Altivo's Horse Tails

Bleeding Hearts

Sun, 18 May 2008 02:45:51 GMT

Bleeding Hearts
Originally uploaded by Altivo

I've been wanting to get some photos of the spring flowers around here, and even though it was kind of overcast this afternoon, I did that. You can view the whole series by clicking on this photo, and then proceeding to the next, and the next, until you reach the end. There are eight selected snaps.

Bleeding Hearts is an old fashioned garden flower, perennial, that produces long strands of little pink hearts in May. Gary likes them and has two very nice specimens going. Our planting style is what is sometimes called "naturalized," in which the cultivated plants are blended right into the natural environment rather than being placed in formal beds.

Pear Tree

Sat, 17 May 2008 03:04:34 GMT

Pear Tree
Originally uploaded by Altivo

I've been meaning to post this one all week, so here it is.

This Beurre Bosc pear tree is about six years old now. Two years ago it had a handful of flowers and produced a single pear. This year it has finally produced full blossom. Unfortunately, between the colony collapse disorder which has reduced the US honeybee population drastically and the fact that a companion pear tree of another type didn't survive, chances of actual fruit are vanishingly small. The next closest pear tree is about a half mile away as far as we know. Taken on Friday, May 9, 2008.

The bee thing is kinda scary. Outside my window at work there's a crabapple tree that has been loaded with pink blossoms for at least a week. I've been watching for honeybees, and I think I've seen two. A few bumblebees, who do pollinate but aren't as efficient and thorough as the honeybee. A few other insects who may or may not really pollinate the flowers. Like 'em or not, folks, we need the bees. Food crops like squash, pumpkins, okra, beans, and most fruit trees absolutely require pollination, often with pollen from a different individual plant in order to bear fruit. Something (and I'm very much afraid it's a reaction to genetically modified crop pollen) is completely destroying the honeybee colonies. (You can read reams about it by looking up "colony collapse disorder" but so far no one really knows what the actual cause is.)

Bees eat pollen, especially when they are in their larval stage. Some of the GM crops have genes inserted to produce the same toxin that Bacillus thuringiensis makes. That toxin kills caterpillars of the moth and butterfly variety. I don't know what it might do to bee larvae, but we may be finding out right now.

Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, predicted that humans would eventually poison the natural balance by overusing pesticides, thereby destroying the pollinator species, and triggering crop failures on a massive scale. She may have been right about the results without guessing correctly at the mechanism.

Numinous sky

Fri, 16 May 2008 02:40:59 GMT

Numinous sky
Originally uploaded by Altivo

I couldn't resist running out at dusk to see if I could get any nice photos. It was gloomy earlier but started to clear up just before sunset. Here's the best one I got, I think. Looking west over the vegetable garden, about 8:20 pm on 15 May 2008. This one was tilted up to maximize the sky, and therefore received a shorter exposure that reduced the vegetation to silhouette. I played with the gamma a bit to reduce the sky's glare, which also emphasizes the colors. With a little help, even a cheap camera makes a nice photo.

Silly fiction meme

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:56:38 GMT

Haven't done one of these in quite a while. Stolen from drgnkiyo.

List 10 fictional characters you wouldn't kick out of bed (in no particular order) and tag five people to do the same. (I don't tag. But I'm curious to see any responses, just the same.) This one requires some thought.

Streak, from Kyell Gold's Pendant of Fortune
Lord Greystoke (Tarzan), from Edgar Rice Burroughs' many stories and books
Taye Dooley, from Circles
Marcus, from Associated Student Bodies
Peter, from Gordon Merrick's The Lord Won't Mind
Tully, from C. J. Cherryh's Chanur books
Balto, from the Dreamworks film
Danilo, from Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Heritage of Hastur
Lancelot du Lac from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Mort d'Arthur and the film Camelot
F'lar from Anne McCaffrey's Pern books
Eunostos, from Thomas Burnett Swann's The Forest of Forever and Day of the Minotaur
Saetto (and Arthur Husky too) from Leo Magna's comic strip Fur-Piled

Yes, I know, that's eleven, not ten. [Edit again: Up to 13 now, but once I thought of Saetto I just couldn't possibly leave him out.]

There are others, of course. Probably most readers won't recognize more than half of these, but that's only fair, since Kiyo's list all came from animé or manga and I don't recognize any of them. ;p

It's that W day again

Thu, 15 May 2008 02:56:38 GMT

*Folds up the Wednesday shield that vimsig gave him, since it's almost bed time*

Wednesdays are interminable, I swear. Someone figured out how to sneak an extra 12 hours into them.

Had lunch with Gary in Woodstock, which was nice, and then went over to the Woodstock Public Library for a catalogers' meeting, which is always at least interesting but tends to run long, which this one did. Back to Harvard for the evening shift, where staff were being harrassed by some middle school age boys who were just being obnoxious for the sake of doing so, testing to see what they could get away with.

The copper pipes have been replaced so the air conditioning works again, for the moment. I wonder if they'll stay in place long enough for us to get a fence and security camera set up back there. A gray and gloomy morning at least turned into a sunny and clear afternoon and a pretty sunset.

Coding on the MUSH continues albeit slowly. Character requests can be queued to trnsmnt (at) ix.netcom.com if you don't want to wait for the web application form to come up. They'll be saved up until we're ready to "go live." Minimum information to provide for each character request is a login name, a species, and a gender. Your e-mail address is assumed valid on the mail sent. Please limit yourself to two requests maximum for now.

Here's a species list. Other species than those shown here may be delayed for later consideration.

Herbivores: mustang, deer (could also be elk), hare, squirrel, goose, woodchuck, dove, mountain sheep

Omnivores: bear, raccoon, skunk, fox, coyote, badger, raven

Carnivores: ocelot, bobcat, wolf, otter, weasel, hawk, owl, heron

Postal addendum

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:57:27 GMT

I was joking yesterday about the connection between Homeland Security and Pitney-Bowes (makers of postage metering equipment, for those who don't know) but it's no joke.

Today I happened to be the one who answered the door when the letter carrier came. He explained it to me and gave me a little printed notice that they are pasting onto packages and returning them to the sender.

The actual weight limit is 14 ounces. Anything 14 ounces or under can be mailed in a mailbox or handed to the carrier with stamps on it for the postage. Anything over 14 ounces must be taken to the post office in person in order to mail it... [Why 14 ounces instead of a pound? Who knows?]

UNLESS...

You use a postage meter to put the postage on. If the postage consists of a meter label instead of stamps, then the old rules apply and you can put it into the mailbox or give it to the carrier. So terrorists can't use postage meters? Or steal them? Or use them illicitly at their cover job? What a crock of you-know-what.

(Yes, I know, postage meters have registered serial numbers on them. I also know it isn't hard to obscure or damage the serial number impression, and that postage meters can be stolen and at least used until the cash recorded in them runs out. I'm still not impressed with the "effectiveness" of this measure.)

Progress and regression

Tue, 13 May 2008 02:19:37 GMT

The HVAC guys were at the library today to start repairing the damage done by the copper thieves. They say that it's likely the thieves were interrupted by something or someone. Otherwise they would have done far more damage. They advise enclosing the entire equipment area in security fencing immediately. I know that isn't going to set well with the city, the library board, or my boss. Not so much because of the cost as because it will "look like an armed camp." Of course the city has a wellhead within about 500 feet of the building and that is surrounded by chain link and barbed wire.

Some little progress on the MUSH environment. More habitat built, and one custom command adapted and installed. MUSH code is like LISP, nested parens and brackets until you want to go mad. It's also more or less object oriented, which is logical in a sort of perverse way, but OOP always hurts my head.

