The Core Dump

What the Dormouse Said is the story of the very early days of the computer revolution, and of how the zeitgeist of California in the sixties affected the direction taken by early computing. While there’s been much written about the personal computer industry of the seventies and eighties, the late fifties and early sixties haven’t received all that much attention despite the groundbreaking work done during that era.

John Markoff has done a fantastic research job for What the Dormouse Said, and as usual writes with economy and grace. The problem with What the Dormouse Said is that Markoff covers too much ground—there are so many characters and so many threads in the book that it becomes overwhelming and difficult to follow.

That being said, it’s still very much worth reading if you’re interested in the history of computing.

Andrea’s preschool uses a piece of software called WinTime Deluxe for parents to clock their wee ones in and out of the virus farm.

The system is set up with just a stand-alone keypad, and the process works by the parent entering either a “1” for clock in, or a “2” for clock out, then the family’s five-digit ID, then numerically selecting which child the parent is punching in or out, then hitting enter. Step and repeat if you’re Catholic.

Today I was tired and entered a “1” instead of the appropriate “2” in order to go through the clock-out procedure. No problem, just hit the escape key and go back to the selection screen, right? Nopers. Escape does nothing. OK, no problem, i’ll just hit invalid IDs a few times until it kicks me back to the selection screen. Nopers. It’ll let me enter bogus IDs until the sun goes supernova.

So in shame—oh, the red-faced shame!—I found the director and asked her how in the name of all that’s Right and Holy you’re supposed to get out of this screen?

She explains that this has been quite a common problem and they have spent much time figuring it out. Turns out the escape key is the *. That’s right, the asterisk. Not the esc key.

Because, really, who doesn’t associate multiplication with sweet escape?

And to think that there might, just might, be an application out there called WinTime Standard. One shudders to think what might be going on in the bowels of that app.

Soundtrack: “Fragments (Splinter)” by Vnv Nation

UPDATE: After I drop some serious Hamiltons on a new hard drive, one of the fans starts sounding like a harvester. Oh, woe is me. /UPDATE

My file server celebrated the new year with some catastrophic hard drive corruption, and since there’s no way I’m going to fly naked without backups, it was necessary to spend some quality time buying a new hard drive and reinstalling FreeBSD.

Apparently the computer gods were wroth with me for some reason. Hopefully the sacrifice of a few hours of Saturday time will be enough to appease them for a while. If not, I guess a goat is in for some unhappiness…

My file server with it innards exposed. Dig the vintage case.

Soundtrack: “Elegi” by Lars Winnerbäck

Here we are then. Saturday night and I’ve spent most of the day installing FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE on my PC instead of doing something fun.

Flatline, my Fedora Core 4 machine, has gone into some kind of psychotic death spiral, where after running yum-update it experiences a spate of disk errors and becomes unusable.

It could be that this is some kind of hardware problem, but that seems unlikely as the machine can take any kind of load in stress testing, but goes into cutter-teenage-goth-on-LiveJournal-mode after yum updates.

So it seemed like a good time to move over to FreeBSD since it’s the reference system for Mac OS X and my spiffy web host TextDrive uses it as well.

And so far so good. Installing FreeBSD is certainly … cough … different … from installing a modern Linux distro. Let’s just call the installer “relentlessly minimalistic.”

It is quite functional though, once you get past the early-nineties feel, and after some time installing the necessary ports (including rebuilding the kernel to get AppleTalk working), Flatline is once again a productive member of society.

It is my fervent wish to not have to touch it again for a long time.

P.S.

If you are running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE and are having problems getting Subversion to install through the ports system, getting an error about apr-1.0 not being installed even though it bloody well is, issue

make install -DWITH_APACHE2_APR

instead of the regular make install.

Hopefully that will save some other poor soul an hour of his or her life.

D.S.

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad

Ah yes, the Evil Computer Infrastructure is back online and now seated on laminate flooring, which means that the Evil Empire is once again unencumbered by earthly constraints.

Looking at the to-do list, it seems we’re a bit behind schedule on World Domination, which has wreaked havoc with the Ruling With an Iron Fist action item.

Hmm. Obviously corners will have to be cut.

But in all—or at least some—seriousness, the Laminate Flooring Adventure seems to be sailing toward a safe harbor, with most of the work done. This is a very good thing, as it means we can actually start using our house again.

Getting the Evil Computer Infrastructure back together yielded a few Teaching Moments. Number one of those is, When you put all of your computer equipment and the many, many cables associated therewith away, no matter how stressed, pressed for time, and tired you are, “Thou Shalt Organize Thine Cables With the Holy Rubber Bands. For if Thou Simply Throwest Thine Cables in a Big Honking Box Willy-Nilly Thine Cables Shall Be an Utter Mess and Thou Shalt Hate Thineself Whilst Unwrapping Them.”

Methinks that one belongs on a stone tablet somewhere.

