Technologists Notes

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

For many years, starting in high school, one of my ambitions was to make good recordings of live music. Until I could afford and justify the cost of good machines, I progressed through a series of mediocre, but less expensive reel to reel recorders, starting with a Wollensak similar to the photo at left. (more…)

I’ve had the privilege of playing music with a few famous musicians, mostly before they achieved their full public prominence, e.g., playing bass with Jimmie Vaughan a couple of times in small clubs in Austin. Perhaps the most notable of these opportunities was impromptu playing harmonica with Pete Seeger, sitting in the grass at a Clearwater Festival in 1976, a time of his full prominence. Seeger’s most famous composition, Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, ends each chorus with the refrain “When will they ever learn?”

Though the song is about more substantive issues than interoperability of video calling solutions, that refrain comes to mind when thinking about all of the isolated islands of video calling solutions that seem to be proliferating instead of reconciling.

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Oops. I really meant Apollo 11 delivered…

But it’s not July 20 anymore, so about Fedora 11:

• Overall, no big problems
• Fedora Project slipped their final release schedule a couple of weeks, so I didn’t get started trying Fedora 11 until mid-June.
• VMware Server 1.0.x still doesn’t work with the 2.6.29 kernel(s) in Fedora 11. It appears that a one line kernel change is needed (assuming VMware doesn’t fix directly). However, I’ve never built a linux kernel before, and my first attempts have failed.
• The nastiest surprise, for me, was confusion about BIND. I’m used to Fedora putting BIND in a chroot’d jail. Fedora 11 seems to eschew actually doing this, but provides the /var/named/chroot directory hierarchy as if the jail still exists. I don’t find anything in the release notes about any of the BIND changes, and the additional DNSSEC  support in BIND 9.6 threw me off temporatily, since I don’t know much about DNSSEC. It took me a couple of hours to sort everything out, and my current solution is a bit clumsy, but seems to work.

There are other awkward aspects, such as the need for a /boot ext3 partition when trying to use ext4 for the rest of the filesystems, but these are adequately documented in the release notes, so not big problems for me.

I put Fedora 11 on my primary mail/web/DNS server yesterday, and all seems OK so far. (This post is stored on that server.) But the machine that depends on VMware Server is still running Fedora 10.

Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, for monitoring the recording and better framing the video with the camera.

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http://www.charliemccoy.com/biographie.php: “Al Kooper described a typical Charlie McCoy incident which took place during the sessions for Dylan’s “Blonde On Blonde” Album. One song called for a trumpet part which should have been an easy overdub, except that Dylan didn’t care for overdubs. So McCoy, while playing bass with his left hand, played trumpet with his right hand, without missing a beat. Kooper points out that Dylan stopped in the middle of the song, amazed.” (The song was probably not “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, based on the sound and reports such as MYSTIC NIGHTS: The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. [Update cinco de Mayo 2022: just bought Kooper’s book which says it was “You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”.¹])
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