Site News & Updates
Wednesday, 22nd March 2006:
Today I'm both annoyed and elated: on the negative side (yup, it's been that sorta day) the harddrive in my laptop is still reporting SMART warnings that it is not long for this life, and my CPU is stuck. Stuck, as in the 1.7GHz processor doesn't think it can go faster than 680MHz according to the CPUfreq instrumentation. This itself wouldn't be so bad, but I'm about 8 hours into an OpenOffice build. With the processor running at full speed, it'll finish within 6 hours... goodness only knows when this got stuck, and so how much longer it has to go.
What really impressed me today was Linux 2.6.15 (I keep wanting to type 6.5.15 - too much IRIX ;) - previous attempts to suspend my laptop always led to a blank screen and loss of data. Today I decided to be reckless and try suspending to disk, from X, without unloading the USB or Firewire drivers. Guess what? Despite having removed power and turned off the wireless card since suspending the machine, it resumed. Perfectly. Back into X. With no corruption whatsoever. And without disturbing the OpenOffice build at all! This is the most impressive display of just-works-ness I've seen from Linux in a long time ;)
Thursday, 23rd February 2006:
Yesterday my laptop (a Sony PCG-Z1RSP) threw a DMA error on the home partition, and the SMART monitors show that it now has an unreadable sector. This is probably worse than it sounds, as all modern drives keep an amount of unused space specifically for remapping bad blocks. The fact that the drive is actually reporting them probably means this area is full. The drive is also reporting a time to failure of just under 4500 hours. I wouldn't mind, except that I've already had to replace the drive in this machine twice already, and the current drive is less than a year old! Every drive has been a Hitachi (formerly IBM) TravelStar, so I'd surmise that either this particular laptop eats drives, or Hitachi drives really are way more trouble than they're worth :(
I've been playing with mediawiki a little recently to migrate this page away from the current system, where I just add to the top of an HTML file! Mainly, though, I'd like to use it as the basis for www.hardware-review.mine.nu.
google have just launched two new services: Google Analytics and Google Pages. The former is a very nice statistics-gathering service: It will show where visitors come from on a world-map, and has a really cool mode where it overlays graphs showing click-rates overlaid on links on the original site. It's just a shame that it uses Flash, and so won't work on my Octane (which only has Flash 5)
Google Pages looks very smart indeed, and seems to be directly aimed (and indeed named after) Apple's new iLife '06 app. When I finally get a Powerbook (of some description) I'll do a comparison of the two...
Monday, 20th February 2006:
I've set up a new site at www.hardware-review.mine.nu which will, once I can populate it, will hold random thoughts and reviews of the neat gadgets and toys I come across. The first major piece should be on my Garmin Nuvi 300 - and the things that Garmin UK won't tell you about it...
Christmas Day 2005!
I'll do a more compelete write-up later, but interesting and shiny gadget-type presents include:
- A Garmin Nuvi 300 GPS in-car GPS system;
- A Nexto CF USB and Firewire external hard-disc enclosure with Compact Flash backup facilities (Yay! No more lugging a laptop on Holiday or spending a small fortune on MemorySticks! Shame that I need a MemoryStick adapter still, though...)
Initial though? "Hmm... it's bigger than it looked"- A windowsill cactus-growing kit called an Oddpod (surely not another Apple-branded digital music player namesake? :)
Tuesday, 20th September 2005:
It's been a while since I updated this new page, but the things that have changed are:
- Gareth, my
littleyoungest brother, has started a year-long placement at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'm hosting his website at www.gazinamerica.mine.nu.
Gareth now has an Apple Powerbook ;)- My younger brother, Peter, has graduated from Manchester University after 4 years with a 2:i Masters Degree in Aerospace and Aeronautical Engineering. To celebrate he bought himself a really smart T-reg. Peugeot 306. He is currently looking for work in the aviation industry...
- I've been accepted onto SGI's Developer Plus programme, which means that I now have access to the MIPSpro compiler suite and IRIX releases and patches. Yay!
