This has been two days of terrible fires in Southern California. We have personally been very lucky, with no loss of property or life in the immediate family. So far, the closest scrape has been the Roca fire in Aguanga. But the extended family was not so lucky.

There has been major damage to Lindemann house in Malibu. I was watching TV as the fire was burning, and was quite worried when I saw houses burst into flames at the ocean’s edge. The main fire was burning inland, but embers were blowing out over the Malibu Colony. The LA Times story on the fire has the following quote:

Among the other structures gutted was a home along Malibu Road. Its owner, Barbara T. Lindemann, said the house, built in 1927, was once inhabited by workers who built the railroad down the California coast. She said she has owned the home for 45 years.

Andy Lyon, a Realtor who helps rent the home for Lindemann, said it was worth $12 million to $13 million, and had burned once before, when singer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas lived there.

“I believe that it was the last standing one of the original Malibu cottages,” said Lindemann, an attorney and expert in employment discrimination law. “It’s a piece of Malibu history.”

I remember the fire when John Phillips lived there. He left many of his belongings, including a large, psychedelic statue of a man with his arms raised.

Here are some pictures of the fire burning. We had hoped that it was OK because the roof was intact, but there was damage in the house from the heat of the fire next door. In the first picture, the Lindemann house is on the right.

In this second shot, the house is in the foreground.

Prayers to all who have suffered loss in these wildfires.

UPDATE: I found another photo. This is looking in from the beach to the house.

On June 2, 2007 at 12:23pm PDT, our daughter was born in St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was a bit early, 3lbs 10oz, 18 inches. Mother and daughter have done well over the last three weeks.

I’ve been short on sleep as you might imagine. I’ve had some ideas for posts, but no energy. Perhaps over the next week…

So this blog has become a chronicle of Lake Riverside events.

This past week has been very cold in California. I was worried about the pipes in Aguanga, but we needed the long weekend at home. Then, on Monday morning (Martin Luther King day), I heard a story on the radio about how the DWP was busy helping people who had burst pipes. That’s burst pipes from the cold. In Los Angeles.

So that made me worried about the house in Aguanga. My wife and I spoke about it and agreed that I would sacrifice my afternoon and drive out to check out the house.

As I drove up the to gate, I knew we had a problem. I could see the glint of water between the house and the workshop. The main line into the house had broken. It is a 2″ PVC pipe. Not my choice, I’d prefer copper. But another do-it-yourself work on the house had left this pipe there and it was broken. I turned off the valve by the line. The water to the workshop had no problem.

It was 44° outside and 46° inside. No worries about inside pipes, but I checked. I ran the heat to warm things up. But there was only one problem, the main line. The pump is off. The main line is off – at the pump. We await the plumber.

We were up at our place in Lake Riverside (Aguanga) last weekend. My wife’s sister had a nice Epiphany get together in Murietta. And the 35 miles from Aguanga to Murietta is a lot better than the 85 miles from LA to Murietta. We also had the pleasure of having my in-laws with us.

We were preparing to leave on Sunday. It had been a very windy day, and as I was talking with my father-in-law I noted that there were clouds of dust passing overhead. I looked to the south and noticed another cloud. It took me a moment, but I realized that it was not dust, but smoke. We ran to the edge of the hill to the south and saw a fire that was probably only five minutes old.

The wind was blowing from the east. The fire had started at the edge of the Lakeshore Boulevard and was quickly moving west, about one half mile south of the house. The fire department drove up shortly after we looked down. The fire was racing with the wind, spreading rapidly and seemingly consuming everything in its path. My father-in-law noted that a dark cloud remained at what seemed to be the staring point of the fire. We then saw a flash and heard the bang of an explosion as a car burst into flames at the start of the fire.

The rest of the family joined us watching the fire. It seemed to calm down to white smoke for a few moments, then flash into a burst of black smoke as if found fresh fuel. We were not in danger. The fire had started down wind of us and was moving away. Scary, but not a danger.

We had watched long enough and got in the car and left the house. On our way out, we saw two California Department of Forestry planes come in. We saw them make several water drops on the fire. As we drove out to I-15 in Temecula, at least 10 fire trucks passed us as the headed to the fire. According to the stories below, 186 firefighters responded, and no homes were damaged. Great work firefighters!

I found two articles on the fire thanks to Google News. The first article was from the The Californian, an edition of the North County Times. We are only about 8 miles from the northern edge of San Diego County.

Brush fire burned 30 acres

By: The Californian -

AGUANGA —- A brush fire burned about 30 acres Sunday afternoon in a rural community near Aguanga, about 18 miles east of Temecula along Highway 371, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The department dispatched 22 engines and 186 firefighters to battle the blaze, which was reported at about 2:50 p.m. in a brushy area near Lakeshore Boulevard and Forest Springs Road in the residential hamlet of Lake Riverside, CDF officials said on the department’s Web site. Authorities believe the fire was started by a vehicle crashing into vegetation.

Firefighters prevented flames from damaging about 60 nearby residences in the sparsely populated area, officials said. The crews were still mopping up Sunday evening with plans to continue patrol operations throughout the night as north and northeasterly winds of up to 25 mph persisted, officials said.

Voluntary evacuations in the Lake Riverside area were lifted and no evacuations had been ordered and no injuries were reported, authorities said.

I like that our house is in a “hamlet.”

The second article was from the Riverside Press Enterprise.

Crews contain fire to 30 acres

12:12 AM PST on Monday, January 8, 2007

The Press-Enterprise

A brush fire blackened about 30 acres Sunday in the Anza area before the flames were surrounded by firefighters, authorities said.

