Moved my blog

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fnocbed

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!

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

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!

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.

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.

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.