Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Windows and street lights installed.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The sign on the right reads "Future Home Of Spotsylvania County DEVELOPMENT SERVICES GROUP & VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES."

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Lightened this picture to show the front of the building, and the tall semi-circle style front entrance.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  No snowplow can keep a good sign down.

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The sign on the right reads "Future Home Of Spotsylvania County DEVELOPMENT SERVICES GROUP & VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES."

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The sign on the right reads "Future Home Of Spotsylvania County DEVELOPMENT SERVICES GROUP & VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES."

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Since the last set of pictures, framing for windows is up on the new County building. Even with the spell of stormy weather, some small amount of inside work activities was evident.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This is a modified camera position, taken from the road. Look closely to find a Canada goose or two standing on the ice on the pond.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Snow plows can be rough on highway signs.

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  A closer look, and from the opposite direction, of the same facade/window framing visible in the RACSB view.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Notice the plastic weather covering visible especially in the two PTCH views.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Plastic weather covering visible.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Plastic weather covering visible.

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Plastic weather covering visible.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Some work has gone on since last time, but not at full pace. There was a 5K run started from the village last week; all done in the afternoon before most commuters returned home.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Ogg Vorbis version at marwalk.net

This program was produced on January 2, 2010. And today's topics will include:

• Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora linux project.
  
• Today's feature is a look at the state of the open source business model. We'll go over the business approach of some well known open source companies, as well as ones you may or may not have heard about. I'll include my own speculation about what could be possible in 2010.
• And we'll close with a Creative Commons licensed work by beat under control.

Here are some Selections of updates from “yum info recent,” as in Recently Added Packages in the Fedora Project:

Name : Miro
Summary : Miro - Internet TV Player
Description: Miro is a free application that turns your computer into an
: internet TV video player. This release is still a beta version,
: which means that there are some bugs, but we're moving quickly to
: fix them and will be releasing bug fixes on a regular basis.

Name : arora
Summary : A cross platform web browser
Description: Arora is a simple, cross platform web browser based on the QtWebKit
: engine. Currently, Arora is still under development, but it already
: has support for browsing and other common features such as web
: history and bookmarks.

Name : bash
Summary : The GNU Bourne Again shell [ as in Steve Bourne of AT&T's Bell Laboratories ]
Description: The GNU Bourne Again shell (Bash) is a shell or command language
: interpreter that is compatible with the Bourne shell (sh). Bash
: incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and the C
: shell (csh). Most sh scripts can be run by bash without
: modification.

Name : cherokee
Summary : Flexible and Fast Webserver
Description: Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server.
: It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI,
: PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, Virtual hosts,
: Authentication, on the fly encoding, Apache compatible log files,
: and much more.

Name : cpmtools
Summary : Programs for accessing CP/M disks [ yes, we're talking about the CP slant M that originally stood for "Control Program/Monitor" here ]
Description: This yum package allows access to CP/M file systems similar to the
: well-known mtools package, which accesses MSDOS file systems. It can be used for file exchange with a Z80-PC simulator, but it works on
: floppy devices as well.

Name : drupal
Summary : An open-source content-management platform
Description: Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal is a Content
: Management System written in PHP that can support a variety of
: websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven
: websites. Drupal is highly configurable, skinnable, and secure.

Name : gnome-keyring
Summary : Framework for managing passwords and other secrets
Description: The gnome-keyring session daemon manages passwords and other types
: of secrets for the user, storing them encrypted with a main
: password. Applications can use the gnome-keyring library to
: integrate with the keyring.

Name : gnome-web-photo
Summary : HTML pages thumbnailer
Description: gnome-web-photo contains a thumbnailer that will be used by GNOME
: applications, including the file manager, to generate screenshots
: of web pages.

Name : jna
Summary : Pure Java access to native libraries
Description: JNA provides Java programs easy access to native shared libraries
: (DLLs on Windows) without writing anything but Java code. JNA's
: design aims to provide native access in a natural way with a
: minimum of effort. No boilerplate or generated code is required.
: While some attention is paid to performance, correctness and ease
: of use take priority.

Name : less
Summary : A text file browser similar to more, but better
Description: The less utility is a text file browser that resembles more, but
: has more capabilities. Less allows you to move backwards in the
: file as well as forwards. Since less doesn't have to read the
: entire input file before it starts, less starts up more quickly
: than text editors (for example, vi).
:
: You should install less because it is a basic utility for viewing
: text files, and you'll use it frequently. And you'll find that less is more; really.

Name : mc
Summary : User-friendly text console file manager and visual shell
Description: Midnight Commander is a visual shell much like a file manager, only
: with many more features. It is a text mode application, but it also
: includes mouse support. Midnight Commander's best features are its
: ability to FTP, view tar and zip files, and to poke into RPMs for
: specific files. [ If you'd ever used Norton Disk Edit, mc looks a lot like it. ]

Name : openconnect
Description: This package provides a client for Cisco's "AnyConnect" VPN, which
: uses HTTPS and DTLS protocols.

Name : qbittorrent
Description: A Bittorrent client using the rb_libtorrent C++ library and a Qt4 Graphical User Interface. It aims to be as fast as possible and to provide multi-OS, unicode support.

Name : rkhunter
Summary : A host-based tool to scan for rootkits, backdoors and local
: exploits
Description: Rootkit Hunter (RKH) is an easy-to-use tool which checks
: computers running UNIX (clones) for the presence of rootkits
: and other unwanted tools.

Name : uuidd
Summary : Helper daemon to guarantee uniqueness of time-based UUIDs, that is universally unique identifiers.
Description: The uuidd package contains a userspace daemon (uuidd) which
: guarantees uniqueness of time-based UUID generation even at very
: high rates on SMP, that is Symmetric Multiprocessing, systems.

Name : xmms-flac
Description: FLAC is a Free Lossless Audio Codec. The FLAC format supports
: streaming, seeking, and archival, and gives 25-75% compression on
: typical CD audio. xmms-flac is the input plugin for XMMS to be able to read FLAC files.

→

You can find additional information on these, and many other recently updated packages, by typing yum info recent at the command line.

=================

The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group, meets on the first Thursday and last Saturday of each month. The meetings take place at the main Library in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Caroline Street in Meeting Room 2:
You can find the FredLUG calendar by going to Google Groups and searching on F-r-e-d-L-U-G. Near the top of the page is a link to the Google calendar containing the meeting schedule.
Besides the FredLUG Google Group, you're also welcome on the IRC channel pound FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

=================

Open source software has been increasing in popularity for at least the past 10 years. And in this economic downturn that most of us are experiencing, the free-as-in-beer aspect has increased in attractiveness. Also, for programmers and project managers, the free-as-in-speech aspect is truly liberating; this is enhanced by the code reuse fostered by the free-as-in-beer aspect.

Upstream projects, like Gnome, KDE, Apache, and many many others, are assembled into the various distributions, known as “distros,” and other packages. These in turn are repackaged further downstream to eventually reach the end users. I think it's fair to say that most people involved in creating and using open source software truly enjoy what they're doing. There really is a community atmosphere around open source, in both doctrine and practice.

Doing what you enjoy, creating things of true practical value, contributing to the betterment of human-kind ... What's not to love? The answer is nothing is unlovable about the thing itself. But there is the thorny question of how to monetize open source, without draining open source of the very virtues that make it so wonderful.

Those with a major stake in the proprietary model are quick to point out, often with glee, that all these creative humans need food, shelter, and the other essentials of a complete life; and therefore the software is not worth creating if it does not generate revenue. Arguably we all need to be compensated for our labor, so how does one earn a living with open source and still keep it ... well ... open source?

Let's survey how it's done in practice. We'll start with the company that cut its teeth on this business model, Red Hat.

Peruse the redhat.com website for Red Hat's description of their offerings. Try searching on redhat.com for pages with titles like “The Value of Red Hat’s Subscription Model and Support” and “Value of a Red Hat Subscription.”

Consider the expression “Subscription Model.” There-in lies the key to Red Hat's, and other successful open source companies, ability to make a good living with open source. Red Hat's linux software is under the GPL; after all, it is linux. Similar to an anti-virus subscription, customers can keep the software if they cancel the subscription; but they are on their own for support and updates if they cancel. One item in the case of Red Hat is the issue of access to the Red Hat Network, which is different from their GPL licensed linux main product; users would have to remove the Red Hat Network Code from their systems if they cancel; but if you're going to cancel, there would be no value in keeping it. The Subscription renewal
F-A-Qs on redhat.com are a good reference.

Another linux distro, one that you might not have associated with subscriptions, is Ubuntu. In addition to the T-shirts and coffee mugs in the Cannonical Store, cannonical.com also offers subscriptions to server support, cloud support, desktop support; and also a web-based product called Landscape Systems Management, which is used for remote systems administration. I continue to hear of more instances where Ubuntu is implemented as a serious server solution, in addition to the its well known use as a desktop OS.

Like other GPL licensed linux products, Ubuntu is free. Cannonical's revenue is from what has been called the “ecosystem of products and services around Ubuntu.”

Any survey of the linux landscape would be incomplete without including Novell. The SUSE linux distribution, is a major player. A must-see on novell.com is the SUSE Appliance Program. Anyone can use what they call the SUSE Studio to customize your own linux distribution. It's slick and not even that geeky. This is a serious tool for Independent Software Vendors and other creative entrepreneurs. It's free to use, and part of Novell's revenue is from their relationship with several other enterprise IT players.

One of the users of Novell's SUSE Appliance Program is a company called BitRock. Although BitRock does not emphasize the word “subscription” on their website, bitrock.com, the software support for open source development has many of the same characteristics as subscriptions.

If you find Novell's SUSE Studio attractive, it's likely you will find even more so the offerings of BitNami, as in B-i-t-N-a-m-i. The website bitnami.com describes the group as “A secret army of highly trained open source ninjas, sponsored by BitRock.” The home page of BitNami.com offers free development tools for popular open source tools such as Joomla!, Drupal, Mediawiki, Trac, Wordpress, and SugarCRM. It appears that BitRock is using BitNami as their own eco-system farm.

We've looked mostly at the big fish so far. Now let's consider how an individual or a small group of people might be able to actually make a living with open source products. I think this is especially timely here at the beginning of 2010, with so many people hit so hard by the sluggish economy. After all, one way that many companies are able to survive is by saving money not employing workers. So how then do individuals survive when there's no place for them in the businesses that once supported them?

The answer might be in the problem itself. As the larger markets jettison what they consider to be excess business activities, the needs left by them still need to be filled. For example, those smaller businesses that can no longer afford the support of a Red Hat or Novell, still have IT needs that must be met. I expect that increasing numbers of these smaller companies will be forced by necessity to drop their familiar applications other mainstays, and look elsewhere for the functions provided by those apps.

With tools such as those at SUSE Studio and BitNami becoming more numerous and easier to use, there will be increasing opportunities for enterprising individuals to implement them for entrepreneurial purposes. Traditional programming skills are now supplemented by creativity in packaging programs already developed.

More things formerly relegated to only über-geeks are being understood and used by others in the IT field. Take for example Git, that's G-i-t. Git is an expansion on the functions of traditional development collaboration and version control tools. Git's functionality focuses on being distributed; as in being able to collaborate with others around the world without ever meeting them. Not just for software development, Git, can be used for many other project management purposes. Watch for further advances in user-friendly interfaces to Git.

Just because almost anyone can do it, does not mean that a business person wants to divert attention from the core business to do a support function. That's best left to someone who enjoys doing that sort of thing. Someone who has the aptitude and interest in solving problems that would only be stressful for the business person. That someone could be you. It's easier than ever to research opportunities like this. Calculations would consider the cost of proprietary software and costly support contracts.

There is clear value in paying you. You have no overhead. No leases. No licensing. The net to you would be a livable but not excessive amount, and still less cost for your customers. As the economy squeezes businesses more, the comfort of their usual applications will be a luxury they can part with. And there is a way to make them comfortable with parting with those old familiar things.

To do this it will be necessary for the open source entrepreneur to part with some community practices that have long since needed a workable alternative. Someone needs to provide something more than referrals to arcane documentation and forums. I love to look things up and test new programs; I know non-geeks dislike doing so, and for that I don't fault them.

