced 
programmer is a recipe for disaster!



Lego or smalltalk, pharo smalltalk has its own IDE so everything is in 1
place


Unless there's now a "Lego" programming language (news to me), could you 
possibly mean LOGO? Never used it myself, but but I've certainly heard 
good things about it. And if you're going to expose first-time 
programmers to ANY C-derived language, Java would be the one to expose 
them to.


Be that as it may, IBM VS-BASIC, on a 370-135 running the McGill 
University MUSIC operating system was good enough for me (and at home, 
I'm working on a project in M$ QuickBASIC Extended for DOS, that marks 
the first time I've touched a BASIC derivative in decades.)


(I miss PL/I.)

--
JHHL

Re: Beeping after power irregularities?

[James H. H. Lampert]

It's the RAID controller card.

Naturally.

--
JHHL

Beeping after power irregularities?

[James H. H. Lampert]

Our AC power just blinked several times. More or less concurrently with 
that, something in our server cage (we think it's a Debian box); it 
doesn't appear to be an AS/400, any network gear, or our UPS) began 
emitting one-second beeps, approximately every two seconds (i.e., a 
one-second beep alternating with a one-second silence).


Any insights?

--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: squirrelmail or other webmail?

[James H. H. Lampert]

Speaking strictly as a user, I really liked SquirrelMail, when I was on 
my old ISP (or on the rare occasions when I check my former ISP email), 
but I utterly despise everything about the "SmarterMail" product that my 
present ISP uses. (It seems like they chose to emulate almost everything 
that's wrong with GMail, and nothing that's good about it, and to do 
everything they possibly can to make plain text and "bottom-posting" as 
difficult as possible.


Probably the only bad thing about GMail's web interface that SmarterMail 
doesn't emulate is making it difficult to edit (or even see) quoted 
material in replies before you send them.


I like SquirrelMail.

--
JHHL

Re: Rust? (and a wordsmithing question)

[James H. H. Lampert]

I wrote:

The student timeshare systems my high school used (running the
McGill University MUSIC operating system) while I was a student
there (an IBM 370/135 at the District Office) and shortly after I
graduated (an on-site IBM 4341) used Merlin drives.


to which Tomas replied:

Those times, high schools and unis built their own OSes. These day
they even outsource "programming" web pages. Way to go :-(


McGill MUSIC still exists, actually.

http://webpages.mcgill.ca/staff/group3/dedwar1/web/msi/musicsp.htm

--
JHHL

Re: Rust? (and a wordsmithing question)

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 12/11/17, 7:04 AM, Joe wrote:

The rigid platters of IBM cartridges and packs (the things you see in
computer rooms in films) did have brown oxide coatings. The surface of
each 12 inch platter side stored a magnificent 2.5MB, or at least the
version I used did. It was used in a system with an embedded DG Nova,
and a competitive product of the time used the modern 8 inch floppy
discs...


The student timeshare systems my high school used (running the McGill 
University MUSIC operating system) while I was a student there (an IBM 
370/135 at the District Office) and shortly after I graduated (an 
on-site IBM 4341) used Merlin drives.






Artist's conception, with a drive open, at



Typical pack, in pack-cover, at



The only time I saw one open was on the 4341 (I was working a summer job 
at the school), when a power failure caused the emergency retract 
mechanism to jam, and we had to get a technician out (from CDC!) to 
unjam the heads.


The 4341, at least, also had an 8" floppy drive, buried inside the CPU 
cabinet.


--
JHHL

Re: Embarrassing security bug in systemd

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 12/6/17, 2:53 PM, Michael Lange wrote:

uh, I guess you ought to have used your time to check your machine and
read some docs instead of figuring out how to best insult the debian
developers ;)
(scnr)


Now, now, you walk up to the physical console on an AS/400, you're not 
going to be able to do a PWRDWNSYS from a sign-on screen, nor can do it 
if signed on as a user who doesn't have sufficient authority to do a 
PWRDWNSYS. And you might be physically locked out of the front panel. 
It's even possible that you might be physically interdicted from 
unplugging the box, or shutting it down from the circuit breaker panel.


Not every OS assumes by default that anybody with physical access to the 
hardware also has the authority to shut it down.


;-p

(And likewise, accounts, including QSECOFR [the closest OS/400 
equivalent to root] can be restricted to certain physical terminals.)


--
JHHL

Re: Gnome desktop almost totally unresponsive in Jessie

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 11/8/17, 10:55 AM, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:

The output of 'ps aux', 'iostat', and 'free -m' would help identify the

problem.  Also, 'cat /proc/mdstat' if you have a RAID setup.

