shwango! blog

i hadn’t posted in a while… not all that busy, but i guess nothing to post about.

i’m sick. a cold or sinus infection since last thursday. i tried to fight it, but it got to me on sunday. i usually don’t get sick except in the winter, so this is a bit odd – as well as miserable.

did a little more mac hacking.

finished reading crypto two weeks ago. it’s a great book if you’re into cryptography and the information age. i really enjoyed it. there’s a great in-depth notes and bibliography section – i added at least a half-dozen books to my reading list.

crypto took a bit longer to read ’cause i was re-reading takedown in parallel. i’m not sure why i’m facinated by the mitnick story and it’s different sides. i do recommend takedown. it’s a good story with a lot of technical details, although i doubt tsu made many friends by publishing it. still need to get and read mitnick’s new book…

continued reading flatland, but haven’t got too far – not something to read before bed. it was written in 1880 and it’s language is a bit difficult in some manner – at least for me. but so far it’s a fascinating story. i recommend it to anyone wanting to look at things in a different way.

not one to finish one thing before starting another, i started reading various positions: a life of leonard cohen last night. cohen’s music works have been a great influence in my life, especially the album various positions.

also, shwango blog looks pretty good in kde 3.0’s konqueror browser, although the calendar’s a bit off, and editing works well too, but there seems to be some caching issues or something.

i had stumbled across not applicable’s music a while ago somehow on mp3.com and just re-stumbled upon the mp3s i had downloaded from the site. not applicable is courtnee papastathis. her music is very haunting. if you like things along the lines of dead can dance, this mortal coil, gladiator soundtrack, koyaanisqatsi soundtrack, ambient, etc., check it out.

oh yeah, shoulda made mention of this in my previous post… i’m glad to hear that chuck shotton – the creator of the original machttp – is back at it!

chuck had sold a license of it to starnine who turned it into webstar. then 4d bought startnine. i guess chuck still retained the rights, so now he’s decided to start working on it again, along with the ‘net community – yup, he’s open sourced it!

machttp is now at version 2.5 with a beta of the next release just posted.

very cool! but one odd note is that machttp.org is running apache!

well, i might have to call my mac ii “lazarus” cuz it’s been raised from the dead! (for those without a religious upbringing, i think you still know what i’m talking about. not that i’m into all that…)

i’ve got it up to system 7.5.5 and open transport 1.1. (still need to update that – i heard that only 1.1.1 and up are stable.) it’s getting a bit sluggish now if i do things while the web server is running. i need to find some old 30 pin simms… i can boost it to 128mb ram if i can find 8 16 meg simms!

i also started looking for digidesign audiomedia ii card and sound designer software – that’s what made me fall in love with the mac ii when i first saw it. ebay’s got some stuff that might work.

i had been having some trouble with machttp 1.3 – it was too slow. and i knew it should be faster. my first web server i ever set up was machttp 1.? on a mac lcii and ran acceptable. i didn’t think it was the networking since pings to the box were fast and ethernet appletalk file serving was speedy.

i think it was a dns issue – lookups seem to kill it. i may revisit 1.3 but now i’m happy with 2.5 – with dns lookups off! it’s speeding along now! not too bad for 15 bucks at hamvention a few years ago.

hmmm… will macperl run on it? if perl will, maybe movable type would… well, for now i’ll just hack on some apple script code… if i can remember it!

maybe i’ll put the box on the public ‘net for all to bask in it’s glory! well, that is after i try to put linux on it…

hats off to all the old mac lovers still out there with site up for drivers, software, tips and tricks!

i gotta spend some time revamping my stylesheet… the anchor color or something is freakin’ out ie6. and sometimes only the part of the blog down to “powered by movable type” shows up and you have to reload.

what a beautiful day. a day to remember last year’s events. i left work early to sit out on the deck and ponder…

ok, well i got the mac ii on the ‘net! spent a long time last night looking around for mactcp to no avail – was up ’til 3am! finally found it this afternoon on apple’s ftp site – not in the software section, but in the developers section! arg!

i had to jump a few hoops to get the networking up and running. to test last night (without tcp/ip, just ethernet) i installed netatalk on a linux box, but the server wouldn’t show up.

turns out the information i got on the etherport ii nic was wrong. there’s a single dip switch that is suppose to select between the aui port and the coax port. it’s labled cnet/enet – i didn’t know what cnet stood for, but the nic auto detects aui or coax as long as the switch is set to enet, which i found out today. i shoulda just flipped the switch last night! (wonder what the other setting is for!)

at work we’ve got mostly 10/100baseT, some gigabit fiber and one legacy 10base2 coax connection – which is in the data center, not by my test area. i’ve got a 10/100 switch in my area, so a dug out a old aui to 10baseT adapter – but it didn’t fit on the back of the mac! luckly we had a aui cable from the old days that i used to connect the adapter to the mac. at home my hub (yeah, it’s old, just 10baseT) has a aui and coax bnc connector, so i just used some old coax.

another problem was that the pram (bios) battery is dead and the mac must use this to store some data such as color settings and localtalk/ethertalk. so sometimes, if i had unplugged the mac, it would revert to localtalk and i’d forget to change it back to ethernet. ug.

so now i could see the appletalk network. that was cool. and once i found mactcp, i was on the ‘net! pinged a few things to make sure, then fired up telnet. sweet! a connection was made.

then i installed mosaic 1.3 – surfin’ in style! ok, most pages don’t come up anymore, but still cool.

tonight i installed machttp webserver from old disks i had. it was slow, but it did serve pages.

i’m installing system 7.5 right now to see if that’s faster or slower. supposedly 7.5.3 is free now, ’cause it’s legacy and unsupported, but i couldn’t find it at ftp.apple.com – thanks to the ‘net i found it though!

it was tricky getting stuff on the mac without a network – just those wonderful 3 1/2 inch floppies! i’d download stuff on windows then use a program called transmac to write a mac disk from windows – tres cool! (system 7.1 doesn’t have built in pc floppy access like system 7.5.)

in the process of looking for reusable floppies, i came across the disks i used to first install linux! ah… old slackware…

you may ask why on earth would i spend the time to do this? well, ’cause it’s cool.

funny note: during the system 7.5 install, one step it tells you it’s doing is “making your macintosh happy”. i’m kinda liking macs now!

i’ve put up the original web page i made for the month following 9-11 as a memorial. the event still boggles the mind.

i thought maybe it’d be cool to have a full soap interface into mt. i’m checking to see if there’s something in development, but would be cool to implement anyway. now that mt’s using mysql, i can interact with the db itself. hmmm… can i find the time?

yes, i have a copy of windows 1.0. i’ve had it lying around for years. yesterday we wound up talking about it and one of the guys didn’t believe it existed. so of course i had to dig it up, but it’s real! here’s a post about my version (oem’d from zenith) with the directory listing of the floppies.

back in the day, i had a 8088 ibm pc with 5 1/4″ drives that i installed it on. yes, you heard me right! an 8088! worked in cga mode graphics. quite a site! someday i’ll install it and do some screen shots. at the time i only had a amber crt for that system, so i didn’t even know it was in color!

window’s history at microsoft.com.