Inert Ramblings

Category: Gnus

News stuff.

  • WebGUI – Overcoming installation hurdles…

    Installation of WebGUI on RedHat 8 and RedHat 9 boxes is quite a pain but, once you get everything up and running, things run flawlessly. As a matter of fact, once the installation quirks are figured out, installation takes less than ten minutes start to finish.

    Although WebGUI is free and open source, PLAINBLACK counts on installation difficulties to boost sales of their documentation and support programs. They also restrict users who have purchased documentation and support contracts from sharing their findings with normal users.

    I agree that companies who create open source software need to make money somehow, but I disagree on putting a gag order on people to keep them from helping others solve problems. Luckily, I have purchased neither documentation nor support so I can share my findings! This will be a multipart series as I uncover more WebGUI weirdness.
    (more…)

  • Information on accident involving Mark Lovell and Roger Freeman

    Mark Lovell and Roger Freeman

    Due to the sheer number of search engine requests coming in on the accident involving Lovell and Freeman, here are links to my previous entires:

    http://www.trunkmonkey.com/
    http://www.rallynotes.com/
    https://www.inertramblings.com/archives/000188.html
    https://www.inertramblings.com/archives/000187.html
    https://www.inertramblings.com/archives/000186.html

    Google News is the authority for tracking down additional news items.

    Here are some photos taken shortly before the incident:

    If you’ve come here looking for photos and video of the crash, you’ve come to the wrong place. The sheer number of people searching for footage of a rally fatality completely blows my mind.

  • Lovell and Freeman fatally injured during Oregon Trail SCCA ProRally

    SCCA has issued an official press release regarding the accident:

    HILLSBORO, Ore. (July 12, 2003) – Subaru Rally Team USA superstars Mark Lovell, 43, and Roger Freeman, 52, both of England, were fatally injured Saturday during the first special stage of the Oregon Trail SCCA ProRally event.

    The first car away from the starting line, driver Lovell, and co-driver Freeman, left the prescribed course moments into the stage and struck a tree in their Subaru Impreza WRX. The two were pronounced dead at the scene by emergency medical personnel. Details of the incident were held until the families were notified.

    “This is a tragic day for the world of rallying and motorsports in general, “said Steve Johnson, SCCA President and CEO, who was in attendance at the event. “Mark Lovell and Roger Freeman were among the best crews in the world, but they were also great competitors as well. Our prayers go out to their families, Subaru Rally Team USA and all of their friends and supporters.”

    The duo who had been rallying together for twenty years were competingin their third event together of 2003. They entered the Oregon Trail fresh from success winning the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb of June 27. The 2001 Overall Drivers Champion, Lovell is survived by his wife, Julia, and his children Oliver and Thomas. Roger Freeman is survived by his wife, Alison, and children Becky and John.

    A decision was made to finish Day One of the rally while information regarding the accident was gathered and after rally organizershad consulted with SCCA national staff, national safety stewardsand at the request of Subaru Rally Team USA Manager and close personal friend of Lovell and Freeman, David Campion. The field then ran an abbreviated schedule of stages later in the day. The rally will continue with the completion of the final six stages on Sunday as scheduled.

  • Two crash during Oregon Trail Road Rally

    No names have been mentioned, but it’s fairly safe to assume this is Mark and Roger. I really have no idea how to feel about this.

    The Associated Press
    7/12/2003, 7:45 p.m. PT

    HILLSBORO, Ore. (AP) — Two men participating in an Oregon Trail Road Rally event died Saturday morning when their car struck a tree, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office said.

    The accident occurred at 10:53 a.m. on a gravel road in Washington County maintained by the Oregon Department of Forestry.

    The victims were the first to drive the course and had apparently gone about nine-tenths of a mile when they lost control and struck a tree, sheriff’s deputies said. The car went airborne and settled in a ditch on the other side of the road.

    The speed of the vehicle on impact could have ranged from 80 to 130 mph but investigators had not determined the exact speed.

    Both victims were from England and were members of the pro-rally circuit. They were wearing helmets and all standard safety gear, deputies said.

    The identities of the victims were not released pending notification of their families.

    Much like certain aircraft, rally cars carry black boxes, which record engine information. Investigators recovered the vehicle’s black box and were examining it.

    Members of the Oregon State Police and the Washington County Interagency Crash Analysis and Reconstruction Team were assisting in the investigation.

  • Fatal accident…

    There have been unconfirmed reports that Subaru driver Mark Lovell and co-driver Roger Freeman was involved in a fatal accident during stage one of the Oregon Trail ProRally. I usually leave the motorsports postings to Trunkmonkey.com but, if this is true, it will effect me greatly. This will be the second fatal accident in less than two months involving drivers that I know personally. I’m trying to hold myself together until SCCA confirms the rumors1 2 that have been floating around.

  • Cite your site!

    Fritz and Venemous Kate have both posted statements on citing sources when updating blog entries. I really have no idea what all the fuss is about…I guess some people get off on plagiarizing popular stories, passing them off as their own and trying to stake claim to being the first one on a scoop.

    Personally, I find that tracking back to the original source is more fulfilling. Not only do you expose your audience to a larger selection of content but, if the original source has trackback enabled, you get your own URL pimped on a popular site! It’s hardly a difficult decision.

  • Preceding recursion?

    I’ve made some major changes to the site. Most authors, after making such changes, would post a Web site update. But such major changes are blatantly obvious to the reader so why bother to outline them?

  • The World as a Blog

    Mikel Maron’s GeoBlog accepts standard pings from GeoTagged Weblogs and displays authors and lurkers visibly on a world map.

    Update: Hitting [tab] and [shift]-[tab] while the mouse is sitting on the world map will jump from dot to dot and display the most recent entry.

  • Steal these buttons!

    I’d always been quite annoyed by most “powered by” icons because they were intrusive and snide. “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” simply translates to “I’m too lazy to make this page look decent in all browsers”. Because of this fact I always kept all of my sites and pages free of any extraneous buttons or icons that weren’t directly beneficial to internal site navigation.

    Enter consumer grade software. I seem to have become addicted to it. I always used to roll my own Web applications because everything else out there completely sucked. Now that projects like SourceForge have popped up there is now a steady supply of high quality Webware that is not entirely unusable. In fact, some of the Webware out there is amazingly stable, usable and actually secure!

    As such, many open source projects require a “powered by” link on any page that uses their software. Other projects simply appreciate it and, since the authors have been generous enough to allow me to use their software for free, I feel inclined to give them a free shout out. So, I went on a search for compact “powered by” icons to replace some of the larger buttons I’ve seen floating around.

    Fortunately, Taylor from gtmcknight.com has come to the rescue with his STEAL THESE BUTTONS! page! He has over 800 high quality ultra compact Weblog style buttons for perusal as well as documentation on the authors, instructions on how to create and upload, ideas for future button sets and news about the page.

  • Why did we get Geocities?

    Clay Shirky has written a fascinating piece on social software. Here is a short excerpt that particularly amused me:

    Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn’t know what we were doing. One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.