For several years, our mail carrier at the library has been taking our outgoing mail with him. Being a library, of course, we mail a certain number of books to other libraries. We use a postal scale and put on the correct amount of postage, and he's been taking them for us. No more, though. Apparently the word came down that he could no longer accept anything that weighs more than a pound. Letters are OK, packages are not. As this came to me second hand, it also included the instruction that it wasn't legal to put stamps on such packages any more, which I find hard to believe. But we are told not only must we take them to the post office personally in order to get them mailed, but we can't prepay the postage unless we use a meter. What's with that? Is Homeland Security now in league with Pitney-Bowes the way the Bush administration is cozy with Exxon?

Speaking of which, as I predicted, the four gas stations in Harvard jumped their prices again today to 4.09 for unleaded. They've been increasing the price twice a week for a while now, sometimes in jumps of 15 or 20 cents. This makes them still the highest priced stations within at least 25 miles.

Indigo buntings

Mon, 12 May 2008 03:26:35 GMT

Rainy yuck today. But yesterday and today we saw indigo buntings. That just about completes our usual bird list for summer. I also saw a brown thrasher eating seed under the feeder several times today. That seems weird, I thought they only ate bugs and worms. But it was definitely a brown thrasher. I even got out my binoculars to make sure.

Congratulations to corelog on his new ham radio license that arrived this week. Now sign up to furryhams, wuffy.

Fox news, Field trip, and more MUSH

Sun, 11 May 2008 02:17:58 GMT

First the field trip. Spinning guild went on a visit to a local wool processor this morning in lieu of our regular monthly meeting. It was fascinating and the machines are wonderfully Rube Goldberg and work very well. Wool still gets washed by hand in stainless steel laundry tubs, but after that hand-controlled machines do the picking, carding, drafting, spinning, and plying. All of the machinery except the pin drafter was new, made to order for the cottage operation by small manufacturers. The pin drafter is 50 years old and was rebuilt for this installation. Like so many things, most of this is no longer done in the US at all. Some equipment comes from Canada, but the pin drafter was US made at a time when the US still had woolen mills. The spinning frame, which can spin up to eight strands of yarn simultaneously, was made by a US maker, but he is a small cottage industry himself and manufactures the machines only on order. So you can't just buy one from stock. It was fascinating, and the Shetland lambs she had on the premises were adorable. Watching snowy white wool travel into the carder on a slow conveyor belt and squirt out the other end as ready to spin roving that looked just like soft serve ice cream extruding from a machine was actually amusing.

Saw a baby fox twice this afternoon. He or she was hanging around our parked horse wagon, playing with a rope that is dangling from it. Each time I cam within view, the kit would dash down the old burrow under the corner of the arena. They are big enough now and have their adult coloration so that they are recognizable as foxen, not puppies. When I first saw them they were sort of batlleship grey in color with darker tails and ears. Now they are definitely fox red, with white and black in all the right places. Kyooot! Just like in Disney's film The Fox and the Hound.

Oh, and for those who haven't heard yet, the Transmontania MUSH now has working guest logins so you can check out the scenery if you like. Only a tiny bit is viewable right now, but you're welcome to pop in.

Oh, yeah. On the way back from Belvidere, where the woolen mill is located, I stopped to top up my gas tank because the price there was $3.75. It's been $3.85 in Marengo and $3.95 in Harvard this week. When I got to Marengo, I discovered that prices there have jumped to $3.99. If Harvard made a parallel move, then it's up to $4.09 there for unleaded. People will be spending the so-called "economic stimulus" checks on gasoline at this rate. I wonder if that was the plan: Republican oil baron dominated administration hands out tax money to the public but times it so that rising gas prices mean most of the largesse will end up in oil company pockets? I'd say yes except I don't believe this administration is smart enough to plan that.

Gah!

Fri, 09 May 2008 21:01:23 GMT

We wondered on Wednesday why the heating and cooling in the building seemed to be goofy. Well, it turns out that yesterday afternoon, entirely by chance, a coworker discovered that the large condensers for the cooling system had been vandalized. Probably on Tuesday night, someone with a large heavy cutter like a bolt cutter attacked them and cut away several large chunks of copper pipe.

Presumably this was with the intention of selling the copper for money. But I estimate that what they took probably didn't get them even $10. Of course they won't be caught, and the repairs will very likely run a couple of thousand. I swear our society is deteriorating so fast that we're all going to be sleeping on the ground and picking fleas off one another inside my own lifetime.

I must be crazy

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:50:10 GMT

Introducing Transmontania MUSH, a North American wildlife simulation role play.

I have one hoof poised over the precipice. MUSH site established and running. Rudimentary web page describing it was thrown together this evening.

Now there's a contact address, and a login screen (and logins for the god Manitou and his wizard assistants Loon, Coyote, and Equus have been established.) Guest logins that will let you view the first scenery will follow in a day or two, I hope.

I don't foresee this giving any competition to FurryMUCK, because it's much more limited and controlled. But let's see if there's enough interest to make it fly for a while...

Well I guess I asked for that...

Thu, 08 May 2008 03:16:55 GMT

Wednesday! After this many years, I should really know better than to take six days off and agree to be back on a Wednesday. Especially when half the rest of the staff is off too. (End of the year, gotta use up excess vacation.) Considering that just having Wednesday off makes me feel like I had a whole week vacation...

They had two power failures while I was in Ohio. In spite of repeated instructions, verbal and in writing, of what to do if the power has been out, they didn't get all the machines restarted appropriately. (The sequence in which things are done is significant.) And no one remembered to change the backup tape for a whole week. Sigh. Oh, and the cat apparently had a furball attack on my desk.

Got through it anyway, and tomorrow is just a half day with no one else there, so should be much better. Also got a paycheck (payday came while I was in OH) and a formal notice of my annual pay increase. Still doesn't keep up with inflation but it's better than last year. On the other hoof, The price of fuel just went up by another 23 cents a gallon overnight. Then they backed it down by 3 cents between noon and eight in the evening, so the screaming must have been pretty loud.

Playing around with the Alpha at home I realized I can run a MUSH on it. After working out how to make it available most days even though we have dialup (it involves using no-ip.org and doing naughty things to the firewall here) it dawned on me that I could be running a MUSH on the Alpha at work instead. I don't think the bandwidth would be significant overall, and it would tend to peak at night when the library is closed. I've been using the Alpha DS10 there as a private test platform, but it isn't going to be put back into actual work service, and apparently everyone considers it to be my personal property now. As long as I keep using it for testing library stuff, I can justify keeping it active there which in turn would let me create a roleplaying system on it. Does the internet really need another MUSH? Probably not. On the other hand, since the demise of Wild Spirits back in 2003 or so, there hasn't been anything else like it as far as I'm aware. No point in making yet another anthropomorphic system, since Tapestries and FurryMUCK have that arena well covered. But the unique character of Wild Spirits was that there were no humans, elves, or other magical beings. The animals were natural species in their natural forms, but had the ability to talk and reason. They also engaged in a lot of pointless yiffery and drama, but I blame some of that on the administrative structure. This seems worthy of a little more thought at least. Server code is available on the Alpha platform for PennMUSH, MUX, or LambdaMOO. I've got PennMUSH up and running with little effort (well, the software that is; actually setting up the environment would take weeks I think.)

At the moment access is restricted, but if there should be expressions of interest, I'll give out connection details later.

Back to work and a meme

Wed, 07 May 2008 02:45:53 GMT

Workshop completed, head stuffed with new concepts and ideas. A much better appreciation of what double weave techniques can do, and, even more useful, at last an understanding of the usefulness of pick-up methods. Because I generally do texture weaves rather than color effects, I've never had to do much pick-up. However, a puffy quilted effect that lends itself to elaborate designs has grabbed my attention. Photos will follow in a few days, once I finish the sample warp.

And here's an utterly geekish meme, lifted from porsupah. If you have to ask, you don't wnat to know:

$history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
140 ssh
126 exit
27 su
22 ls
21 cd
12 sftp
12 man
11 less
10 ps
9 mount

OK, OK, it's a list of the ten most frequently used commands in my Linux shell history, with frequency counts.