. . .

After a mostly-off-List discussion with Mr. Sanchez, I gave up and did a 
"shutdown -r" on the system.


After a re-IPL, Gnome was back to gnormal, and everything else was back 
up as well.


It's not like it's an AS/400, or even a state-of-the-art Linux box, 
that's designed to run for years at a time without an IPL -- it's an old 
Dell PowerEdge 400SC.


And I'd forgotten: it DOES have RAID: a hardware RAID controller with 
two mirrored pairs on it.


No sign of damage to the mirrored pairs, but a full cold-start might be 
necessary to be sure of that, if not an actual controller-level diagnostic.


--
JHHL

Gnome desktop almost totally unresponsive in Jessie

[James H. H. Lampert]

I've got a small problem. On our local Jessie box, the Tomcat and Apache 
web servers both seem responsive enough, and I likewise have no trouble 
getting and using an SSH session remotely (except that the "find" 
command is extremely slow).


But the Gnome desktop has become almost totally unresponsive.

I'd rather not restart the box. Any advice on how to deal with this 
without restarting the box?


--
JHHL

Re: Icons for mount points (Continuing with configuring our "new" Debian server

[James H. H. Lampert]

About a week and a half before I went on my fall vacation, acting on
recommendations from a couple of List members, I moved the mount point
for the "Auxiliary" mirrored pair I added from "Media" to the file
system root, and it works quite nicely.

Just before my vacation, I asked a question about an issue that 
developed when I did that:



I'd like that mount point to show up in Gnome as
something other than a generic folder icon.

. . .

When I plug [my] icon into the mount-point folder's properties, it
shows up . . . . Until the system is rebooted. After a reboot, the
mount point shows up as a generic document icon (the very last thing
I would want a mount point to look like!)

What am I doing wrong?



--
JHHL

Icons for mount points (Continuing with configuring our "new" Debian server

[James H. H. Lampert]

About a week and a half ago, acting on recommendations from a couple of 
List members, I moved the mount point for the "Auxiliary" mirrored pair 
I added from "Media" to the file system root, and it works quite nicely.


But a question: I'd like that mount point to show up in Gnome as 
something other than a generic folder icon. Specifically, as an icon I 
use generally for disk volumes in both Linux and Mac OS X, a photograph 
of a 1970s-era removable disk pack, stored in its pack cover (not sure 
if the picture I found is of a pack to fit an IBM "Merlin" drive, but 
it's the same general size and shape).


When I plug that icon into the mount-point folder's properties, it shows 
up as a disk pack. Until the system is rebooted. After a reboot, the 
mount point shows up as a generic document icon (the very last thing I 
would want a mount point to look like!)


What am I doing wrong?

--
JHHL
(In no great hurry for an answer, as I'm going to be on vacation for two 
weeks, but I will be checking my email, and even though I'll be unable 
to actually *try* anything anybody suggests, I'll certainly be *looking* 
at any replies, and acknowledging them.)

Actually, it was STUPID, not weird (cross-posted to Tomcat and Debian Lists): my BROWSER CACHES never got flushed!

[James H. H. Lampert]

I really can't believe I didn't think about the possibility that my 
browsers were both still caching the default root context from Tomcat 7 
when I did the port swap.


I definitely need to always remember to consider the possibility that 
I'm doing something stupid.


--
JHHL

Still more, Re: This is weird (cross-posted to Tomcat and Debian Lists): Tomcat 8.5 is going to /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT

[James H. H. Lampert]

I also stuck a similar named trivial static context into 
/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps (with a different directory name: "foobar" in 
Tomcat 8, "bozbar" in Tomcat 7).


In theory, Tomcat 8.5 should be able to see the foobar context, but not 
the bozbar context; this is also true in practice.


So it's something specific to the root context.

--
James H. H. Lampert

More, Re: This is weird (cross-posted to Tomcat and Debian Lists): Tomcat 8.5 is going to /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT

[James H. H. Lampert]

Just for grins, I put a trivial static context (nothing more than a 
directory containing a simple "index.html" file) into 
/var/lib/tomcat8/webapps. Tomcat 8.5 found it. So it's only the root 
context that's somehow getting redirected.


But on the other hand, if I rename var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT to 
"ROOTx," Tomcat 8.5 STILL finds that one (or at least its index.html).


Curiouser and curiouser.

If I remember right, Linux file systems can have not only symbolic links 
to files, but also multiple hard links to the same file. Is there an 
easy way to look for something like that?


