A Special Halloween Post

The following is my attempt at a scary Halloween entry.  Be warned!  Looking at the following link is not advised for those with weak hearts.  If you see it and can never look at the world again, then don't come blaming me!

Beware!

ybin: Blessing /dev/hda2 with Holy Penguin Pee...

This is a plea for help from anyone with any Linux PPC experience.  I decided to try and install bootsplash the other day, and I've been running into nothing but problems ever since.

The problem goes like this:  in order to work properly, bootsplash needs the console to be running at a colour depth of at least 16 bits per pixel.  Depending on where you get your information from, an iMac (Rev.B) is capable of either 24 or 32bpp.  The default size for a bootsplash image is 1024x768, the iMac monitor defaults to 1024x768@75Hz.  So far, so good.  However, the atyfb frame buffer driver (ATI Rage Pro chipset) defaults to 8bpp.  That's not so good.

Thankfully, Gentoo has info on bootsplash on PPC, and they say to use append="video:driver:1024x768-32" to get it working (where driver is replaced by the name of the framebuffer driver, in this case atyfb).  And here the first problem pops up.  atyfb doesn't support choosing video modes in this format, so I had to go digging through ancient documentation to find out that you need to use vmode:X,cmode:Y instead.  Cue further digging, looking for the appropriate vmode for an iMac (Rev. B).  Eventually, I find it on the old Linux PPC FAQ-O-Matic (which deals with LinuxPPC and sometimes MkLinux, proving how dated this info is).  Everything should be fine now, right?  Wrong.

Appending vmode works fine, but the moment I try to append any cmode greater than 8bpp I start being told that I've selected an invalid vmode (and the frame buffer drops to 1024x768 @ 60Hz, which causes the monitor to go into low power mode, although the colour depth does actually change, not that that makes any difference when you can't see anything).  So, I'm looking for anyone who's gotten atyfb to display a console with greater than 256 colours in a recent kernel.  (All info I can find is for either 2.2 or early 2.4 kernels.)

Anyone?

Update:  Oops.  Seems I forgot to test out the vmode:17,cmode:16 on my stock 2.6.9 kernel.  They work fine on there, which means that it's the bootsplash patch itself that's trying to change the framebuffer refresh rate.  Given the reasons the patch wouldn't compile on PPC prior to kernel version 2.6.7 (the patch contained explicit references to vesafb, and VESA is an x86-only standard), I'm can't say I'm terribly surprised.

The Horror In The Mailbox

Mmmm…. Vintage Lovecraft. (Weird Tales, March 1940: The Dweller (Verse))

Current mood:  Indescribable^*

* Only time I'll ever include "current mood", I promise; the joke was just too good bad to pass up.

I Am Mung!

I hit the used bookstores today, so I'm going to share a few of my finds:

First up, we have a novel that I expect to be absolutely dreadful:  Stationfall, by Arthur Bryon Cover.  The reason I picked it up should be obvious enough, but if it isn't: "An Infocom Book" says everything that needs to be said.  On the negative side: it supposedly doesn't make a lot of sense without having read the first novel, and secondly, it's a marketing tie-in dating from the the last days of the post-Activision-buy-out version of Infocom.  On the plus side: there's a glowing review of the author's ability by none other than Harlan Ellison.

And speaking of Harlan Ellison — the man who left college because he punched a professor in the mouth, who once tried to design a computer game that was impossible to beat, the man who spent almost 30 years feuding with Gene Roddenberry over the later's altering of a script (which won Ellison a Hugo in its altered state), and who once mailed a publisher a dead gopher (fourth class) — I managed to spot a graphic novel collection of three of his stories (with the original text-only versions of the stories included) at Strange.  Given the difficulty in acquiring Ellison's works (perhaps largely due to his ability to irritate people, especially publishers and editors), it was a must buy.  I have to tell the owner whether it is any good the next time I stop in there.  So far I've only read the introduction, which has a tone that's unmistakably Ellison.

And finally, another author who's next to impossible to find, but for different reasons: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, better known simply as Lord Dunsany.  For a man who produced an unbelievable amount of literature during a 50-year career (there are five volumes collecting just the stories involving Jorkens, a character he created 25 years after his first major published work), he certainly is difficult to find in bookstores.  (Chapters lists 4 titles by him, one of which is out of stock, and another which is temporarily unavailable to order.)  It's a pity, as he was considered to be a master of fantasy writing, influencing the likes of Lovecraft, whose early published work reads like a pale imitation of Dunsany, and Tolkien, with his tales of strange gods with Eastern-sounding names.  (The official website of the Dunsany Estate has a story by Dunsany online.  It's not anywhere's near his best work, but it does give people who've never heard of him a quick introduction.  Project Guttenberg has a number of his works, which have lapsed into the public domain due to age, online, but I've never been one to enjoy reading entire books from a text file.)

