Month: November 2003

how to run a modern OS on steam-powered hardware

I am updating the Darwin installation on my circa 1995 Mac PowerPC 9500, for no other reason than to see how complicated the process is. XPostFacto exists to make this possible, so perhaps documenting My Struggle with this will be of use to someone else.

The hardware isn’t supported in Darwin releases since the last 10.1 release (10.1.5) prior to Jaguar, with the corresponding Darwin version number being 5.5.

Installing the OS itself was easy: XPostFacto is a control panel in OS 9 and worked like a champ. Next up, I am trying to install DarwinPorts, since a. the Darwin team have a relationship with Apple and b. I have tried fink in the past and found it wanting in some ways. But as things are working out, I need to use fink to get DarwinPorts installed: tcl is what DarwinPorts uses (FreeBSD‘s portupgrade uses ruby, and fink uses perl) and doesn’t exist in my old version of Darwin. Looks like I’ll have to build it.
Continue reading “how to run a modern OS on steam-powered hardware”

virtual reminders

Wired News: Gizmo Puts Cards on the Table

Researchers in Dublin, Ireland, have developed a way to help people who are far away from their loved ones feel a little closer, using a pair of kitchen tables equipped with radio tag readers, projectors and computers running on Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

The kitchen table is the holding place for keys, wallets and pocketbooks at the end of the day. It’s also the place where many families gather for meals and coffee breaks. By allowing distant friends and family members to participate in these activities, albeit virtually, researchers at MIT Media Lab Europe say they can provide an added sense of context for those who are communicating.

I can’t get this story out of my head. This came out around the same time David Pogue was extolling the virtues of iSight and iChat . . . .

Only connect . . . . we keep finding more ways to do just that, and that can’t be bad.

localfeeds working

Localfeeds is now working for me. I got a note from the proprietor explaining where the problem was.

I fixed the problem you were having with Localfeeds– it was partially my fault and partially yours.

Even though I don’t advertise the fact, Localfeeds reads geo.position as well as GeoURL-style ICBM. Since your geo.position comes after the ICBM, it was overriding the perfectly valid ICBM with an invalid geo.position.

Your geo.position tag is invalid because the tag is not supposed to include the compass directions “N” and “W” , as you can see with these examples:
http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html

What I did to make this work is make it so my script does not read geo.position if ICBM has already been defined.

I think I have a mish-mash of stuff defined in the head section of my pages, using information from different sources. But for now, it seems to be working. Thanks, Ross.

another clever use of RSS

DarwinPorts Home

If you’ve ever been on a mailing list for CVS commits, you’ll appreciate this.

There are currently a few hundred completed and usable ports, with more being added on a regular basis. You can track recently added ports by subscribing to the cvs-darwinports-all mailing list, or by using our RSS feed of recent commits.

I’m experimenting with OpenDarwin on my old PPC 9500: I can only run 1.4.1, the moral equivalent of OS X 10.1, since Jaguar and later releases are built for G3 and G4 hardware.

XPostFacto is required, of course. Works like a champ . . . .

blast from the past

www.spiv.com postcard rack

Send a postcard to a friend

I had no idea this stuff was in the Wayback Machine’s repository . . . .

I’m glad to see this: it was a fun time, back in 1996 (!?) when these kids (I use that word advisedly: they were all younger than me and tons smarter) were creating innovative web content before the interweb was ready for it . . . . . .

They’ve all gone on to do great things elsewhere.
Continue reading “blast from the past”

blocking (slow) adservers

If adserving companies didn’t run such slow webserving plants that they didn’t block pages from loading, I wouldn’t mind so much. But I do, and I can make this problem go away.

nidump hosts / > hosts
vi hosts
edit the file to have adservers synonymous with the loopback interface:
127.0.0.1 localhost ad.doubleclick.net ar.atwola.com
niload -m -v hosts / < hosts

what’s the link between java mavens and Mac OS?

James Gosling: on the Java road…

Also in 1990 an arcade-style 2D game called OIDS was released on the Apple Macintosh. I developed a real addiction to it and spent many hours going back and forth between writing the java (then oak) compiler/VM and playing oids. There’s something deeply fascinating about gameplaying that unlocks mental logjams. I’m sure that there are many PhD thesis topics here. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find that a new release of oids came out for OS X just recently.

First Bill Joy and now James Gosling . . . . .

Obviously, Solaris is not desktop-friendly enough, if these guys don’t use it. But for them both to using OS X is interesting.

What appeals to them? They could install cygwin and get a commandline on Win32 platforms, or run VMWare to get what they need/want. But instead they use the OS made by the company long decried as making toasters.

I wondered when Java first came out if it was partly an attempt to add a UI to UNIX/Solaris, not as opaque as Classic Mac OS, but in addition to the terminal and X.

I guess this old fortune quote is obsolete now:

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac
(and nobody cares about it).
— Bill Joy 6/21/85

more on marriage and commitment

My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? | Metafilter

What’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage? Dahlia Lithwick has an interesting piece in Slate commenting on the real threats to marriage in light of Massachusetts Supreme Court’s declaration that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution.