This Mind Intentionally Left Blank

Moved my blog

2007-08-02T03:05:00.000-07:00

I've moved my blog to my own host, http://gunkies.org/blog. Please update your bookmarks.

fnocbed

2007-06-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

end debconf;

...and what a pity. This debconf has been absolutely magnificent. The orga team has done a wonderful job. Many a beer have been toasted to these people, and they have deserved every pint.

I was as usual a member of the video team, and as usual, I got in less work than I should have. and as usual I feel a little bit rotten for it. I hope I put in enough camera work hours... Our results did end up very very good, though. A big thank you to the rest of the video team. It's astounding how damn professional the videos came out! It looks like something that was produced with cameras at least two orders of magnitude more expensive.

For the conference I was supposed to write a program that would include some small headers at the start and end of every video. These would show the coming talk, with author information etc. I started work on it in Python, but I simply ran into too many frustrating gstreamer bugs. Even though it's gotten a lot better, it's still a very frustrating toolkit to be using. I hope it will get better. It is in all fairness a very ambitious project. Some of the bugs were just downright weird.

At the beginning of the planning of debconf7, the terms were that we would get to use Teviot Row House, our main venue, 24 hours a day. However, for the hosts this proved to be unacceptable. So - we have a secondary, night, venue. This turns out to be a semi-derelict, deconsecrated church. Churches tend to have organs. So, in a dull moment, while I was wating for some XML parsing code (Thanks, LarstiQ!) I sneak up and start... repairing it. With the help of Simon Richter and David Noble, we did actually get the organ working - first manual-drive, then we wired up the old blower motor. The thing worked beautifully, and the organ returned to past glory.

I'll write more about the organ effort at a later date. Now, I'm going to fix the organ up a bit before leaving to go home.

Picture taken by Dave Noble

Farewell, Falwell!

2007-05-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the BBC Four radio news and I heard that Jerry Falwell has died - I think this is as good a cause for celebration as any. Some quotations from this great man:

"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for [9/11] because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians..."

"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals." (If so, then God has remarkably bad aim.)

"The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country."

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." (And I'm glad you didn't live to see that. I hope I won't.)

A vocal supporter of the Apartheid regime, a strong opponent of Desmond Tutu recieving the Nobel Prize, a homophobe, a bigot, a creationist, a tax fraud, a hypocrite, a liar, a segragationist, a theocrat of the worst kind. Truly we have lost a prime example of the kind of person the world would be much, much better off without.

I'll break out the booze, it's celebration time.

Trip to Trondheim and NTNU

2007-04-01T02:36:00.000-07:00

Quite a while ago, I decided that a second visit to NTNU was way overdue. So I went over to NTNU, hoping to get a few more machines running - maybe creating the possibility for a self-sustained hobbyist community sprining up around these machines.

The machines we ended up powering on were a MicroVAX 3800, an AlphaServer 2100, and a VAX 11/750. We haven't quite revived the 11/750 yet, but I'm working on that. All in all, it really was a great time, even though I accidentally ended up pulling some 24-hour-plusplus work stints.

The machines were set up with VAX/VMS 5.5 on the VMS boxes, and OpenVMS 8.2 on the Alpha. The differences between the versions are very striking. Although I am a VMS novice, I do believe I'm starting to get the feel for the system, and I have to say I like it quite a lot.

I also set up a VAXstation 3100, booting from the 3800, and a few terminals hooked to a DECserver 100. I had the enthusiastic company of Arnt Richard Johansen.

I've made some pictures available at http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/ntnu-tur.

I think I've invented a smiley!

2007-03-03T09:04:00.000-08:00

That's right. I have made my contribution to the world. Ars longa, vita brevis - I have achieved immortality,
merely by applying a Unicode character in a novel manner. I will forever be remembered as "That dude who invented the happiest smiley".

Ü is the happiest smiley. People are even starting to use it!

My friend Timothy Goh quickly pointed out thatǙ is also good - I agree whole-heartedly.

To the liars who claimed they used it before I invented it: They are all liars! I'm not listening. I'm the inventor. Not listening. Lalalala. :)

My brain hurts.