All of this, of course, meant that I was very happy to find a novel by him in one of the secondhand stores.  I've never actually read a novel by him before, as I only have short story collections by him.  I'm hoping it's good, but I've got plenty of other things to read first.

That's it, that's Andrew's day at the bookstore.  Rather cheap, given the amount I normally spend.  Oh, I almost forgot: since I'm on the topic of old publications, here's something for the Unix geeks that I found in an old (April 1981) edition of Scientific American.

And That's Time. Pencils Down, Gentlemen

I've decided to cease entry title trivia, if only because Matt's the only one getting them.  Here're the final scores:

MEAT: 27
Andrew H.: 13
Derek: 6
Rar: 4
Nancy: 3
Peter: 2
beki mcdermott: 1 (Note: I have no idea who this is.  Anyone?)
Jon: 1
Kaptain Jack: 1

I've enclosed all the solutions to the unanswered ones in the extended entry.  Enjoy!

 Continue reading And That's Time. Pencils Down, Gentlemen

Greedo Shot First? (Plus A Very Strange ICQ Spam)

I'm going to ostracise myself from the majority of the geek community by saying the following:  I don't really care for Star Wars.  I never saw the movies when I was little, my "film buffquot; veneer came during my teens, when I finally had money to spend from my first part-time job.  This means that by the time I finally got around to seeing them, I missed whatever the appeal was to so many other people.  However, I have seen the 1997 special edition and original theatrical version of Star Wars  (I refuse to refer to it as 'A New Hope', I'm sorry.), and I have to agree that the Greedo shoots first scene is one of the worst editting jobs I have ever scene in a major motion picture.  So, for all the Star Wars fans who may read this, here's a link to an amusing comic called "The Emperor's Court", in which Han Solo attempts to prove he's innocent of shooting Greedo first using video footage.

Secondly, the following is the oddest ICQ spam I have ever recieved:

Are you tired from ethereal invisible ghosts of text chats ?
If that's the case, You coming in animated flash-chat
(Address and random gibberish to evade spam plugins removed)

Now, I want to know: what are ethereal invisible ghosts of text chats?  Are they harmful? Should I be worried about them?  How do I get rid of them?  (Do I need to track down a bell, book, and candle and perform an exorcism? If so, since they're ghosts of text chats, will reading from the book you use for the exorcism in Zork I^* work?)  Should I draw up a circle of protection prior to logging on to ICQ? I need to know these things; I don't want to be putting myself at risk here.

^*Commandment #12592

Oh ye who go about saying unto each: "Hello sailor":
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?
Yea, verily, thou shalt be ground between two stones.
Shall the angry gods cast thy body into the whirlpool?
Surely, thy eye shall be put out with a sharp stick!
Even unto the ends of the earth shalt thou wander and
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.

All That Seizin' Made Me Hungry

I really really hope that no one here is an epileptic, because this next image could cause some problems.

I think whoever created that should be taken around back and shot, along with FastClick for hosting it.  Yee gads.

If you can stop convusling, the title is worth 1 point.

Trivia

Here's something interesting to think about: the closest living relative of the elephant is the hyrax; which, as the picture below illustrates, is roughly about the size of a housecat.

Finally, since this would be a pretty pointless entry with just the above (not that most of my entries aren't pointless, anyways):  Iconochasms.  Basically, you have to try and pick the originator of the quote from the list of famous figures.  I managed 19 out of 30, proving that, while I can smell a Winston Churchill quote a mile away, I'm pretty much hit-or-miss on the others.

There's A Law In New York State: Tuesdays, Thursdays, And Especially Saturdays

I picked this up from Backstreet Records where, oddly enough, it was classified under "Exotica and Other Strangeness".  I've heard all the material before as, aside from the scenes in Annie Hall, it's the only record of Allen's standup career that remains (and, it should be noted, the material in Annie Hall — but not the actual performances — overlaps with some of the material here); however, it still bears repeating that the stuff is hilarious.  Definitely worth the $7.

"I must pause for one fast second and say a fast word about oral contraception:  I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception.  Two weeks ago I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said "No.""

Remember This Time, People: 80 Past 2, On April 47^th. It's The Dawn Of A New Enlightenment

Maybe I'm crazy, or maybe I just have too much time on my hands; however, the site will now display dates using the French Revolutionary Calendar.  There's still a few bugs in it, as it doesn't accept all the standard date parameters yet (so times aren't showing up by the comments yet.)  Also, the archives are still archived by Gregorian month, making things even more confusing until I can do something about them.

If you really want to blame someone, blame Neil Gaiman for having written a Sandman story called "Thermidor", and Jean Forget for writing the DateTime::Calendar::FrenchRevolutionary perl module.

1 point, as always.