Nekonomicon

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of Amiga 1200 3.1, Hd 1230 50Mhz 16mb, Indivision mk 2, Hxc UK at April 16, 2013, 4:05 p.m...

I am continually amazed at how hackable these are. ISTR uridium hacking his to have USB ports by intercepting some of the m68k pins :-)

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 383 notes

Wrote on the subject of Thinking about starting a collection at April 19, 2013, 5:07 a.m...

smj wrote:

The Power Mac G5 running OS X is certainly UNIX-based, though maybe not USDA 100% Grade A Certified Organic UNIX™.

*snort*

smj wrote:

And while I've only had my hands on the G5 Xserve and Intel-based Mac Pro, I'd say they're built to traditional workstation/server standards. But remember, this is your collection so you call the shots.

Didn't the G5's have some terrible leakage problems wrt. the the liquid cooling system? Perhaps that's what you mean by traditional standards... :-)

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halo , oct ane
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duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of mtools at April 22, 2013, 8:09 a.m...

hamei wrote:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we got past ERROR one and two by deleting from the __attribute to the semicolon (thank you Shade) but now :

Code:

   cc-1515 cc: ERROR File = config.c, Line = 521
   
   A value of type "int" cannot be assigned to an entity of type "const char *".
   
   devices[cur_dev].name = strndup(img, ofsp - img);
   
   ^

This looks to me like a bit of a false flag error, the problem is not that strndup returns int, it's that on IRIX it does not exist.

you can probably fudge something with strncpy like

Code:

  devices[cur_dev].name=malloc(ofsp - img);
  
  strncpy(devices[cur_dev].name, img, ofsp - img);

I'd test this if I didn't have a headache. Just doing a #define strncpy(img, size) strcpy(img) isn't likely to work because I suspect they're doing some pointer arithmetic and thus won't have a null byte to stop at. Also, using the address of a variable in size calculations gives me the heebie-jeebies.

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of mtools at April 24, 2013, 4:38 a.m...

hamei wrote:

Code:

   ld32: WARNING 84 : /usr/lib32/libsocket.so is not used for resolving any symbol.
   
   ld32: WARNING 84 : /usr/lib32/libsun.a is not used for resolving any symbol.
   
   ld32: ERROR   33 : Unresolved text symbol "libiconv" -- 1st referenced by charsetConv.o.
   
   Use linker option -v to see when and which objects, archives and dsos are loaded.
   
   ld32: ERROR   33 : Unresolved text symbol "libiconv_close" -- 1st referenced by charsetConv.o.
   
   Use linker option -v to see when and which objects, archives and dsos are loaded.
   
   ld32: ERROR   33 : Unresolved text symbol "libiconv_open" -- 1st referenced by charsetConv.o.
   
   Use linker option -v to see when and which objects, archives and dsos are loaded.
   
   ld32: INFO    152: Output file removed because of error.
   
   gmake: *** [mtools] Error 2

I'm not so sure this thing is going to work even if I get it to link but came this far with help from y'all, seems like it would be rude to stop now. Back to the salt mines ....

Come now, it practically yells it can't find libiconv :-P

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duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of mozilla critical? at April 29, 2013, 10:37 a.m...

It's a critical (programming) error when something holds/ignores signal 10 :-P

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of Any Kindom of Loathing players on here? at May 2, 2013, 8:16 p.m...

Recently I felt a unified background for my two-monitor desk setup (one sgi, one windows mounted on a newstar desk mount) might be nice, and have under the last couple of weeks been twiddling around in Maya.

Perhaps someone here would be interested: http://duck.at.shangtai.net/files/unified-bg/

If you like, I can make all the source material available.

Edit: photo of the effect

Attachment:

File comment: Operator's console

_MG_8649.JPG [ 763.34 KiB | Viewed 196 times ]

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N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of Maxwell at May 3, 2013, 4:15 a.m...