Open source has abundant selling points that will increasingly ring true. A very visible problem with the proprietary software model is the extensive cost of licenses. It's a nice business model for the proprietary vendor; just replicate the product and collect your money without doing any more work. Sweet indeed for the vendor; but the economy is forcing changes upon that model.

It's not only the cost of the licenses themselves. Much too much effort and resources are needed just to keep a current accounting of licenses. And when mission critical business functions are impaired due to lack of funds for more licenses, it's time to look for workable alternatives.

One of the clear advantages of open source is the ability to scale at will. Need another server; just spin off another virtual machine, or procure a bare metal server without the software cost. Need more computers for expanded operations; just procure the hardware and deploy the additional desktops and laptops complete with full productivity software.

Yes, there will be reluctance to abandon the look and feel familiar to so many for so long. However, as a business reaches its own economic tipping point, open source might make the difference between laying off needed workers and affording to keep them employed and productive. Gnome and KDE are excellent desktop systems that come with every major linux distro. Sure, they look different, but they'll get over it. Consider Firefox as an example of an open source product that looks different but has been embraced by the public; and arguably they're loving it.

Open source software does not have to be offered in isolation; its full value is realized together with other endeavors. This is helped along as the disparate pieces of open source are increasingly easy to assemble into productive packages. For example, imagine a small scale implementation of CentOS together with Moodle to operate a distance learning based training system. Combine that with credit or non-credit courses taught at your local community college, and it's possible to have something that is fun, productive, of clear social value, and profitable.

Perhaps it's time for an entrepreneurial adaptation of the enterprise subscription model. I see it as a need to be met. And it should be a little easier to meet that need here in 2010.

======================

Today's podcast will close with a Creative Commons licensed work by Beat-under-control entitled "This is beat under control."

Enjoy.

=======================

Thanks for joining us for today's FredPod podcast.
This is Mark Walker.
Enjoy life, and we'll talk with you next time.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Best view of the evergreen decorations.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Nativity scene with BRE1 in the distance from the opposite direction; the BRE1 location is just this side of the house across Brock Road visible in the distance beyond the Three Kings.

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Best view of the evergreen decorations.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Best view of the evergreen decorations.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Show notes are at marwalk.wordpress.com.

• FredPod MP3 RSS Feed
• FredPod Ogg Vorbis RSS Feed
• iTunes subscription to FredPod

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The larger building on the right and a bit farther back has apartments for future lease.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Barely visible to the right of the girders and closer to the road is the top of the fountain that is down at water level in the pond.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

There are some notable changes this time; use the RACSB view as a point of reference to orient the scenes in the other views. Since two weeks ago, another cinder block structure has gone up. The first structure, which was in the previous pictures, is at the very far right of the RACSB view. The cinder block structure close by it to the left with the three door-sized openings is new as of last week. During the past two weeks this second cinder block structure was encased in scaffolding as it went up.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The cinder block structure visible through the tree foliage is the first of the two. The second one, not visible from here is behind it.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The visible cinder block structure is the first of the two. In this view, three door-sized openings are visible on the side facing the school (and the camera).

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The first cinder block structure, which was in the previous pictures, is at the very far right of this view. The cinder block structure close by it to the left with the three door-sized openings is new as of last week. During the past two weeks this second cinder block structure was encased in scaffolding as it went up.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The second cinder block structure is the one visible in-between and behind the pavilion and the building.

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The second cinder block structure is the one visible; observe the two sets of three door-sized openings on this side, which is opposite the side visible in the RACSB view. The tree that is visible behind the far left corner of the structure is the one through which the first structure is visible in the SYE and SYW views; the first structure is behind the second and is not visible in this view.

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The second cinder block structure is the one visible. There is only one MegaMix machine there now, as there had been two in recent weeks.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

This program was produced on October 14, 2009, and today's topics will include:

• Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora linux project.
  

• In Today's feature we visit Frederick, a community in the neighboring state of Maryland where there is an active small animals rescue group. Although the area's name, Frederick, is similar to Fredericksburg, it is likely not of the same origin. But as with Fredericksburg, the Frederick, Maryland area has several shelters and foster homes for animals. One of those is Small Angels Rescue, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. On Saturday, October 10^th, Small Angels Rescue held their annual gathering entitled Blues in the Barn. We'll talk with Kristy Tevelow, Angela Moxley, and Michelle Clowe, who tell first hand about their work with critters small and furry.

• And we'll close with a special recording of the group The Hard Swimmin' Fish performing live at the Blues in the Barn event.

Here are some Selections of updates from “yum info recent,” as in Recently Added Packages in the Fedora Project:

Name : chronojump

Summary : A measurement, management and statistics sport testing tool

Description: ChronoJump is an open hardware, free software, multiplatform

: complete system for measurement, management and statistics of sport

: short-time tests.

:

: Chronojump uses a contact platform and/or photocells,

: and also a chrono'meter printed circuit, designed ad-hoc in

: order to obtain precise and trustworthy measurements.

:

: Chronojump is used by trainers, teachers and students.

Name : f-a-p-g

Summary : Fast Audio Playlist Generator

Description: FAPG means Fast Audio Playlist Generator.

: It is a tool to generate list of audio files (Wav, MP3, Ogg, etc)

: in various formats (the M3U or PLS playlist files, or also HTML).

: It is very useful if you have a large amount of audio files

: and you want to quickly and frequently build a playlist.

:

: It is coded in C to be as fast as possible, and does not use

: any specific audio library (like ID3-Lib, which is used to store meta-data in an audio file).

: This allow you to deploy it faster and easier, and to have

: better performance since less information is loaded.

: In the other hand, this tool is not (yet) compatible with

: all the known formats.

Name : openldap

Description: OpenLDAP is an open source suite of LDAP (Lightweight Directory

: Access Protocol) applications and development tools. LDAP is a set

: of protocols for accessing directory services (usually phone book

: style information, but other information is possible) over the

: Internet, similar to the way DNS (Domain Name System) information

: is propagated over the Internet. The openldap package contains

: configuration files, libraries, and documentation for OpenLDAP.

Name : publican-fedora

Summary : Publican documentation template files for fedora

Description: This package provides common files and templates needed to build

: documentation for fedora with publican.

The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group, meets on the first Thursday and last Saturday of each month. The meetings take place at the main Library in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Caroline Street in Meeting Room 2:

• You can find the FredLUG calendar by going to Google Groups and searching on F-r-e-d-L-U-G. Near the top of the page is a link to the Google calendar containing the meeting schedule.

• Besides the FredLUG Google Group, you're also welcome on the IRC channel Hash FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

Today's feature is a talk with Kristy Tevelow, Angela Moxley, and Michelle Clowe, who tell first hand about their non-profit organization Small Angels Rescue.

Today's podcast will close with a recording, made with special permission, of the group The Hard Swimmin' Fish performing live at the Blues in the Barn event.

Here's their song “Ain't It Hard” And if you like what you hear, there's more at hardswimminfish.com (no “g” in swimmin)

Jump in, and Enjoy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This perspective provides a view of the next building's foundation.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This perspective also provides a view of the next building's foundation, from an almost opposite camera orientation from SYW.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This perspective provides a view of the next building's foundation. Look to the front of the pavilion. Notice the small front-end loader tractor through the tree foliage; and use that as an orientation marker for the view from PTCHW.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This perspective also provides a view of the next building's foundation, from an almost opposite camera orientation from SYW.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Readjusted some view perspectives to provide better coverage of the area where the new streets have been built.

The new perspectives introduced in this edition are:

• PTCHE = View from pavilion away from Courthouse area, east side
• PTCHW = View from pavilion toward Courthouse area, west side

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Brought back this perspective to cover the work not included in SYW.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Moved back out from BRE2 to provide more view coverage behind the pavilion, and also as a wider view than provided by the PAV view from last week.

• PTCHE (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The water tower in the background will be in the right side of the PTCHE view.

• PTCHW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The water tower in the background will be in the left side of the PTCHW view.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Welcome to FredPod, a podcast about creativity and technology from the Fredericksburg, Virginia area

This podcast is available in MP3 format via iTunes and at marwalk.podomatic.com. You also can get this podcast in the open source Ogg Vorbis format via the podcatcher RSS feed at marwalk.net/rss/fredpod dot ogg dash vorbis dot xml

FredPod is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This is your host, Mark Walker.

Show notes for this podcast are available at marwalk.wordpress.com, under the category Podcasts.

This program was produced on September 20, 2009, and today’s topics will include:

*

Selections from Recent file releases on SourceForge dot net.
*

And Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora project.
*

In Today’s feature, you have an audio taste of Software Freedom Day as experienced in Fredericksburg, Virginia on September 19th. We had visitors of all ages seeking FOSS alternatives (FOSS as in Free and Open Source Software). Many visitors had great questions, and we were glad to provide great answers! We also gave away lots of Linux installation DVDs and CDs and other open source resources.
*

And we’ll close with a Creative Commons work from (short e)
Etherine, entitled Modulation.

Among the Recent file releases on SourceForge are:

*

OpenDisc is a high quality selection of Open Source programs for Microsoft Windows users; to educate them about OSS and Linux and provide free alternatives to costly proprietary software.
Find more information at theopendisc.com
*

A Linux, Windows & OS-X vector graphics editor (SVG format) featuring transparency, gradients, node editing, pattern fills, PNG export, and more. Aiming for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc.
Find more information at inkscape.org
*

xml2hostconf is a utility for central configuration and automatic installation of networks of Linux computers. Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu are supported. It makes use of rpm, yum, kickstart, dpkg, apt-get, preseed, dhcpd, tftpd, httpd and pxelinux.
Find more information at xml2hostconf.sourceforge.net

Here are some Selections of updates from “yum info recent” :

Name : ath_info

Summary : Tool to get detailed information from Atheros WLAN cards

Description: ath_info prints some version information of Atheros WLAN modules.

: It furthermore allows to change regulatory domain and PCI ID fields

: in the EEPROM. Since the output of lspci and dmesg is not always

: sufficient to correctly identify chipset versions, it is useful to

: attach ath_info output to bug reports for the ath5k driver.

Name : devio

Summary : Read and write utility for block devices

Description: devio is a command line utility intended to read and write on block

: devices. The primary difference between devio and other command

: line utilities, such as dd and cat, is that it is not stream based

: – it writes directly into the object rather than reading and

: writing a stream of data.

Name : drupal

Summary : An open-source content-management platform

Description: Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal is a Content

: Management System written in PHP that can support a variety of

: websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven

: websites. Drupal is highly configurable, skinnable, and secure.

Name : dvisvgm

Summary : A DVI to SVG converter

Description: dvisvgm is a command line utility that converts DVI files, as

: created by TeX/LaTeX, to the XML-based scalable vector graphics

: format SVG. Besides the basic DVI command set, dvisvgm also

: supports various special sets, like color, PostScript and TPIC.

:

: Fonts that are only available as Metafont source are automatically

: vectorized so that the generated SVG is freely scalable without

: loss of quality.

Name : gnome-bluetooth

Summary : Bluetooth graphical utilities

Description: The gnome-bluetooth package contains graphical utilities to setup,

: monitor and use Bluetooth devices.

Name : hosts3d

Summary : 3D real-time network visualiser

Description: Hosts3D is a 3D real-time network visualizer, displaying

: hosts and packet traffic. Features include support for

: multiple sensors, analysis of packets to gather hostnames

: and services, configurable layout of subnetworks,

: recording/replaying of packet traffic, and the ability

: to filter packets by host, protocol or port.

: hsen (as in Hosts3D Sensor) is a packet capture daemon which

: reads and sends packet header information to Hosts3D,

: locally or remotely. hsen also equates hostname to IP

: by reading DNS packets (UDP type A class IN standard

: query response). The relationship between hsen to Hosts3D

: can be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many

: (many Hosts3Ds would be on multiple computers on the

: same subnet, receiving packet header information

: from hsen via broadcast).

Name : kdenetwork

Summary : K Desktop Environment – Network Applications

Description: Networking applications, including:

: * kget: downloader manager

: * kopete: chat client

: * kppp: dialer and front end for pppd

: * krdc: a client for Desktop Sharing and other VNC servers

: * krfb: Desktop Sharing server, allow others to access your desktop

: via VNC

Name : listen

Summary : A music manager and player for GNOME

Description: Listen is an intuitive music player for GNOME written in Python.

: Thanks to it, you can easily organize your music collection.

: It supports many features such as podcats, daap sharing,

: crossfades, access to lyrics and wikipedia, sync with media

: players, Jamendo etc… Listen can be extended with plugins.

Name : me-tv

Summary : GNOME desktop application for watching digital television

Description: Me TV is a GNOME desktop application for watching digital

: television services that use the DVB standard, as in Digital Video Broadcasting. Me TV works with

: DVB-T, DVB-C, DVB-S and ATSC cards that have kernel driver support.

: Me TV reads the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) data that is

: transmitted over the air to populate a built-in program guide which

: can be used for scheduling recordings.

Name : mono-nat

Summary : .NET library for automatic port forwarding

Description: Mono.Nat is a .NET library used for automatic port forwarding,

: using either uPnP or nat-pmp, as in NAT Port Mapping Protocol.

Name : purple-facebookchat

Summary : Libpurple plug-in supporting facebook IM

Description: This is a Facebook chat plugin for Pidgin and libpurple

: messengers. It connects to the new Facebook Chat IM service

: without the need for an API key.

:

: Currently the plugin can log into the Facebook servers, grab the

: buddy list, send/receive messages, add/remove friends, receive

: notifications, search for Facebook friends and set your Facebook

: status.

Name : rfkill

Summary : A tool for enabling and disabling wireless devices

Description: rfkill is a simple tool for accessing the Linux rfkill device

: interface, which is used to enable and disable wireless networking

: devices, typically WLAN, Bluetooth and mobile broadband.

Name : synergy-plus

Summary : Mouse and keyboard sharing utility

Description: Synergy+ (synergy-plus) lets you easily share a single mouse and

: keyboard between multiple computers with different operating

: systems, without special hardware. All you need is a LAN

: connection. It’s intended for users with multiple computers, where

: each system uses its own display. It’s a little like having a 2nd

: or a 3rd desktop. Synergy+ is a maintenance fork for implementing

: bug fixes to the original Synergy, which hasn’t received any source

: updates or new releases since 2006.

Name : tzdata

Summary : Timezone data

Description: This package contains data files with rules for various timezones

: around the world.

Name : vidalia

Summary : GUI controller for the Tor Onion Routing Network

Description: Vidalia is a cross-platform controller GUI for Tor, built using the

: Qt framework. Vidalia allows you to start and stop Tor, view the

: status of Tor at a glance, and monitor Tor’s bandwidth usage.

: Vidalia also makes it easy to contribute to the Tor network by

: helping you setup a Tor server, if you wish.

Name : virt-v2v

Summary : Convert a virtual machine to run on KVM

Description: virt-v2v is a tool for converting virtual machines to use the KVM

: hypervisor. It modifies both the virtual machine image and its

: associated libvirt metadata. virt-v2v will also configure a guest

: to use VirtIO drivers if possible.

:

: virt-v2v also includes the virt-snapshot tool, which will modify a

: guest to use snapshot storage, and later commit the snapshot back

: to the original storage if desired.

Name : vmpsd

Summary : A GPL implementation of Cisco Systems’ VMPS

Description: VMPS (VLAN Management Policy Server) is a way of assigning switch

: ports to specific VLANs based on MAC address of connecting device.

: OpenVMPS is a GPL implementation of VMPS.

The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group, meets on the first Thursday and last Saturday of each month. The meetings take place at the main Library in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Caroline Street in Meeting Room 2:

*

You can find the FredLUG calendar by going to Google Groups and searching on F-r-e-d-L-U-G. Near the top of the page is a link to the Google calendar containing the meeting schedule.
*

Besides the FredLUG Google Group, you’re also welcome on the IRC channel Hash FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

The new perspectives introduced in this edition are:

• PACH = View from pavilion away from Courthouse area
• PAV = View of pavilion and commons, looking toward Courthouse area
• PTCH = View from pavilion toward Courthouse area

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Observe the streets taking shape.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• PACH (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  A closer view of the buildings from the perspective of the previous OBB pictures. Off to the right side corner of the buildings is the BRE2 point, which looks in from the other direction.

• PAV (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  I had called this structure the "gazebo" up until now. It's actually more of a stage for speakers and performances. Watch the buildings behind the pavilion take shape as construction progresses.

• PTCH (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This view is looking back toward the SYW point. The water tower in the background is across SR 208 (into which Brock Road ends at the traffic light) from the Courthouse campus.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

FredLUG is getting ready for Software Freedom Day 2009. The FredLUG name goes with a Google Group and freenode.net IRC channel. Stop by and see us if you're in the area.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  One of the portable lighting units pre-placed for Sunday's festivities. The lettering on the first building reads: "The Pear Tree" and "Village Sales & Marketing."

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Perspective includes the wood chip roof of the corner structure and the lettering on the first building.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Notice that the Jersey barriers are gone. You now can drive on Old Battlefield Boulevard, although the manhole covers in the street still mound up some and there are a few other rough spots in the pavement.

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  No Jersey barrier here either.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  
  

  

  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  
  

  

  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  
  

  

  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  
  

  

  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  
  

  

  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  
  

  

  
  ...

mcw

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Sign showing concept of how the completed village should appear:

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Here's the best view of the contrasting facades on the second building. Look closely to see the stonework on the first story. The street from BRE3, which runs out from the second building, and adjacent parking lot have been paved since start of construction on the 2nd building.
  

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The intersection of Brock Road and Spotslee Drive (on the subdivision side) and Old Battlefield Boulevard (on the Village side) is taking further shape. In addition to the median and street lights, a masonry signage structure is being built; it appears to be about three meters tall.

• SLDR2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Here is a view of the style of street signs being installed on the Village grounds. Zooming in on the photograph should reveal Brock Road and possibly Old Battlefield Blvd. on the other sign might be readable. The speed limit is 12 miles per hour.

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Best view of brickwork so far.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Best view of brickwork so far.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:

See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  

  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  

  This is the best view of the lamp posts.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  

  ...

• BRE2 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  

  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  

  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)

  

  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The first "For Lease" signs are up. Observe the banners just below the top story windows.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  First building side is painted white.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  A good framing in this picture of the second story framing.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Moved camera pan to the right, as preparations for another building appear to be in the beginning stages to the right of the gazebo structure.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Observe the night construction lights to the left of the steel framing of the second building.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Backhoe now moved next to building at BRE3, and barely discernible from this angle..

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Observe the backhoe in the right of the picture.

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

• Bible Notebook
• Courthouse Village Chronology (aka CVChron)
• Fiction
• Linux
• Mac
• Podcast
• Renewable Energy
• Uncategorized

Of those, as of this date, the Bible Notebook, CVChron, Fiction, and Podcast are the most active. There are ideas worth viewing in the other categories as well.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

See further comments at http://marwalk.wordpress.com

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Follow the story as it develops at http://marwalk.livejournal.com/.

Enjoy.
mcw

Follow the story as it develops at http://marwalk.livejournal.com/.

Enjoy.
mcw

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

The WordPress.com blog is configured as a true interactive blog, which allows you to share your own thoughts if you want to. Or just read, as I do with most others’ blogs. Just becasue I do not post does not mean that I am not getting anything out of a blog, and I’m sure that’s the same for everyone.

I have posted an initial “seeder” in each category for the WordPress.com blog, so you can see what it covers. Take a look at the marwalk.wordpress.com main page to see the categories covered. And there's a link there back to MarWalk home as well.

Enjoy.

mcw

FredPod 081214 is out, featuring an interview with Jeri Phillips, a local community volunteer in the Fredericksburg area discussing the joys and rewards of doing volunteer work.

The MP3 version is still at http://marwalk.podomatic.com and from there you can play it in your browser if it has the necessary plugins, or subscribe to the RSS feed at http://marwalk.podomatic.com/rss2.xml.

Enjoy.

mcw

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Aaron describes why open source software is the way to go.

Enjoy,
Mark

- --

Mark Caldwell Walker
GnuPG public key is available at
http://www.earthalien.com/#pubkey

FredPod Podcast in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis:
Web page: http://marwalk.podOmatic.com/
RSS feed: http://marwalk.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

Also updates to Bible Notebook web page include web browser rendering of the RSS feed.

mcw

Also added are direct links to the Mac and Linux resource pages, as these have been popular visitor destinations on the website.

mcw

--

FredPod Podcast in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis:
Web page: http://marwalk.podOmatic.com/
RSS feed: http://marwalk.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

FredPod Podcast in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis:
Web page: http://marwalk.podOmatic.com/
RSS feed: http://marwalk.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

Enjoy.

mcw

Have 2 "episodes" posted already at the pod feed main page:
http://marwalk.podomatic.com/

The FredPod RSS feed is at:
http://marwalk.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

Also will note new FredPod postings on my marwalk RSS feed (this feed) at:
http://www.marwalk.com/rss/marwalk.xml

and also on the FredLUG Google group.

Already podOmatic is showing several downloads, and that's with
practically no promotion.

FredPod format goes something like this:
--> Recent file postings to SourceForge
--> Selections from the latest "yum info recent" results
--> Updates on FredLUG, such as meetings and group postings
--> Feature item, either an interview or me highlighting an open
source tool (I have an interview arranged next weekend with a talented
musician I know)
--> A music production licensed under Creative Commons, non-commercial
with attribution works fine; downloaded from sites such as Jamendo or
Magnatune. (If you have a Creative Commons licensed production you would like me to include, please send me the info on it.)

If/when I get some listener mail, will include that too.

It's actually theraputic for me to do this.

Enjoy.

mcw

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The third structure area has the largest footprint yet in the project; getting ready this week to pour the concrete floor.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The third structure area has the largest footprint yet in the project.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Look past the stop sign to notice the brick sidewalk going in.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The third structure area has the largest footprint yet in the project.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Also added, a view of the sign placed at each end of Old Battlefield Boulevard, that provides an artist's concept of what the completed village should look like (scroll down if necessary).

Sign showing concept of how the completed village should appear:

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Roof is now on, more that just rafters.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This perspective allows the best view of the small structure's roof, in relief against the trees; especially as the white roofing material is difficult to see against the clouds from other angles. Look closely at the small structure, and you should see some brick work around the bottom.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Until the brick work on the larger building rose above the flat roof part, a protruding part of the HVAC system was visible that was not there before.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Many of the same supplies stacked around as from two weeks ago.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  This perspective allows the another view of the small structure's roof, in relief against the other building; especially as the white roofing material is difficult to see against the clouds from other angles.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The mud is mostly gone; for now.

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  See the progress on the second building just to the left of the tree. It's smaller but if you look closely you can see it.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Further progress on the front of the first building noticeable from this angle.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The "new" building takes shape in the background.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  View of second building progress between first and the traffic light at OBB and the Bypass.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The mud is back after the rain. The road bed continues to just beyond the picture.

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Second building framing dwarfed in front of the first building, but this provides added perspective.

mcw

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

• Work on the "front" of the building at Old Battlefield Blvd. and Brock Rd.
• Smoothed out road bed at BRE1 entrance at the far end of the field.
• Construction on a second building started.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  See the start of the steel framing for the second building just to the left of the tree. It's smaller but if you look closely you can see it.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Progress on the front of the first building noticeable from this angle.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Some window framing with the masonry; nice touch.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  View of second building between first and the traffic light at OBB and the Bypass.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  No more mud hole. The road bed continues to just beyond the picture.

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Second building framing dwarfed in front of the first building, but this provides added perspective.

mcw


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:48:22 -0400 a-second-building-and-new-road-bed-at-courthouse-v http://www.marwalk.com People can't be taking this thing seriously! Can you say "Twitter" with a straight face? Reminds me of Thumper the rabbit in Bambi who became Twitterpated, which basically implied active hormones.

But after seeing CSPAN use Twitter as a serious tool in covering the US political conventions, and professional IT journals discuss Twitter as a serious tool for the enterprise, one must conclude that if broadcast and IT professionals are taking Twitter seriously, then it is by virtue of that acceptance a serious tool indeed.

I first wondered what makes it different from RSS. Three things about it stand out:

1. Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters; talk about forced conciseness.
2. Twitter can be extended to various mobile devices, including integration with web and SMS text messaging (with associated carrier costs).
3. Twitter's blog-like feature allows anyone to follow and reply to tweets from "Twitter-ers" of their choice; sort of like Instant Messaging expanded and compressed at the same time.

