Linux

Damn. The thin client arrived today and it's DOA. The seller is perfectly willing to replace it but I was really looking forward to playing with my new geek toy today.

next time buy from china. It takes so long to get here that by the time it arrives you've forgotten about it and are pleasantly surprised.

actually that's a funny point.
You can buy amazing things for cheap from china, but you can't buy anything used or antique.

Although I suppose they'll get into copying ancient hardware if there's enough of a market.

Actually what will eventually happen is that either China will begin buying its own stuff, or the dollar will plummet, or both. The result will be that there will no longer be any such thing as "cheap stuff from China." This will be bad, but we'll be able to keep more of our own people employed in manufacturing, which will be good.

In the meantime buy cheap stuff while you can. :)

If my replacement terminal works, I'm probably going to buy a few more. In fact ... I might even be able to build a small business out of grabbing old terminals off eBay and selling them back repurposed as Thinstations.

I had to something similar for a class project in college. The goal was to build a DMA controller for a PDP/11 using a VME bus. The controller had to copy blocks of memory and then push the contents, byte-by-byte into shift registers to output to an oscilloscope. We then had to write a program in assembler to trigger the whole process and draw something.

It was all vector-based. Printing text through the interface was conceivably possible, but that would've been much more effort than the class required.
PDP Binder

It was definitely fun to just be given a simple set of requirements and then implement the whole thing from design, to construction, testing, programming, and debugging.

I don't usually toot my own horn, but when I finished, it worked better than the reference controller built by the teaching assistant. :P
Spell

Someday, even oscilloscopes will be LCD, and life will officially be not worth living.

Too late.

We've got a couple of digitizing oscilloscopes in our lab with LCD displays.
I daresay one of them may even have a touch-screen display.

Heck, even 10 years ago, we had digitizing oscilloscopes, but they were at least using a CRT to display the info. However, the trace was still digitized first and drawn on the screen via a normal video adapter. No direct-driving of the CRT guns by the signal being measured.

Certainly not as cool as the old green-screen o-scopes, but the digitizing scopes are a lot more advanced. With the digitizing scopes, the inputs can be very high-impedance, which means less distortion of the signal being measured.
It also means you can do a lot more signal analysis right on the scope instead of having to figure it all out by hand.
Oscilloscope Binder

but you don't get that warm green phosphor glow!

I found this great thing called handbrake. Ignore the fact that it's by a french guy, :-) it's very good.

the most fucked up thing just happened.
The windowlist applet started sticking to the wrong monitor.
I'd drag it back, it would stay for 1 second then pop back to the other/wrong monitor.
What the fuck I say. I started hunting around google but then thought the better of it, time to reboot.
So I did.
Then the really most fucked up thing happened. My vmware vms didn't start up, saying it required a driver recompile. Oh no not again. But wait. I never ever ever upgrade linux anymore for fear of that problem (really it's time I switch to vbox).
Then I notice that my mail only goes to september.
Something very not cool going on.
I look at df and get this: I'm booted on a raid-0 device
Real interesting since I blew away the drive and reinstalled a non-raid setup from scratch a while ago... like september.
Ahhh... I see the problem. BIOS booted off the wrong drive.
So I go to the bios and as I have to two identical drives, it's hard to tell which is the right one, but I switched to the other and voila I got my machine back.
I can't tell you the feeling of dread that goes through my stomach when I see my machine doesn't boot right.

So now I'm wondering how do I blow away the mbr on the second drive so it never boots again without killing the partition table?

I guess I was a bit vague in that message. The second identical drive used to be part of a 2 piece raid zero array when I thougt it would be fun to run raid 0.
So when it booted off that drive it came up in broken raid 0 mode and ran happily waiting for me to replace the first broken drive.

I have long since thought better of the idea and blew away the first drive and installed OS from scratch, but left second drive alone thus (as never occurred tome) it was still a viable functioning half of a raid 0 setup.

So I had a better idea. I invented raid minus 1.
Rather than have the OS manage live mirroring I decided to remove everything off the second drive and write a script to dd drive 1 to drive 2 once a week.
It's like raid 0 but not live. I have daily incremental backups to cover the span between dd script runs.

What I realized is that it's not just my data that's important, but the OS setup as well. I get such a sick feeling in my stomach when I realize I have no working machine and I have to do nothing but install configure install configure fight with vmware (which is really the worst of it) just so I can work from home and get my mail and such.
So my mirroring the drive once a week, if the first drive fails, I just change my bios and voila working machine, no installing of anything.

"BUT!" you say, "if you run dd on an active partition, it's not in any real state that should be backed up. It's a useless backup."
"NAY!" I retort.

I read an article a few years ago suggesting that you don't shut down your machine, you just power it off. Why wait for it to fuck around flushing buffers and what not, when really, the OS has so many layers of transaction log and whatnot, it generally can recover pretty well most of the time (esp ext 3 and ext 4) so really, if my live partition dd backup isn't usable it's a failing of ext4 not my backup mechanism.
Of course I haven't tried this out yet....