PymbleSoftware wrote:

(La)TeX rocks and I produce my user manuals with it, and while you can practically program every dot on the page, create chess diagrams, music scores, write books with indices, TOCs, etc... Even though I use it all the time, I think TeX is a bit of an overkill for a letter to grandma.

Hmm, really? I've mostly used groff, and the one time I tried to use (La)TeX it had terrible table handling, lines all over the place.

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duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of Any Kindom of Loathing players on here? at May 3, 2013, 9:09 a.m...

jpstewart wrote:

Neat effect! I downloaded the wallpaper file from your linked site to have a look at it in more detail than the photo. I really like the way the neatly arranged grid of dark spots makes the image look like its on some sort of perforated material. I couldn't see that level of detail in the photo of the whole desk. It looks like you've got a really nice setup there.

Thanks! *bask*

The grille is actually double (a horizontal cylinder, you may see the specular reflection off insides from the side spotlights--coloured logos--if you look closely, the inside has less specular roll-off than the outside so as not to produce distracting lines behind the darker parts) and the tiny holes are bumpmapped so as to look like the grille has thickness :-)

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of Any Kindom of Loathing players on here? at May 3, 2013, 6:28 p.m...

vishnu wrote:

Very nice Staffan! BTW do you have your trackball on the left because of right-hand mouse induced RSI? Because that's what happened to me. As a result now my left hand hurts too... :lol:

Nope, I'm leftmoused. The trackball is directly connected to the PC because Synergy sometimes doesn't play well with games; there's a SGI puck mouse just out of view beside the teacup (mm.. Zhen Zhu). Now that I think about it, I can't remember why I got the trackball instead of a mouse, some combination of novelty and space saving probably.

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N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 363 notes

Wrote on the subject of Any Kindom of Loathing players on here? at May 4, 2013, 1:16 a.m...

vishnu wrote:

Ah a true lefty! I'm ambidextrous in the baseball sense; throw left bat right, but all the sociological research shows that true lefties score well above the average across the board in all categories. For example look at how well organized your computer workspace is, by comparison mine looks like it was organized by hand grenade... :lol:

Yep, true left, even my feet are left first, except when I bicycle (or unicycle). Don't be fooled by the clear desk (not clean, it's covered with dust :-P

), all the mess it out of view... I used to have a fair bunch of USB cables on my desk but they were all eaten by my cat. Strangely he only eats USB cables. :roll:

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of call for network professionals ! dns :( at May 31, 2013, 8:45 a.m...

Sorry to hear the dragon of misfortune has visited you, hamei.

Personally I would not test with an IRIX system, nsd is a beast of black magic that previously has interfered with my happiness. Is some foul demon eating your udp packets, though? Looking at the man scroll, it seems that IRIX' traceroute uses ICMP packets instead of the traditional UDP, so working replies might not be an indication that it's limited to DNS queries.

Look, now you made me write like you do :-P

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of undefined identifier : SIAG at June 10, 2013, 3 a.m...

hamei wrote:

Code:

   cc-1029 cc: ERROR File = xsiag.c, Line = 142
   
   An expression is expected at this point.
   
   };
   
   ^
   
   cc-3940 cc: ERROR File = xsiag.c, Line = 131
   
   an empty initializer is invalid for an array with unspecified bound
   
   static XtActionsRec actions[] =
   
   ^

I tired removing the semicolon .. that was a mistake

Saw a few new warnings, too ... it went by too fast to read thoroughly but I liked the one about WARNING: da da da, dit dit looks suspicious ...

The semicolon does need to be there, the compiler is just complaining that hey donut! You're supposed to put something sensible in before that!

hamei wrote:

The array of unspecified bounds seems to be a gcc-ism : no one else in the world allows that, ahem. Didn't find an easy fix tho ... the missing expression ERROR occurs here;

Code:

   static XtActionsRec actions[] =
   
   {
   
   #ifdef HAVE_LIBGUILE
   
   {"guile", execute_guile_action},
   
   #endif
   
   #if 0
   
   {"execute", execute_siod_action},
   
   #endif
   
   #ifdef HAVE_LIBTCL
   
   {"tcl", execute_tcl_action}
   
   #endif
   
   };

I can't reproduce the "unspecified bounds" with test code, perhaps your cc is slightly smarter than the version I have, or XtActionsRec is declared differently than I guessed. 7.4.2m just says that the type is incomplete.