Strangely enough, in a few days I’ll be able to think and blog about something else than this…

Soundtrack: “Obstacle 1″ by Interpol

We’re having the wall-to-wall carpet in the entire house replaced with laminate flooring this week. According to the contractor, the entire house should take about six days. We are extremely excited about this—two puking cats and a toddler are not synergetic with wall-to-wall carpeting. Plus it will be infinitely easier to get rid of cat hair, dust and all the other allergenic matter that assembles, lives and flourishes in wall-to-wall carpets.

The contractor will move the furniture around as needed, so we don’t have to worry about that. However, we had to move all breakable items into storage and empty all shelves so the furniture can be moved around.

You know where this is heading. Yes, we had to take all the books down. Turns out, I have a lot of books. A lot a lot a lot.

So now my back hurts.

We also have to break down the computers and move them out of the way. So after I post this, Monolith is getting packed away for a few days, leaving us with naught but portable computing until the study gets its shiny new flooring installed. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of days, we hope.

Which is more sad: That you’re catching up on your feed reading at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday or that you think people are losers for commenting on a post that was made at 10:00 p.m. that same Friday evening?

When I was in college, I had a 1,200 Baud modem. With a 1,200 Baud modem, you literally see the text coming down the line draw on the screen, like a teletype machine.

Right now I’m in class at the University and for some reason decide to do a speed test at DSLReports while my students work on their projects under my benevolent gaze.

Now that’s cooking with gas! Kudos to the ASU networking team.

Soundtrack: People typing HTML

For the last five years or so, I’ve had a series of machines in the house assigned to file serving duties. And since a file server has to be on all the time anyway, it makes all kinds of sense to run a distributed computing project and give some of those otherwise wasted CPU cycles to a worthy cause.

So they’ve been slaking their thirst for useful endeavors by crunching on SETI units, looking for little green men. Which has been great, as I feel this is a very important project. After all, incontrovertible proof of intelligent life on other planets would be just the kick in the pants needed to get people to lift their eyes above the parochial, national, and religious clap-trap that’s causing so much unneeded pain and suffering right here and now.

And the project is full-on just cool as hell. Big-up yourself, as the British would say.

But lately the SETI project has been experiencing a lot of technical problems, leaving Flatline, my poor file server, to sit there, all alone and miserable, waiting for the Great Server in the Sky to provide it with more work units. And that’s just not right.

From reading through the troubles and travails detailed on the SETI tech news page, it’s simply mind blowing how poorly outfitted these people are. A shame on the University of California at Berkeley for allowing this kind of underfunding to go on. We’re looking for ET here, people! Could we perhaps have first-world electricity? Are the electricians busy doing a drum circle?

To make a long story short, it was time to find a source that would keep the fileserver busy at all hours, and after some time looking around at different distributed projects, the winner is Stanford’s Folding@Home. The idea here is to donate cycles to increase our understanding of how protein folding (a task your body performs all the time) actually works; this knowledge will help us fight disease and in general help all DNA-based life forms on this planet. How could you argue with that? So as I type this, Flatline is busy folding interesting proteins.

Seriously, if you have a machine that’s always on anyway, donate its cycles to some worthwhile project. It may just save your life some day.

Soundtrack: “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails

Finally heeded the call of the semi-conductor (can you hear it? It’s outside your window right now, calling “Buy new stuff … you know you need it … you know you need new shiny electronics … you don’t need a savings account–you need new electronics.”) Ahem.

Ended up putting two 200-gig RAID 1-configured hard drives in Monolith, my main workstation, and upgraded the Casa Core Dump network to gigabit speeds. The RAID install went without a hitch, and then much hilarity ensued when it was time to get the newly-acquired Belkin F5D5005 to talk correctly to Temeryx, my old faithful G4/450. Plop in card, install driver, reboot, get 100 megabit speed. Dammit. Force card to use gigabit instead of autoselect–link goes dead without so much as a by-your-leave. Reinstall driver. Nope. Link goes dead as soon as the card is forced into gigabit.

Finally decided to try a different cable. Yup. Link goes to gigabit. Damn cheap CAT5-cables. Moved not-quite-evil-enough cable to its new position between base station and switch, where it can sit and poke along at 10 megabit without blowing a gasket.

And now for the piece de resistance–getting Ubuntu to talk to the second F5D5005 card. That took some deeper nerdery, so the how-to will end up on Tech Goes Boom. It did work, though, which was a bit of a relief, as the only reason I had for purchasing the Belkin cards instead of one from a competitor was that they were enlightened enough to put support for Linux, Mac OS X, and NetWare on the box.

Kind of a good idea if you’re selling a card that has drivers for the anything-but-Microsoft set to actually list that fact on the box.

So the RAID volume is mirroring away, the network is humming along at ridiculous speeds, and another Sunday is gone.

Listening To: “Darts of Pleasure” by Franz Ferdinand