That fallen tree

Tue, 06 May 2008 02:13:35 GMT

Downed Hickory Top
Originally uploaded by Altivo

Here's a photo of the fallen tree that narrowly missed our indoor arena building last Friday. Estimated height of unbroken tree was 50 feet or more. It seems to have hit the oak at left of photo and folded in the middle, thus sparing the building from serious damage. My mare's stall is right inside that building and just to the left of where the branches are touching the wall. Fortunately she wasn't in her stall when it happened anyway.

In other news, today was the first half of the weaving workshop I'm attending. We saw explanations and demonstrations of weaving in two layers at once, and then started on a sampler on our own loom. I'll post a photo of the final result when it is complete. More of the same tomorrow.

Ohio fun

Mon, 05 May 2008 02:42:51 GMT

Got back from Ohio safely and with no serious traffic issues, yay. Seeing loriana, aerofox and quickcasey was just plain fun. It was nice and made me feel good. Thanks guys. Seriously.

Loom is sleyed, need to tie on and get the tools together before going to bed. Gary took care of the critters all alone and even had a yummy supper ready when I got home. He's a sweetheart.

Pictures of the hickory tree that fell down in Friday's wind and rain tomorrow maybe. It was almost dead, but I didn't expect it to fall, and especially not in that direction. By sheer luck, it broke in half and didn't land on the arena roof right over Tess' stall. Just a couple of small dents in the metal building, probably no new leaks, and Tess wasn't in her stall at the time. Ironically, Gary was in Woodstock dropping off the chainsaw for sharpening when it happened. ;p

Hickory is good firewood. Hopefully we'll get some of it into a form we can use next winter.

Long day, lotsa rain and clouds

Sun, 04 May 2008 02:47:59 GMT

Downtown Sidney has some great old buildings, including a Louis Sullivan designed bank building. I really enjoyed Aero's radio collection, and we got his Alpha PWS running. OpenVMS installed, but he needs to get the license keys. Then we went grocery shopping so I could make pizza and salad, and played with toy trains. Or, I should say, quickcasey and loriana played trains while Aero and I watched. Back home tomorrow, then the weavers' workshop. Still have to sley that warp Sunday night.

Fri, 02 May 2008 11:46:32 GMT

Shower, load car, and off. See y'all Sunday, probably. XD

Almost ready

Fri, 02 May 2008 03:24:14 GMT

Had today off to prepare for the trip to OH and the weaving class next Mon-Tues. Of course there were other distractions. We had to take the dogs and cats to the vet for their annual checkup, shots, etc. Ouch. It was more than we can afford, but they deserve their care. Our farrier friend was here yesterday to trim the horses' feet, too. Fortunately he's not as expensive as the vets are. He gave all the feet a good grade, too. Tess is finally back in shape after her near miss with founder two years ago. Now he (and the vet) say I need to start riding her again.

First oriole arrived yesterday. Today we heard and saw another (they are easy to distinguish because the pattern of black markings varies so much between individuals) and then just at dusk, we saw a hummingbird. That's a marker of the shift from spring to summer, I think. After all, it *is* May. Only two birds who are here briefly most years, have yet to put in an appearance: the red headed woodpecker, and the indigo bunting.

The loom is threaded, still needs to be sleyed, but that shouldn't take long. There are 288 warp threads but they get sleyed four to a dent in an 8 dent reed, so it will only take 72 pulls. I should be able to get that done Sunday evening. I found working with such a densely packed warp rather frustrating, because the threads tend to tangle and cling to one another. But it's done anyway.

Just have to pack up in the morning. Fortunately not a lot, one little bag and a few tools and things, in the morning. Now, to bed.

Wednesday...

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:58:10 GMT

Will this still work? Stuck at work until 8 pm...

[EDIT: Works mostly. No way to do a carriage return on my cheap phone, it seems.]

Whew!

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:29:30 GMT

Finished the weaving this morning before work. Now I have to:

Finish a newsletter for the spinners
Warp the loom again for a workshop on Monday and Tuesday
Get stuff together for a weekend trip to Ohio

Fortunately, I have Thursday off work and I'm not leaving until Friday morning. Oh oh, gotta get directions to quickcasey's place too.