If neither HAVE_LIBGUILE or HAVE_LIBTCL (0 is always false of course) is declared though you end up with...

Code:

  static XtActionsRec actions[] =
  
  {
  
  };

...which is an empty initialisation which MIPSpro does not like at all. Either remove/ifdef the initialisation in entirety or add something harmless in it. (What, depends on the code using it, normally you'd have something like {"end", NULL} or whatever to facilitate looping over the contents. I'm guessing but this code might have ifdefs around its usages instead and that means you could probably just put whatever you like so long as the first value isn't "tcl", "guile" or "execute".)

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of undefined identifier : SIAG at June 11, 2013, 3:32 a.m...

hamei wrote:

This thing is giving me a headache :

Code:

   cc-1117 cc: ERROR File = matrix.c, Line = 845
   
   An expression appears after a "return" in a "void" function.
   
   return unpack_string_area(buf, data, s, row, col);
   
   ^
   
   1 error detected in the compilation of "matrix.c".

Oh, that's rich. unpack_string_area is also returning void, so you can see how they intended it to work. Saves a line!

just...

Code:

  unpack_string_area(buf, data, s, row, col);
  
  return;

...ougt to do the same thing. If it's the last line of the function, you don't even need the return statement.

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of vet unix admins ... at June 12, 2013, 5:30 a.m...

Ouch, I feel like I just looked in a mirror and saw a great big # on my forehead.

As an aside about sudo though, anyone contemplating using it should really have a look at the security lists and ponder how such a simple, security critical tool could possibly contain so many bugs. It's frankly terrifying.

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of undefined identifier : SIAG at June 12, 2013, 6:17 a.m...

hamei wrote:

Wull, ah'll be a monkey's uncle ... we run outta code for him to do weird stuff with. Ta-daaa

Looks like I've got enough stuff to keep me busy for a month tardistting ... A big thank-you to everyone who gave directions and didn't laugh at the stupid questions. Not publicly, anyhow

Heh, no worries. I must confess I quite enjoy this kind of armchair porting.

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of undefined identifier : SIAG at June 15, 2013, 12:20 a.m...

miod wrote:

Well, what about something ugly like

Code:

   static XtActionsRec actions [0
   
   #ifdef HAVE_LIBGUILE
   
   + 1
   
   #endif
   
   #if 0
   
   + 1
   
   #endif
   
   #ifdef HAVE_LIBTCL
   
   + 1
   
   #endif
   
   ] =
   
   {
   
   #ifdef HAVE_LIBGUILE
   
   {"guile", execute_guile_action},
   
   #endif
   
   #if 0
   
   {"execute", execute_siod_action},
   
   #endif
   
   #ifdef HAVE_LIBTCL
   
   {"tcl", execute_tcl_action}
   
   #endif
   
   };

It might work if MIPSPro supports zero-sized arrays. I don't remember if it does.

You'd need to add backslashes after the 0 and +1:s to make this trick work, and you introduce another problem with the exact same cause, if neither of the defines are set, the array is initialized with zero length which is not allowed. Nah, just making sure that ={}; does not happen is sufficient.

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of undefined identifier : SIAG at June 15, 2013, 2:29 a.m...

miod wrote:

duck wrote:

You'd need to add backslashes after the 0 and +1:s to make this trick work

No.

Yes. I tested it :-)

It seems GCC doesn't require them though.

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of undefined identifier : SIAG at June 15, 2013, 7:08 a.m...

ShadeOfBlue wrote:

Compile them both with c99; if it fails to compile the second example, then the compiler doesn't follow the standard.

Wow, must have been a PEBKAC, because now I can't reproduce it... D'oh!

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of prerequisites : I'm pissed (rant) at June 17, 2013, 11:58 a.m...

The version numbers are not related to the library/software version, it's the package version. This is important only for prerequisites... The number chosen is entirely up to the software packager, and while I would probably have chosen something like <major><minor><micro><two-numbers-for-fixing-my-messing-it-up> a number incrementing for each new release of a package is totally fine.

To find out what package a particular file belongs to there's no need to pipe and grep, just do

Code:

  % showfiles -- /usr/nekoware/lib/libz.so.1.2.3
  
  f 39037 132392 neko_zlib.sw.lib        usr/nekoware/lib/libz.so.1.2.3

In order to find out which version of a package you have installed to make it a prerequisite (since there isn't a specific system to the prereq numbers you'll have to go with this number or guess, if you want to have prerequisites at all, which AFAIR nekoware often do not have)

Code:

  % versions -n neko_zlib
  
  I = Installed, R = Removed
  
  Name                 Version     Description
  
  I  neko_zlib                     6  zlib 1.2.3 Compression Library
  
  I  neko_zlib.sw                  6  zlib 1.2.3 software
  
  I  neko_zlib.sw.lib              6  shared libraries

Somehow it seems to me like my reply has an offensive tone, please do take it as just information.

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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of Building GLchess on 6.2 at June 29, 2013, 4:21 a.m...

Without reading the makefile, I'd assume they randomly chose not to use those variables...

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of New laptop thoughts at June 29, 2013, 3:08 p.m...

Hmm, wouldn't SSDs have inherently much better failure modes though? Their only drawback as I see it is the write cycle limitation, and when you bump into that you can still read your data back (barring unsafe filesystem use like async mounts, I'm sure that could cause problems if you need to write metadata and suddenly you can't).
I'm keen to know if you have experience of other types of failures (well, theoretical pitfalls are fine too, TBH)

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of my observatory at July 5, 2013, 6:13 a.m...

jan-jaap wrote: The woodwork reminds me of a Finnish sauna. I like it.

Yup, looks very much like it, excepting the beautiful floor.

The ceiling is just bonkers though! :shock:

halo , oct ane

knightrider , d i g i t a l AlphaPC164, pond , soekris net6501, misc cool stuff in a rack
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of Building GLchess on 6.2 at July 11, 2013, 12:29 a.m...

johnsmith wrote:

Code:

   [...]
   
   |+++ glchess-0.4.7/src/splash.c 2013-07-08 21:00:57.472914000 +0200
   
   --------------------------
   
   File to patch:

Patch does this when it can't find the file mentioned just above to patch. It's asking where to apply the patch. Seems like your
source code differs from tgc99's.

Edit: Just realized that you specify the file to patch on the command line and that the path differs. Notice that the --- (and more importantly) +++ lines say glchess-0.4.7/... This means that the files specified to patch in the patchfile are in this relative path. Either edit the patch file or change your current directory to reflect this before running patch.

Edit2: Also, normally you do not need any command line arguments to patch, it can generally figure things out on its own.

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of arfing gtk2 at July 12, 2013, 7:05 a.m...

hamei wrote:

Okay, I'm arfing stewpid, thought I'd see how far up the food chain we can go with this thing ... pixman-0.28.2

Code:

   cc-1020 cc: ERROR File = ../test/utils.c, Line = 371
   
   The identifier "MAP_ANON" is undefined.
   
   addr = mmap (NULL, n_bytes, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS,
   
   ^

This might be a big one; anonymous maps are, AFAICR, not available on IRIX. Note however that it's in ../test/, you might get away with just ignoring the tests.

_________________
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halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of arfing gtk2 at July 12, 2013, 8:21 a.m...

ShadeOfBlue wrote:

This is a bit trickier to fix, since IRIX doesn't have MAP_ANON. The first comment here shows you how to fix this.

