We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • something went wrong

    Something went very wrong when my Thinkpad booted up:

    Pretty, though.

  • actually quite happy to see this

    Dammit, E-UAE is fiddly to set up. I finally got hard disk images working, by doing something like this:

    1. For an 160MB image, create the blank file: dd if=/dev/zero of=blank160.hdf bs=1M count=160
    2. Add the file specification to your .uaerc, something like: hardfile2=rw,DH2:$(FILE_PATH)/Amiga/blank160.hdf,32,1,2,512,-12,
      (Yeah, linux e-uae doesn’t allow you to add in HDF images. Annoying.)
    3. I found I had to put the amiga system executable FastFileSystem in with my ROM path. Your path may vary – look at the UAE log output for something like ‘RDB: fakefilesys, trying to load ...‘, and see where you want it to go.
    4. Pop into UAE, start a CLI or Shell, and issue this command: format DRIVE DH2: NAME hd160 FFS QUICK

    I’ve updated the drive images from yesterday, so you probably won’t need to format them.

  • amiga: blank hdf images

    I’m trying to get running an Amiga again, to see if I can remember what was rocking my computer world twenty years ago. I want to run that code, swim with the Fish disks, and generally muck about with what was my life back then.

    Emulation is interesting. Variants of UAE (which came with an Amiga Forever CD set I bought in 1997 or so) rule the roost. Quality is variable – on Windows, WinUAE is very comprehensive, even making grink-gronk noises as the floppy spins. On Mac, E-UAE is really not worth the bother kinda okay – it doesn’t want to emulate anything above a 68000, and falls over quite often but has decent sound. On Linux, it’s plain and stable, and I happen to have an old Thinkpad going spare I can dedicate to emulation.

    I would have expected all the old disk images to be readily available for download. It seems that the current owners of the Amiga name (this week, at least) still cling on to the old IP as if it has real value. The Amiga games market (which was the market) basically collapsed with Commodore in 1994. I really wonder who is buying the PowerPC based, vastly overpriced new hardware? For now, I’m relying on good old-fashioned torrent sites for my data.

    I want to emulate two machines; the A500 I had for all my cringe-worthy magazine writing running Workbench 1.3, and a fast thing maxed out with all the processors and RAM I never had, probably running 3.1. While I did have Amiga[D]os 2.04 (can’t remember if they’d dropped the D by then), it wasn’t the main focus of my interest by then.

    The biggest problem I have is getting hard disk image, even blank ones. UAE is picky. Here are a couple I formatted under WinUAE, both blank.

    I wonder if they’ll work under 1.3?

    Update: yes, they should. I formatted them FFS under AmigaDos 1.3.

  • well, they did ask

    BizRate had a survey regarding Ticketmaster‘s service. Here’s what I wrote:

    Just whose convenience is your 25% “convenience fee” for? You guys are a scandalous monopoly. I’ve had better customer service from the Mafia – at least they’re family-run.


  • another hypotrochoid

    Had another one lurking on my desktop:

    and here’s the gnuplot code to generate it:

    set terminal svg size 400,400
 set output "fig-spiro11.svg"
 set size ratio -1
 set nokey
 set noxtics
 set noytics
 set noborder
 set parametric
#
 x(t)=(R-r)*cos(t) + p*cos((R-r)*t/r)
 y(t)=(R-r)*sin(t) - p*sin((R-r)*t/r)
#
 R=100.0; r=-37.0; p=50.0
 set samples 8001
#
 plot [t=0:320*pi] x(t),y(t)

  • some svg hypotrochoids

    Just by messing around with the simple gnuplot script in the article Plotting the spirograph equations with ‘gnuplot’, I made:

  • still the coolest thing ever

    Got E-UAE running properly from a hard disk image last night. Tried to get the configuration close to what I had on my old 3MB A500.

    This is what it sounds like.

  • something went wrong

    At the automatic podcast today, something went very wrong with the announcements. Hear what I mean.

    I was playing with flite‘s new voices, and I think the command line went up the chute.

  • TTC Trip Planner

    The TTC Trip Planner seems to be live, after some digging by the Spacing folks.

    It works with a bunch of small browsers I’ve thrown at it – w3m, mobile Safari, Blackberry – so I know I can use it from a handheld. Yay!

    Only minor annoyance is that for subway journeys, it only shows the direction of travel in the summary (“YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA TOWARDS DOWNSVIEW” – and yes, in all-caps) and you have to click through to the details to find out which station you need to get off at.

    It does seem to get deeply confused at Kennedy Station; I live just south of Kennedy, and it expects me to take the 43 Kennedy north to the junction to Eglinton, then walk south. Everyone here uses Transway Crescent …

    Update: how could I have missed the prettier and much less capslockier MyTTC?