So what would one use Twitter for? Here's one use: Often I discover a software tool that I would like to add to my Linux or Mac pages but just don't have the time even to write an RSS item for it. Well now I can tweet about it, and not take up much of your time or mine. An example would be tweeting out a web link with solutions to a vexing problem. There even are burgeoning web search capabilities for Twitter tweets; try Googling them.

I'm very busy as I'm sure you are too with various projects, not to mention life's daily demands; so I've added Twitter to my repertoire of communications tools. You can follow my tweets in any of the following ways:

* My website www.marwalk.com, in a box at the bottom of the home page
* My Twitter page http://twitter.com/marwalk
* My Twitter RSS feed; copy this link into your RSS reader

Happy tweeting. Seriously.

mcw


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:48:22 -0400 courthouse-village-brickwork-continues http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Significant brickwork progress on two sides of the first building this week, even though we had some heavy rains during the week. Then a beautiful Labor Day weekend.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Front brickwork.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Side brickwork.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:53:03 -0400 brickwork-underway-at-courthouse-village http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The bricks that had been stacked up now are laid around the building; more brickwork yet to go, as indicated by the scaffolding still in place.

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Good view of the building progress, as well as the paving layout for the streets. The roof is seen taking shape.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Better perspective on the building from this view.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Much of the brickwork is visible on the addition on the building to the rear.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  ...

mcw


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends

The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:06:35 -0400 first-building-in-village-now-has-windows http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Oh my! What an experience! I thought I'd never get it working. But it's beautiful. My EVGA 8800GT graphics card takes two PCIe expansion slots; actually only plugs into one but is two slots wide for the cooling fan.

As a little background, I recently built a computer with an Intel® Core™2 Duo processor on a DG35EC motherboard. I wanted to run x86_64 Fedora Linux; 64 bit processing was my goal. The onboard graphics output was wavy and looked awful.

So I got the EVGA graphics card, selecting that model after the evaluation posts mentioned how cool it ran. That was important as I had placed already an additional cooling fan on my cabinet where I had three hard drives along with the other heat generating components inside.

Everything installed beautifully, but the xserver was not happy at all. My new computer dropped back to runlevel 3 after flickering the screen in an abortive attempt to start x.

Many many hours of poring over blog posts and how-to descriptions. It seemed like I'd never get the driver and kernel versions to match. The NVIDIA install script was never happy with the version of kernel source I had; to add further insult it said I had an NVIDIA driver already installed. Yum could never find kmod-nvidia on its own, so I went in search of RPMs only to find myself in a do-loop of missing dependencies. It was Catch-22 by orders of magnitude. No joy.

Just to try something I never expected to work, as I had done it before, I ran yum upgrade again after all those abortive driver installation attempts. At the end of the yum process it said it was installing the NVIDIA driver. I watched the dots go across the screen fully expecting the process to crash. Not so! It started the xserver! WooHoo!

I wish I could provide a "this is how you can be sure to make it work" description, but I confess it was more good fortune than victory. That's okay; I'll take it!

However, I would like to share the sites I traversed that I think were the most helpful. If you are having difficulties with NVIDIA cards on Fedora, I hope this will help you get your system running sooner.

Here are the resources:

• http://fedorasolved.org/video-solutions/nvidia-yum-livna
• http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
• http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/FAQ
• http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/173.14.05/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.05-pkg1.run (execute with the "sh" command as root#; use wget to download if stuck at runlevel 3)

May you see clearly very soon.

mcw


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]]> Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:21:24 -0400 new-marwalk-rss-feed-marks-bible-notebook http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Not much noticeable change since July until now, but the first building has windows and an addition.

There also is more construction acitivity now compared to recent weeks

Here are the latest pictures, going clockwise starting at the schoolyard:
See Spotsylvania Courthouse Village—Chronology in Pictures to see the abbreviations spelled out.

• SYW (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Good view of the building progress, as well as the paving layout for the streets.

• RACSB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  A new RACSB sign is now in (foreground). Better perspective on the building from this view.

• SLDR (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Windows now framed in part of the building. Also, the intersection median on Old Battlefield Boulevard has taken shape. Notice the addition on the building to the rear.

• BRE3 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  There has been more activity in this area recently. Additional materials have been stacked.

• BRE1 (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  Some pre-construction activity has been done in this area, but still only sparsely.

• OBB (click thumbnail for larger picture in your web browser)
  
  The blue building in the distance is RACSB. The brick building to the far left is Robert. E. Lee Elementary School. All of the building construction is at the opposite end so far.

mcw


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]]> Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:25:31 -0400 village-construction-work-slowly-ramping-up-2 http://www.marwalk.com/BibleNotebook.html It is brand new, but now online. Mark's Bible Notebook is what would be my markups in the margins of a well worn Bible. Usually I will follow Lectionary readings for a particular Sunday or weekday; but if I encounter something especially inspiring in a particular context, I could share that with you as well.

Regardless of your religious or spiritual background, it's there for you to peruse at your leisure. If you find yourself blessed through it in some way, then all the better.

Enjoy.

mcw


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]]> Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:17:08 -0400 first-paved-streets-at-courthouse-village http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Since the last set of pictures taken on June 29, 2008, today's pictures show pavement and further curbing construction.

The blue tarp provides a reference point for several angles.

If you miss the RACSB sign from the road construction days, it was taken out be an accident several weeks ago. What remains of it is shown in today's RACSB picture.

mcw


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]]> Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:48:50 -0400 first-building-in-village-goes-multistory http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html More rain this past week, but construction on the first building in the Village continued on Saturday and Sunday, Jun 14 and 15. See SLDR below; if you look closely you might notice some construction workers on the top level. This is the first time I've noticed work here on a weekend; there seems to be serious interest in getting this building finished. No indication yet as to what will be the purpose of that building.

Another notable advance in progress is the paving preparations for Old Battlefield Blvd. The traffic light at its junction with the Bypass has been flashing red/yellow, waiting for the street to be opened.

Here are this week's pictures:

• BRE1
  
  -

• OBB
  
  -

• SLDR
  
  -

• SYW
  
  -

mcw


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]]> Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:08:37 -0400 midweek-storms-slow-village-construction http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Heavy thunderstorms all around central and northern Virginia this past week; certainly slowed down construction. On Wednesday, June 4, 2008, trees were uprooted and tossed across roads, and it rained heavy enough to make 35 mph treacherously fast; plenty of areas without electric power as well.
There even was hail the size of a US Nickel coin:


Here are this week's pictures:

• BRE1
  
  -

• OBB
  
  -

• SLDR
  
  -

• SYW
  
  -

It's only June, but the "dog days" of summer are here already.

mcw


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]]> Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:58:25 -0400 village-construction-work-slowly-ramping-up-1 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The foliage seems to have reached its full development for the season. The weather continues to be cooler than expected in this region for this time of year.

Here are this week's pictures:

• BRE1
  
  Not much change visible from this end so far. The taller wall at the SLDR end stands out against the elementary school in the distance. The identifier "BRE" indicates a street entrance to the village from Brock Road. The number following the "BRE" counts the streets from the BRAV/BRTV location, which is just behind the camera.

• OBB
  
  If you look closely in the distance over toward Brock Road, you will notice another stack of cinder blocks off to the side by the parked trucks. Although it appears that there is only one MegaMix machine, two of them are visible from the other pictures.

• SLDR
  
  It would take a very large machine to break through the Jersey barriers and the road grader parked in front of the entrance to Old Battlefield Blvd.

• SYW
  
  How much greener can it get? There still has been enough rain to keep things fairly muddy, in an area that used to be grassy field.

Things are sure to dry out more soon; the "dog days" of summer are not far behind.

mcw


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]]> Sun, 25 May 2008 20:08:03 -0400 village-construction-work-slowly-ramping-up http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html There is a view from a new perspective this week. See BRE1*, which indicates the the first entry to the village from the intersection of Brock Road and the Bypass (BRAV/BRTV). Not much at this end so far, but it does give a sense of the heavy rains, with tornado warnings and watches, that poured down last Thursday.

The street bed for Old Battlefield Blvd. is viewable in both OBB and SLDR.

And the grass and foliage is much greener than a week ago; from the rains and the progression of Spring. Still much cooler than expected in this region for this time of year.

Here are this week's pictures:

• BRE1
  
  This is the added perspective hinted in earlier posts. The identifier "BRE" indicates a street entrance to the village from Brock Road. The number following the "BRE" counts the streets from the BRAV/BRTV location, which is just behind the camera.

• OBB
  
  Noticeable is the grading that was done since last week for the street bed for Old Battlefield Blvd. The ground is very wet still from the rain last Thursday.

• SLDR
  
  The framing for another story is up for the first building of the village. It now is clear to see that it will be a straight drive across Brock Road to the Bypass from Spotslee Drive.

• SYW
  
  The grass in the school yard is much greener, but the construction area is commensurately muddier.

*Local anchor links bring you to the marwalk.com home page from the RSS feed, but take you to the intended thumbnail on the html version.

mcw


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]]> Sat, 10 May 2008 22:18:21 -0400 courthouse-village-progress-and-a-cutthrough-view http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html I'm going to try something different this time. I'll provide a short narrative as needed, but with it a description of the pictures together with a thumbnail instead of just a link. Please let me know if you like this presentation style better.

There was a lot of needed rain this past week, so not as much construction work was done. Some more rows of cinder blocks on the building next to SLDR, and the Mega Mix containers were moved (they're farther apart this week; see SYW).

I included another "one time" picture, one that I'd been intending to include for several months. That is the view from what is now the "new" Business 208 ("B208" for reference here), which is really the old main 208 that went through the Courthouse and County Government complex. For some time now, there has been a direct view to the Bypass that was obscured by trees before they were cleared. At first it appeared that another spur connecting the Bypass with Business 208 was planned, but nothing has been constructed; not that anyone would want that necessarily.

So here are this week's pictures:

• B208
  
  This is the view from B208. You can see the break in the trees done near the beginning of the Bypass construction in 2007 allowing a clear view of the traffic signal at OBB.

• OBB
  
  Not much difference from this perspective, except for the wetter ground from last week's rains.

• SLDR
  
  The rains kept construction work to just a couple of days, but a few more cinder blocks were laid in the first building of the Village to be started.

• SYW
  
  Visible from this perspective are the additional walls of the building and the Mega Mix containers a little farther apart from each other.

At this point the project looks like it could be just another strip mall going in, but at least the signs around the edges indicate the "Village" concept. Let us hope.

mcw


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]]> Sat, 10 May 2008 18:35:18 -0400 construction-has-begun-on-the-courthouse-village-1 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Up until now, the work has been concentrated on the Bypass. For the past few weeks, preparations were being made for the Village between the Bypass, Brock Road, and Robert E. Lee Elementary School. The open area that has been a "field in waiting" is waiting no longer; the first building walls went up this past week.Just as notable, and welcome to drivers at the BFEX end of the Bypass, was the completion of the pavement at that end and the opening of all four lanes between the new Business SR 208 traffic light (see the final pre-opening picture at 080106BFEXSR.jpg) and the Battlefield exit. Compare the picture 070429BFEX.jpg with 080426BFEX-1.jpg, which is a year later. The bit of bare earth in the 2007 picture is where the road curves to the right behind the signs at the Battlefield exit in the 2008 picture. All traffic used to go straight at the new curve, and now drivers must go through the curve and turn left at the Business SR 208 traffic light to go directly to the Courthouse and county administration buildings; the straight route is not only blocked, the former pavement has been covered with earth with curbing around it.

Here is a guide to the new pictures chronicling the Village construction:

• The SLDR and SYW pictures are the same as before, only now they will show the building construction.
• The BFEX picture was a one-time addition to highlight the before/after comparison described above.
• Next time, the BFEX picture will be replaced with a new set of BRTV pictures. These will be just to the Courthouse side of the traffic light installation that was visible in the BR608, BRAV, and BRTV pictures of the road construction.

The large Mega-Mix dispensers were visible from SLDR up until Friday evening, April 25, 2008. The cinder blocks in the building had gone up that day, and blocked the view of them. The RACSB building is visible in 080426OBB-1.jpg straight above the post lying on the ground in the picture; the Spotsylvania Post Office is the brick building on the left side of the picture. Observe that Old Battlefield Blvd. will curve to the left just before its intersection with the Bypass so as to meet it square on.