2007-02-28T02:09:00.000-08:00

Amusingly perverse juxtaposition:

10:47  <p2-mate> Nokia-N800-51:~# ps | grep hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1874 root      16384 S   hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1875 root      16384 S   hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1876 root      16384 S   hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1877 root      16384 S   hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1880 root      16384 S   hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1881 root      16384 R N hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1882 root      16384 S < hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1883 root      16384 S N hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1884 root      16384 S   hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1886 root      16384 S N hercules
10:47  <p2-mate>  1906 root        408 R   grep hercules
10:47  <p2-mate> \o/
11:06  <toresbe> >:D
11:06  <toresbe> you are a SICK, SICK bastard. :)
11:07  <toresbe> I am *so* blogging that...
11:10  <p2-mate> it's been booting linux for the last 10 minutes or so :)

(For the uninitiated: hercules is a program which emulates IBM mainframes, from machines made in 1964 and up to modern-day machines. The N800 is a Nokia Internet Tablet the size of a cellphone. He is using a cellphone to emulate a huge mainframe.)

Apologees for being far too lax in blogging, but I'm no good manager of time. Things have happened, fun things! And I shall write of them imminently. Honest.

Geeking.

2007-01-24T17:07:00.000-08:00

Damn. One full month since I last posted to the blog. Where to start? One twelfth of the new year is about to be done with. And what's to show for it?

Firstly, I've become involved in an extremely cool project, the Nordic Simulator Center, NSC. One day, a man with the nickname "kaasen" entered a local academic IRC channel I dropped by, and asked if anyone in there knew anything about these PDP-11 computers. Well, someone immediately pointed me out (Gee, wonder why...) and we started talking. Apparently, somebody has gotten their hands on a full "Level B" (whatever that means) DC-10 simulator, made by Link-Miles in 1977. Well, what kind of computers control a flight simulator made in 1977? Well, a cluster of PDP-11s, of course.

We quickly made contact and I wanted to stop by. And stop by I did. Crikey, what a setup. A full DC-10 cockpit with original instruments. Downstairs, there's a five-rack configuration of three PDP-11/45 CPUs. The blinkenlights fanatic in me goes mad. :)

The machines had been powered up in the past, so the PSUs have been verified. The voltages all seem in spec (a common problem with the PDP-11/45 series). On the second day, I got CPU B running. On the third day, I got CPU NVS *somewhat* running. Things are progressing.

There is more, I'll post about it tomorrow.

I need help...

2006-12-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

So we were toying around with the ideas for debconf7 and one of them (and a very good one it is!) is to set up a temporary DVB-T station. That's right! A Debian TV station! Isn't that a great idea!? This, however, means one thing: We need an ident. What better ident to use than a swirling Debian swirl!? So, I find a neat Debian wallpaper somewhere and decide to make a series of JPEGs to spin it around. The bash line I ended up using was this:

toresbe@fortran:~/ident$ rm big/*.PNG; for deg in `seq -w 0 . 360`; do export file=`perl -e "print "1$deg*10""`.PNG; echo $file; convert debian-swirl-big.png -rotate -$deg  big/$file; TEST="`file big/$file | sed -e "s/,//g"`"; convert big/$file -crop 1024x576+$(((`echo $TEST | cut -d " " -f 5`)/2-512))+$(((`echo $TEST | cut -d " " -f 7`)/2-288)) done/$file; done

I just found that so horrible that I found I needed to blog it. It physically repulses me. I LOVE it! :)

The reviews are unanimous:

19:30 < daven> dude
19:30 < daven> that is sick
19:30 < daven> and twisted

A random thought...

2006-12-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

One of the arguments used by our minister of culture, Trond Giske, against the separation of church and state - something most developed countries have done decades or centuries ago - is that the mainstream Christian church might become less inclusive - in particular on the subject of homosexual priests. This makes me wonder...

Why would a homosexual want to preach a religion whose holy writings explicitly command that he be murdered?

Just a thought.

Miscellaneous, mischievous minutiae!

2006-10-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

Well, life happens, and that's good, I guess. A few interesting and a lot of quasi-interesting things happen at times. Firstly, I upgraded my desktop Ubuntu install to Edgy Eft! Thank you, Debian and Ubuntu, for making another brilliant release. Xvideo has broken, though - I'll try to figure that one out, but I think it's my own fault (Did not restart after upgrade).