Snow?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:56:58 GMT

It didn't last, but it sure did snow today. Hard. Visibility near zero for a while. Ground temperatures were well above freezing, so it was pretty transitory. On the other hand, I think we'll get a hard freeze tonight. Not that it's too late in the year for either of these, because I can remember snow in May a few times in my life. However, the apple trees are just starting to bloom, and ice or frost now could be very bad news.

Gary saw the fox again twice today, once with one of the kits visible, and once by herself out in the pasture. Clearly they haven't gone far. We think they are hiding under the old logpile on the edge of our woods, which is a good place for them. Lots of entrances and exits, and places to peek out from. Most of those "logs" are whole treetrunks that probably weigh in the tons each, so they aren't going anywhere. (Other than decaying.)

Writing this from the web interface on the Alpha. It's working reliably at last.

And now, back to the loom. [whipcrack in the background, chains rattle...]

Fox again

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:47:31 GMT

Well, it hasn't snowed yet. It was in the 50s today, but they're still saying it may snow tomorrow or tomorrow night.

We saw several rose breasted grosbeaks today, and I spotted a white throated sparrow on the feeder (I've been hearing them for weeks, but hadn't seen one.)

At dusk, Gary went out to close the cover on the hot frame and saw the vixen and one of her kits in our lane near the old woodpile. That's full of tunnels and hiding places, so no surprise, and in fact I've smelled her there a couple of times this week. It's good to know she's still around. Hopefully, the other kit is still there somewhere as well.

Chained to the loom, gotta finish what's on there tonight or tomorrow at the latest, so... back to work.

Roaring winds and little birds

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:27:32 GMT

How do they do it anyway? I mean, those little tiny birds flitting around out there when the wind is gusting to 45 mph and holding on at a steady 30 or 35? That's how it's been for much of today. At least it was sunny, but nowhere near as warm and pleasant as Wednesday, or even yesterday when it was rainy.

Spring birds are here. Finches gold and red, chipping sparrows, white throated sparrows, song sparrows, robins. Today I saw the first rose breasted grosbeak, but no orioles or hummers yet. All of them seem completely unconcerned by the winds that ought, by rights, to blow them into the next county or crash them into trees and buildings.

One bird didn't make it through the day, though. We haven't actually seen the fox since about Tuesday, but this afternoon I found a pile of chicken feathers in the middle of Tess' pasture. By color, they were from one of the Brits' chickens, but by location I'd say the chicken didn't get there under its own power. The fact that there were still a couple dozen feathers lying there in the grass that hadn't yet been blown away by these persistent winds says to me that the feathers were quite recently deposited. Like maybe in the last hour or two. So the fox is still hunting right around here, even if she and her kits have moved to a different location.

Tess was eager to get out, after being trapped inside by rain the last couple of days. Once we got into the woodlot, though, she wasn't exactly happy with the roaring wind. I had to work to keep her focused and under control, but we're getting so we understand each other better I think. She was very snorty by the time we got through the pasture gate, but she waited for me to take the lead off and step back before she took off kicking up her heels for a gallop. (Thank goodness.)

Glad I wasn't on her back just then. I've stuck on horses before who just ran like that, but it's not my cup of tea. I prefer a much more sedate pace. ;p

Weather day

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:47:42 GMT

This was one of those days when the weather alarm goes off every hour or so with another warning or watch. Tornado watches, severe thunderstorm warnings, flash flood warnings, and so forth. We actually shut everything down at one point because the lightning was so heavy, though we never got much rain beyond a spattering. Now they say it will snow on Sunday. I'd scoff, except that there are actual blizzard warnings out in the Dakotas and Minnesota.