--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: This is weird (cross-posted to Tomcat and Debian Lists): Tomcat 8.5 is going to /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT

[James H. H. Lampert]

Pete Helgren (on the Tomcat List) wrote:

Longshotsomething in .profile of the user the Tomcat instance is
running under?


Neither the "tomcat7" nor "tomcat8" users have .profile files.

This is interesting. I got rid of the Tomcat 8.5 catalina.out files on 
both boxes (the one where everything works right, and the one where 8.5 
is getting 7's root context) and restarted them, and I got this at the 
tops of both catalina.out files:



WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/var/lib/tomcat8/common/classes], 
exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/var/lib/tomcat8/common], exists: 
[false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory 
[/usr/share/tomcat8/common/classes], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], 
canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat8/common], 
exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/var/lib/tomcat8/server/classes], 
exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/var/lib/tomcat8/server], exists: 
[false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory 
[/usr/share/tomcat8/server/classes], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], 
canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat8/server], 
exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/var/lib/tomcat8/shared/classes], 
exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/var/lib/tomcat8/shared], exists: 
[false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory 
[/usr/share/tomcat8/shared/classes], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], 
canRead: [false]
WARNING [main] . . . Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat8/shared], 
exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]


On both boxes, according to catalina.out, CATALINA_BASE is 
/var/lib/tomcat8 and CATALINA_HOME is /usr/share/tomcat8.


Then I get a bunch of stack traces. I'll omit the stack traces 
themselves for the sake of brevity, and give just the error messages:

 java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/java/el-api-3.0.jar (No such file or 
directory)
 java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/java/jsp-api-2.3.jar (No such file 
or directory)
 java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/java/el-api-3.0.jar (No such file or 
directory)
 java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/java/jsp-api-2.3.jar (No such file 
or directory)
 java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/java/el-api-3.0.jar (No such file or 
directory)
 java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/java/jsp-api-2.3.jar (No such file 
or directory)
and so forth, alternating back and forth between those two jar files 
several times.


I'm still stumped. None of the configuration or log files I've looked in 
so far appear to have any references to anything in tomcat7.


--
JHHL

This is weird (cross-posted to Tomcat and Debian Lists): Tomcat 8.5 is going to /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT

[James H. H. Lampert]

I've got two separate boxes, both running Debian Jessie, with both 
Tomcat 7.0.56 and Tomcat 8.5.14 installed, all of the installations via 
an apt-get from Debian's repositories.


On one of the boxes (Tomcat 8.5 installed alongside Tomcat 7 with no 
previous Tomcat 8), Tomat 8 is somehow pulling the root context from 
Tomcat 7: the Tomcat 8.5 server is going to 
/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT when it should be going to 
/var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/ROOT.


On the other box (Tomcat 8.5 installed on top of Tomcat 8.0, alongside 
Tomcat 7), the Tomcat 8.5 server is correctly finding 
/var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/ROOT.


On both boxes, Tomcat 8.5 is correctly finding its manager context at 
/usr/share/tomcat8-admin/manager, while Tomcat 7 finds its manager 
context at /usr/share/tomcat7-admin/manager.


The only difference is that on the box that's finding the correct root 
context, Tomcat 8.5 was installed on top of Tomcat 8.0, while on the one 
that's finding the wrong root context, it was installed without any 
previous Tomcat 8. In both cases, the installations were alongside 
existing Tomcat 7 installations.


Can anybody point me to the right haystack to find my needle?

--
James H. H. Lampert

Re: Strange results with an additional HD -- any idea why?

[James H. H. Lampert]

Oops: Forgot to hit "Reply List" on a reply I'd intended to be public. 
My bad.


Dan Ritter and "deloptes" both advised me to put the "Auxiliary" drive's 
mount point someplace other than /media.


When I finally had a chance to do so late yesterday afternoon, that 
solved the problem.


I never would have imagined that the location of the mount point would 
be the reason.


Thanks to both of you.

--
JHHL

Re: I just installed "tomcat8" and "tomcat8-admin" on a Debian 8.9 box, via an apt-get

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 8/31/17, 8:32 PM, david...@freevolt.org wrote:

Have you added the jessie-backports repository to your
/etc/apt/sources.list yet?

There's a how-to for that here, along with other information you might
like to know:

   https://wiki.debian.org/Backports#Using_the_command_line



Thanks, "david...@freevolt.org."

That solved the problem. Both on the local box I'm in the process of 
reconfiguring as a Debian server, and on our Google Cloud server.


And my apologies to the List for my Friday repost of my question after 
it had already been answered: I've got half a dozen lists pouring 
traffic into my work email address, and once in a while, things get 
thrown out by mistake. Just last month, I threw out something from my 
boss (and if I remember right, it was also a direct reply to a question 
I'd asked).


