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

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.

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

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 this week's pictures:

• BRE1
  
  -

• OBB
  
  -

• SLDR
  
  -

• SYW
  
  -

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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 … .

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 … .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ]]> Tue, 22 May 2007 00:40:32 +0000 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.

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.

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

" 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."

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.

• 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

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.