- To reduce the bandwidth used by people downloading from Nekochan's software archives, I wrote nekosync to automatically download and unpack only the altered packages, without requiring any additional server software or modification (which is why rsync isn't suitable).
- After having used EnforceRate to enable IRIX to play music without interruption from other applications, I decided that I could improve on its operation: EnforceRate polls the audio system every second, whereas my new ær utility relies on the IRIX Audio EventQueue to select() on state changes - which means no more second-long slowdowns!
Wednesday, 22nd June 2005:
I just arrived back from Dublin, Ireland yesterday. On Sunday there was an R.E.M. concert at Ardgillan Castle - which had the most beautiful views out over the sea behind the main stage. Wonderful, except the (otherwise very friendly) woman on security confiscated the battery from my camera. This would have been less annoying had almost everyone else in the venue seemed to have got through unmolested...
The conert itself, though, was truly excellent: We missed local group The Devlins and Ambulance Ltd., but arrived in plenty of time to see The Zutons and Moby. Included in Moby's set were Lou Reed and The Velvet Undergrounds' "A Walk on the Wild Side", a Billy Idol cover(!), and a stunning rendition of Father Ted's "My Little Horse" ;)
R.E.M.'s set was fantastic, and a great mixture of the old and the new. Included in the set was a three-song dedication to Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma (also covered by the NME). The only track not played at this show was the much-missed "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", which always used to provide the best show finale ever!
What photos I was able to take will be online in my Photo Gallery shortly...
Intermission May - June 2005:
My Octane is now my main desktop at work. During this period I bought a PCI Card Cage, sold the PCI Card Cage along with an the Firewire card, and also sold an O2 and my SGI320 Visual Workstation on eBay. Although IRIX detected Firewire plug and unplug events, it couldn't ever read the disks that were connected. At best, it found a disk but was unable to read the geometry - whilst at worst it couldn't see any devices connected. This is a shame, because I'd have liked to connect some removable storage (or even a Firewire media reader) this way - since IRIX can read both FAT (Windows) and HFS (Apple) filesystems.
Thursday, 28th April 2005:
My Octane arrived today! (What were the chances? :)
To recap: dual 400MHz R12k processors, 2Gb RAM, V10 graphics, 2 × 18Gb 10k SCSI disks. PCI Card Cage arrives tomorrow.
Other than the limitation of not accepting any form of online payment or credit cards, I've got nothing but praise for comtrade - knowledgeable, good communications (in English!) and fast shipping.
Tuesday, 26th April 2005:
SGI have announced the new Prism line - headed by the Prism Desktop. Using the same chassis as the Tezro the basic configuration is, as expected, a 1.3GHz Itanium. The price for this, however, is only $8500. Unfortunately, the Prism is also seen by many to be a successor to HP's zx6000 series of Itanium workstations which had twice the on-board cache, and can now be bought from HP for as little as $1999...
Monday, 25th April 2005:
My new Octane should be here by Thursday!
Me? Impatient?? Nah...
I also bought a PCI Card Cage from the US, so I should be able to get the Octane Firewired-up ;)
In other news, SGI will tomorrow announce the details of their new "Dorado" Itanium-based workstations, which are expected to retain IRIX backwards-compatibility whilst running Linux, and are projected to be priced below $10,000. This actually makes it cheaper (at £5,230) than a new Tezro, and even than some dual-processor Octanes on eBay!
It is also thought that SGI will claim that IRIX applications running under emulation on the new dual-1.3GHz Itanium workstations will outperform the same application running natively on a Tezro (although they don't specify whether they mean a dual- or quad- processor system, nor the MIPS processor speed used for the comparison).
The Dorado workstation will use one or two Intel/HP "Madison" Itanium 2 processors built on a 130nm process with 3Mb of full-speed Level 3 cache backed by at least 2Gb RAM with a low-end (AGP) ATI FireGL graphics card, reports The Inquirer. The top of the range configuration will feature dual-1.6GHz processors with dual (still AGP) FireGL X3 graphics cards and 24Gb RAM, coming in with a price tag of almost £26,000.