But probably most interestingly, I've started my first real restoration project since the PDP-7 project in 2003. Though that never did pan out (That wasn't just my own fault...), with this project I have no excuse. I should take you back to the start of this:

25th of March, 2006, we get a mail by Norwegian ARPAnet/Internet pioneer Pål Spilling. Apparently, there is a NORD-1 in a barn in Gjerdrum (Countryside outside of Oslo). We go to inspect this. It's not just a NORD-1, there's also a NORD-10. (pictures available here)

Apparently, the farmer, a very nice man named Finn Stokke, had been hired to haul away the decaying remains of Norsk Data, and he realized that there was history in these machines.

Multiple attempts are made to salvage the computers, but things collide every time. Finally, months later, Pål Spilling nags a little more at me. We arrange a move with Pål Spilling's trailer.

We had a tentative agreement from March with Geir Isene (really cool guy) in FreeCode (really cool company) to place the machines there. Problem was, I couldn't reach him. The haul was on very short notice, and he was in meetings the whole day. So we improvise. We load the machines into the CS building, with help from some very friendly people at the University.

This has proved to be distinctly for the better. FreeCode was considering moving, and the subsequent restoration project would not have been possible without the equipment of the microelectronics laboratory.

There is talk about a permanent exhibition in the new cantina planned for the second Computer Science building currently being constructed (To the neighbours' great chagrin, I might add...). A NORD-1, a NORD-10, and a few DEC machines would be obvious candidates.

In addition, I have been talking with the telecomms museum and museum of science and technology to try to somehow get together an exhibit in occasion of the 40th anniversary of Norsk Data, with a few running machines. I'm sure a Satellite-9 would make an excellent machine to run a multiplayer game application on, to entertain the kids - and also have some neat exhibits, possibly even with live demonstrations of what application development was like in the bad old days - Blinkenlights, Teletype, Facit punch, maybe magtape, and all.

I've also gotten some (insufficient) work done on my website. I really want to make a document called "Program development using MAC" on the wiki.

Test post to explain problems with Opera text break.

2006-10-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

I'm just posting this as an example of how the Opera browser seems to have problems coping with line breaks in posts.

Somehow, it seems to only happen sometimes. I believe the relative positions of line breaks and paragraph shifts make a difference. I'm not sure why I am currently unable to reproduce it. It's been like this every previous time I've written it. Oh - it's the demo syndrome!

It used to happen, anyway. I am not entirely sure of why I am currently unable to reproduce this error. It seems to be wrapping perfectly every time! It's very odd. Testing, I'd like it to be less wrappey, testing, testing... This is very odd.

Ah! Now I remember the exact cause of it. Once the vertical scroll bar appears, it starts to ignore line breaks, and allow me to continue along the rest of the blog without ever wrapping. It's a frustrating bug as blogger.com seems to trust the wrapping given to it by this JavaScriptey editor. Thus, text seems to fly off the end of the page. It does, however, seem to arbitrarily rebreak the above paragraphs, and somehow it's now almost randomly breaking the lines. I'm just typing to have text. Lorem ipsum, Dies Irae, Dies Illa - Solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sybilla. QUantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus! Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla, teste david cum sybilla. Ompa, ompa. Tuba mirum, tubaen min, tubaen din.

New hardware! \o/

2006-09-30T22:31:00.000-07:00

I has a tape robot - no tape drives yet. I also fetched some stuff for NODAF.

I've cut my hair!

2006-09-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

I broke my hair! It's all gone! Well... some of it is, anyway... And I'm sort of convinced it was a bad idea. The haircut didn't turn out like I wanted it to... But it's not all bad. I guess my old hair was getting a bit worn out anyway.

Very long overdue update

2006-09-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Well, my blog has remained unmaintained for far too long. The reason I am finally updating it is quite simple: I quit IRC!

Allright, I may have mainly just detached the screen, it *is* still running, but I'm not interacting with it. And might I say, it's a hoot. I've cooked a decent dinner, I've cleaned the whole appartment, and I'm just going out for a walk soon. I have already after an hour and a half noticed that I'm more focused and constructive.

This is not just very pleasing, it's also very scary. If dropping IRC made this much of a difference to me, should I go back? I maintain most of my friendships online on IRC. Friendships can tolerate a week-long absence, but for longer periods, I'd start losing friends - or at least begin to distance myself from them. I've had a number of thoughts about what to do. My main idea at the moment is just to wait a few days, then start hanging around for something like an hour daily at most.

