Magic isn’t real.

So, I’m in the process of moving – again.

I found it rather amusing the other day to see my current apartment listed on Craigslist as being “cozy”. A quick google search to define “cozy” returns an appropriate definition of “oversized dog house”.

Yeah, it’s small. Really small. So small that when I bought a small love-seat, it took forever to squeeze it through the entryway and up the flight of stairs to the ONE ROOM abode. And that room was basically the size of a large walk-in closet.

Ok, whine, whine, whine… what does this have to do with software or hardware projects? Well, getting the love-seat OUT of the apartment turned into a hard project. A REALLY HARD PROJECT. Here’s what happened:

I paid the guy that helped me move it in $40.00 to help me get it out. “If we got it in, we can get it out.” But after 45+ minutes of trying to get the P.O.S. back to the stairway, it became evident that this was a task that required some serious mathematics.

I’m not like John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind”. I’m more like Son in “Shotgun Stories”. (“I can divide up to 4 decimal spaces”.) So when the suggestion “Well, I’ve got a circular saw in the truck” came up, I knew we only had 1 solution.

Before:

Before...

After:

After...

And so now I’ve got to pay another $40.00 to have the carcass disposed of. (BTW, I love how it appears that Dylan is sadly walking thru some sort of furniture holocaust)

UML Block Device Issues

I spent about half an hour the other day trying to figure out why a new Usermode Linux 2.6 kernel wouldn’t boot. Most of the time I focus on the 2.4 kernels, since adding “TTY Logging” to that kernel is really easy. (Yes, I’m watching your every keystroke)

For some reason, every time I’d boot the kernel, I’d get:

Kernel Panic – VFS: Cannot open root device “98:0” or unknown-block

The obvious problem would have been misspelling the flag “ubd” “udb”… but that wasn’t it. After scouring the Internet for any help I could find (and coming up empty), it turns out I missed a really simple but necessary config option when compiling the kernel:

“CONFIG_BLK_DEV_UBD” – Don’t leave home without it.

It’s practically an antique computer museum…

Being the nostalgic person I am, over the past 10 years I’ve accumulated a large number of old computers – everything from the Timex Sinclair 1000, TRS-80 COCO’s, and of course a Commodore 64 or 128…

The Commodore was interesting – I remember playing Exodus Ultima III, and BC’s Quest for Tires/Grogs revenge – and using this amazing “Turtle Graphics”(?) animation tool. Years before my last long-distance move, I got my hands on 5+ boxes of Commodore software from an old collector.

There’s a lot of stuff there, A LOT. A lot of games, but one of the more interesting items was the entire COMAL suite, with full documentation.

I’m using the past-tense because I found a new home for the C128 this weekend. I also offloaded an Amiga 2000. I’m tired of moving around and lugging all kinds of stuff I never use. So… anyone interested in a PowerMac 7215 running Yellow Dog Linux – it’s in need of a new home as well – AND SOON.

Toad Hall Ancient

Long, long, long ago I worked in the realm of Tech Support…. take a look over at the links for “Toad Hall Ancient” (it’s a reference to the very first ISP, many, many years ago)

While I tend to think that most everything over there is old and outdated, the sad fact is that there are a number (4, maybe 5) of people out there still running Windows 2000, 98, or CP/M. The screenshot project (which isn’t my work, aside from a couple small additions), provides a good visual layout of these OS GUI’s.

Still have a Dialup modem? There’s init strings over there somewhere too.

I’m sure something over there is of interest to someone. Enjoy.