Perhaps SGI are waiting for PCI Express graphics cards which are more than just an AGP card with an additional bridge chip - ATI's own product matrix shows that of the two equivalent low-end AGP and PCI-E products, the AGP solution actually has over 1½ times the available bandwidth than the PCI-E version. I'd imagine they'd also want the ability to run multiple cards simultaneously on multiple 16x lanes, and a workstation-level SLI solution.
Monday, 18th April 2005:
Yay! My O2 now has a Firewire card installed! Time to reformat my external firewire drives with XFS ;)
(The only IEEE1394 card that IRIX supports is the version of the Adaptec 4300 with the red PCB)
Sunday, 10th April 2005:
Met a fantastic guy in Birmingham named Rob who gave me a 13w3 cable to connect my new Octane to an SGI (or Sun) monitor - cheers!
Friday, 8th April 2005:
eBay is just scary...
Not only have I won the Firewire card (for far too much money), I also got a little carried away and ended up buying an Octane2 with dual 400MHz MIPS R12k processors, 2Gb RAM, V10 graphics, and no PCI Card Cage...
... so next on the list are a PCI cage, a Dual Channel Display option, and a V12 graphics board, in roughly that order.
Though by the time I can afford even some of that, there'll probably be affordable Tezros available on eBay ;)
Tuesday, 5th April 2005:
eBay sucks :(
I keep missing out on Octane2's at the last moment, generally to bidders with new accounts and zero feedback...
Having said that, I'm also trying to get hold of an Adaptec 4300 PCI Firewire card - come on eBay, restore my faith!
Sunday, 3rd April 2005:
The webserver seems to be running happy now, and has nice new (relatively unscratched :) skins - courtesy of "Dustpuppy", the machine from work. I've also switched the DVD drive to operate with a 512byte blocksize, but I think the currently installed firmware makes this unnecessary.
(IRIX EFS Installation CDs require a 512byte blocksize to boot, whilst every other CD format on the planet uses 2048bytes)
Actually manually opening the drive is now much easier too - I added lots of layers of electrical tape to the back of the O2's custom CD/DVD faceplate, so the "prodder" (for want of a better name :) now pushes the eject microswitch more consistently.
The best news is that the dead O2 from work actually works perfectly well! It looks as if the motherboard assembly was removed whilst the machine's power was connected, tripping a safety in the chassis. There is a (very well hidden) "power-up" jumper on the system board which resets this, and brings the machine back to life!
The new machine is currently running a system disk containing Gentoo that I built for my own O2, and is now compiling X very, very slowly...
Friday, 1st April 2005:
Argh! For the first time, my webserver has crashed - it's been totally unresponsive since about 4pm today :(
We've had a cleanout at work, and I've inherited a (non-working) O2. It's a 256Mb 180MHz R5k O2 with two 4Gb disks with the O2 audio option. Doesn't power on, mind...
Thursday, 31th March 2005:
eBay rocks :)
My O2 now has an LVDS digital interface and an O2Cam. Admittedly, I still don't have a 1600SW to go with it, but give me time...
Tuesday, 29th March 2005:
Happy Easter!
I've finally fixed-up the last few bugettes in bluetool - the output looks nicer and it no longer occasionally loses configuration data (hopefully :)
Thursday, 17th March 2005:
Disabling DMA on the Promise controller does work (as long as you ensure that hdparm doesn't re-enable it ;) but it makes drive access very slow - last night it took about 6 hours to backup my iAudio M3 music player. A combination of patches seem to fix this, and allow DMA to work to by disabling support for LBA48. This patch can be downloaded here.
Tuesday, 15th March 2005:
It seems that the Promise PDC202xx IDE controller driver running under Linux 2.6.10 corrupts large DMA transfers, resulting in junk data being written to the attached drive. The solution seems to be to disable the Special UDMA Feature option, which disables DMA for the controller unless set by the BIOS.
Thursday, 10st March 2005:
sonyxosd-1.5 (and Gentoo ebuilds) are released today!