    Update 2: The official TTC site appears to have moved here http://www3.ttc.ca/Trip_planner/index.jsp?useplanner=true. Let’s see if it still works with mobile devices.

  • old computer

    I got my Amiga A500 twenty years ago …

  • implicit markup: easy to read, hard to parse

    I don’t usually ponder about other people’s blog postings, but Jeff Atwood’s Responsible Open Source Code Parenting reminded me of some of the old wars that the used to be when I was a markup head. Jeff writes about his frustration that John Gruber’s Markdown text-to-html filter:

    1. hasn’t been updated for some time
    2. doesn’t quite do exactly what Jeff’s users at Stack Overflow want
    3. appears to have any changes in its behaviour from v1.0.1 strenuously vetoed by Gruber himself.

    Markdown is nice in that you can write screeds of text, and it does almost exactly what you’d expect. The markup doesn’t get in the way, usually. The difficulty arises when implicit markup (indented lines for quoted text, bulleted lists, highlights) has to give way to explicit (cross-references, code samples). Explicit markup is ugly, but sometimes, you’ve got to do it. Complex intent requires complex modes of communication, and sometimes plain text just hasn’t the bandwidth. [As an aside, there was a hilarious lengthy recurring episode on John Mark Ockerbloom‘s late bookpeople mailing list where a user (mercilessly skewered here)  insisted that they could write a general Gutenberg plain-text converter that would re-create typeset quality in an e-book reader with no explicit markup, and that XML was completely unnecessary and ill-conceived. The un-markup language, called zen markup language (said user had an aversion to the shift key) lives on only in a single website: the home of z.m.l. As for XML, its executive assistant had no comment on the matter.] Looking at Markdown, it looks like Gruber’s moved on from it. He made a 1.0.1 which did what he wanted. The code’s there to change if anyone needs it. I understand his frustration at people wanting to make changes and still call it Markdown; I’d be annoyed if I had text which I thought was in one format suddenly not be accepted, or do something unexpected. Seriously, that’s almost as bad as ‘deprecated‘. [At least Gruber didn’t go on a deletion rampage, like (admittedly smaller-time) erstwhile CHDK stalwart Barney Fife did when he was slighted in a forum. Looks like almost everything he contributed to CHDK has been removed, including some very useful control scripts and explanations.] Personally, when I need to make text to web conversions, I still use txt2html and a bunch of shell and Perl glue to feed to tidy. It’s on its third maintainer, doesn’t do much, but does it simply. And I’m pretty simple that way.

    Update: see also On my increasing exasperation with Markdown.

  • image rollover in wordpress, no plugins required

    I’m seeing quite a bit of traffic to this post. I suppose I should explain that this was a quick hack to see if I could get image rollover to work on a friend’s wordpress.com hosted blog (and no, I couldn’t). This little example doesn’t do preloading, either, and I really don’t have any intention to develop this further. Sorry …

    <img title="this" onmouseover="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/that.png';" onmouseout="this.src='http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png';" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/this.png" alt="" width="192" height="116" />

    This does not work on wordpress.com hosted blogs; it gets stripped out.

    Update: You probably want to install the plugin Ultimate TinyMCE, which does the job rather well.

  • Recoverfab – for all your memory card recovery needs

    NB to readers: I am not the Recoverfab guy. I can’t help you recover images.

    A friend has baby pictures on an SD card, which said baby later found and used as an inappropriate teething aid. Yeah, yeah, I know …

    He asked me to try to get the pictures back. I couldn’t read the card. It even fried one of my card readers. I tried RescuePRO, PhotoRec and PhotoRescue: no dice. Downtown Camera returned it as unreadable (and declined to charge me anything).

    So I asked metafilter, and someone suggested Recoverfab in Germany. I sent the card off last week, and waited …

    Got an e-mail at 06:30 this morning that they’d received the card, with a latest completion date of a week. Before 09:00, received a second e-mail with a link to picture samples and payment options. Have paid (not cheap – €89, but they got results) and am awaiting the FTP link.

    Many thanks to Leopold Hiersche for his excellent results.

  • perhaps a slightly easier way to make SD cards bootable for CHDK under OS X

    Now that CHDK has a working beta in the source tree for my Canon PowerShot SD790is, I actually have to prepare SD cards for it. The Bootable SD card – OS X instructions seem a bit contrived, so I took a look at the linux instructions, and modified them accordingly. These instructions should work for FAT16-formatted SD cards of 2GB capacity and under. It will not work for SDHC cards, which are generally formatted to FAT32.

