Oh God, this is funny. I may have to buy a t-shirt……
Jan 192006
Tormentron (or Gar as he is more commonly known), wrote to remind me of Trogdor’s 3rd Birthday.
BURNINATE!!
Jan 122006
That Kid From Crumlin recently posted the infamous “swayback” video of one Justin Harmon when he was a little tipsy – believe me it was even better in person. Well, the good news is that the cure just involves tickling his stomach 
Jan 122006
For anyone who reads my geekier posts, you’ll know that I have managed to find an old Origin 200 (though mine is missing the nice blue plastic). My efforts to install Linux on it ultimately failed, though I have since figured out what went wrong while hunting around the Suse Sparc message boards of all things. It turns out that headless installations of Linux go nuts sometimes if you do not remove the mingetty lines in the /etc/inittab file. If you don’t do this, the system refuses to boot and you get errors like this:
INIT: Id “3″ respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Unfortuately, by the time I read this post I had already wiped the SCSI drive I had been using in the Origin 200 for use elsewhere and could not test to see if this would resolve my issues. I had intended to go back and correct the issue with a fresh install but that won’t be happening now….
A friend of mine (former SGI employee) has managed to dig up an old copy of IRIX that will install for me instead. Since it’s an OS I’ve never played around with before I’m happy to use it instead of Linux, plus there are apparently some strange issues on Linux with the Origin 200 processor anyway. I’m currently in the middle of formatting the disk for IRIX now and hopefully will have it up and running before the weekend
Jan 042006
Currently at home, with dial up. So S-L-O-W – am currently looking up Irish broadband providers. It has to be said that with these kind of offerings in the market, no wonder people are sticking with dial up in their droves. It’s like going back in time to the infancy of broadband markets in other countries. Low speed DSL offerings, limited cable availibility, usage caps on everything – ick.
Anyways, besides that all is well, basically I’ve been drinking, sleeping and eating while not going online or thinking about work (much) though not necessarily in that order. Once we get back to the US I’ll post some pics from Jen’s new digital camera
Dec 192005
Nuff said………credit must go to Jenny for the idea though.
Had to zoom in, for full tongue effect
Dec 182005
As Promised, I have the pictures available from our travels this year. They are available in the links on the right, but here they are for this post too (in chronological order):
I think my favourite pic has to be this one:
Taken on Fremont Avenue in Seattle, it shows one of the stranger landmarks in the city, a giant bronze statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin! Given the pose and the height difference I think it looks like Jen is going for a walk with her Dad, though Jen’s Dad doesn’t really bear any resemblance to Lenin
Dec 052005
The $70 dollar Ultra 60 I mentioned arrived today – it looks like the graphics card in it has seen better days, though it does power on and the HD spins up which is a bonus. I’ll hook up a null modem cable to it and see if I can tip into it to discover the issues. The graphics cards aren’t that expensive so it may still work out as a good deal.
Even better news on the machines front is that a friend of mine may be giving me a fully loaded SGI Indy2 – for the cost of lunch (though he didn’t say where). It should come pre-loaded with Irix 6.5 and a bunch of nice software for me to play with not to mention a nice 13″ LCD from SGI. Sweet! All I asked him was if he could lay hands on some old Irix disks for me (he used to work for SGI) so I could rescue an old Origin 200 that refuses to load Linux.
Next post will include me putting up the Vegas and Seattle pictures I swear. For now, be satisfied with this one. Oh yes, I look H-O-T.
Dec 012005
Joe mentions that we advised him to talk with a Scottish accent in order to be (more) irresistable. Of course that was inspired by our recent viewing of Cho Chang in the latest Harry Potter movie. I’ll admit I was a bit worried because she looks quite young in the film to be talking about how attractive she/her accent is, but IMDB assures me that the actress that plays her – Katie Leung – is in fact 18. Hell, in a few years that’ll make her eligible using the Half Your Age Plus Seven Rule
Dec 012005
The SPARC 20 I found has been hooked up and installed with Solaris 9 (Solaris 10 does not support 32-Bit SPARC). The process was a bit painful because the SCSI drive I was using was not pre-formatted. The installer (very unhelpfully) told me that there were “no disks present”. I dutifully swapped out for another drive only to run into the same issue again. It turns out that the installer really means that it cannot see the drive because it has not been “labelled”. The format -e command took care of that little problem and after some considerable time the install was successful (old CD drives do not make for fast installs).
Eventually I booted it up and logged in but had no Ethernet connectivity – it seems the reason this box had been left for dead is because the onboard Ethernet is dead. Nevermind, EBay has provided me with an SBUS combo card that will do the trick. The cost? All of $7.95
Once that is sorted I will have my first SPARC based system up and running properly. It’s a dual CPU (1MB L2 Cache each) machine with 256MB of RAM and a decent sized 10k RPM SCSI drive so it should certainly be usable. On another Sun related note I managed to pick up an Ultra 60 (as is) for $70, including shipping! Even if there’s nothing more than a CPU and a motherboard, that’s a steal – thank the Lord for Ebay. So there may be some Ultra SPARC fun on the way too.
Besides that, on the more coventional Intel front, I am working on upgrading a bunch of machines to PIII’s from PII’s to see if they’re worth keeping around. I also have a HP Kayak that I’m attempting to get running but the new CPUs I got for it are proving a tough fit. If anyone knows where I can get a tool that removes Slot 1 heatsinks, please let me know
On a SETI related note, I currently have two 3 Ghz Pentium based machines running Seti@Home. One is a “true” dual processor with Hyperthreading running Linux. The other is a Pentium D (dual core) without Hyperthreading running on windows. So far the two machines are runnning neck and neck. I would have expected the true dual CPU machine to have the edge given the HT advantage, so I’m not sure whether this is a damning endictment of SETI@Home performance on Linux, or just evidence that HT doesn’t really give you anything extra for SETI.
The next post will be less geeky and have all the nice pics from the West Coast and as little geekiness as I can manage – I promise.
