2004-9-12
'nuther weekend turning over to week
Another weekend ending, watching the late broadcast of the Monza Grand Prix. Great race, as they usually are when there's at least a little dampness or rain. Rubens was on top all weekend, excellent job chap :)
I find myself a bit anxious, I think it's the adjustment to full time classes starting NEXT WEEK. AAAAAAAAAAgh! A little scary. Plus all of the financial adventure, switching to part time work, living partially on financial aid overage, the welfare dole of the new millenium. Does millenium have two 'n's? I don't know how to ask Emacs...
Anyways, I haven't had a chance to get back to the folks that posted comments and were working on the GLAT, thanks for posting guys. I'll get back to you in turn. I haven't worked on the blog or bzero all week.
Yesterday I spent five or six hours working on getting linux-wlan-ng and Debian to play nice on my iBook. It's still crapping out. I am to the point where I have a new kernel, and the wlan module, and when I try to load it, I get a dump about unresolved symbols for a bunch of calls made in the module. Also the Debian-specific instructions I read, that were supposed to make things easier, did not work. The scripts were written in a way that they are very dependent on what path you are running them from, which is okay if they are documented, which they are. However, they are broken even if you follow the instructions. So, I tried the easy Debian way, the more involved Debian way, and doing everything myself from raw source, and they have all barfed. Grr. This was my first serious assault, after moping around and prodding at the project like a dead possum from a distance for a few weeks. I had hoped that Yellowdog or Gentoo or Mandrake PPC would Just Work with my usb wireless dongle, but research told me that that was not the case. None of the BSDs support it. Any Linux PPC version *should* work with the wlan code. But it is not easy. I'm sure if I retrace my steps ten more times I can get it going, but at this point I don't care. I have a great environment running on OS X right now, and I have my Development Tools disk at home again, so I can get GCC installed next time I have an itch to get a Perl module.
I found some old mbox's on my ftp server Puffy yesterday, and felt a little nostalgic. Hey to all the folks at Fairfield County District Library, Pickaway, and CLC. I miss you folks, and it was great working with you. If I had a drink I would toast. But the future lies ahead of us, and we have to forge on. The mbox is a wonderful thing. I'm not even sure what OS I was running when I dumped everything from my various accounts into that mbox as a backup to purge server space. At various times I was running Mandrake, TurboLinux Server 8, NetBSD, and Slackware 10 prerelease. OpenBSD was in there too. But the beauty of using open standards means that when I fire up Puffy, a Pentium 100 with 32MB of RAM running in an old giant tower that had a 486 board in it, with a 40MB/s SCSI card and two half-height, noisy as hell 4GB Seagates, running some outdated OpenBSD like 3.2 or 3.4, I can stumble across an mbox file, type mutt -f mbox and read and sort mail like I just got them today. In fact these were in a tarball name evolution-backup-someyearandmonth, and since evolution uses mbox storage (or will if you set it that way anyhow), the Inbox, Sent, Trash, etcetera mbox's were all there. And like I said, on my Gateway 1GHz laptop I had half a dozen free Unix variants running at different times, but my mail spools always moved with me.
Shoot, I think I wore out the CDRW in that laptop booting to CDs to install operating systems. I remember one hot summer night sitting on my porch with the thing burning the top of my thighs (it ran hot), with an ethernet cable jammed in the screen door, booting into Slackware or Mandrake, reading some docs, rebooting to my HURD CD, wrestling with it some more, rebooting into Linux... I had a P166 tower named Marvin that was my PPP server and firewall/NAT machine. Marvin is always my server/development machine that is underpowered, and usually assembled from discarded parts. Puffy right now is my ftp server, and was my firewall until my girlfriend put me in the dark ages by buying a wireless router/switch. My 10Mb hub is too ashamed to work any more... Marvin is after the Douglas Adams paranoid android, of course, as well as a Mennonite friend I grew up with. Puffy is the OpenBSD mascot. Indigo is my clamshell iBook, an Indigo model. Not real creative I guess. I have a P100 Compaq Armada 4110 laptop with 24MB of RAM, a 1.4GB drive, a 10.4" 800x600x8 display, a completely dead keyboard, and a PCMCIA ethernet. And a floppy, thank Dios, or it would be a complete Helen Keller machine. The Armada is H2G2, thin small and dark chocolate colored. You can guess that it's another Douglas Adams name... The Armada follows me from job to job, since there are never enough test computers around. It runs OpenBSD, since the Linux kernels don't work on it since around 2.2.20. It must have a rare PIC and architecture. It's an Opti chipset, blech. Anyways, I ran Slackware and Mandrake and OpenBSD and W98 and NT4 on it, but none of the newer distros will run. Woody still does with the 2.2 series. Even FreeBSD has left it behind. But OpenBSD versions just keep working. Since I have to use a PS2 keyboard with it, I can't do special things like adjust the display, or use an external monitor. Unfortunately under X the display makes your eyes water like you're chopping onions. I often work from the console. It has no working battery, so I found an AC adapter to haul around, and a serial cable to connect to switches and routers. It's a pretty good wiring closet computer. It also had Emacs and a Python environment with Idle on it, and Dillo for browsing the Python docs, and some limited Web browsing. Fetchmail too.