    This is all command-line only for here on in. It seems to work. Please note that you will be modifying raw file systems with root permissions here; there is no safety net. If you b0rk your main hard drive, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

    Firstly, you’re going to have to find out where the SD card in mounted. Do this with:
    df
    I got:

    Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   487463200 318749896 168201304    66%    /
devfs                222       222         0   100%    /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%    /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%    /home
/dev/disk2s1     3969280      3328   3965952     1%    /Volumes/CANON_DC

    There are three important concepts to note when looking at the mounted card:

    1. The mount point (or volume) – in this case /Volumes/CANON_DC. This is the location that you see in Finder when moving files around.
    2. The filesystem – here /dev/disk2s1. This is the partition on the disk, arranged according to a certain formatting scheme like MS-DOS FAT16.
    3. The disk device – which for me is /dev/disk2. This is the disk device itself, and it may contain several filesystems.

    Your locations for these three could well be different, so please substitute your values.

    You’ll need to unmount the device, as writing to a raw filesystem while the OS thinks it has control often results in hilariously unexpected results. I used the OS X-specific command

    diskutil unmount /Volumes/CANON_DC

    You should get a message like Volume CANON_DC on disk2s1 unmounted. Now you need to write the boot instruction:

    echo -n BOOTDISK | sudo dd bs=1 count=8 seek=64 of=/dev/disk2s1

    This will prompt you for your password.

    If you need to, you can remount the filesystems on the card with

    diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk2

    (Note that we used the disk name here, not the filesystem. If there were several partitions on the disk, this command would mount all of them that it could. It’s also kinda handy for remounting USB devices that you’ve accidentally ejected from Finder.)

    Update: Knowing a difficulty getting the firmware update method of getting CHDK to work on a Mac? Running a Leopard or newer machine? Then you need to learn all about Apple’s quarantine attribute and how to remove it with xattr: FAQ/Mac – Still having trouble?.

  • no ironic dying from dysentery, either

    Oregon Trail

    … and here’s me never played it before, too. You can play it too, at Virtual Apple ][.

  • this document has layers

    Never noticed this tiny icon in Adobe Acrobat Reader:

    layers

    Looks kinda weird when enlarged:

    layers

  • i want my svg

    Look, SVG has been the cool graphics format since 2001. And while WordPress now supports a bunch more embed formats, you’d think it’d work. Nope.

    Even to upload an SVG file, I have to bypass WordPress’s built in whitelist using PJW Mime Config, and manually add support for image/svg+xml. Otherwise, it’s refused as an insecure file. (All my files are quite well adjusted, I’ll have you know.)

    Say if I want to embed this SVG image. I’d probably want to do something like:

    <embed type="image/svg+xml" width="100" title="ford_script_fnord-plain" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg" />

    But this doesn’t end up being what the final code says:

    <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="100" height="100" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="src" value="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100" height="100" src="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg"></embed></object>

    If I’d wanted Flash, I’d have asked for it. Do What I Mean, Little Computer!

    Update (after the comment below): Okay, last try:

    <object type="image/svg+xml" width="220" height="72" title="ford_script_fnord-plain" data="http://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ford_script_fnord-plain.svg" />

    Yay, that sorta works – but it doesn’t scale the image. You know what the S in SVG stands for? That’s right – Scalable. Doesn’t seem to allow scaling. Kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

  • just in case it gets deleted again …

    sorry, reeling from an edit fight:

    Billy Faier

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Billy Faier is an American banjo player. Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 21 1930[1], his family moved to Woodstock, NY in 1945[2], and now resides in Marathon, Texas. He, along with Pete Seeger, was one of the early proponents of the banjo during the mid-20th century American folk music revival.

    Active in the Washington Square Park folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1940s, he recorded two albums for Riverside Records, The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957) and Travelin’ Man (1958)[3]. In 1973, he recorded Banjo for John Fahey‘s Takoma label.

    [edit] Selected Discography

    In 2009, Faier decided to make much of his out of print and unreleased material available on his website.

    • The Art of the Five-String Banjo (1957 – with Frank Hamilton)
    • Travelin’ Man (1958)
    • The Beast of Billy Faier (1964 – with John Sebastian)
    • Banjo (1973)
    • Banjos, Birdsong And Mother Earth (1987 – with John Sebastian and Gilles Malkine)

    [edit] References

    [edit] External links

    source:

    
'''Billy Faier''' is an American banjo player. Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 21 1930<ref>{{cite web|url=http://web.archive.org/web/20071111171835/http://www.billyfaier.com/
|accessdate=2009-12-19
|title=Billy Faier - The Five String Banjo
|date=2006-08-07
|description=Billy Faier. Born in Brooklyn, New York on Dec. 21, l930.  Moved to Woodstock, New York in l945 with family. Started playing banjo, guitar, and singing folk songs at seventeen, in 1947. Recorded for Riverside Records, Elektra Records, Tradition Records, and many other labels over the years.
|GENERATOR=Microsoft FrontPage 6.0
|keywords=billy faier, billie faier, banjo billy, five string banjo, the beast of billy faier, banjo, bille faier banjo, billy faier musician, Folk Music, Guitar; Woodstock, New York folk music, Newport Folk Festival, Berkeley Folk Festival, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Kerrville Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, billy fair, famous billy the banjo player, billie fair, www.billyfaier.com, banjo billy faier
|rating=General
|robots=All
}}</ref>, his family moved to Woodstock, NY in 1945<ref>{{cite web|url=http://billyfaier.com/
|accessdate=2009-12-19
|title=Billy Faier - The Five String Banjo
|date=2009-12-10
|description=Billy Faier. Born in Brooklyn, New York on Dec. 21, l930.  Moved to Woodstock, New York in l945 with family. Started playing banjo, guitar, and singing folk songs at seventeen, in 1947. Recorded for Riverside Records, Elektra Records, Tradition Records, and many other labels over the years.
|GENERATOR=Microsoft FrontPage 4.0
|keywords=billy faier, billie faier, banjo billy, five string banjo, the beast of billy faier, banjo, billy faier banjo, billy faier musician, Folk Music, Guitar; Woodstock, New York folk music, Newport Folk Festival, Berkeley Folk Festival, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Kerrville Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, billy fair, famous billy the banjo player, billie fair, www.billyfaier.com, banjo billy faier
|rating=General
|robots=All
}}</ref>, and now resides in Marathon, Texas. He, along with [[Pete Seeger]], was one of the early proponents of the banjo during the mid-20th century [[American folk music revival]].

Active in the [[Washington Square Park]] folk scene in [[Greenwich Village]] from the late 1940s, he recorded two albums for [[Riverside Records]], ''The Art of the Five-String Banjo'' (1957) and ''Travelin' Man'' (1958)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.wirz.de/music/faierfrm.htm
|title=Billy Faier Discography
|accessdate=2009-12-19
|date=2004-01-31
|ROBOTS=NOINDEX
}}</ref>. In 1973, he recorded ''Banjo'' for [[John Fahey (musician)|John Fahey]]'s [[Takoma Records|Takoma]] label.

== Selected Discography ==

In 2009, Faier decided to make much of his out of print and unreleased material available on his [http://billyfaier.com/ website].

* ''The Art of the Five-String Banjo'' (1957 - with [[Frank Hamilton (musician)|Frank Hamilton]])
* ''Travelin' Man'' (1958)
* ''The Beast of Billy Faier'' (1964 - with [[John Sebastian]])
* ''Banjo'' (1973)
* ''Banjos, Birdsong And Mother Earth'' (1987 - with John Sebastian and [[Gilles Malkine]])

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
* [http://billyfaier.com/ Billy Faier's website]
* [http://www.wirz.de/music/faierfrm.htm Billy Faier discography] (with some errors and omissions).
* [http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=102378 Billy Faier] at the Internet Broadway Database.
* [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/f/Faier,Billy.html Billy Faier Collection] at The Southern Folklife Collection, [[University of North Carolina]] libraries.
* [http://archives.nodepression.com/author/billy-faier/ Articles by Billy Faier] in [[No Depression (magazine)]].
* [http://thebanjoman.com/know-featured-archive.htm Feature on Billy Faier on The Banjo Man]

<!--- Categories --->
{{DEFAULTSORT:Faier, Billy}}
[[Category:American folk musicians]]
[[Category:American folk singers]]
[[Category:American singer-songwriters]]
[[Category:American banjoists]]
[[Category:People from New York City]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Riverside Records artists]]

  • the subtle image editor in WordPress 2.9

    While I still like 1&1, they have a fairly modest hard-coded PHP memory limit. This means that some WordPress plugins will exhaust memory, and fail.
    I’d been wanting to set up Scissors for Catherine‘s blog so she could more easily edit images without having to learn GIMP. But it wouldn’t work, running out of memory at every turn, and trying to set PHP’s memory limit locally cause WordPress to fail completely.
    So I was pleased to see that WordPress 2.9 had an editor built in. The upgrade went smoothly (I don’t miss the days of rm -i *.php and making sure you didn’t vape your config file), but I couldn’t seem to find the editor. (It’s early, I’m old.)

    It’s called up by that quiet little button under the image details:

    Works just fine. It probably zaps all the image metadata (Scissors did), but we’ll see how it goes.

  • nice, slightly amusing, try

    HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!It seems I’m not the only one who got this today.