The interesting thing is my reaction to this self-imposed online-pause. While eating dinner, I usually hang around on IRC. I watched a TV series episode (Rome season finale, if you must know :) instead - I'm not likely to be constructive anyway - and that was fun. After seeing something that annoyed me, I immediately reached for alt-tab to talk about it on IRC. Only after seeing screen tell me there was no such window did I remember what I'd decided to do. Also, twice within 4 minutes of this episode did get bored, and paused the thing to say hi to IRC. After doing the dishes for 5 minutes I walked over to IRC to check up. Only after quitting did I realize what a humongous timesink this has been for me!

I don't think I'll come back any time soon. I'll just let Vilde know about this blog and I'll be off again. I CAN QUIT ANY TIME! :)

We're on our way home...

2006-07-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

We're going hoooooome...

I wish there was a way to backdate blogs... I write blogs on my palmtop and just don't get around to copying them to my real blog. I have a lengthy post about my trip to JPL and other things. I'll get that posted later, but it'll look funny and jumbled.

So, I'm currently at Mexico City airport, and I've gotten almost everything with me. Somehow, I regret buying all those 78s... They're heavy.

Anyway, the flights are going according to plan, and I have my ticket, or at least a brochure for the airline, here, or somewhere, someplace. I have yet to find any free wireless here, and I am instead spending my remaining US dollars on a net kiosk here. I'm running out of time now, however, so I'll have to cut this short. I'm off to spend a few unproductive hours walking around in a circle singing to myself.

Also, uh, my Skolelinux shell just died... that ain't good. I hope it's back by the time I am.

Can't wait to get started on NODAF things.

Back from Vegas!

2006-07-13T01:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm writing this as we're about to leave Vegas, sitting by a video blackjack machine, watching the others gamble. It's been a lot of fun, and very interesting - and I've now Been To Vegas™ - and I only have a few regrets. The biggest one by far is missing the Penn&Teller stage show at the Rio. I'm not usually much for magic shows, but they seem to be very interesting people, and probably guys that would be likely to put on an interesting show.

The Bellagio, the hotel that we stayed at, was very beautiful - I daresay it was one fo the best, if not the best, hotels on the Strip. The swimming pools, though unimpressive, were the best I'd seen of all the hotels there. Hotel swimming pools had recently been crippled by a law enforcing that no hotel swimming pool may exceed 4 feet of depth. Bummer. Still, the pool was certainly enough to cool me down. The sun here in the daytime can be truly evil.

The decoration inside was interesting, and the famed fountain was great. By the lobby, there was a conservatory with many interesting and beautiful things, including rare and beautiful tropical flowers, scale reproductions of American historical buildings, and a model railway running around the parts of the conservatory.

I bought a 24-hour pass for the Las Vegas Monorail, and made good use of it looking around at a lot of the casinos. Off the top of my head, I went through the MGM Grand, Caesar's Palace, the Mirage, the Paris, New York New York, and the Venetian.

MGM Grand had a beautiful and fascinating lion habitat inside the Casino. The lions looked pretty happy and didn't seem to mind, or even notice, being put on show. They seemed to hold genuine affection for their trainers, frequently coming over to snuggle them, just like an overgrown attention-starved domestic cat.

The Mirage had a white lion habitat just by one of the entrances. The lion there at the moment looked pretty bored, and repeatedly tried to open the door going back into the main habitat. Not desperately unhappy, just.. bored.

There was also a dolphin pool and more lions there, but that was behind a gate carrying an entrance fee and I had no money on me. Behind the lobby reception desk there was a 20.000 gallon fish tank with a lot of beautiful tropical fish, much like the ones I swam with in Thailand, except far more of them. The MGM Grand had an even more impressive fish tank in one of their cafes, which I did get some video of.

The Venetian was pretty fun, with a long indoor canal (Hmm, didn't know that the Venetian canals of the time were tiled and chlorinated...), shops on each side of the canal, and some surprisingly convincingly European buildings. I think the buildings were about as beautiful as you could get with a plastic "sky". Some of the decorations were very beautiful.

The Paris was interesting. I got about halfway up the "Eiffel tower", to the restaurant, before I was told to leave, as the restaurant was just closing. New York New York was interesting, but nothing inside that made it stand out from the crowd. By the time I'd gotten there I was pretty tired anyway.