--
JHHL

Strange results with an additional HD -- any idea why?

[James H. H. Lampert]

The box I've been reconfiguring over the past few weeks has a hardware 
RAID controller card, with one mirrored (RAID 1) pair on it at the time 
of installation. Over the weekend, I plugged two more drives into the 
two empty sockets, to create a second mirrored pair, which shows up in 
Linux as "sdb."


Initially, it auto-mounted much the same way the external drive 
auto-mounted. I added this line to fstab, and now it mounts at the 
mountpoint of my own choosing:



/dev/sdb /media/Auxiliary ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 2


Everything seems to work fine, except for two things:

1. Gnome produces a desktop icon for it. Before I added the fstab entry, 
that icon was a picture of a modern hard drive; now, with the fstab 
entry, it is, of all things, a generic *document* icon. (By contrast, my 
USB external drive shows up with the "Merlin disk pack" icon I gave it 
years ago, and I didn't have to do anything new for Linux that I hadn't 
done for WinDoze; I've got both .ico and .png files of that icon on the 
new mirrored pair.)


2. It can be unmounted. I'd rather it not be unmountable.

What can I do about these things?
--
JHHL

Re: external USB hard drive mount permissions

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 9/2/17, 6:01 AM, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote:

On 02-09-2017 09:29, Federico Beffa wrote:

I'm using Debian Stretch with Gnome. When I plug-in an external USB
hard drive (ext4) it gets automatically mounted at /media/beffa/label.


but the device is still only writable by root.

How can I tell the system to make it writable for the user owning the
Gnome session


You might also consider adding an FSTAB entry, using a "LABEL=" 
drive-ID, to map it to a mount point of your own choosing.


That's what I ended up doing.

--
JHHL

Re: Recommended editor for novice programmers?

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 9/2/17, 7:29 PM, Doug wrote:


There must be something simpler than emacs or vi that will still allow
coding formatting!


Personally, I use nano from a terminal session, or GEdit from a Gnome 
session.


--
JHHL

How do I get Tomcat 8.5? Re: I just installed "tomcat8" and "tomcat8-admin" on a Debian 8.9 box, via an apt-get

[James H. H. Lampert]

I just now realized that my subject line was not exactly to the point, 
so if you'll pardon a repeat of my post from yesterday:


I wrote:

I want to put Tomcat 8.5 on the box I've spent the past week configuring.
What my apt-get got me was Tomcat 8.0.14.
Can I get Tomcat 8.5 via an apt-get? If so, how?


On 8/30/17, 5:04 PM, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:

The apt-cache command says that the backports repository has Tomcat 8.5.14.
My mentally-lazy way to get everything I needed to install it looked as
follows:
apt-get install tomcat8=8.5.14-1~bpo8+1 tomcat8-common=8.5.14-1~bpo8+1
libtomcat8-java=8.5.14-1~bpo8+1 libecj-java=3.11.0-5~bpo8+1


Tried it just now. This is what I got:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Version '8.5.14-1~bpo8+1' for 'tomcat8' was not found
E: Version '8.5.14-1~bpo8+1' for 'tomcat8-common' was not found
E: Version '8.5.14-1~bpo8+1' for 'libtomcat8-java' was not found
E: Version '3.11.0-5~bpo8+1' for 'libecj-java' was not found


Am I doing something wrong?

--
JHHL

Re: I just installed "tomcat8" and "tomcat8-admin" on a Debian 8.9 box, via an apt-get

[James H. H. Lampert]

I wrote:

I want to put Tomcat 8.5 on the box I've spent the past week configuring.
What my apt-get got me was Tomcat 8.0.14.
Can I get Tomcat 8.5 via an apt-get? If so, how?


On 8/30/17, 5:04 PM, Nicholas Geovanis wrote:

The apt-cache command says that the backports repository has Tomcat 8.5.14.
My mentally-lazy way to get everything I needed to install it looked as
follows:
apt-get install tomcat8=8.5.14-1~bpo8+1 tomcat8-common=8.5.14-1~bpo8+1
libtomcat8-java=8.5.14-1~bpo8+1 libecj-java=3.11.0-5~bpo8+1


Tried it just now. This is what I got:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Version '8.5.14-1~bpo8+1' for 'tomcat8' was not found
E: Version '8.5.14-1~bpo8+1' for 'tomcat8-common' was not found
E: Version '8.5.14-1~bpo8+1' for 'libtomcat8-java' was not found
E: Version '3.11.0-5~bpo8+1' for 'libecj-java' was not found


Am I doing something wrong?