Not shown, but the OBB intersection and the 7-Eleven on Business SR 208 can be seen from each of those two locations. The view of the 7-eleven is at about 60 degrees to the left of the view in OBB.

The whole area seems smaller now that these areas can be viewed from locations where they were obscured before. On a smaller scale, it is similar to what happened to the distance between the Interstate 95 interchange at Route 3 and Fall Hill Avenue when Fredericksburg's Central Park went in; or what is happening now with construction at the Spotsylvania Towne Centre in the area behind what used to be know as Spotsylvania Mall.

Traffic is sparse along Business SR 208 during non-business hours since the Bypass opened. However, the 7-Eleven and the twice a week farmers market are still operating; and complaints of no more Courthouse traffic jams have not surfaced so far.

mcw


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]]> Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:12:19 -0400 construction-has-begun-on-the-courthouse-village http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html No more detour for SR 608; the new road is open.

The Fredericksburg.com site has done a great job of providing videotours. Here's their general story about the road.

A driving tour from BFEXTV through BFEXSR is here.

A driving tour from BFEXSR continuing through BFEXTV is here.

A driving tour from BFEXTV through a right turn at BRAV is here.

A driving tour from BFEXTV past the traffic light in SYE through a left turn at BRAV and past SLDR, RACSB, and SYW in quick succession, and finally ending up at the original Courthouse traffic light (where all the traffic used to be choked through) is here.

A driving tour from SR 648 (Blockhouse Road) almost near the Po River through to BR608 (looking from the opposite direction) is here. This tour shows (from the opposite direction) where BRAV will tie into SR 648. It takes you through the four-way stop signs at SR648 and SR 608 (Robert E. Lee Drive) and on past where SR 608 used to continue (about where the SUV from the opposite direction appears). The tour turns off to the right where SR 608 picks up again after being cut off by the Bypass; had they continued 1/4 mile further they would have been at BRTV. By turning right onto the near segment of SR 608, the tour ends where SR 608 joins Brock Road; and they then turn back onto the Bypass at BRTV.

Very nicely done tours. Compare the completed Bypass with the beginnings from April 2007.

The next phase in progress now is to complete the four lane expansion for BFEXAV/BFEXTV. Work on that is ongoing as of now, and those videos starting at BFEXTV provide a glimpse of that work toward the early part of the videos.

The Canada geese shown several months ago in BRTV have made themselves athome near the drain water pond just to the westbound side of the Bypass.

Plenty of traffic on the Bypass, and now hardly any on Brock Road— it's just a little eery if you remember how it used to be.

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---

]]> Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:04:19 -0500 take-a-tour-of-the-new-road http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Word is that the Spotsylvania Bypass is to open this Thursday, January 10, 2008. What a change that will make to traffic patterns around the courthouse!

But this Thursday will not be the end of Bypass construction. Look closely at 080106BFEXAV and 080106BFEXTV, and observe that the four lane Bypass squeezes down to two lanes at the eastern end.

So there's yet more to be done on the highway. And then the village itself is yet to be built.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

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]]> Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:25:46 -0500 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Noticeable change at the Brock Road intersection, especially with the new paving and curbing (compare 071209 pictures with those from Christmas Eve, 071224).

Completion now appears to be expected in early 2008.

The detour for SR 608 remains in effect, but things will be different when that road is open once again. The Bypass cuts through SR 608 between Brock Road and The Laurels subdivision, and SR 608 stops at a "T" into the Bypass; that instead of SR 608 continuing straight through to SR 648 as before.

]]> Sun, 30 Dec 2007 12:27:15 -0500 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html As of this week, in addition to the traffic lights and the poles that support them, most of the accompanying signs and control boxes now are installed. To provide a better look at them, the following views are shown with optical zoom toward the traffic lights:

Side road at the Battlefield exit end

View from the school yard of the Brock Road interchange

View from the school yard of the (extension of) Spotslee Drive interchange

View from Brock Road of the (extension of) Spotslee Drive interchange

Notice also the sensor loops especially visible in 071209BRAV.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

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]]> Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:49:14 -0500 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html They're going in; the lights for the traffic signals at the Brock Road and Bypass intersection are up but not on. What the intersection will look like is becoming apparent, in 071111BRAV and 071111BRTV, even though drivers must navigate the mix of old and new road in that construction zone. Look just to the left of the orange and white barrels near the center of 071111BR608 to see the median that will divide that part of Brock Road.

Poles for another traffic light are located where an extended Spotslee Drive would intersect the Bypass, which is located where the maroon arrows point in 071111SLDRtruck and 071111BRTVtruck.

That is in addition to the third traffic light at the Battelfield exit end of the project, as seen by the traffic light sign in 071111BFEXSR. Another traffic light sign for that intersection is just out of view to the right edge of 071111BFEXTV; but zoom in on that picture (the Opera browser is excellent for this) to see the the SR 208 West and Business signs along the westbound shoulder, both approaching and at the intersection with the side road.

Get ready for trees along the Bypass. Look closely along the shoulders of the Bypass in 071111BRTV to see the new trees planted this past week. (When trees were planted along the Spotsylvania Parkway, between US 1 and Smith Staion Road, the trees affected the speed limit on the Parkway.)

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

]]> Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:47:49 -0500 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html So far it's only the poles and a sign or two, but more traffic lights are under construction; both annoying and necessary. There was further progress on the side road intersection at the Battlefield exit end of the project, 071104BFEXSR. And another set of traffic lights is being installed where the Bypass crosses Brock Road, 071104BRTV, 071104BRAV, and 071104BR608.

This is the first day of standard time, starting a week later than the previous long-standing schedule. The late afternoon sunlight is beginning to take on its winterish glow. After all, it's only a little over a month before the winter solstice.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

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]]> Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:32:47 -0500 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html If you use rss2email, you might have encountered difficulty when copying and pasting a feed link from your browser to the r2e utility when the link in the browser address field starts with "feed://" and then the link.

I've observed that r2e does not recognize the "feed://" part of the address; it wants "http://" instead.

So I block copy the address in the browser from the right all the way up to and including the "://" part. Then in r2e, I type in "http" and then paste the rest, to produce:

~/.rss2email$ ./r2e add http[pasted link from browser]

Works fine. Prove it with:

~/.rss2email$ ./r2e list

Enjoy your reading.

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]]> Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:42:24 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The first day of beautiful Fall weather after several days of much needed rain was a delight that drew many people outside. It followed a week of paving progress, with some of the work done in the rain.

Some things of note are:

• Paving was extended at both ends of the project, with the eastbound pavement finally growing again after several weeks of stopping just past the side road. Look closely in 071027BFEXTV and you might notice the line of demarcation where the paving had halted and then started again. The end of the current eastbound paving progress is visible in 071027BFEXAV.
• It appears there will be a traffic light at the intersection of the By-Pass and the side road. Try expanding 071027BFEXTV to the point of pixelization, and observe the two brown traffic light poles in the background just to the left of the paving equipment on the right. Another view of the near traffic light pole is in the background in 071027BFEXSR just to the right of the left-most orange and white barrel. Blocked from view by the barrel in 071027BFEXSR are the indentions in the pavement for traffic sensors at that intersection; the second brown traffic pole is obscured from view by the yellow paving equipment.
• Finally the paving has progressed for the first time across Brock Road, as you can see in 071027BRAV. With the additional paving equipment visible in 071027BR608, it is clear that that small but busy intersection will never be the same again.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

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]]> Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:09:40 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html After several weeks of other preparatory work, the pavemet appears to be extending farther eastbound at the Battlefield exit end, as seen in 071020BFEXAV and 071020BFEXTV.

To get a better perspective, observe the same piece of paving equipment in 071020BFEXTV and 071020BFEXSR.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

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]]> Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:45:26 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html Just a quick note on my experience with trying to boot the Fedora network install utility from a thumb drive. Some of the blogs and other documentation said to just dd the boot.iso image onto a USB flash drive. I did that and no joy, at least for me.

What did work was an image file named bootdisk.img. It's located on the Fedora mirror sites with a path such as:

[mirror ftp or http url]/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/images/

The key is to drill down past the os directory to the images directory, the same place you find the boot.iso file for the network install boot CD.

A site I have found very helpful is:

LinuxQuestions.org - where Linux users come for help.

More later on the network install process.

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]]> Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:58:08 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html A few things worthy of mention this week:

The curbing is being extended around onto Brock Road at that end of the by-pass; a small part of it is viewable in the lower right corner of 071014BRTV, and more of it is viewable in 071014BR608.

Notice how Brock Road shifts to the left heading toward the courthouse in 071014BR608; and its old path is beside it in 071014BRAV where it appears that pavement will be laid soon.

As a matter of perspective, the dirt path in the near view of 071014BFEXTV is the old roadbed for the previous westbound lanes of SR 208 just before the road narrowed into two lanes.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:18:53 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Last time we observed that there's a nice median shaping up in 070923BRTV. The camera's battery died at a most inopportune time and the 070930BRTV picture was lost, but take a re-look at the median picture from last time. There appears to be no left turn provision due to the solid median. So if a driver wants to turn into the village from the westbound lanes, there is no place to make that turn. An alternative would be going on down to Brock Road, turning left and then left again into the village area. Another alternative would be to follow the old road past the Court House to the traffic light at the "T" where SR 208 turns left and Brock Road joins in from the right; turn right at the light and then right again into the village area.

The further lane shifting just out of view to the right of 070923BRTVa mentioned last time is revealing the intersection of Brock Road and SR 608 that is taking shape, as shown in 070930BR608.

Paving work at the Battlefield exit end of the project was almost at a standstill this past week, as shown by 070930BFEXTV as compared with the previous week, 070923BFEXTV. Since then, another strip of asphalt has been laid for the eastbound SR 208 By-Pass traffic (to be shown next time).

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:49:01 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Looks like the paving equipment in 070923BFEXTV got some use last week as shown by the new pavement in 070923BFEXSR—compare that with the lone gravel pile only a week earlier in 070916BFEXSR.

Now there is a similar gravel pile in the actual village area, as seen just to the left beyond the stop sign in 070923SLDR1 and 070923SLDR2, and to the right middle of 070923RACSB.

There's a nice median shaping up in 070923BRTV; also some further lane shifting just out of view to the right to accomodate additional paving work. Will start including a view of that next time.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608, with additional road signs so advising drivers.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:41:56 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html Naturally, you start with an old computer, perhaps a laptop, on which to install Fedora. The information that follows is for frustration prevention, that I learned from returning to do an additional installation a few months after doing the last one. Some small but critical things had changed in the process, namely:
• The mirror I had used before no longer was a mirror, and there were other changes to the mirrors list
• Just as importantly, the paths had changed. Not only that, but the different mirrors had different paths than each other for the locations of the install files.
This will affect whether or not your over-the-Internet install will get past finding the files on the mirror site. To save headaches, NB the below info.

Select a mirror near you from this list:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/7

Important: The list of mirror sites in the link just above changes, as do also the paths on those sites. If you have not installed from these mirrors lately, it could save you time and frustration to check the list to ensure that your favored mirror is still there. Also, and just as important, it's best to check the path to the iso file you want, and in the case of running the CD from boot.iso, the image files that the install program will use to install your selected options. One way to do this is to anonymous FTP to your selected mirror site, and drill down to the directory with installs for the architecture (e.g. i386) of the machine to which you are installing Fedora. The directory you are looking for is the /os/ directory underneath the architecture directory. The boot.iso process will find the image file it wants from there, so going deeper into the directory in the mirror site and path screen of the install program will only cause an error and stop the process. Once you've determined the path to the os directory on the mirror you intend to use, note it exactly and then use that path for that mirror when installing.

To just run Fedora 7 from CD, download your preference between the following two full CD images off the download root level from your selected mirror site (remember to verify the mirror path via FTP beforehand):
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-KDE-Live-i686.iso
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso

Get the Internet installation boot CD image from this directory off the download root level from your selected mirror site (remember to verify the mirror path via FTP beforehand):
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso

After you boot your target install machine with the Internet boot CD, when it asks you for the path from your selected mirror where the installation files are, enter (remember to verify the mirror path via FTP beforehand):
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/

If all goes well, the screen should display a message advising that stage2.img or minstg2.img or something similar is being downloaded. After that, installation will launch and you are into the selection menus.

