I got round to putting Haven Viewdata back online this evening. The user file is a bit corrupt but I think i’ve managed to fix that.
Have fun 🙂
What Jessie Did Next...
...being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.
Page 13 of 26
Earlier this year I was given some MDFS kit. Manufactured by SJ Research, this was a modular Econet fileserver system which didn’t require a host computer (the MDFS controller did all that) and you could just attach drives and printers to it – very advanced for its time and the hardware even matched. All told I had three MDFS controller units, a few drive units, a tape drive and a dual 5.25″ drive unit. Add to that the three (!) printed manuals and 5.25″ floppy software and I’ve got what can probably be said to be a complete system with spares!
So having a little spare time I got mine working. The first thing was getting the MDFS controller running: these have CMOS battery backup that charges over time, but given they’d been switched off for some years it was all corrupted. Simple fix, hold down the ‘RELEASE’ button for 5s and it’ll clear.
Next thing – talk to it. SJ Research were pretty forward-thinking so you can do rudimentary utility control through the serial port allowing disk format, copy, initialise, resetting password file, set Econet station number, all that sort of thing. It takes a 5-pin domino RS423 connector which is coincidentally the same as in a BBC Micro so I had one available, and it only took 5 minutes to reset it all.
The SCSI drives were a bit more complex. One of the slices worked straight off giving me two Fujitsu SCSI drives (40MB and 100MB), but the other disk slice with the Rodime RO752 drive was defective. I did however have a Morley external hard disk unit from an Acorn A3000 which had a SCSI drive in – further investigation yielded a Seagate ST277N-1, which with a few jumper changes and when that didn’t work a quick hunt for the jumper settings on the ‘Net, made a third drive of 60MB.
All formatted, passwords set, and… ‘*I AM SYST’ worked fine across on the workbench BBC Master!
So, it’s all racked up now. The A4000 is the older fileserver, the A5000 is there for assistance in copying 5.25″ floppies. Hooray!
Photos here.
I’ve just been having a look at the contents of those LVROM discs – aside from the Countryside Disc I mean.
I have three volumes of ‘Energy Curriculum Pack’, produced by the British Nuclear Forum and distributed by Eltec; inside each pack there are a few floppy discs, a laserdisc and an instruction manual. Reading the requirements they’ve been designed for an Acorn A3000 hooked up to a Philips VP406 player (not the same one as the Domesday System), together with a serial interface (RS232), genlock and memory upgrade inside the A3000. The system itself is referred to as LaserStar V occasionally in the documentation so I guess that’s what we have to look out for!
As well as the Energy stuff there’s also three volumes of 3 laserdiscs each marked ‘The World Of Number’, with ‘Trial Version (c) NCC 1992’. No instructions or indication of what system they run on. That’ll be the biggest mystery I think!
I showed up to demonstrate the restored Domesday Project at the Wakefield Acorn Show today, which took place at Cedar Court Hotel just off M1 J39.
I was a bit late to be honest – I’d nipped via the office to pick up some speakers and then via Maplin to get a cable for the Music 5000 system, arriving at the hotel around 9:30am (with the show opening at 10am!). Thankfully there were quite a few helpers on-hand to assist in getting everything upstairs, and the organisers had laid on some cages-on-wheels to transport stuff to the stand.
My demo chiefly comprised the Domesday Project, but I’d brought along a BBC Master with Sprow’s ARM7 coprocessor, a Music 5000 system, and some games (mostly educational). I was pleasantly surprised the Domesday LVROM started up without any problems, and for the first two hours the demonstrations went without a hitch.
A gentleman showed up on the stand during the morning, asking if I was interested in some more laserdiscs – of course I was, although I thought they might be videodiscs. However, when he brought them up they were some of the ‘very hard to find’ LVROMs including a full copy of the Countryside Disc and some other ones I’d not seen before. Some digging led to the discovery that these were designed for use on an A3000 with a VP506 laserdisc player – what a great find!
Meantime, all the fiddling with these ‘new’ discs did something to the Domesday LV player itself – the damn thing stopped reading the discs. I carry the service manual on my laptop which led to a quick faultfinding session resulting in error code 004: the tilt unit. This bit keeps the laser perpendicular to the (slightly curved) surface of the disc which curves into a convex shape due to its weight. I was just about tearing my hair out when Rick Sterry mentioned he’d got his toolkit, and with the judicious application of a toothbrush and a good old fashioned blow of air, the dust came out and it started working again although I declined to change the disc after that “just in case”.
All was going so well – then the Music 5000 packed up. Grr! Good job I’d got the old Podd game to keep people amused, although I bet you didn’t know Podd can’t smeg.
Interesting bits: seeing an EeePC running RiscOS; noting that Virtual Acorn seems to be a bit happier on Intel Mac hardware nowadays (the guy on the stand was a bit curt but did say it had been out since last September, but I wasn’t in the mood to buy a copy when he’d been quite snappy with me); the RiscOS package project now has a Kerberos port (but no ssh for it, limiting its usefulness for anything I’d do with it).
