Ferrari lead BAR in session one

The US GP is just two days away. After the final results from Canada last Sunday, things are looking good for Ferrari. Can anyone come close to the two red devils?

It looked like things we going to be a lot closer at the Gilles Villeneuve Circuit last week. The first third of the race had many teams in contention. But Ferrari ran a two stop race, as opposed to a three stop strategy that the rest of the field ran, to hold off everyone. At the end of the race Michael Schumacher held off his brother Ralf to take his 7th win in 8 races this season. Rubens Barrichello came in third to give Ferrari a 1-3 finish. Things didn't stay this way for long, though. Both the Williams and Toyota were disqualified for improper specs on their brake ducts. This moved Rubens up to 2nd and gave Timo Glock, driving in his first F1 race ever (driving as a replacement for the Jordan-Ford team) 2 points. Ferrari widened it's lead in the Constructors race with 124 points over Renaults 61. Michael also became the first F1 driver to win 7 races on the same track.

One other thing that is strangely interesting is the plight of Takuma Sato driving for BAR-Honda. For the third race in a row he's had his engine let go in spectacular displays of smoke. I think he could be a real star in the sport if he could get a complete race out of his Honda engine. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the Honda engines overall performance as his teammate Jenson Button has finished well (he's currently in third place in the Drivers Championship with 44 points).

We will just have to see what comes out of the race Sunday at the Brickyard. Will Sato finish the race? Will Williams get back into form? And what about McLaren? They finished 5th and 6th in Canada for their best team showing of the season. And will Renault get back on track this week? Ask me again in two days.

Lots of Linux this Weekend

I am planning on doing a bunch of things this weekend. First, I'm already in the middle of upgrading my main workstation from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2. Shouldn't be a major problem there. Then I need to redo the new server (ok, I've had the damned thing for 7 months so it's not "new"). I had it running with Whitebox Linux but the partition setup I had was not quite optimal. The 500MB I'd allocated to /var was not nearly enough. The system has a 120GB drive in it and I'm thinking about putting another 60GB drive in as well. Still need to figure out a good partition scheme. I usually have these partitions on servers -

/
/boot
/usr
/usr/local
/var
/var/spool
/opt
/home
/tmp
SWAP

This should be good enough to handle what I need to run on this box. The only question is how much space to allocate to each one. I'm also thinking about trying cAos CentOS-3 instead of Whitebox. No major reason other than wanting to see how they look against each other.

I also want to play a little with SUSE Linux. I really believe that Novell has a clue this time and Novell SUSE Linux will be even better than it is now. I haven't really looked at SUSE in many years. It'll be good to get a feel for it.

Lastly, I have a couple of articles I need to write for Linux Weekly News. There's two in the queue right now, though the editors are thinking about combining them into one. that should work as they are very similar articles that have a lot of overlap. I have another one outlined that needs to be put together. Then I'm going to do some reviews of different, lesser known linux distros. There's a couple of them out there that look pretty interesting. I just wish I had the time and resources to spend doing this more often.

Slashdot | Linus Torvalds Moving to the Silicon Forest

Slashdot | Linus Torvalds Moving to the Silicon Forest. I wish I was someone important enough to have news organizations track where I move to. But then again, maybe it's better that some people don't know. :-/

The Daily Grind

Unless I'm jinxing myself by saying this already, when I go to work tomorrow it will be the first full work week I've had since I don't remember. Missing all that work has made a real impact on my income. I only get paid for the hours I work. The last few paychecks were between half and 2/3's. I had to borrow money from my mother yesterday just to get gas in the car. Hopefully, with the warmer weather and the adjustments to the medication I'm on, I will be in much better shape and have a better chance of being able to work the hours I am supposed to.

There is one thing that annoys me on occasion. My ex-wife will complain that she's short on money and needs her girlfriend to work in order for them to have enough to live on. Yet I, with virtually the same net income, have to pay for almost everything related to our son (child care, school lunches, school clothes, health insurance/medical costs, food and lodging for the school year). Not to mention any extra curricular activities like Tae Kwon Do (tuition, uniform, testing, graduation, etc). It's just me and him in a house I am renting for $1180/mo while most of the time is her and her girlfriend in an apartment with a much lower rent and no child expenses. She does have a brand new car (well it's a 2001 Ford Taurus) and doesn't seem to have any trouble going out every other weekend or going to a concert.

But it's not the crying of "I'm so poor" that's the worst. It's the fact that she has someone there with her to help her with our son. If she's not feeling good her girlfriend can spend time and play with him. When I'm under the weather, which happens often due to the medical disability I have, I got no one to help me with him. He is such a sweet and intelligent boy, though. When I am hit hard (i.e. unable to get out of bed at all) he does a great job of taking are of me. He really is an incredible and wonderful child.