In other news, artoo is now updated to the latest IRIX release, 6.5.27. I've also just finished building a new fileserver for centralised network storage. At 160Gb, it only has half the capacity of my desktop(!) - but this should be more than enough....
Tuesday, 1st March 2005:
Phew! IRIX 6.5.25 is now (re)installed, and artoo is again up and running! As an added bonus, the DVD drive now reads ISO9660-formatted discs, which for some reason it never did before...
The other great news is that I finally got around to properly packaging sonyxosd (for Gentoo, at least). This has involved packaging a stack of additional CPAN modules which Gentoo doesn't already have in Portage, but it all worked surprisingly well. Hopefully this, in addition to the new external config. file, will be a step in the right direction to help people who just want to use sonyxosd without having to learn CPAN or edit any code...
Incidentally, if anyone reading this is running IRIX with seperate root and usr partitions with the XVM option installed, and is seeing aborts logged on startup due to a missing libm.so, the solution is to copy /usr/lib32/libm.so to /opt/lib32/ (or lib64 for the big boxes) so that the library is available before usr is mounted.
Sunday, 27th February 2005:
Argh! I was applying IRIX updates to artoo (the webserver), and managed to confuse Software Manager sufficiently for it to link code from two different versions of the IRIX kernel into the (only) boot image. The system boots to single user mode, but gets no further without crashing horribly...
Oh well, I guess I know what I'll be doing for the next few hours :(
Friday, 25th February 2005:
Updated the ZXTM filter script to read in an external file, to keep down the size of the main script itself and make adding extra filter rules much less error-prone. Logging is improved, as is the logic of the scipt as a whole.
(The configuration where this is used has ZXTM listening on port 9119, and then all browsers have this value set as their "HTTP Proxy". A ZXTM Virtual Machine then applies the TrafficScript code above and passes the result to a local copy of privoxy running on port 8118. This filters out adverts, certain images and webbugs, then sends the request out to the internet. ZXTM is also used to protect this webserver by applying DoS filters to all incoming requests, as well as serving a placeholder page should the main webserver fail - which looks like this!)
Thursday, 24th February 2005:
Finally started to update site to show SGI/IRIX logos rather than Gentoo!
Saturday, 13th February 2005:
I'm on Microsoft's new Search Service for my TrafficScript filtering rule! Perhaps it's not so bad after all ;)
I've just finished migrating this entire site from my Desktop PC to my Silicon Graphics O2. Despite it only being a 200MHz machine, and running IRIX(!), it seems more than up to the job. The main advantages of this are that it can now truly be left running 24/7 (and should consume less power in the process), and that any noise it makes will no longer disturb anyone - it's nestled under the stairs. Having said that, it does seem wrong to put such a fantastically designed machine anywhere out of sight.
Next up - an Octane2 or a Mac Mini? Must resist...
Saturday, 27th November 2004:
Today, I added a new hard disc (a Samsung Spinpoint SP1614C) to complement the existing one, giving me 320Gb of Serial ATA storage :)
Unfortunately, on detecting this new addition, the VIA RAID controller on my Soltek KT600-RL motherboard helpfully decided to zero the partition table on the primary drive. Many hours (and Boot CDs) later, I found that gpart was the answer to my problems, and restored the partition table like a dream! In the end, no data was lost - but VIA obviously have a severe problem with their RAID BIOS.
Thursday, 25th November 2004:
Christmas come early? I've just won a Toshiba SCSI DVD drive (to upgrade my O2), a pair of 18Gb SCA disks (to upgrade my O2) and am bidding on a SGI 1600SW TFT monitor (to ... you get the idea). Why the sudden flurry of activity? Well, firstly because it'll make a great web server - but mainly because those clever guys in #gentoo-mips have come up with a bootable Gentoo LiveCD for SGI/MIPS machines. I'm just one step away from a usable operating system...
I've just today finished the latest update to sonyxosd. There's not really anything new per-se, but I've fixed and optimised much of what is already there. Still, I'd class this as a must-have upgrade, because it does things so much more nicely now...