Finally got a good stable graphical display on the Alpha this morning, no thanks to the software. This is the first occasion in many years that I've had to say bad things about Linux. Well, not Linux itself, which runs fine on the Alpha, but the X.org graphical interface, which serves not only Linux, but several flavors of BSD and some other operating environments. When it was XFree86 it was constantly improving. Now that it's X.org, the bugs are multiplying faster than the code. I couldn't get a decent windowing interface on the S3 Trio 64, my original choice for the Alpha because it also works with OpenVMS. There seem to be multiple introduced bugs in the S3 driver (which used to work just fine back on XFree86.) I went on EBay and got an ELSA Gloria L for about $20. That doesn't work with OpenVMS, but should work with Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the X.org version of the drivers. Same problems as the S3 Trio, even though it's a totally different driver. So I bought another cheap video card off EBay, this time a Matrox Millennium. I knew that one would work because I have one running in the other Alpha at the library. And it does work.

Unfortunately, while trying to debug the S3 driver, I installed beta versions of several system elements at the request of the software support team. They didn't fix the S3 problems, and it seemed like too much trouble to remove them, so I left them in place. That was a bad mistake. Something in the X.org system turned around and crashed today, hard. It trashed some undetermined number of files on the hard disk on its way down. I'll probably end up having to reinstall everything to get a stable system back out of it. That wouldn't be too big an issue, since there's next to no actual data on there right now, except running a network install over a dialup line takes many hours. Like about 24 to 30 of them.

Maybe it's time to try Gentoo...

Hurry up and wait

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:00:57 GMT

No fox sighting today. It was gloomy much of the day and began to rain in late afternoon. However, while working in the barns I found three small bird eggs lying in the sand on the floor. One was broken, the other two intact. They are about 1 cm. across and 1.5 cm. long, dull bluish gray with tiny brown speckles, heavier at the large end. They may be barn swallow eggs, as the barn swallows returned at the beginning of the week. However, they were just repairing their old nest on Wednesday, so it seems unlikely that they had three or more eggs already. That is the only nest in the barn or near the entrance, but it is on the ceiling rafters about eight feet above the floor and eight feet horizontally away from where I found the eggs.

I'm assuming that some predatory egg thief, like a rat perhaps or another bird, took those eggs from their rightful nest, wherever it is. But I'd have thought egg pirates would eat their spoils on the spot, rather than carry them away so delicately only to abandon them later.

Went to the spinning study group meeting only to find out that I was the only one there. (Other than Toni, at whose shop it was held, anyway.) Two others were expected, but called her to say they were turning back at the last minute because one's sister had just been in a wreck. I hope she's OK. And I had finished a nice skein of blended dog hair and wool, too. Maybe I'll get a photo of it and post it.

Finally, after six months of battling with it on and off, I have gotten the graphics card in the Alpha workstation at home to talke to Linux. Or rather, gotten Linux to recognize it. The only other device that ever gave me so much hassle in Linux was a Compaq proprietary sound chip. Several factors combined to make this particular video setup such a bear. First of all, the card is an S3 Trio 64. These were among the industry leaders in their time, but that time was around 1991 or so. They have long since become obsolete. Linux still has drivers for them, but they really haven't been properly tested and debugged in recent releases, while the GUI system was completely redesigned. Result? The S3 card and driver don't seem to work. I kept trying different settings but finally gave up this week and reported it as a driver bug. I did get some immediate response, so someone may in fact fix it. In theory this card should work with the VESA standard driver too, just not with all its features fully enabled. Couldn't get that to work either. Then yesterday I tried getting it to work as a totally dumb VGA interface, which in theory is supposed to work with nearly everything, at least on Intel style hardware. That didn't work either. Finally a light went on. The drivers had all been complaining that there was an addressing conflict, and that they couldn't find the Video ROM BIOS.

I did some poking around with utility programs that read and write raw data to the PCI bus, and discovered that the card is not being configured properly. Linux doesn't quite do "Plug and Play" the way Windows does. The end result was that the video chip thought its BIOS was at one address, while the OS driver thought it was at another address. The card goes back to this "broken" configuration each time the system reboots. So I put a command to set the BIOS address into the system startup files. That did the trick. The VESA driver works, or almost does. The screen still tends to flicker whenever it gets updated, which is not good. But information derived from the log written by the VESA interface may well provide the necessary clues for the real S3 driver, too.