Once the installation process checks all the transactions, it will start installing hundreds of files. As with previous Red Hat installation utilities, this one displays the filenames and a one line description of what each file does.

Always double check for changes.

]]> Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:09:53 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html We had more needed rain this past week, as evidenced by the small muddy puddles in 070916BFEXAV. Not much additional paving, though (070916BFEXTV); although a pile of gravel awaits spreading on the side access road (070916BFEXSR).

Three culvert pipes await installation in 070916SLDR, just to the left of the large dark blue political sign.

An orange backhoe is visible near the center left in 070916SLDR—for further perspective on the backhoe, it is visible just above the top right rear corner of the SUV in 070916RACSB1, and also at just about exact center in 070916SY.

No geese this week, but then the hummingbirds have migrated on too.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:53:41 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com Just a quick note about some minor adjustments to the email service, thanks to Feedblitz, the service that emails the RSS feed to those who subscribe to it on marwalk.com. It's a little more personalized now.

A lot of the traffic to marwalk.com is to the Linux Notes and Mac Notes pages. In the next few weeks, there will be more frequent additions to the 'Notes and the RSS info about them.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:19:44 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The most visible activity in the past two weeks was further curb work. Also see the median work in 070909BRTV.jpg and 070909BFEXTV.jpg, as well as 070909BFEXSR.jpg. Look closely at 070909SY.jpg and the curb and median work at 070909BRTV.jpg is visible in the distance.

Here's a special pictorial treat not included on the CVchron web page: Canada Geese on the westbound side of the bypass (look closely to see them in 070909BRTV.jpg).

The detour still is in effect for SR 608.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:38:44 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Convert Formats with Python Audio Tools
Have some audio files in one format, that you would like to convert to another? Try Python Audio Tools. This is an excellent audio format converter. It uses very simple syntax from the command line and does a great job. It will work with as many different formats as you can install. Remember that any tool, this one included, cannot create something that is not there—that is, it cannot add fidelity to a conversion from an already lossy format.

Required: You will need a working recent installation of the Python Interpreter. The Audio Tools installation instructions are very straightforward.

If you would like to "geek out" on audio formats, there also is an excellent PDF from the Audio Tools site that will explain a lot of aspects of audio, about which you might not have known to ask.

]]> Sat, 01 Sep 2007 22:43:25 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Curb work is visible on the westbound side in 070826BRTV.jpg—and a start also on the eastbound side at the Battlefield exit end as seen in 070826BFEXTV.jpg ; it appears to stop at the side road at this stage. The curbing is visible also in 070826BFEXSR.jpg, and in the distance in 070826SY.jpg.

Had some heavy thunderstorms last night (most of the mid-Atlantic was under a severe thunderstorm watch)—see evidence of the storms as rain puddles in 070826BFEXAV.jpg, 070826BRTV.jpg, and 070826BRAV.jpg.

Additional utility work in the form of more water/sewer pipes above ground in 070826SLDR.jpg and 070826RACSB1.jpg, and also in 070826SY.jpg if you expand it and look very closely. Communications/electrical utilities also making progress; take another look at 070826BRTV.jpg to see the cables poking out of the ground.

The detour still is in effect for SR 608.

It was a very hot and muggy week, especially with the 100 ℉ temperatures during part of that time.

---

MarWalk.com website cross promotion

Penelope & Friends
The world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of perceptive animals. Three of these animals are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, and they sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels. Feed available also via html.

---

]]> Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:58:25 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/rss/penelope.html If you've read Penna: The Alien Earthling and/or Familiar Aliens, you already are familiar with Penelope, the clever and lovable pellar rat. You also would have met Comet the cat and Gretchen the dog. There now is a new series on MarWalk.com, named "Penelope & Friends," that is available both as an RSS feed and in an HTML version.

This new series views the world of humans and other hominids as seen through the eyes of these perceptive animals. In addition to the three animals mentioned above that are "characters" from the Earth Alien Trilogy, there also is a fourth animal, Ariel the alpaca, created just for Penelope & Friends. Ariel and his buddies sometimes might even talk about the people in the Earth Alien novels, as they continue their "lives" past the end of Familiar Aliens.

So add Penelope & Friends to your subscription list in your favorite RSS reader or browser, and enjoy poking good-natured but candid fun at those silly humans.

Enter your Email in the field below to get Penelope & Friends via email.



Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

]]> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:57:37 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/MacNotes.html#Mutils Open Source Ports for Mac OS X
Tired of tweaking Linux and just want something productive? Get a Mac. Now that you have your Mac, do you miss all the fun things about tweaking? No problem.

Many of the open source projects, such as those on Sourceforge, are ported to Mac OS X. A Google search turns up a plethora of such projects and useful utilities.

See the link listed above, Open Source Ports for Mac OS X, for a forum post on MacResearch.org with a list of several websites featuring open source programs and utilities that are ported for Mac OS X, many of them already in compiled binary form.

No need to accept limits if you don't have to—and in this case, you don't have to.

]]> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:48:21 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Take a look at Community Supported Agriculture, and then ask yourself: "What would agriculture have to do with alternative fuels and renewable energy, other than growing crops for bio-based fuels?" The answer could be "plenty."

Here's how: Local production and consumption of basic agricultural products would significantly reduce the burden on national and regional transportation systems. That reduces the gallons/watts of energy needed for trucks and trains—and this would have an associated benefit of reduced cost for road and rail mainenance (wouldn't it be great if the potholes on your favorite highway were patched faster). We still could have our favorite crops that don't grow in our region shipped in, but chances are we would find that we don't need to eat those special things as often anyway.

Local production and processing also would go far in meeting employment needs in economically depressed areas, where jobs have been sent elsewhere because they are no longer profitable under current circumstances. "Local" would and should be a major component of the solution to numerous regional and national problems.

]]> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:37:30 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html Except perhaps for those within the Linux kernel development listservs, the name Con Kolivas might not have been a household word. But it's bound to be now. In a nutshell, after having contributed patches and other code for the Linux kernel for several years, Con Kolivas is stepping away from the project in a very public way. The apparent reason: Linux kernel development is concentrated on server and enterprise functions at the expense of desktop users.

Kolivas' interview in Austrailian online magazine APC is worth reading through to the end. Don't stop there—read the posted comments following the interview too.

That there is a problem, well at least an issue, for Linux on the desktop is fairly well recognized. The reasons described by Kolivas in his interview would remove any hope of Linux becoming commonplace as a desktop environment under the current situation. That situation is that mainline linux kernel development is dominated by full time professionals solving corporate enterprise needs, such as support to backend databases, etc.—it's likely thought by this group, perhaps correctly, that there's not enough profit to be made for them by supporting a Linux desktop for the general public. Kolivas' take on the state of PC architecture, the economic reasons for its stagnation, and the effect of that on kernel development for any operating system is thought provoking to say the least.

Many of the discussion posts after the interview address what to do about this problem and where do we go from here. The impression I get from reading the post-interview posts is that it might be time for a forked Linux kernel project dedicated to optimizing desktop performance versus server performance. For example, how may people need a web server on their laptop?

Ubuntu gets kudos for aiming toward making the Linux desktop attractive to people other than computer geeks. As one post put it, having fun tweaking a system is no substitute for something that works without any fuss. But even Ubuntu is a distribution versus a completeley desktop-optimized kernel.

I think the aggregate of the posts points the way—it's time to fork a Linux kernel made for the desktop. Done creatively it might be very profitable. Takers, anyone?

Kernel patch homepage of Con Kolivas

Home Page of Con Kolivas

]]> Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:23:59 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html One week and one more set of lanes on the bypass; this time the eastbound lanes. See 070812BFEXTV.jpg and 070819BRTV.jpg to view them from both ends of the bypass. Also a good start toward paving for the interchage at the Battlefield exit end of the project; see 070819BFEXAV.jpg for a look at that. Concrete curbing also is visible along the westbound side in 070819BRTV.jpg.

Indications of foundational work for the village part of the project can be seen as what appear to be water and sewer connections sticking up, and are visible beyond the numbered highway sign and the hedge in 070819SLDR.jpg. Expand 070819SY.jpg to the point of pixelization and you can see the pattern of these connections as well as get a sense of the planned street layout.

The detour for SR 608 is still in effect—and it probably will be for a while, as paving work on the west side of Brock Road is not yet visible in 070819BRAV.jpg.

At least from my observations, everyone seems to be negotiating around the project with minimal or no difficulty.

]]> Sun, 19 Aug 2007 15:36:07 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Sometimes I like to move between two computers, usually my Fedora 7 Linux machine on an older Dell Dimension box and my MacBook Pro running OS X Tiger. One of my favorite programs is the one I'm using to write this feed: ListGarden.

You can create, publish, and maintain as many feeds as you like with ListGarden. But if you want to work on your feed on more than one box and keep the content constant, you can't do that by just downloading your xml and/or html (yes, ListGarden does a paralell html version of your RSS feed if you choose, very cool) from your public website.

So, here's what to do: Change into the operating directory where you installed ListGarden. List all the files in that directory that end in ".txt" and look for the ones of that set that contain "feed" or "listdata" in them. For example, from your ListGarden directory, execute a command like:

ls *.txt | grep feedname

and all of your list data files will be shown. Then you just need to be sure you synchronize those files on your different local machines. Nothing fancy required, sneakernet can work just fine.

As ListGarden has an html option (via checkbox) for inputting the content, you can approach that in a couple of ways. One is to just write it all out by hand as if in vi or Notepad etc, tags and all. That might give you a good personally validating geek rush, but when you tire of that there is another way.

Take just about any web authoring tool that lets you at least view, and preferably tweak, the html source. An excellent such tool that is open source is Amaya, which I am using for this feed item. Have both the "design" and "source" windows open in your authoring tool of choice. Write out your feed content in plain language in the "design" window, and tweak the source as necessary along the way. When you're done writing your content, block copy everything in the "source" window between but not including the "<body>" tags. Then paste the code into the "Description" field in ListGarden. Be sure all your changes are reflected in the code before you finalize your feed item.

Save and publish your updated feed, and you're done.

]]> Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:01:43 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html You can see it in 070812BRTV.jpg and 070812BFEXTV.jpg—blacktop has been laid for the westbound lanes of the new bypass from Brock Road up to the side access road at the Battlefield end of the project. The paving enabled another perspective I hadn't noticed before, perhaps because the new blacktop provided sufficient contrast to other objects reflecting the bright sun. From the vantage point of 070812BFEXTV.jpg, I could see the traffic in the distance on Brock Road at the other end.

Not shown but worthy of mention, are the pre-placed sidewalk wheelchair ramps at the several access streets to the village being prepared along the short stretch of Brock Road between Spotslee Drive and SR 608. When these streets open, the right turn lane from the RACSB end will earn its keep in spades, as the left turn lane for Spotlee Drive already is.

As "advertised," SR 608 has been closed to all but local traffic this past week. Detour signs are included on Brock Road between the bypass project and Blockhouse Road, and also for traffic approaching Blockhouse Road from the opposite direction. Brock Road has been a little busier as a result, but without noticable problems.

 

]]> Sun, 12 Aug 2007 15:26:37 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Perhaps the only thing Fedora 7 and ethanol have in common is the moniker "Moonshine." But the following updates on vegetable oil alternative fuels and the Fedora Project's latest release should prove to be interesting reading:

• WVO & SVO—What in the world is that?
  A growing number of people at least talk about alternatives to fossile fuels, especially for power generation and locomotion. Unfortunately, as of August 2007 there is no combination technological-economic silver bullet for the displacement of fossile fuels from their central place in national and world economies. It doesn't require agreement with global warming theories to observe that no one is breathing easier physically as a result of the emissions malaise.

  Brazil's "successful" experiment with ethanol notwithstanding, there are serious complications for other industrialized countries involving the resources required to produce ethanol that regrettably change that equation to negative gain in too many settings. With current technology, ethanol production takes corn from hungry human mouths, and the ethanol production process uses more energy than it yeilds (even allowing for the upcoming use of non-corn cellulosic ethanol). Technology could change, so it might yet be too early to write off moonshine as a vehicle fuel.