I'm very excited about the NODAF wiki site, and can't wait to get back online to check out how much progress has been made. My original rationale for putting up a wiki as a mere vehicle for expediting organizational work, like hte Kai Paulsen warehouse article where people sign up for get-togethers, but the more I think about it, the more I see it as sort of a Norwegian informal mix of Wikipedia, folklore.org, and who knows what else, a generic information repository where people can put information on computing history which is not directly suitable for a wikipedia-style fact sheet, but nonetheless contains intersting and relevant, or maybe just funny, information. My decision - if you can call it that, as it was the default and I saw no reason to change it in what was then only a sandbox for me and Thomas Martinsen - to license the wiki contents under the GFDL, is good for this, as Wikipedians like myself can extract information, or even page-long paragraphs directly from the site and insert it into the more formal Wikipedia, reaching a broader audience.

By now, I must inform the reader, we are in the car, heading out of Vegas. We're going past casinos I recognize from "Honey, I Blew Up The Kids", most notably the Flamingo - Other interesting sights include the world's largest gifft shop, and the Stratosphere. Wow! The world's largest gift shop! I wonder if they have souvernirs for the World's Largest Gift Shop? A miniature largest gift shop? A decal? Also, I think the Stratosphere misses the stratosphere by a few kilometers. But I'm bringing everyone down - back to NODAF.

I've gotten nothing but positive feedback on the wiki, so if I get no objections from the board of NODAF, I'll ask Thomas Gramstad to set up nodaf.no to point to tech's server until we can get a more permanent host for the site.

I also hope people will like the photo gallery. I'm uploading a lot of stuff that I'd uploaded to the old site, but forgotten to regenerate the HTML and thumbnails (Argh!), and also stuff I just never got around to uploading, like the NORD-1 at the Nautical Museum, and a few meetings. This gallery, unlike the wiki, can only be edited by users, and authorized ones at that. The wiki has an image upload feature as well, and it's the one you'll have to use if you're embedding images into an article - it is, however, very cumbersome to use with large series of images.

Things I want to get around to doing include improving the introduction to SINTRAN, trying to cut out some of the stumbling blocks that I hit upon when I first got my ND-120, and maybe talking others into doing the same with other systems with which I'm less acquainted, like RSX-11M (I could RTFM, I guess... but it's around 2 shelf-meters of M to FR...), VMS, TOPS-10, KP/M, NORD-TSS, etc. I'd also like to elaborate on my introduction to the wiki concept. I suspect our most valuable potential contributors would not be familiar with the concept.

So now, almost in LA, I'm finishing off this blog post with the realization that I have no way of transferring this to the PC. Hrmph.
I typed it off the palmtop. I was bored. :)

A second item!

2006-07-09T01:15:00.000-07:00

Wow, I actually got around to posting a second post! A persistent blogger is me!

So, today I'm going to Las Vegas, in four hours - staying at the Bellagio. I'll try to get some pictures of it.

In other news, I got so into editing wikis that I decided to try setting up one of my own wiki, for use with NODAF. So naturally, I did what any resourceful geek would do - I got someone else to do it. Everybody's friend Thomas Martinsen, AKA "tech", set up a wiki page and a PHP gallery page and I got to writing on it. By now it's got all the content the old page had, so I'm working on a mail to the board suggesting we point our main address there. The page is at http://tnet.no/nodaf.

I also find it very amusing that the spell check on this page, blogspot.com, recognizes neither the words "blog", "blogging", or "blogger".

My First.. uh, well second, sort of... Blog!

2006-07-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I could at least try to give this one a meaningful attempt.

I hope to be blogging about relevant and irrelevant stuff I may encounter in my life here.

First off I can mention that I've been doing some work on ND-related Wikipedia pages lately...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PED
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USER-ENVIRONMENT (I haven't started this one yet..)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLANC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINTRAN (Needs some work and a restructuring...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORD-10 (Not really a recent one, but I'm still quite proud of it... :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NODAF (Badly needs improvement)

Perhaps I'll later do a Norwegian NODAF wikipedia page too.

These are only the ones off the top of my head. I'd appreciate anyone with ND knowhow getting a bit more into Wikipedia, and maybe editing or creating new pages.