June 24, 2003 - I had to postpone my "Summer Solstice" ride Sunday due to rain. I've done a similar ride on my Honda Goldwing for over 6 years now, each June near the 20th/21st - the longest days of the year. I typically do a ride of from 800 to 1000km up through the Interior of BC via the Fraser valley and back via the Duffy Lake road and Whistler Mountain. The weather forecast for the Southern B.C. area said Sunday the 22nd would be tolerable but I awoke at about 5AM to dreary skies and by 7AM it had started to rain. At 8AM, with the rain getting harder, I decided to postpone the ride for another day, hopefully the next weekend.

This left me somewhat at loose ends for the day - too wet to do anything outside on our property, and too early to start vacuuming around the house (not that I should have been doing it, we have 2 post-teenage sons who are supposed to amongst other things, keep the house floors from crunching too loudly.)

So I decided to continue working on my friend and business associate Gary Bannerman's web site at www.bannerline.net, with an eye to getting it launched. My webmaster, Doug Cook, and I have been working with Gary on the site for a couple of months now, not full time, but as time permitted.

I've known and worked with Gary for quite a number of years now, having met him through David Ingram, another of my business associates. David and I dragged Gary kicking and screaming into the computer age about 20 years ago when David loaned him a PC and printer one day and I taught him how to do word processing on it. I'm not sure that he has ever forgiven us - but he seems to have adapted over the years to the point where he's really quite comfortable with things like reformatting his disk and putting a different version of Windows on it as he did last week. Of course the 3 or so hours he had "spare" in which he expected to do this ended up being most of a day, but that's par for the course.

In the case of Gary's web site, I've been bugging him for a number of years to do something on the web. He's countered that he felt that the people who might visit the site and decide they needed him to do something would end up costing him time for little gain, as it was unlikely anyone visiting would want to pay him his normal rates. Anyway, the site is now up, and you can judge for yourself.

Speaking of David Ingram, I got a call from him a couple of weeks ago about a virus message people were getting, allegedly from him or one of the computers he has (one of about 8 in the house or over 15 in the office). It turns out that his wife had received a message purporting to come from him, with an attachment and a seemingly innocent subject about something she knew he was working on; so she opened it - bad mistake. It turned out to be the BugBear.B virus - a particularly nasty variant of the original with what appears to be a financial gain in mind since it specifically targets domains of major banks.

In any case, the virus didn't get trapped by the AVG anti-virus software on her machine, possibly due to the 1 week cycle of updates it was on and the fact that this variant has spread so fast - here machine was due to get the updates the next day but instead got infected. The rest of the machines' identical software caught the virus and quarantined it so I guess it was just bad luck.

Anyway, I tried several different ways to fix the problem and could not even find her e-mail store. We discussed options including re-installation (which I tried over top of the old install to no avail) and I finally suggested this was a good time to try a completely different option - move to Linux. The machine seemed to have enough disk, including an unused secondary partition of about 4 Gigs, that I could install Linux and dual boot the system. My thought was that I'd be able to mount the Win98 partition as a data partition and paw through it using the better tools available in Linux and see if I could recover her mail folders.

So I booted up a copy of RedHat 9 that I'd appropriately brought with me :) and proceeded to install it.

The problem was that the disk parameters the computer "knew" were apparently wrong - and the hard disk was in fact smaller than it claimed. The partition table was bad, the architecture info was bad, and the possibility of dual booting with the old OS still there was gone. So... with a grim look on my face, I informed her that we'd have to start from scratch and that it appeared that all her e-mail and address information wouldn't survive the transition.

Much anguish and gnashing of teeth; and eventually a tacit "go ahead".

So I installed the system as a workstation, configured Evolution to pick up her mail and gave her a minimal amount of training on how to log on, start Evolution, start Open Office, and log off. She's been working in the CEN-TA offices for many years, where we have used SCO Unix up until recently when I installed a RedHat server, so she's at least seen things like the command line prompt on such systems before. The default interface for RH 9 is so similar to the Windows one she's been used to that there was little problem anyway, so she caught on quickly. Then I left.

Now I have to admit that to a certain extent I was "experimenting" with her, but it was nowhere near my first such experiment. I've had my wife, Shirley, using Linux in one form or another for several years now, and had put RH 9 up on her system a couple of months ago. I knew that it was very stable, useful, and exactly what was needed for basic web browsing and e-mail.

So far, the only comment my friend's wife has given me is "it works just great!" and the kids love all the various screen savers that come on - so different from the ones they have under Windows.

It's been a couple of weeks now and the comments are still the same - I guess my experiment is a success and Billy G. loses another convert :)

I'll note here that I am also using RH 9 on my workstation at home. The GNOME desktop is not quite the same as I'm used to with FVWM - and the pager is not as smart or capable, but all in all it works. The pager in FVWM allows me to have several "desktops" each of which can have many pages - my favourite setting being 3 sections of 20 pages for 60 total. The GNOME pager only allows me to have 30 pages and doesn't seem to allow me to set up the hot keys at all - forcing me to use <CTRL><ALT><left/right/up/down> arrows to move around instead of my more useful <CTRL><F1> or <ALT><F1> to go to page 1 row 1 or page 1 row 2 respectively (and F1-F10 for the various rows and <CTRL><ALT><1> for desktop 1, etc. Oh well, I'm trying to do less system administration any way, so I really don't need all those pages and desktops, right? 30 should do me.