  But consider Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) and/or Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) as a diesel fuel. It's being used right now to power small fleets of vehicles in various parts of the world. One problem yet to be solved is that of a collection system that is quality controlled, fair, and accessible to businesses and individuals who would be willing to pass a certification inspection—if WVO/SVO fuels were used on a large scale, inspection/certification would be required for public health and safety. But even motorcycles are being built to run on WVO or SVO. There are dozens of serious references to private and business development of WVO/SVO fuels. It's a technology that deserves watching, as the current petroleum distribution infrastructure could be adpated to it with workable cost. The referenced link above is a good example of the resources that are available.

• Fedora 7—Linux worthy of installation and use
  The Fedora Linux Project, associated with Red Hat, is one of the more geeky and fully featured of the several Linux distributions. But for Fedora versions up through Core 6, one had to be a programmer, or at least a tweaker of code, to get it running the way you wanted or at least could live with. To a certain extent, that's the way it was intended and still is.

  Although there still is plenty of geek room in Fedora 7 (they dropped the "Core" part in the name this time), this Fedora distro is noticably friendlier. There are a lot of good distros available, and among them I've tried Debian and its derivatives Knoppix, Helix, and Ubuntu. I've also tried some more off-beat distros such as Damn Small Linux. One of the beauties of open soruce is the quick pace that things change and get improved.

  The main link above refers to the adventures with Fedora 7 section on the LinuxNotes page on the MarWalk website. Follow the steps there, and you should have an up-and-running Fedora 7 machine in very short order.

]]> Sat, 11 Aug 2007 22:26:17 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com Back in late June, I had mentioned a long and difficult way to remove unwanted RSS feeds from your implentation of the rss2email utility. There is a much better way that is provided for in the program itself. You have to pay attention to what you're doing with it, but their delete feed feature works cleanly and effectively.

As with other commands in this utility, you have to be in the hidden directory where the Python scripts reside to execute them. So here's how to delete a feed you no longer want from your rss2email installation:

1. cd to the …/.rss2email/ directory (wherever you put it when you installed it). Remember to put the dot before the "rss2email" path name because it should be hidden.
2. The process is twofold: First you "list" the feeds, and then you delete a feed by its list number. Be sure to "list" again, as the list numbering is changed after each individual deletion. Your can do multiple deletions, but great caution is necessary to avoid deleting a feed you want to keep. Here's the process and the syntax from the ./rss2email directory:
   1. Find the feed(s) you want to delete from your current feeds with the command ./r2e list | grep <unique string from feed to be deleted>. Note the list number of the feed that you want to delete.
   2. Next delete the unwanted feed with the command ./r2e delete <list number of feed to be deleted>.
   3. If you want to delete more than one feed at a time, what you do next is critical: Redo the command ./r2e list | grep <unique string from feed to be deleted>. Note this time the _changed_ list numbers due to the one you just deleted being removed and no longer counted.
   4. Redo the command ./r2e delete <list number of feed to be deleted>, and "do while" those two steps, list afresh and then delete one, until you've removed all the feeds you want to be rid of.

That's it. If you like my earlier harder way better, enjoy. But now you have choices.

One thing I have noticed about different RSS feeds: Some of them will give you enough narrative to get the gist of a particular feed item without having to go the their web link to find out what it's all about. I like those a lot. Others just offer what I'd call "tease text" and if the link doesn't show what they've teased about, then those are the ones to which I apply the above deletion procedure.

Happy reading. It sure beats spam.

 

]]> Sun, 05 Aug 2007 20:15:57 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Some much needed rain came Friday, with wet ground and a nice big rain puddle visible in 070804BRAV.jpg—notice also the pavement related equipment along the left side of the road. Looks like they're getting serious about that link between Brock Road and SR 608, even to the point of electronic signs advising of SR 608 being closed starting Tuesday August 7^th between Brock Road and SR 648 (only people whose residences are on that stretch of road will be allowed there for a while).

Rapid progress visible at the Battlefield exit end of the project this week. More of the old SR 208 pavement was torn out as is visible in 070804BFEXTV.jpg.

No one stops behind the stop line at Spotslee Drive, as evidenced by the white SUV visible behind the cedar tree in 070804RACSB1.jpg—you can see the white line just under the SUV's rear bumber. It's the only safe thing to do there.

]]> Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:33:18 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html This past week showed the most rapid visible progress in a single week so far.

The obvious pre-surfacing work for the main by-pass pavement gives a feel of greater imminence than before. See 070729BRTV.jpg and 070729BFEXTV.jpg for a paving perspecitve from both ends of the by-pass section between Brock Road and SR 208.

Also in 070729BFEXTV.jpg you can see where the old westbound lanes of SR 208 used to be, just before the end of the four-lane extension that was done about 10 or 15 years ago (I remember watching that go in but cannot remember exactly when it was).

There are several things in certain of these pictures to help with perspective. In the distance down the road in 070729BRTV.jpg there is a white truck parked to the right of the road. That same truck is visible from a different angle in the center of 070729SLDR.jpg; also new in 070729SLDR.jpg this week are the jersey barriers across Brock Road from Spotsless Drive.

Another thing to help with perspective is the concrete pipe opening into the storm drain pond, visible in 070729SY.jpg between the chain link fence and Brock Road where Spotslee Drive joins it. You might have to expand the picture to the point of pixelization to see this, but it also shows some water in the storm pond. The pond is located behind the orange plastic fencing in 070729RACSB2.jpg, which is just to the right of the view in 070729RACSB1.jpg where the jersey barriers opposite Spotslee Drive are visible behind the solar-powered school zone sign.

Also visible on the left side of 070729RACSB2.jpg is a small construction equipment service road along the edge of the pond. This road runs just beyond the parking lot pavement in 070729SY.jpg; the tree that usually is visible in previous pictures is just out of the view of the camera on the right side of 070729SY.jpg.

A strong thunderstorm came through toward evening; surely there will be some patch-up work to do on Monday.

]]> Sun, 29 Jul 2007 18:00:39 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html There appear to be no more /dev/hd(x) devices in Fedora 7. The main hard drive, what used to be hda, is now sda; and the second hard drive is /dev/sdb. Having forgotten that I some time ago had reformatted the sdb drive to ext3, I thought there was a problem when I tried to mount it as vfat and got a bad superblock error (well, duh).

So I took the sdb drive off the IDE/ATA chain and put it on an external USB hub connected to the computer. It showed up as /dev/sdb1, just as when it was inside the box. Finally remembering what file system I had on it, I mounted the drive just fine through the USB hub (probably could have done the same from the ATA chain). Even without mounting the drive, and using the system mount when it appears, I found that I could edit a file and write it back to the drive (had not been able to write back in that mode in earlier versions of Fedora). Just to be sure the "write" took, I released the sdb1 drive via the KDE removal option and reconnected it. This time I mounted it in the traditional way to its old mount point in the /mnt/ directory. A cat of the edited file showed the changes (woohoo!).

Now to see what Fedora 7 will name a CD. I popped in a CD and it came up as /dev/scd0; yes the letter order is stated correctly: scd (just think "CD" perhaps as a means of remembering that).

Sound system's in good shape, and I played one of the ogg files I had to prove it.

Nice look and feel for the login screen after bootup. The hot-air baloon theme seems a little 1990s-ish to me, but mainly because I remember that theme from a commercial application package from that time.) For login, instead of the blank field default from Fedora Core 6, the Fedora 7 default login screen provides a list of accounts on the machine by person name versus account name (nice touch, but I'm sure there's a way to have it not list the accounts if needed for security reasons). In any case, leave it alone for a short time and you have to re-enter your user password to re-open the screen; as I've been having to do when I switch my KVM to my Macbook and stay there for a while.

PDFs display crisp and clear.

KDE on Fedora 7 has a nice feature with file properties being displayed upon mouseover of an icon. The temporary pop-up window shows device, permissions, owner, mount point if it's a storage device or type and name if it's an application, and other no-nonsense information.

So far no serious unhappyness on my part with Fedora 7.

More as the adventure continues … .

]]> Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:24:02 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html Fedora release 7 installed without a hitch on my old Dell 933MHz Pentium III tower. Easiest Fedora upgrade I'd ever done.

Running sudo yum -y upgrade downloaded several hundred updates/upgrades, but there was enough extra disk space on the 20GB /dev/hda drive on the machine to cache and install them.

An issue yet to be resolved is the system now does not even see the second, former /dev/hdd1, partition on the 250GB drive that is in there. Fedora 7 install had complained about designating the drive in fstab as /dev/hdd1 instead of a label name. My favorite partion editor, parted, refused to label the msdos partition on the drive, so I had just commented out the /dev/hdd1 line in /etc/fstab to let the install proceed. After Fedora 7 installation, there was no hint of that drive in fstab, so it appears that the Fedora 7 install process re-writes fstab to its liking. I have options on this, and will be exploring them.

More as the adventure continues … .

]]> Sun, 22 Jul 2007 15:02:25 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The most noticable change this week is the gravel easily visible in the 070722BRTV.jpg view. The median also is almost end-to-end now, as visible in the 070722BFEXTV.jpg view.

From the 070722RACSB1.jpg view the excessive degree that the stop line is set back on Spotslee Drive is visible just to the left of the bottom of the cedar tree at the middle left edge of the picture. A driver who stopped at that line never would see the approaching white car in the picture.

Look closely in the left area of 070722SLDR.jpg and you can see the leveled out areas for bulding foundations across Brock Road.

]]> Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:37:43 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html Adventures in upgrading from Fedora Core 6, without a DVD.
(there are no CD images available to download, so if you have no DVD burner and/or blank DVD media, your options are reduced somewhat)

This is about installing Fedora 7 from the Internet using a boot CD. Let's start by listing the download sites and paths upfront for easy reference, and instant use if you're so inclined.

Select a mirror near you from this list:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/7

To just run Fedora 7 from CD, download your preference between the following two full CD images off the download root level from your selected mirror site:
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-KDE-Live-i686.iso
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso

Get the Internet installation boot CD image from this directory off the download root level from your selected mirror site:
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso

After you boot your target install machine with the Internet boot CD, when it asks you for the path from your selected mirror where the installation files are, enter:
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/

If all goes well, the screen should display a message advising that stage2.img is being downloaded. After that, installation will launch and you are into the selection menus.

Once the installation process checks all the transactions, it will start installing about 722 files. As with previous Red Hat installation utilities, this one displays the filenames and a one line description of what each file does.

More later, as installation progresses.

]]> Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:32:19 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html It's finally broken through to SR 208 at the Battlefield exit end of the project. By broken through, I mean the project has reached the pavement of SR 208, and the west bound lanes of the four lane section have been closed off at the Battlefield exit. There now are three rows of pictures in each set starting with 070715.

Take a look at 070715BFEXAV.jpg from the MarWalk CVchron page and expand it in an image viewer (the Opera browser does this nicely without having to copy the picture). Although the image will become "pixelized" you still can identify the orange and white plastic barrels that shunt the westbound traffic into one of the lanes of the eastbound side (just like the days before the four lane expansion was extended to there). The day after, the pavement in that picture was torn out.

In 070715BRAV.jpg notice the beginnings of an access turn lane to the right across from Brock Road.

In 070715SLDR.jpg notice the further development of what appears to be an extension across Brock Road of Spotslee Drive, whether or not it is named that when it's completed. From the location of the corner to the left it is easy to observe that the stop line is much too far back for drivers to see oncoming traffic from that direction.

To help with perspective, the respective distant ends of road in 070715BRTV.jpg and 070715BFEXTV.jpg are practically the same spot as seen from different directions.

The access road in 070715BFEXSR.jpg, as seen from across SR 208 just east of the new fire station, has been in progress for several weeks. The more distant piece of equipment in the center of the picture probably is one of the two visible in 070715BFEXTV.jpg.

What once was a farm field is rapidly being transformed into what certainly will be a busy bypass highway, but with an accompanying residential and commercial village.

 

]]> Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:47:09 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html

These pictures (on the reference link) from just past noon on July 1^st show the progress of the turn lanes. Later in the day, the Courthouse area was crowded with traffic and people, with Spotsylvania deputies and state troopers directing traffic at the most congested choke points, specifically the traffic light and SR 208 at the pedestrian crosswalk. Nearby subdivisions were lined with cars as people tried to park closer to the festivities. The event had the look and feel of one that was well planned, and the people there appeared to by having a good time, along with their children.

In the SY picture you can see the orange crowd control plastic fence, and a small sign that serves notice of fireworks that evening. Where will they do fireworks after the Courthouse village is developed?