The fire, believed to have been started by a spark from a vehicle that drove on dry vegetation, was reported about 2:50 p.m. near the 40000 block of Lakeshore Boulevard in the Lake Riverside area southwest of Anza, said Patrick Chandler spokesman for Riverside County Fire Department. He said 186 firefighters contained the blaze at 8 p.m. and prevented the flames from spreading to about 60 homes in the sparsely populated area.

He said a voluntary evacuation for the area has been lifted and firefighters plan to do mop up activities and patrol operations through the night. Winds of about 20 mph complicated firefighting efforts but did not hinder the crews from getting the blaze under control, he said.

–Herbert Atienza

hatienza@PE.com

Our lot and the lots to the East and South are well cleared, so I am not to worried about our house. But this was a stark reminder that fire can move fast in dry brush, with high winds, and with low humidity. Too close for comfort.

On Friday, January 5th, a wind storm knocked out our power in Los Angeles at about 3am. When we left for Aguanga at Noon, it was still out. This is the 4th time we have had a major outage at our house in the past year.

1. Blown transformer at the end of the block that left a live high-power line dangling in the street,
2. Blown transformer around the block,
3. A transformer fell off a power pole into our neighghbor’s house two doors north when the termite-eaten support collapsed, and
4. This wind-caused outage

I sure am glad we have UPSs on all of the computers. Perhaps I need to set up the wiring so I can plug a generator into the house. Our neighbor has that set-tup. He disconnects himself from the city grid and plugs the generator into a socket at his outdoor power panel. The generator takes the place of the grid, and everything in the house works. It is pretty cool.

We were very impressed with our Bose Wave Radio‘s performance during the outage. Like many clock-radios, it has a 9-volt battery that allows it to keep the time when the power is out. But Bose went one step further — the alarm worked on the battery. So with a power outage it won’t let you oversleep. Great design, if you ask me. In addition, when you modify the settings on one of the two alarms, it turns the alarm on. Good design again.

Update The power did not come on until 5am on Saturday. It went off at 2:49 am Friday. 26 hours of outage. Ouch.

After several weeks of preparation and work, the three Linux computers have been upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the current release of the freely-available version of Red Hat Linux.

I downloaded the CD and DVD images in November, and loaded the installation packages on the main server’s web server. I started with the P3 500. This upgrade (clean install actuall) went without a hitch. The machine booted cleanly off of the rescue disk, and the installation went fine. The main server and the laptop were not so smooth.

I backed up all the data and configuration from the server, a P3 850 2-processor machine. It has been running Fedora Core 3, and I needed to reconfigure the disks, so a clean install was in order. I loaded Fedora on the web server on the P3 500, and booted off of the rescue disk. (One note on installation methods. Keeping the P3 500 around has been very convenient for Linux installs. I have found burning CDs to be problematic at best, so having the full install on a web server both removes the need for burning CDs and having to swap disks during the install.)

When I went to choose HTTP as the install method, I received a message that no drivers were installed for that boot method — Fedora could not talk to the NIC. I tried many things. I bought a new NIC (gigabit ethernet for $20 at CompUSA), tried to create a driver disk. Nothing worked. I posted at Fedoraforum.org, usually very helpful, but no one there was able to help. Some advice on where to look from Fedora-List led me to boot off of a full install DVD, ctrl-alt over to another terminal, and run lspci -v. This showed me that not only was Fedora not seeing the NIC, it wasn’t seeing anything on the PCI bus. This allowed me to make a much more informative post to Fedora-List. The kind people there gave me a number of kernel parameters to try. The one that worked was pci=noacpi.

Once that was figured out, the installation went fine. I had the usual troubles installing the Perl modules for The Gimp, (send me an e-mail if you need to know how) but with my full /etc directory backed up from the old install was pretty clean.

The laptop had some trouble, but that was mostly user error. First, I had trouble getting the machine to boot off of the CD. Cleaning everything solved that one. Then I had a strange error when I went to upgrade. The install said it could not find the install package repodata file. I should have paid more attention the first time through as I would see this error again. I just figured that I should do a clean install instead of an upgrade and proceeded. Half way through the package load, the machine locked up. I cursed and started over. I then kept getting the same error about repodata. No on-line search showed this error. Finally it struck me. I was entering the IP address for the server instead of the P3 500 with the install data on it! Thankfully, once I had that figured out the install completed successfully.

Here are some of the things I have found with FC6:

• Printer support is much improved. You don’t use the HP IP emulation, rather IPP: protocol which works very well with both Windows and OS 10.
• Installing the Java runtime environment (JRE) for Firefox is a pain. You can use an RPM from Sun that puts Java in the correct place, but you need to use this command (as root) to get it to work: ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_09/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
• There is a new search program that comes with Fedora called Beagle. It is supposed to index everything in all your files so you can find a document with a quick search. I don’t use Google desktop and I don’t need Beagle. It hogs memory and CPU. I uninstalled it yum remove beagle
• I tried running the laptop with SELinux (Red Hat’s Secure Enterprise Linux) enabled. It rebooted half way through the main yum update after install, and then complained about restarting. I disabled it entirely. It has always caused me nothing but problems. Hey, I’m not an enterprise so why do I need secure?
• The NTP daemon on the server did not need any tweaking to get it to accept NTP calls from the other PCs on the net. On past installs it has taken a lot of changes to the ntp.conf file to get it to work.
• I haven’t gotten flash to work yet.

Ugh. Nothing more worth saying.