I get paid on the 15th so hopefully that will let me pay off the big-ass stack of bills sitting on the table. Playing the bill juggling game really sucks. After next week our son will be staying with his mother for the summer (I get him during the school year and we alternate every weekend and major holidays). It will be very difficult to be in the house alone. Last summer I spent the time lying on the couch watching crap on TV that sucked because I didn't even feel like moving enough to change the channel. This summer I am going to put forth an effort to get back into programming again. That and start going back to TKD again. It's been nearly a year since I've been there regularly. I am hoping that the hacking and TKD will keep me motivated enough so I don't fall into the "Pit of Despair" when he's not here.

And with a little luck I can kick this Eclipse habit that's stuck on me worse than white on rice. I was able to stop for a few months using Skoal but about two weeks ago I fell back into the cigarette's. There are just some days that you can't get through w/o something to give a little kick. What I need is a wife.

My personal home page

It's been many, many years since I worked on my useless vanity page. So this evening I redid it. It's even more sparse than before but the directories are cleaned up and now I should be able to make a simple but decent looking bunch of pages. Something like what I did with the now defunct WebTrek site.

Sumo videos

Natsu Basho 2004 Movies. The Natsu Basho is the third tournament (Basho) of six that happen every year. Sumo, along with Formula 1 racing, are my favorite sports. Most people think that Sumo is just two fat guys trying to push each other out of a ring. On the surface this is true. But Sumo is so much more. There's a culture and history that goes back 1500 years or more. And the Sekitori, or professional Sumo wrestler, are really very athletic. If you watch their practices you'd be amazed at their flexibility and strength and, especially, their conditioning. They aren't going to be running any marathons but in the few seconds that a bout normally lasts they will expend as much energy as someone playing a full game of soccer. These guys are like NFL linebackers covered by a good sized layer of fat. And the fat is actually a help in Sumo. It's all about balance and center of gravity. If you want to see something amazing look at the bouts with the Yokozuna (Grand Champion) Asashoryu. You will never view Rikishi in the same way again.

Blog this: Network Your Shell Scripts with Netpipes

Network Your Shell Scripts with Netpipes by Robert Bernier -- Shell scripting and automation are an administrator's most powerful tools. Unfortunately, many processes require transferring data back and forth between machines. Instead of tunneling yet another app over HTTP or writing yet another ad-hoc protocol, why not use netpipes? Robert Bernier explains this set of utilities that provide network-aware pipes to shell programmers.

This looks interesting. I wonder how it would fair against ssh, though. My opinion based on a quick browsing of the article suggests to me that Netpipes covers a different kind of situations from what ssh can do. With luck I will find a few minutes to really look into this and maybe write an article on how it compares with ssh's remote script execution capabilities.

Results and observations of the European GP

The headline says it all. Schumacher unstoppable at the Nurburgring. After a strange outing in Monaco where Michael hit the wall in the tunnel late in the race, thus ending his season winning streak at 5, he came back to take the European GP. After building a "devastating 17s lead" by the 7th lap it was just a matter of keeping it on the track. Rubens Barrichello, driving the second Ferrari, used a cunning two stop strategy (as opposed to the three stop strategy that the majority of teams used) to take 2nd. This gave Ferrari their 4th 1-2 finish in 7 races and puts them 45 points ahead of the next team in the Constructors Championship. Michael leads the Drivers Championship by 14 points. Second place is held by Rubens so it's looking good for the 6 time world champion to get his 5th consecutive title. It's still early in the season, though, and there already are some interesting happenings this year.

The most significant is the success of both the Renault and BAR-Honda teams. They stand 2nd and 3rd respectively in the constructors championship. Williams-BMW being 4th would normally be the talk of the season except for the situation at McLaren-Mercedes. The disastrous showing of the once proud and storied team is shocking, to say the least. They only have 5 points so far, just 1 more than the young Toyota team. The success of the Renault and BAR teams has not gone unnoticed by Ferrari. They are already working to try and get a little more speed from their engine and chaise. If Toyota could keep their engines from blowing they might be much higher in the standings, too. I'm sure that there will be some interesting races coming in the middle third of the season.

Can Ferrari keep their dominance? Will Renault or BAR find that little bit of performance that can catapult them to the top? Can Toyota fix their engine and keep it from blowing, albeit in such spectacular fashion? What about McLaren? Will Minardi-Cosworth ever get any points this season? We'll just have to see what the future holds.