Quik Finally Running

I finnaly figured out why Quik wasn't working on my powermac 4400 - the IDE drive was set to master, changing it to single worked.

When I first installed the hard drive I noticed MacOS couldn't see it at all- I had put it down to limitations in Apple's Drive Setup (as it's not an Apple drive) seeing as Linux would see it and install. Even though I could get Linux installed on it Quik never worked, so I had to boot off an external SCSI drive with BOOTX.

I started playing around with Quik and OpenFirmware and I noticed that OF couldn't see the drive either (it never appeared in OF's dev / ls command). Googleing around found indications that MacOS (at least when running on a 4400) is a bit odd about how it handles IDE, so I decided to pop the case off and have a play with drive's jumpers. Setting it to single worked - it popped up in OF and after booting one more time via BOOTX so I could run a dpkg-reconfigure quik it started working.

Circular Knoppix

In order to get Knoppix running on an old machine that won't boot from a CD, you need to use boot floppies. In order to make boot floppies with the current version of Knoppix you need to boot into Knoppix and run the makefloppies script.

The terms Chicken and Egg come to mind.

Why is distutils seperate from python on debian

distutils is part of the core of python, but the debian people have decided to make life harder for their users and have split it off from the main python package and into python-dev. Why? Besides being part of the core, distutils is used by non developers to install python software. It should not be in a seperate package.

Ebay and the WRT54G

OK, I think I'm pretty much sold on the Linksys WRT54G, so I've been looking around at prices. Of course, I've checked ebay, but the prices there are almost as much (and sometimes even more) than what I'd be paying at ebuyer or amazon.

More thoughts on WRT54G

Thinking about, the WRT54G wouldn't fully eliminate the need for the firewall box, for the moment at least. Untill I get upgraded to the new Ethernet based Homechoice, I'm still stuck with the somewhat odd USB based serial PPP setup, so I would still need something sitting in between the WRT54G and the homechoice box. What I would want to do is make that setup appear as similar as possible to the Ethernet HC setup, so when I do get the upgrade it would be a matter of plugging the router from the bridge pc and straight into the new HC box (though I suppose I might need to power cycle the router).

Fortunatly, my friend Graham already has the ethernet hc, so I might have to go around and have a look at it.

Lucent WaveLan Silver card

Today I won on ebay a Lucent WaveLan 802.11b Silver PCMCIA card to use with the new Newton. Hopefully it'll get here soon, however I still haven't decided on how I'm going to setup the wireless lan in the flat - I'm not sure whether to get a standalone AP or to try and get the firewall/router pc I'm intending to setup to act as an AP. A standalone AP would be the probably be the easiest solution but setting up the firewall to be the AP would take up less space (which is at a premium). I suppose it will mostly depend on whichever is the cheaper option - a standalone AP or a PCI card that can be used as AP (which appears to be any card with an Intersil Prism 2 chipset). Oh, and then there's the little matter of should I go for an 802.11b only network or an 802.11b/g one. While b/g would be more futureproof it's more expensive and as I'm mainly setting this up for the newton I won't be using the g option for some time.

A New Newton

I've got myself a new Newton - this one's an MP2000! I'm looking forward to trying to figure out how to get it to work with WiFi (I know I need Hiroshi's driver and WaveLan based WiFi - ebay here I come)

Mozila crashes and tabs

Galeon has a very usefull feature - when it's started after a 'non-normal' shutdown, it offers the ability to recover the tabs that were open. A very nice, usefull feature. How come Mozilla 1.6 doesn't do this? Mozilla flaked out on me just now, and I lost a lot of tabs.

Motorola V100

I picked up an old Motorola V100 off eBay last week. It was Motorola's 'text messaging phone' - ie it's got a qwerty keyboard and no built in microphone/speaker. It's a bit of a shame they didn't continue development of this type of phone - with Bluetooth, Java, a few PDA functions and a larger screen it could have been a rival to a Blackberry. However, it's been fun to use it for text messaging and instant messaging on MSN, though I don't think I'll ever use it as a voice phone as I can't be bothered carrying around the handsfree kit (Bluetooth would have been so useful here). One thing though, I can't seem to get it to do the : character.