In general there was a lot less 8-bit stuff around this time. The charity stand had a few odds and ends (mostly ones I’d brought although there was a Torch Z80 Disc Pack) but no other 8-bit exhibitors other than myself. Jonathan Harston had booked a table but didn’t show which was a shame. I think for future shows I may suggest a larger table for 8-bit amusement since visitors were obviously interested and kept asking if I’d brought more software to play with; perhaps that’s a cue for an Econet next time round!
All told I came home with less junk than I’d taken, some more LVROMs to play with, an Acorn User Group mug, and a RiscPC that was on the charity stand (and which I’ll probably use as a spare).
It’s the Wakefield Acorn Show tomorrow, Saturday 26th April. The show takes place at Cedar Court Hotel on junction 39 of the M1, and is bigger than last year (they’ve actually been turning companies away for stand space!).
Apart from myself doing old 8-bit demos and showing off the Domesday Project (which still doesn’t have working sound but is fine otherwise), I can see that JGH is there too. There’ll also be most likely some 8-bit fun to buy on the charity stall.
I have a box of things which will be ‘for sale’ based upon ‘give what you think it’s worth for the charity box’. Looking over at the box now there’s some BBC motherboards, some networking gear, some internal boards, manuals/books, and a pile of software. No I won’t send it anywhere, this is exclusive to the stand tomorrow 😛
Show opens at 10am. See you there 🙂
Gaz pointed out this BBC article: Sky TV has “…given the green light for the development of two 60-minute scripts for a ‘potential event series'”. Could be fun!
(Just what is a ‘potential event series’? One would presume that it’s a normal TV series with a story arc, but they couldn’t actually write that because there’s not enough verbal masturbation.)
Nicky’s 15″ MacBook Pro has been exhibiting some signs of weirdness recently – coloured spinner just sticking on, fans going at full rev. A quick look at Apple Hardware Test (comes on the bundled install DVD) said quite helpfully “error 4SNS/1/40000000:TGOD”. A brief Google search suggested that it’s the logic board that’s gone, so it becomes a warranty repair.
Colin recommended an Apple-accredited repair centre in Armley (Leeds) called Clockwork Creative – a quick phone call and they suggested I bring the machine up. Half an hour later and they’ve got the Mac, suggest it’ll be a few days, and they’ll give me a call depending on parts – it’s a nice small place, seem clued-up and very hands-on.
Now we see how good, and given past support nightmares with other larger companies don’t expect me to remain silent on it 😛
I happened upon Virus Comix recently (finding it via Subnormality and this great montage of people you’d find at a rock concert).
One comic that I really, really like is Things They Don’t Tell You (But Should). This should be mandatory reading.
My attention was brought to this BBC article this morning about police (and other authorities) preventing folks taking photos in the cause of ‘preventing terrorism’ and ‘prevention of paedophilia’. Interesting.
I take photos a lot – rarely a day goes by without taking a photo or ten, of lots of things really. I don’t do ‘paparazzi’ shots, and have a tendency to check it’s OK with the venue/artiste if I’m at a gig. You know the score – check and nobody can complain. Yet I had a policeman challenge me when I was taking this photo – you can actually see Mr Plod in the background. I pulled back quickly from the family and took the pic (hence why it’s blurry), and the policeman challenged me. Lovely!
Indeed, Mr Plod needs education: It’s not illegal to take pics in the street, it’s not “against the data protection act” for someone to be in the way of me when I’m taking a photo of Westgate, it’s especially not “copyright” because your building is in the way (one I got when doing some historical photos)!
A colleague just forwarded me a link to Project Space Leeds’ new exhibition which purports to be “…an exhibition of images by Swiss photographer Eric Jaquier which have not been seen in the UK for almost 40 years, alongside images of Leeds by native photographer Peter Mitchell, documenting the sweeping changes in the city from the 1960s to the present day.”
It’s on at PSL Whitehall Waterfront (directions) and I think I’ll be going to take a look this weekend.
So here I am with a glass of wine in a Premier Inn just out of High Wycombe, keeping warm thanks to the huge table of MSISDNs that my laptop is (poorly) attempting to merge and worrying about tomorrow’s meeting. It’s going to take at least another 10 minutes for this to finish running so I’ve compiled the list of how people coming through Google, Live and MSN found our photo gallery:
| Hits | Search terms used |
|---|---|
| 75 | nicky |
| 7 | girls of amsterdam |
| 5 | fabulous nipples |
| 4 | subnova |
| 4 | amsterdam girls |
| 4 | girls amsterdam |
| 4 | stephen laszlo |
| 3 | girls in Amsterdam |
| 2 | empress state pictures |
| 2 | sue lawley |
| 2 | sue lawley pictures |
| 2 | dover hoverport |
| 2 | windmill |
| 1 | lvrom |
| 1 | hellset |
| 1 | strangers |
| 1 | eliminator |
| 1 | crosscut |
| 1 | Sue Lawley Wogan legs |
| 1 | craig |
Interesting seeing the Clarence bands still making an appearance, and also people who want to know what Sue Lawley’s legs look like 😛
Mm, I took advantage of an offer at 7dayshop.com the other week and upgraded my Mac’s RAM to the maximum it’ll take – 3GB! Nicky got the same and it only cost us £34 (including the postage!) for a 2G 667 RAM clip each.