I don't know why I'm giving the rundown on my gear now, but what the hell. To finish things off there is Monty, after the Simpsons character. Monty wheezes and farts dust. It's the original Beetle of the computer world, just about. It's a Macintosh Quadra 610, a 25MHz 68040 CISC cpu, 16MB of whatever Fast Page or EDO would work, and 1MB of unaccelerated video ram on one SIMM. It has a SCSI controller onboard whose chipset I forget at the moment, narrow of course. It has the IWM floppy controller, who no one has abused themselves enough to write drivers for, and some other Woz designed sound scheme, that probably requires insane inline assembler optimizations in real time to work at all. There is a story about this computer of course, otherwise why would I have it? How can I explain it, it's like trying to explain love. It just happens.
Okay, so it all started a few months after starting work at Fairfield County District Library as the IT manager for the whole county, managing a staff of one. One day I got the compulsion to really uproot everything in the whole office and get things to a more organized and practical state, as anyone who has been in a job for a little while begins to feel comfortable enough to do. I love to root things up and rebuild. So of course under a pile of junk in the corner was this little beige pizza box, with a tiny rainbow apple and a tiny font that said "Macintosh". Damn, waves of nostalgia from seeing Macs in RUN magazine in the 80's when I was kid came rushing back. So I took it home, while the rest went in the trash.
I found the original manual and Mac OS 7 cd, what luck! So at home I examined the thing and took the case off to discover the hardware. 250MB IBM SCSI disk, wierd Apple video connector, SCSI cdrom, floppy drive, AAUI port, and those ADB ports. I plugged in a power cable and turned it on. It played a major chord, resolving with the third as the lowest note (that's how it sounds anyways), something that R&B guitarists, and Keith Richards too, often use as a lick at the end of a song, to make it sound like it "resolves" onto a happy major key. The SCSI drive ground and rumbled like ten year old narrow scuzz drives do. It was pretty quiet, but the darn thing was running. It may have even beeped after a while, since there were no input or output devices. I was fascinated.
So I got on eBay in a moment of weakness and ordered a video adapter so I could *see*. I just wanted to see what it did. I won the auction and found an adapter laying around at work in a monitor manual baggie at the same time. So I had two. I plugged in a browning out old monitor and fired up the Mac. It was running at 640x480, looked like 8 or 16 bit color. It booted to the desktop. It gave an error about some problem with the printer. I had only ever used an Apple IIc and a Mac II something or other years ago.
Battery is running out, will finish later. Time to go to bed.
I find myself a bit anxious, I think it's the adjustment to full time classes starting NEXT WEEK. AAAAAAAAAAgh! A little scary. Plus all of the financial adventure, switching to part time work, living partially on financial aid overage, the welfare dole of the new millenium. Does millenium have two 'n's? I don't know how to ask Emacs...
Anyways, I haven't had a chance to get back to the folks that posted comments and were working on the GLAT, thanks for posting guys. I'll get back to you in turn. I haven't worked on the blog or bzero all week.
Yesterday I spent five or six hours working on getting linux-wlan-ng and Debian to play nice on my iBook. It's still crapping out. I am to the point where I have a new kernel, and the wlan module, and when I try to load it, I get a dump about unresolved symbols for a bunch of calls made in the module. Also the Debian-specific instructions I read, that were supposed to make things easier, did not work. The scripts were written in a way that they are very dependent on what path you are running them from, which is okay if they are documented, which they are. However, they are broken even if you follow the instructions. So, I tried the easy Debian way, the more involved Debian way, and doing everything myself from raw source, and they have all barfed. Grr. This was my first serious assault, after moping around and prodding at the project like a dead possum from a distance for a few weeks. I had hoped that Yellowdog or Gentoo or Mandrake PPC would Just Work with my usb wireless dongle, but research told me that that was not the case. None of the BSDs support it. Any Linux PPC version *should* work with the wlan code. But it is not easy. I'm sure if I retrace my steps ten more times I can get it going, but at this point I don't care. I have a great environment running on OS X right now, and I have my Development Tools disk at home again, so I can get GCC installed next time I have an itch to get a Perl module.
I found some old mbox's on my ftp server Puffy yesterday, and felt a little nostalgic. Hey to all the folks at Fairfield County District Library, Pickaway, and CLC. I miss you folks, and it was great working with you. If I had a drink I would toast. But the future lies ahead of us, and we have to forge on. The mbox is a wonderful thing. I'm not even sure what OS I was running when I dumped everything from my various accounts into that mbox as a backup to purge server space. At various times I was running Mandrake, TurboLinux Server 8, NetBSD, and Slackware 10 prerelease. OpenBSD was in there too. But the beauty of using open standards means that when I fire up Puffy, a Pentium 100 with 32MB of RAM running in an old giant tower that had a 486 board in it, with a 40MB/s SCSI card and two half-height, noisy as hell 4GB Seagates, running some outdated OpenBSD like 3.2 or 3.4, I can stumble across an mbox file, type mutt -f mbox and read and sort mail like I just got them today. In fact these were in a tarball name evolution-backup-someyearandmonth, and since evolution uses mbox storage (or will if you set it that way anyhow), the Inbox, Sent, Trash, etcetera mbox's were all there. And like I said, on my Gateway 1GHz laptop I had half a dozen free Unix variants running at different times, but my mail spools always moved with me.