- Added support for changing to arbitrary CPUfreq governors, and implemented ondemand support for Linux 2.6.9 and later - reduce your processor speed below the lowest setting to enable this automatic processor frequency mode;
(Try "watch -n 0.2 cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq" to see the effect!)- The X On-Screen Displays are now split up by default, and much more descriptive;
- Console Tagging now works! Swap between X and a VT with a single keypress, rather than with CTRL+ALT+iforgotwhichconsoleiwasusing ;)
- For ease of localisation, all strings displayed to the user are now defined in the User Variables section;
- I seem to have got to the bottom of the problems that caused sonyxosd to abort, and mine has been running fine for weeks now (famous last words... :)
- The ACPI code is now much cleaner.
Friday, 8th October 2004:
New today - an update to bluetool (better config file handling and output) and sonyxosd, as promised :)
Any sound used is now read in on startup, and then piped to the player utility. The fact that it is then already in memory reduces the latency of playing a sound noticably.
Downsides: You (currently) need to restart sonyxosd if you replace the sound file to be played, and you require a sound player that can accept data on STDIN. "bplay" works brilliantly, but I believe that both play and aplay will fail.
Friday, 10th September 2004:
Well, the last months has been a little up-and-down: I finally not only got Linux to boot, but also to run under load for 3 days solid on my SGI 320 (yay!) - but then I found that my particular box won't boot with an SMP-enabled kernel (boo!)
(It works absolutely fine with two processors installed under Windows 2000, but on trying to boot Linux 2.6.7 or 2.6.8.1 I get
APIC error on CPU0: 0(40)
... followed by infinite...
APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)
... messages. This is generated in smp_error_interrupt of arch/i386/kernel/apic.c.
Annoyingly, the 2.6.8 kernel will only compile in SMP mode for the SGI Visual Workstation platform - so I'm hoping that this is fixable... )
Update: Kernel 2.6.10 not only compiles and runs successfully for a Uniprocessor setup, but is also much more successful in SMP mode - now it gets as far as initialising the SCSI card without errors, but then freezes. Here's hoping for 2.6.11... ;)
I won a SGI O2 (200MHz MIPS R5000, 256Mb RAM) from eBay for a great price, and found a fantastic community at Nekochan - why not drop in and say "Hi"?
My heat-related problems have still been ongoing this month - as the heat is still triggering reboots if I do anything CPU-intensive without remembering to turn up the fan control. This really should be automatic...
Be on the lookout for a new version of sonyxosd very soon, which much improved sound-handling and responsiveness. With this out of the door, I'm going to make a final push to get everything documented and track down those last few cases where it sometimes aborts. I've also been rethinking the screen-switching mechanism on the F7 key, and the (mis)interactions with X. Come again soon :)
Finally, I've added another new utility, bluetool which wil search for any discoverable Bluetooth devices, scan for the services they advertise, then maintain this list in a persistent database. Then, sending files to discovered devices is simply a case of running:
bluetool send <device nickname> <file>
... no more searching around for baddr's and channel numbers!
(Also note the from-first-principles XML parser - what was I thinking??!? :)
Thursday 12th August, 2004:
The recent server problems (namely, overheating in the heat of this Indian Summer that the UK is currently experiencing) should be fixed - I have a new custom-built fan cable :)
Many thanks to Paul "Leonerd" Evans for building this - if you have an interest in IRC and would like to help Paul with his latest project, please see the PFJ website. Cheers!
Tuesday 3rd August, 2004:
Updated sonyxosd to version 1.1 - Added proper P1 key support.Wednesday 28th July, 2004:
Added more files, including an X-free (as opposed to XFree :) sonypi daemon and Jochen Michel's contributed SuSE init script.
Tuesday 27th July, 2004:Altered icons and added sizes, and added link targets Completed sony details page
Wednesday 14th July, 2004:Created sony details page Created this page! :) Created sony-tools site, split content from gentoo-tools.
Created gentoo-tools site.
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