So, instead of using -1 as the file descriptor and MAP_ANON in the flags, you manually open /dev/zero (mfd in that comment is an int) and use that file descriptor. You should also close() that file descriptor after the munmap() call, otherwise it will leak resources if it's called too often.

EDIT: I see we really jumped on this one

Bit of a race condition, hurr hurr...

While not applicable in this case, it's really useful to be able to "emulate" an anonymous map like this... here I was idly pondering using tempfiles or something, thanks for this :-)

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of Motif and MWM at July 21, 2013, 9:19 a.m...

hamei wrote:

Okay, here's a dumb Motif question ... under /usr/Motif-2.1/include/Sgm we have the SGI Motif customizations. Supposing one is compiling a Motif application, if you use the SGI headers do you get the SGI-appearing widgets ? or is there more involved ?

AFAIK it's actually even simpler than that, you just have to enable sgiMode for that app in the X resources and voila, you get IRIXy Motif.

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of Terminal Types at July 30, 2013, 4:08 a.m...

I had a look in NetBSD's termcap and found this (among many, many other TTYs). Are these what you were looking for? I have no clue about such old gear.

Code:

  tty43|model 43 teletype:\
  
  :am:bs:hc:os:xo:\
  
  :co#132:\
  
  :bl=^G:cr=^M:do=^J:kb=^H:le=^H:sf=^J:
  
  dw3|la120|decwriter III:\
  
  :bs:hc:os:\
  
  :co#132:\
  
  :bl=^G:cr=^M:do=^J:\
  
  :i1=\E(B\E[20l\E[w\E[0;132s\E[2g\E[z\E[66t\E[1;66r\E[4g\E>:\
  
  :is=\E[9;17;25;33;41;49;57;65;73;81;89;97;105;113;121;129u\r:\
  
  :kb=^H:le=^H:me=\E[w:se=\E[w:sf=^J:so=\E[6w:ta=^I:

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of Terminal Types at Aug. 2, 2013, 12:40 p.m...

Ah yes, it's exclusively terminfo. Hadn't expected that, I must not be using my Octane as much as I ougt to. :-/ I was muzzily thinking of a $HOME/.termcap entry. Still, there's apparently a captoinfo(1M) that could be used in a pinch.

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Donor
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of speed check at Aug. 3, 2013, 5:43 a.m...

My ISP does not suck. Cheap, reliable, fast service. All I lack is native IPv6.

halo , oct ane

knightrider , d i g i t a l AlphaPC164, pond , soekris net6501, misc cool stuff in a rack
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.
and authored 384 notes

Wrote on the subject of about LISP performance at Aug. 5, 2013, 6:45 a.m...

Funnily enough, John Carmack talked some about this at this year's superlong quakecon talk. Relevant video part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A

Keep in mind that his point of view is 3d gaming.

_________________
:Octane:

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Donor
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Cool (open source) software you would like to see ported... at Aug. 24, 2013, 11:52 p.m...

Just a FYI, minidlna isn't very useful on anything but linux because they rely solely on inotify to find new files other than an initial, hideously slow, filesystem traversal. I had some mind to hack together a kqueue module for usage on *BSD but I lack in time and energy. I don't even know if IRIX has any kind of equivalent other than plugging into fam.

halo , oct ane

knightrider , d i g i t a l AlphaPC164, pond , soekris net6501, misc cool stuff in a rack
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Maya 6.5 IRIX performance? at Dec. 21, 2013, 5:05 a.m...

It's all rather up to how you define 'usable'. I used 5.0 (I think) on an R10k I2 with SI graphics at one point and found it perfectly workable. My current machine has been running 6.5 on a single 300MHz R12k and SE+TMEZZ for a while, and with a V6 and now with dual 300 R12ks with V12. All the combinations work just fine (though the viewports glitch with lines in the grid sometimes disappearing and weird colours in the animation slider; I guess it's not optimized for vpro). Just don't expect performance like a modern machine. Doing any kind of simulation on a desktop sgi is going to let you take long coffee breaks or naps...

Personally I still prefer modelling on the SGI, the UI--particularily on OSX--is suffering from nasty porting artifacts, or at least did when I last checked the PLE. I've been looking for a compatible standalone MR (MRfM asks for a backend from the server of the same minor version and croaks if it doesn't get it) for windows so I could slave the rendering on the hulking i5 for this reason but as yet to no avail.

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Maya 6.5 IRIX performance? at Dec. 21, 2013, 6:04 a.m...

Trevalin wrote: I guess it might help if I described my goals a bit more, which will primarily be character and spaceship modeling for a story I am writing, strictly as a personal creative project. So it will mostly be still images, and perhaps some short (10 seconds, give or take) animation clips rendered out at no bigger than 640x480.

It all depends on the complexity, and even then you can turn off (or use selective) texturing and shading previews and use tricks like bouding box displays to keep the polycount down when you're modelling. Shouldn't be too big a problem unless you want armies of millions of highly detailed battleships... The things that run slow are really physics simulations and operations on objects with high poly counts or complexity. Rendering always takes a long time but that's "unmanaged" so it's generally not such a big deal.

trevalin wrote: Which reminds me of another question…is there any other method other than networking for moving files around? I'm sure its not as easy as throwing texture map files on a USB stick and moving them from one machine to another like we might do with macs or pc's, but is there any other method?

What else would there be? Magic? I tend to use NFS for file transfers here, my "work" dir on all desktops is mounted from a server in the closet. Mind you, you'll still have to deal with the problem of absolute paths to textures in the scene files if you intend to model on irix and render elsewhere.

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
Donor
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Happy Holidays at Dec. 26, 2013, 2:24 a.m...

Happy holidays once again guys!

halo , oct ane

knightrider , d i g i t a l AlphaPC164, pond , soekris net6501, misc cool stuff in a rack
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Apple + China Mobile - a good deal? at Dec. 26, 2013, 4:54 a.m...

Hamei speaks truth in his usual hyperbolic way (or so I hope)...

As a northern European, the US prices seem absolutely insane. The norm here used to be a per minute charge for phonecalls and per-message SMS costs (back when we have marks it was 1mk per message as I recall) in a subscription fashion, you signed the contract, got to choose your phone number and was given a (full size) SIM card. Thanks, goodbye. Also we sell phones here if... oh, you have one already, fine.

Data, as it were then, was a per-minute charge as well but as GPRS and EDGE moved to 3G it turned into rate-limited tiers, where you paid a certain amount for a certain level of service. Splendid. I can't remember what I paid before but the subscription I had up til last year with a 512k (up/down) speed limit (easily enough for my needs) was about 10 euros a month.

Some time after the introduction of EDGE the mobile operators started to get wind of this data cap business from abroad (I presume), and started selling packages with "1000 free minutes" and "1000 free messages" thing "for the heavy consumer", nothing that I was really interested in because I send and receive on average a quarter of a message a month and about as many phone minutes.

This has now morphed into a full data cap, all plans I found while looking for an LTE upgrade it seems come with "minutes", "messages" and "gigabytes" and cost a fair lot more... I was fortunate that my old provider allows upgrades of only the data service but I couldn't chose a rate limited one (but with the added latency benefits of LTE) so now I'm paying about 27 euros a month with (theoretically) more bandwidth to my phone than my home connection... (50Mb/s vs. 10Mb/s fibre) *grumble* PAYG please...

Prepaid is available, you can get a SIM card in any store or kiosk, as well as refills but it's socially seen as something for foreigners and losers :-)

In any event, it boggles my mind that US subscribers blithely pay so much for phone service and can only hope that the service providers here get a grip and go back to the good old ways.