--
JHHL

Re: Weird shell script behavior in a cron job

[James H. H. Lampert]

On 8/31/17, 5:16 AM, Reco wrote:

$ bash -c 'cd foo; echo $?'
bash: line 0: cd: foo: No such file or directory
1

To this:

$ dash -c 'cd foo; echo $?'
dash: 1: cd: can't cd to foo
2


Aha! That's what it was! Thanks!

At any rate, changing the test script's utterly nonspecific shebang 
(that, I gather, essentially just said "this is a script, but you're on 
your own to figure out what interpreter it wants"), and the backup 
script's "#!/bin/sh" shebang both to a "#!/bin/bash" shebang solved the 
problem quite nicely.


And late last night (actually, early this morning), after I'd left the 
box with Gnome signed off and ExternalHD very deliberately unmounted, 
the backup script worked perfectly.


--
JHHL

I just installed "tomcat8" and "tomcat8-admin" on a Debian 8.9 box, via an apt-get

[James H. H. Lampert]

I want to put Tomcat 8.5 on the box I've spent the past week 
configuring. What my apt-get got me was Tomcat 8.0.14.


Can I get Tomcat 8.5 via an apt-get? If so, how?

If not, what's the easiest way to get Tomcat 8.5 up and running as a 
service from an Apache download?


--
JHHL

Re: Weird shell script behavior in a cron job

[James H. H. Lampert]

A few minutes ago, with respect to my backup script attempting to mount 
ExternalHD if run from a command line, but not from cron, I wrote:

Why would the behavior be any different? Could it be that cron is
running it an entirely different shell, that doesn't understand the "if"
statement?


That was it. I added a line to echo $SHELL to my debugging log file, and 
that was it: if I ran it from cron, $SHELL was /bin/sh; if I ran it from 
a command line, $SHELL was /bin/bash.


Changing the shebang from
> #!
to
> #! /bin/bash

did the trick, and when I looked back at the original script, I found a 
shebang of

> #! /bin/sh

which I also changed. High hopes for finding successful test results 
tomorrow morning.


--
JHHL

Weird shell script behavior in a cron job

[James H. H. Lampert]

Can somebody explain this:

My backup script WILL detect that ExternalHD is not mounted, and attempt 
to mount it, if I run it manually.


But it WON'T do that if it runs in a cron job.

I've isolated the relevant code into its own script, added debugging 
output, and set it up to run every minute. Here's the test script:

#!
date >> ~/test.txt
pwd >> ~/test.txt
cd /media/ExternalHD/Backups
if [ "$?" = "1" ]; then
  echo "mounting" >> ~/test.txt
  mount /media/ExternalHD >> ~/test.txt
  cd /media/ExternalHD/Backups
fi
pwd >> ~/test.txt


Here is what I get when the cron job trips, and ExternalHD is not mounted:

Wed Aug 30 10:49:01 PDT 2017
/root
/root
Wed Aug 30 10:50:01 PDT 2017
/root
/root

. . .

Wed Aug 30 10:55:01 PDT 2017
/root
/root


and here is what I get when I run the script from a command line:

Wed Aug 30 10:55:07 PDT 2017
/root
mounting
/media/ExternalHD/Backups


Why would the behavior be any different? Could it be that cron is 
running it an entirely different shell, that doesn't understand the "if" 
statement? Here's the crontab line:

* * * * *   ~/test.sh


--
JHHL

On another (but related) note: Zip files

[James H. H. Lampert]

I know that the tradition for Linux is GZipped tarballs, but I also know 
that, at least from the Gnome desktop, I can open a PKZip-compatible Zip 
file, and create a (presumably also) PKZip-compatible Zip file.


I don't, however, see a way to do so from the command line (or within a 
script) without doing an apt-get to install the zip package (and 
presumably also the unzip package).


Can somebody explain this? It seems a bit puzzling.

--
JHHL

Re: USB external hard drive -- mounting

[James H. H. Lampert]

Ok. As it stands now, I have only the "case 1" fstab entry in place, and 
after this line of the backup script:

cd /media/ExternalHD/Backups

I've added these lines:

if [ "$?" = "1" ]; then
  mount /media/ExternalHD
  cd /media/ExternalHD/Backups
fi


which (at least in theory) should mount the external drive if it's 
connected but not mounted.


(And if it doesn't mount, then the backup gets built in the home 
directory instead, which is no big deal, since it's backing up something 
from a separate physical box.)


Tonight, I'll leave ExternalHD connected but unmounted, and tomorrow 
morning, I'll see what will have happened.


Thanks.