My friend, Niall, passed away on Saturday – he was just 27 years old and I’m still in shock, I can only imagine what his family is going through and I will keep them in my thoughts and prayers.  I won’t be able to make it to the funeral on Thursday in Waterford, so I think I’ll just remember Niall from happier times, like this one below that is one of the few I can find with the two of us together.  Rest in peace my man, you will be missed.

Level 62 – need to go to bed, but cannot stop………collapse imminent……

Bloody Qwyzzle – SO addictive. Level 58 so far, but they’re taking more and more time

Oh, and Joe may have put up pictures, but I honestly don’t remember much of that night – if my hangover the next day was anything to go by though, I had lots of fun

Well, has been a while, and the reason why was because I have been sick – damn chest infections. This Mucinex Stuff worked a treat in holding it down so that I didn’t need to hit the doctor for anti-biotics though.

Of course, we hit red alert mode in work while I was sick and no doubt the 12 hour days that followed slowed my recovery a bit. I also missed 2 Ireland games – which sux

It seems that chest infections dampen the effects of RRDS also…..

RRDS:
A strange seasonal affliction which causes its victims to get up at un-Godly hours on a Saturday morning and begin drinking as soon as it is legal to do so. Some people with RRDS have even been known to pay $20 up front for the privilege of inflicting this damage upon themselves. The primary gathering place for these individuals in Washington DC (and surrounding areas) is Fadó’s, though they can be found in many dark and secluded buildings huddled around flickering televisions in just about every country in the world. RRDS is thought to be highly contagious, so approach known carriers with extreme caution.

It’s truly amazing how much tinkering time you can have between mammoth data mining queries – I’ve been putting in long hours, but a lot of that stems from waiting around for something to finish. So, from a few posts ago, the list of inactive machines was (with one addition):

• Sun SPARC 20 (bad HD, no mount rails)
• Sun Ultra 60 (bad Graphics? – will not POST)
• HP Kayak (New CPU does not fit – need to mod heatsink)
• SGI Origin 200 (No OS)
• Dell Precision 530 (Bad VRM)
• Dual PIII 1Ghz Fedora Core 4 box (will not POST)
• G4 Cube (Motherboard)

Now the list looks like:

• Sun SPARC 20 (bad HD, no mount rails)
• Sun Ultra 60 (bad Graphics? – will not POST)
• HP Kayak (New CPU does not fit – need to mod heatsink)
• SGI Origin 200 (No OS)
• Dell Precision 530 (Bad VRM)
• Dual PIII 1Ghz Fedora Core 4 box (will not POST)
• G4 Cube (Motherboard)

Not bad – I found some old PIII procs (400 – 550 Mhz) and was able to swap the heatsinks out on the Kayak to allow the PSU to fit into the case. It already had an OS installed, so once that was done it was running within minutes, sweet! The Ultra 60 (mentioned before) just required the NVRAM zapped and is now happily running Solaris 10. The Dual PIII 1Ghz had developed a case of dead graphics card, I swapped that out and all was well.

Using the other spare PIII’s I’ve also upgraded a few dual PII machines to dual PIII – not a huge difference since the clock speeds are not much higher, but should bump their SETI scores a bit.

I really hope someone wins the OSX Contest – that would remove any potential stumbling blocks to owning a Macbook. I think I’ll be pushing to get one from work though, rather than buying myself since I will be due to refresh the old Dell in a little wile. For home I think I’ll wait until they stick the new Intel chips in a Mac Mini, though if they go for a single core I may jump to something else, I don’t fancy Rosetta running single threaded…..

The good news continues on the Ultra 60 front – I picked up a second CPU for $25, so now it has 2 x 360 Mhz Ultra Sparc II w/4MB cache and the total system cost goes up to $100 – still a pretty good deal methinks. That gives the CPU’s a total of 8MB cache – considering that my *upgraded* Amiga 1200 had the same total RAM back in the day, I find that rather weird

Nice to know that I get paid more than the Google Execs. Though my stock package may be worth slightly less

If I did have a decent stock package – I think I’d like a set up like this one. The smallest screen he has there is the same size as my current TV. Definitely time for an upgrade………….

A while back I mentioned that I had managed to get an Ultra 60 for $70. It seemed that the graphics card was crocked, but after hunting around some Sun forums I tried hitting Stop+N to zap the NVRAM.

Voila! It not POSTs just fine and I managed to boot the Solaris 10 installer from the SCSI CD I pulled from the Origin 200 (the Ultra60 did not come with one). Now that it posts, I know what I got for my $70:

• 1 x 360Mhz SPARC Ultra w/4MB L2 Cache ($290)
• 1 GB RAM ($60)
• 18GB SCSI HD ($80)
• Creator 3D Graphics Card ($30)
• PCI Ethernet Card ($20)

So, all in all, not a bad deal really – I’ll do the Sol 10 install tomorrow and we’ll see how it performs.

So, the SGI installation did not go as planned. The IRIX Discs I received did not have the base installation included, they were only for updating. Grrrrr……

I attempted another install of Linux, but it’s pretty painful and I couldn’t get it to a fully functioning state within a couple of days (compiler issues, kernel issues, xfs mounting issues). So that’s the Origin 200 dead until I can get the base install discs.

The list of inactive machines is growing:

• Sun SPARC 20 (bad HD, no mount rails)
• Sun Ultra 60 (bad Graphics? – will not POST)
• HP Kayak (New CPU does not fit – need to mod heatsink)
• SGI Origin 200 (No OS)
• Dell Precision 530 (Bad VRM)
• G4 Cube (Motherboard)

The last two are the most problematic and will probably end up dumped (or on Craigslist). The others I still have hope for though.

On a happier, but perhaps even more geeky note, I successfully loaded the DD-WRT Firmware onto my Linksys WRT54G V2 router and am pleased with the results. I had bricked one of these in the past while flashing, so I was wary of doing it again, but the feature set tempted me back into the fold. I recommend it for anyone using a similar router, especially since you can pick a new one up for $40 on EBay these days