| |||
| bsd | dude, where's my code? | ||
| code | hacking for the masses | ||
| contact | solo sex does not qualify as reaching out and touching someone | ||
| gnu | what it means to be free | ||
| history | what state of mental health? | ||
| microsoft | on the lack of innovation | ||
| mrt | get out of school, do drugs, don't drink milk | ||
| phil | an ode to my favorite groundhog | ||
| religion | i am write and you are wrong | ||
| schismtracker | what makes good software great | ||
| secure | tightrope walking without a net | ||
( home : history ) Save Soviet Jewry -- Win Valuable Prizes!!!!
PREHISTORY
i started nimh.org for three reasons:
- i am a big fan of don bluth's secret of nimh
- i am completely lacking mental health
- i like nonsensical presenses
when the name became available after the other national institute of mental health moved, i decided to move in. since that foggy saturday, nimh.org has done nothing but serve as a vehicle for my satire and code.
Oddly enough: more stire than code...
TEXT ONLY
I've also gained many complements on my ``Text Only'' experience. while many people think it's great, and assume i use lynx (or some other crappy excuse for a web-browser), i of course have to shatter their confidence and allusions, and explain:
my roomate has his own web-presense for some time. quite infrequently, he'd decide to build his site thrice more, and get just-finished with the look/feel before running out of those creative juices.
i told him, he shouldn't bother with the look/feel; there's always a prettier picture out there, so there's no sense in pretending about it unless he's selling pictures.
that's when i remembered that's exactly what he did. sell pictures.
then, i remembered that I don't. sell pictures. so i took my own advise and made the ``Text Only'' experience you see today.
FOR A WHILE
nimh.org was running on a beat-up SparcStation-20 with more problems than you would know what to do with since the beginning of time. it had a 9gig disk too tall to fit into that shallow pizza-box, broken libraries (could not compile anything more complicated than a hello-world) everywhere, busted ram, two busted disks, a vgaish sbus video board that got swiped by somebody a while ago, and a thick film of dust.
ANTIQUITIES
i am quite dissimilar from other antique collectors; i don't buy hardware except under the strangest of conditions- my home computer was a p-133 until mid 2001. so when i got my hands on a decpc-150 i decided it was time to move my site.
unfortunately, this wasn't my first alpha, and as anyone who has worked with a jensen knows, those bastards at DEC have such funky hardware in this thing that almost everything else that runs on (well) everything else- meaning, other alphas, will yield odd results on install or use.
and, as any jensen owner also knows, that once working, this alpha - like any other - will run solid, and quick. up to 2x an x86 of similar clock, and the jensen will outperform many pci-based alphas.
based solely on this urban myth, i decided to attempt to make some good use out of this box.
just learning about ecu's and arcs and srms and everything just about made my head spin. administering a alpha system != building one.
THE TEST
i started by making some linux ISOs. i decided that redhat 7 had done well for making decent x86 workstations, and once i got it up, the can opener would come out anyway, so i burned the first disc and tried to boot.
the first thing that happened was that the disk hung right after starting kswapd. using the hardware trap-key, i continued execution from SRM and found it would plod along up to the first dialog.
the keyboard is frozen.
okay, jensens are old, and linux doesn't like it's keyboard. my wyse-160 will fix that.
redhat's ignoring /dev/console and banging on /dev/tty0 instead.
google groups are groopy. yeah. and they pointed me in the direction of a patched kernel. i got the ARC copyboot and minlabel tools and shortly thereafter... a working install
plodding along hapily: i got to fdisk, and accidently blew away my bsd-style disklabel. no problem. i'll just wquit.
on a good day, i can type around 120 wpm. on a halfway decent day, i'll still avoid a two-character typo like that.
beginning install: take 5. NOW redhat's installer can't see my CDROM anymore. it's telling me it isn't a redhat disk.
take 6: network install. somefolk recommend redhat 6.2 over 7. neither works any better.
take 9? ten? try the debian network install. i'll have nasty problems getting the mail working (cron/at depend on a debian mailer... pain in the ass).
debians install is flawless. /dev/root is mounted ro, and i can't get the keymap working, but at least it's running linux.
AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?
it went pop. apparently, jensen motherboards turn into rice crispy treats in 120 degree weather. so i replaced it with a alphaserver 4/200 with 128m ram. i have never owned a computer heavier than me, so i suppose it was about time.
APA trucking was great. the truckdriver thought he could carry it all by himself, and i started making floppies. i made it a debian-3.0 unstable system running 2.4 in about 3.5 hours.
TODAY
i still hate flash
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