Also, is it true that you can be charged for receiving calls or messages in the US?

halo , oct ane

knightrider , d i g i t a l AlphaPC164, pond , soekris net6501, misc cool stuff in a rack
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of uptime contest ! at Jan. 25, 2014, 7:21 a.m...

Code: Select all


   knightrider% date && uptime
   

   Sat Jan 25 17:19:51 EET 2014
   

   5:19PM  up 507 days, 21:10, 5 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.35, 0.38

No UPS . Knightrider is my AlphaPC164 (500MHz ev5.6) running NetBSD 5.1 and operates as my irc, http, mail and misc server.

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of uptime contest ! at Jan. 27, 2014, 2:09 a.m...

jpstewart wrote: I want your power company! That's really impressive.

I'm hard pressed to get uptimes like that with a UPS. I've got 20 minutes of battery power but around here the power tends to go out for less than a minute or for several hours. There's no middle ground. The brief power flickers happen too often for my tastes. The major outages happen every year or two, it seems. The last one (over 4 hours) was just 34 days ago. Although at that time, people in nearby cities were in the dark for the better part of a week thanks to an ice storm. So I got off lucky.

I did once have a trio of Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers running Linux all make it (just) past 800 days of uptime before the power went out for several hours. That was my best uptime but can't compare to anything I've seen a long while. And almost always due to power outages.

Yep, I'm really amazed at their performance these last few years. Mild winters helped no doubt. Admittedly the server rack now has a PDU which smooths things over a bit, the alpha used to be really sensitive to microfluctuations but as you see it's doing great now.

I've been meaning to get a UPS but the closet half-rack is full and well.. why? :-)

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Mac is 30 years old at Jan. 29, 2014, 7:08 a.m...

guardian452 wrote: You're a latecomer? I was only born in 1988! And my first would have been a performa 6400 that I bought at a yardsale for $50 in 2002 or so.

Believe it or not, I've never played Myst. It's now high on my to-do list

Oh great, now I feel OLD :-P

You really need to get Myst; 1, 2 (riven), 3 (exile) are great, and 4 (revelations) is extremely beautiful but in the end the puzzles get rather stupid (the dream stuff).. I never finished that one because of them. Myst and Riven could be a bit hard to get running because of their reliance of really old quicktime, but at least of Myst there's a "millennium edition"--I think it was called that--which lets you run it on modern hardware. At least on windows xp it was possible to install bits of the ancient QT to get Riven to run, I probably have a note of the procedure somewhere.
Can't help you with running it on macs :-)

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Mac is 30 years old at Jan. 29, 2014, 8:27 a.m...

hamei wrote:

duck wrote: Oh great, now I feel OLD

That's 'cuz you are old ! Never trust anyone over 30 !

Oh, so that was it.. :-P

hamei wrote:

You really need to get Myst;

Wasn't Myst created on Barney-boxes ? I have a video "Creation of Myst" or something, somewhere, and it's all SGI hardware

Can't help you with running it on macs

I wish they released it on the hardware they made it on

No, I'm pretty sure it was modeled and programmed on macs, hence the quicktime dependency. ISTR they built their own software to model the entire first island in one go which was a big deal at the time, presumably given the memory constraints. Perhaps that video is on my Myst ME CD, I'd better go look it up :-)

Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94pzx_9LkVI

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

duck
From Jakobstad, Finland
Who joined Oct. 27, 2003, 5:22 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Mac is 30 years old at Jan. 30, 2014, 12:18 p.m...

guardian452 wrote: Good old games has the myst games. What's nice about those guys is they make the games run on modern hardware, remove bonehead copy protection, and often include bonus artwork..
http://www.gog.com/game/myst_masterpiece_edition

In this case though, they didn't need to do anything. Myst: ME was already made to work on modern hardware and without copy protection. I have a demo CD with it from somewhere here (paper sleeve type thing)

scottE: I stand corrected :-)

halo , oct ane
N.B.: I tend to talk out of my ass. Do not take it too seriously.

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