Life is full of surprises...

Went out for a walk this morning; came home shortly before the chaoswolf and flowercat left for their FurCon meeting. Went to Togo's with the Y.D. for lunch, then went out to hit a couple of my favorite surplus joints. A place just down the street from Halted (one of my favorites) was luring people in with a tabletop display of laptops for $40.

Yeah, they were laptops -- genuine IBM ThinkPads, in fact. No disk, no battery, no AC adapter -- but one had to admit that they were laptops. Inside, it was a different story, though -- they had a sizeable pile of working ThinkPads in the 700-900 MHz range. I heard a price that sounded like $250. Hmm.

By the time I got home, the Cat and Chaos were home, too, and the Cat was in the mood for a drive. I told her about the laptops, and she agreed that the price was somewhere around the high end of the impulse-buy range, provided I got her a Windows XP soon to upgrade her computer skills on. OK... As it turned out, the 750 MHz T21 they had up and running was $300. OK.

It has a (presumably bootleg) "demo" install of Win98SE on it. I have a spare Win98 license I'm not using, so I'll let it slide. GNU parted on the just-released DeMuDi Live CD resized the DOS partition, after which DeMuDi 1.2.1 installed just fine except for some problem with the built-in network card that I haven't diagnosed yet a page I found via Google (of course) says requires acpi=off on the boot line. Success.

Google vs. the script kiddies

The chkrootkit program often gives false positives of the form "Possible LKM trojan detected". It's looking for discrepancies between what ps tells it and what it can find in /proc; these can happen if one or more processes start and/or end between the two tests. That, in turn, can happen if (for example) you're serving a lot of pages from Apache. Um, right.

Impending events

I'm going to Portland, OR the first week in August to attend the O'Reilly Open Source Convention -- the main part of the convention is August 3-5 (Wednesday through Friday); I'll be arriving Tuesday in the mid-afternoon, and leaving Sunday morning (to, um, save the company money on the plane fare -- yeah, that's right). This leaves me free all day Saturday. cflute, will you be around? Should I pack some recording gear? The Source is strong with this one...

The following week is LinuxWorld in San Francisco. I'll be wandering around the expo -- unlike OSCon, the sessions tend to be introductions and overviews rather than something I can really use, but there's always something interesting at the expo. The following Sunday, August 14, is the Linux 14th Anniversary Picnic and Barbecue.

Rounding out the summer is ConChord, the LA Area filk convention. We figured it would be a good idea, since we didn't go to Westercon and won't be going to Worldcon. As it turned out, the Y.D. starts school the week before (!$!@#$!@#$ school district!! What were they thinking?), but she doesn't want to go anyway. We still need to find a house-sitter, BTW.

Another Sunday drive

The flower_cat and I drove down to the South end of Santa Cruz to visit the Antonelli Brothers Begonia Gardens. Came back the long way, via Half Moon Bay. Nice way to spend an afternoon, but unfortunately not terribly conducive to getting much done in the way of yardwork, music, or hacking. So it goes -- top priority is spending time with those members of the family who want it. Played Settlers of Catan with the Y.D. Friday evening...