In the BRAV picture, you might be able to notice the road curving to the left just at the picture horizon. That road, the bypass, crosses SR 608 just before the Laurels subdivision.

In the SLDR picture, a wide stop line is visible. It is way too far back to see what traffic is coming from the left, and drivers have to creep half a car-length past it to see if any traffic is approaching.

In the BRTV picture the developing median is visible for the first time. The median had taken shape a week earlier at the Battlefield exit end of the road project.

 

]]> Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:53:05 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com Here's a quick introduction to a tool I found after searching for something that would email me the RSS feeds I'd subscribed to. I wanted to do this as I always open my email client but it's less convenient to go to my RSS reading areas of my web browsers. So the tool rss2email does exactly what its name implies.

The rss2email utility has ports for both Windows and *nix systems; I'm using it on my Mac, having configured it with the Terminal command line. It's written in Python, so you'll need a Python interpreter on your computer, but those are available; just search, download and install.

The installation instructions are at http://rss2email.infogami.com/getstarted, including downloads. One drawback I've found with rss2email so far is there does not seem to be a way to remove feeds from the feeds.dat file that it keeps by using the program itself. I had to locate the feed in the feeds.dat file and text edit them out, including any usage data that had accumulated. The feeds.dat format starts each feed listing with the word "Feed" and all of the information it has for that feed follows until the next line that consists of "Feed" by itself. After viewing the file in a text editor the pattern will become noticable, and you can confidently remove any feeds you want without damaging the data for the feeds you want to keep. But you can add to your heart's content with the "./r2e add " command.

Note the "./" in the command; yes, it must be run from inside its own directory, which you are instructed to make hidden at installation. So, with that in mind, you will need to run the program from the directory where it resides. This caused crontab problems for me, and the way I solved it was to create a shell script that first did a cd to the ".rss2email" directory and then ran the command to execute it from the shell. You can prove this out for yourself by invoking the "top" command just before the time of the crontab execution of r2e and watch for the Python interpreter to come up in the processes list. You also will see a number of mail sending processes as r2e grabs the RSS feeds and emails them to you.

The next time your email client checks your mail, the RSS feeds will be there in your inbox. I set up a rule to move them to a special folder so they won't clutter my inbox and I can peruse them as I go through my email. No extra effort.

What makes routing RSS feeds to your email so desirable is that you can subscribe to RSS feeds instead of email newsletters. And since RSS is pull (versus email being push), you can make them stop when you want them to stop without being at the mercy of some marketing email list. And not to be overlooked, you cannot be spammed by RSS!

It takes a little tweaking, but the end result is well worth it in my opinion. Give it a try and see what you think.

]]> Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:20:16 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html This past week the repaving was completed for adding right and left turn lanes along Brock Road (SR 613) from the Post Office to SR 608. A couple of workers were finishing up the lines Sunday afternoon, and the barrels were still in certain places to keep traffic off the freshly laid lines.

Also added was a left turn lane at Spotslee Drive, an absolutle necessity whether or not they ever put a traffic light there. The new pavement went up to the milled spots, which removed the rough road conditions.

Much activity and progress also at the Battlefield exit end of the road project. No pavement there as yet.

]]> Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:58:58 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Traffic between SR608 and SR208 on Brock Road (SR613) never has been light during morning and evening rush hours (yes, Spotsylvania Courthouse has traffic backups every business day). The pavement is being laid for the extra lanes between the Post Office and SR608, which terminates near the western end of the new bypass. Traffic now is being routed onto the new pavement and off of the "original" Brock Road pavement.

There has been a lot of construction activity since the last set of pictures in May, and the most recent June pictures do not seem to convey the degree of change as seen up close on the ground.

Not shown are the beginnings of the new access lanes from the bypass to SR208 at the Battlefield exit side of the project. It seems that the progress there is more visible, but it still is not practical to get pictures from that area. New gravel has been delivered and it appears that paving of the bypass itself is imminent.

]]> Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:01:31 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/technology.html I have recently discovered the joy of java programming with Eclipse, available for several platforms at http://www.eclipse.org. I'm using the Mac OS X port with version 3.2.2 of Eclipse, which also has Linux and Windows ports of the same SDK.

I've heard several people rave about Eclipse, as well as complain about its quirks. It's rightfully worth a try if you program in java, even if you decide to stay with another SDK you'd been using.

mcw ]]> Mon, 21 May 2007 20:50:10 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The work for the past couple of weeks seems to be shaping up the ground outlines more. Some leveled areas appear to be preparations for building foundations. The street layout is more apparent as well. More sidewalk and curb work visible.

The progress was to a point that I dropped one of the views from the RACSB location and added a view toward the village from Spotslee Drive across Brock Road. It is from this view that the new foundations are the most visible.

One way to get an orientation of the pictures is to note the same items from the different views. In the May 20 set, for example, notice the same orange earth moving equipment in the RACSB1 picture and the Spotslee Drive picture. Likewise, the same tree to the left in the schoolyard picture is visible in the other RACSB picture.

Not shown, because there is no location out of traffic to get a picture, is the notable progress on the new interchange at SR208 near the Battlefield exit. The progress at that distant end of the village is noticable almost daily.

mcw ]]> Mon, 21 May 2007 20:40:32 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html The change doesn't look like much since last time, but it had been raining a lot of the past week. One noticable difference is the added earth piled up in the view across Brock Road looking away from the village area.

To make it easier to distinguish between sets of pictures, the background will alternate between shades of yellow and green. As of this time, this works well in all browsers except FireFox and Netscape; but you can still easily see all the pictures in all browsers.

mcw ]]> Tue, 08 May 2007 21:35:32 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html Watch it Now; It'll Never Be the Same Again

Development growth in the Spotsylvania, Virginia, Courthouse area had been at a steady and mostly stable pace over the previous 15 years or more. All the rapid development was in other areas of the county …

… until in 2007 the long talked-about bypass and associated residential and commercial village finally began to take shape.

At http://www.marwalk.com/CVchron.html, the filenames of the images indicate the date and the perspecitve of each picture. Each filename starts with the date, in "yymmdd" format. The letters following the date indicate the orientation of the view as indicated in a list of abbreviations just above the pictures area.

Each picture is a clickable thumbnail of the larger size picture. The link next to the thumbnail goes to the same picture as the thumbnail link, but the text link also has the filename with the date and view orientation information. The plan is to take snapshots each weekend, when there is less traffic and congestion, and add the new pictures at the top of the Chronology page at the start of each week.

Regardless of the pace of the project's progress, this will affect the county in ways no other developments have.


mcw ]]> Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:34:41 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Plug in—Drive on: Electric cars, on the drawing board for 100 years and still it's a struggle for them to attain acceptance. In both public media and private conversation, electric and/or hybrid cars are mocked as lacking the horsepower and other characteristics to be considered seriously as a mainstream means of transportation.

However, even in the face of the "celebrated" death of the electric car, we are invited anew by a major car manufacturer to plug in and drive. The day might be arriving faster than previously thought when coulombs prove more profitable than crude, for both car maker and car driver.

Meanwhile, on the computer front, here's something you can do right now with the electrons (and/or photons) on your network:

Samba—Windows sharing on Unix flavors: One of the most popular ways to connect to a remote file server or mount a volume on another client is through the Server Message Block (SMB) or Common Internet File System (CIFS) that is made much easier with the Samba suite of utilities. Unlike the Unix oriented Network File System (NFS), Samba is built to provide cross-platform file sharing. The GPL license requirements for Samba developers emphasizes its open source nature. This information on Samba is also on the MarWalk pages for Linux and Mac OS X.

mcw

]]> Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:05:23 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html#Lutils
On your Linux or Mac OS X machine, try "man lftp" and peruse the eloquent simplicity of tasks that might have seemed out of reach without more advanced toos. For example, you can make directories with ease (assuming you have the privileges) on the remote server with lftp.

But there is no need to take anyone's word for it. The following paragraph from the man pages should whet your appetite to try lftp:

" lftp can handle seven file access methods - ftp, ftps, http, https, hftp, fish, sftp and file (https and ftps are only available when lftp is compiled with openssl library). You can specify the method to use in `open URL' command, e.g. `open http://www.us.kernel.org/pub/linux'. hftp is ftp-over-http-proxy protocol. It can be used automatically instead of ftp if ftp:proxy is set to `http://proxy[:port]'. Fish is a protocol working over an ssh connection to a unix account. SFtp is a protocol implemented in ssh2 as sftp subsystem."



There also are more controls on the local client machine, remote grep searching capability, and switches that work with other protocols such as http and telnet.

LFTP is a convenient addition to the OS bundled tools, worthy of frequent use.

mcw
]]> Sat, 21 Apr 2007 23:07:10 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/ Click here to subscribe to get emails of new MarWalk RSS feed items

Happy reading,
mcw ]]> Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:51:58 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html

Get a job—in eco-tech
Employment areas include wind power and solar energy, water utilities & wastewater treatment works, solid waste management & resource recovery & municipal recycling, green building, land trusts, urban & regional planning, brownfield redevelopment, environmental consulting & engineering, and an assortment of related positions. Try some of these terms in your search strings and see what openings turn up.

GIMP—an excellent open source graphic editor
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. This superbly featured application can work with numerous file formats and hold its own against commercial competitors. Software ports are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.


mcw ]]> Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:00:12 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html

• Linux applications and utilities at http://www.marwalk.com/LinuxNotes.html

• Mac OS X utilities and widgets at http://www.marwalk.com/MacNotes.html

• Research references, such as search engines and other sources of information at http://www.marwalk.com/OnlineResearchTools.html


Additional references and resources will be added to these pages as seems appropriate and useful. These will include not only programs and utilities, but also descriptions of command line tools that are part of a basic Linux or Mac OS X installation.

mcw
]]> Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:51:31 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html

Atmospheric CarbonTracker
According to the site: "CarbonTracker is a system that calculates carbon dioxide uptake and release at the Earth's surface over time. It estimates the carbon dioxide exchange from an 'atmospheric point of view'. " What it is used for, again according to the site: "Policy makers, industry, scientists, and the public need CarbonTracker information to make informed decisions to limit greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere." Good tool to track the game; now to improve the score … .

LilyPond ... music notation for everyone
This program is awesome. According to the site: "LilyPond is a batch system: it is run on a text-file containing the notes. The resulting output is viewed on-screen or printed." See a comparison of the text based "code" and the printed results at http://lilypond.org/web/switch/howto. You can do music notes with lyrics, guitar chords, simple to orchestrally complex; all with an editable text file. Output in midi and/or pdf. GNU license is right on the money.


mcw
]]> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:23:40 -0400 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html Ocean Wave EnergyThe concept of using the motion of tidal ocean waves has been around for several decades. It bubbles up in the news occasionally, as it has recently in Scotland. This seems like a no brainer. The ocean waves are constant 24/7, unlike wind and a sunny day. Certainly not as messy as fossil fuels in any form. Wave generators also have a reduced visual impact compared with wind propellers and solar panel arrays; much less cause for the neighbors to object on aesthetic grounds.
UnicodeChecker (for Mac OS X)If you've ever been frustrated by trying to find the exact value of a Unicode character to display in a document or web page, this sharp utility will be just what you need. The Unicode.org site can be daunting to navigate if you're not used to its layout. With UnicodeChecker it's easy to see a character's value in Unicode Hex, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 Hex. Although not open source in the GNU sense, it is freeware with AppleScript support. Works on only Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.
]]> Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:15:02 -0500 http://www.marwalk.com/Technology.html
1. Straight vegetable oil as diesel fuel
This process has been around for a while, mostly in isolated instances up to now. Consider the use of used cooking oils from restaurants and institutional food facilities that is just thrown out as waste. No extra farmland taken from food production as required for ethanol. No prohibitively expensive manufacturing processes for hydrogen fuel cells and engines. Replace the gasoline engines in hybrid-electric cars with vegetable biodiesel engines and this viable alternative is possible. Today.

2. ImageJ public domain image processor
The long title is "Image Processing and Analysis in Java." Apparently developed for scientific and academic use, ImageJ is a convenient and simple to use image editor that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac (both OS 9 and OS X). The program includes simple tools to do most of what you need to do with scanned photographs and other images; that being the ability to crop, rotate, and save in common formats. The ImageJ website has clear and complete install and usage instructions. Nice utility.

mcw]]> Sun, 18 Feb 2007 20:44:49 -0500