Shoot, I think I wore out the CDRW in that laptop booting to CDs to install operating systems. I remember one hot summer night sitting on my porch with the thing burning the top of my thighs (it ran hot), with an ethernet cable jammed in the screen door, booting into Slackware or Mandrake, reading some docs, rebooting to my HURD CD, wrestling with it some more, rebooting into Linux... I had a P166 tower named Marvin that was my PPP server and firewall/NAT machine. Marvin is always my server/development machine that is underpowered, and usually assembled from discarded parts. Puffy right now is my ftp server, and was my firewall until my girlfriend put me in the dark ages by buying a wireless router/switch. My 10Mb hub is too ashamed to work any more... Marvin is after the Douglas Adams paranoid android, of course, as well as a Mennonite friend I grew up with. Puffy is the OpenBSD mascot. Indigo is my clamshell iBook, an Indigo model. Not real creative I guess. I have a P100 Compaq Armada 4110 laptop with 24MB of RAM, a 1.4GB drive, a 10.4" 800x600x8 display, a completely dead keyboard, and a PCMCIA ethernet. And a floppy, thank Dios, or it would be a complete Helen Keller machine. The Armada is H2G2, thin small and dark chocolate colored. You can guess that it's another Douglas Adams name... The Armada follows me from job to job, since there are never enough test computers around. It runs OpenBSD, since the Linux kernels don't work on it since around 2.2.20. It must have a rare PIC and architecture. It's an Opti chipset, blech. Anyways, I ran Slackware and Mandrake and OpenBSD and W98 and NT4 on it, but none of the newer distros will run. Woody still does with the 2.2 series. Even FreeBSD has left it behind. But OpenBSD versions just keep working. Since I have to use a PS2 keyboard with it, I can't do special things like adjust the display, or use an external monitor. Unfortunately under X the display makes your eyes water like you're chopping onions. I often work from the console. It has no working battery, so I found an AC adapter to haul around, and a serial cable to connect to switches and routers. It's a pretty good wiring closet computer. It also had Emacs and a Python environment with Idle on it, and Dillo for browsing the Python docs, and some limited Web browsing. Fetchmail too.
I don't know why I'm giving the rundown on my gear now, but what the hell. To finish things off there is Monty, after the Simpsons character. Monty wheezes and farts dust. It's the original Beetle of the computer world, just about. It's a Macintosh Quadra 610, a 25MHz 68040 CISC cpu, 16MB of whatever Fast Page or EDO would work, and 1MB of unaccelerated video ram on one SIMM. It has a SCSI controller onboard whose chipset I forget at the moment, narrow of course. It has the IWM floppy controller, who no one has abused themselves enough to write drivers for, and some other Woz designed sound scheme, that probably requires insane inline assembler optimizations in real time to work at all. There is a story about this computer of course, otherwise why would I have it? How can I explain it, it's like trying to explain love. It just happens.
Okay, so it all started a few months after starting work at Fairfield County District Library as the IT manager for the whole county, managing a staff of one. One day I got the compulsion to really uproot everything in the whole office and get things to a more organized and practical state, as anyone who has been in a job for a little while begins to feel comfortable enough to do. I love to root things up and rebuild. So of course under a pile of junk in the corner was this little beige pizza box, with a tiny rainbow apple and a tiny font that said "Macintosh". Damn, waves of nostalgia from seeing Macs in RUN magazine in the 80's when I was kid came rushing back. So I took it home, while the rest went in the trash.
I found the original manual and Mac OS 7 cd, what luck! So at home I examined the thing and took the case off to discover the hardware. 250MB IBM SCSI disk, wierd Apple video connector, SCSI cdrom, floppy drive, AAUI port, and those ADB ports. I plugged in a power cable and turned it on. It played a major chord, resolving with the third as the lowest note (that's how it sounds anyways), something that R&B guitarists, and Keith Richards too, often use as a lick at the end of a song, to make it sound like it "resolves" onto a happy major key. The SCSI drive ground and rumbled like ten year old narrow scuzz drives do. It was pretty quiet, but the darn thing was running. It may have even beeped after a while, since there were no input or output devices. I was fascinated.
So I got on eBay in a moment of weakness and ordered a video adapter so I could *see*. I just wanted to see what it did. I won the auction and found an adapter laying around at work in a monitor manual baggie at the same time. So I had two. I plugged in a browning out old monitor and fired up the Mac. It was running at 640x480, looked like 8 or 16 bit color. It booted to the desktop. It gave an error about some problem with the printer. I had only ever used an Apple IIc and a Mac II something or other years ago.
Battery is running out, will finish later. Time to go to bed.
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