Makes a hell of a difference (even just upgrading from 2GB to 3GB) – $contract right now involves me throwing around huge amount of data (tables of 30 million rows or more) and merging them – the coloured spinner is coming up less, although now it sounds like a 747 taking off when the fans start up. Mmmm, toasty.
With the prices being that low, you’d be daft to not take advantage of it – especially since Leopard is so memory-hungry.
With the installation of Logic Pro 8, Apple’s ‘Spotlight’ feature is required: without it weird things happen such as files not being found when loading sounds! You end up having to manually go digging for files (which, when they’re 6 levels down is a pain in the arse).
So, I’d not actually realised Spotlight wasn’t working on my install of 10.5.2 – it’s not something I use that much but suddenly it became crucial. I dug around a bit and found that it was crashing like thus:
Apr 12 18:51:28 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Formulating crash report for process Spotlight[147]
Apr 12 18:51:29 trixie com.apple.launchd[139] (com.apple.Spotlight[147]): Exited abnormally: Bus error
Apr 12 18:51:34 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Saved crashreport to /Users/joel/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Spotlight_2008-04-12-185121_trixie.crash using uid: 501 gid: 20, euid: 501 egid: 20
Bus error – sounds like a memory issue. Sadly not, it was a little more complex than that!
Next step was to find out how to reindex Spotlight. I found quite a few references on Apple’s support website here which referred to mdutil, but sadly this did odd things too giving me a ‘No index found for volume (-107)’.
Right, the gloves are off. Let’s drop the whole damn spotlight system by:
- Running ‘Fix Permissions’ on the root disk – you never know, something odd might be prodding it.
- Dropping the Spotlight preferences (they might be corrupt) by deleting
/Users/joel/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist . - Killing anything cached by deleting
/.Spotlight-V100 . This actually gave an error but some stuff disappeared. That’ll do anyway.
At that point I thought ‘hang on – maybe something else is upsetting it?’. Just to be sure, I prevented Spotlight indexing anything to do with Parallels – and therein was the root cause. The damn thing was indexing the virtual disk for Parallels, which would send it into a tailspin. Sodding Windows again, eh?
A reboot later and it’s reindexing, and I’ll try the Logic Pro instruments again. We’ll see how it goes anyway 😀
Update: It’s worked. Bed now.
Eagle Press, the last non-chain stationer/art shop in Wakefield, is closing its doors for the final time next Tuesday. It’s been there as long as I can remember, and can be seen in old photos of the area.
They do however have 50% off everything in the shop, and I’ve taken the opportunity to acquire myself a mount-cutting setup and a load of art stuff for the kids.
The locals are really taking advantage of the cheap sale – there’s sod all office supplies left in there but absolutely tons of pens, pencils, paper, paints, craft stuff and art packs – very very good if you have kids and you’re in the Wakefield area.
I’ve been looking for this quote for a while from a 1989 movie called Skin Deep. It’s a conversation between the lead character and his psychiatrist:
Dr. Westford: Don’t you know by now that changing one’s basic character is next to impossible?
Zach: No. I don’t know that. Jesus, Doctor, if I thought I couldn’t change, I wouldn’t come see you in the first place.
Dr. Westford: I didn’t say that you couldn’t.
Zach: You just said it was impossible.
Dr. Westford: I said it was next to impossible.
Zach: Well, shit, Doctor. “Next to” isn’t that far removed.
Dr. Westford: If it were, there’d be no analysts.
Zach: Not an entirely unhappy prospect, Doctor.
Dr. Westford: Did I ever tell you the story about the scorpion and the frog?
Zach: No.
Dr. Westford: A scorpion who couldn’t swim asked the frog to carry him across the river on his back. The frog said, “Do you think I’m crazy? Halfway across the river, you’ll sting me and I’ll drown.” “That’s not reasonable,” said the scorpion. “If I sting you and you drown, I’ll drown too.” Frog thought about it, he said, “Climb on.” Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and as the frog was drowning, he said to the scorpion, “But now you’ll drown too.” The scorpion said, “Yes. I know.” “That’s not reasonable,” said the frog, and the scorpion replied, “Reason has nothing to do with it. I’m a scorpion. It’s my character.”
Zach: You know what I feel like saying to you?
Dr. Westford: Yes. You feel like telling me to go fuck myself, and you probably will, because it’s your character.
Zach: See you next Tuesday.
I think I’m going to have to find a copy of that film.
Yorkshire lass, born-and-bred. Photographs stuff, writes software, makes music, cooks, dances round the kitchen. Happy lesbinum, wife, and parent to three. Proud to have a rainbow family.
Musician, composer and producer, under the monicker of The Bleeding Obvious.
Regularly seen performing live – gig list here. Been on TV and radio in various capacities.
I’m on Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon
By day I work as a systems architect for a marine technology company. More details about all that on LinkedIn.
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