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A Happy New Year to every body.
May God bless you richly this year.
I found (another) `thought of today'
page. (3/14/96: link broken?)
Submit it if you want
to submit your page. And I found another diary on the net. It is by
Sabina.
How dreadful, if suddenly your sister would be
missing.
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[January 5:
I apologize for the contrast between the above line, and the rest
of this page. Please read what happened]
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Umberto Eco on DOS versus Mac
Umberto Eco writes [the excerpt is from an English translation of
Umberto Eco's back-page column, "La bustina di Minerva," in the Italian
news weekly Espresso (September 30, 1994)]:
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh
computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am
firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS
is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has
been influenced by the 'ratio studiorum' of the Jesuits. It is
cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must
proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven - the
moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the
essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and
sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation
of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle
hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not
all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to
interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque
community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of
his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS
universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist
tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an
Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is
always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in
accordance with bizarre decisions.....
This has been quoted from:
William H. Calvin's
Searching for Intelligence
(Ch. 6).
This morning when I put Annabel in
the living room, she started to say: `da da', while pointing at her
coat. When I gave it to her, she made an attempt to put it on.
A little later, I put her with Li-Xia,
and when I said goodbye, she
started to cry, disappointed that she could not go with me. She does
not like to be at home any more, and obviously likes to be at the
day-care. Yesterday afternoon she was smiling when I came to get her.
Last Tuesday, I made some short reference about her missing. Yesterday,
I found out that she has been
killed.
Lets all remember Paul
Barber, and his family, who have to deal with this horrible loss.
Lets also hope, that this terrible crime will be solved.
Decompiling
I posted a message about my decompile page
in some programming, compiling and hacking groups.
Before, I did this, I installed a
counter.
The PC I run at home is dual
bootable: DOS and Linux. Because I had
found a cheap VT100 terminal, I wanted to try to connect this to the
PC, so I could use it as a terminal with Linux. But because the mouse
and the modem (yes, I have a slip connection) already used up two
COM ports, I needed a third COM port. Normally, if you want more than
two COM ports, you have to buy some special IO-card, that can deal with
it. But I did not want to invest a lot of money in this experiment.
I did find a cheap second hand Multi-IO card (10$), of which I disabled
all function accept one COM port that I configured as COM3. Because now
I had two IO-cards in my machine, I needed to use an extra interrupt. I
took IRQ5, from LPT2, I believe, or something like that. (The special
cards, let you use more than one COM port on a single interrupt.)
When I had all of this working, I put the modem on COM3 and the terminal
on COM2, and spend some time to configure Linux, such that I could use
the terminal.
Lately, however, I wanted to use the modem for CoSession under DOS.
CoSession is program which allows you to take over (through a modem line)
the keyboard, screen and mouse of another PC.
When I tried to run the Remote program of CoSession, I had to choose a COM port.
But COM port COM3 was assigned to a different interrupt than the one I had,
so it did not work.
Of course, I did not like the idea of swapping the modem and the terminal,
as then I would have to reconfigure Linux.
Luckily, I discovered that the Remote program would also allow you to choose
a COM4, of which you can freely choose the IRQ and the Base address.
I tried the values for my COM3 port and it worked. So, now Remote thinks
it is connecting to COM4, but in reality it is using COM3.
Yesterday evening, I build a 5-speed CD-ROM drive into
my PC at home.
First I tried to fit it into the top bay, but it did not fit, so
I had to exchange it with my 5 1/4 drive (how should I otherwise
read my old floppies). Then I connected the IDE cables in the
wrong way, such that the PC did not want to boot any more. Luckily
Li-Xia had bought a one meter long IDE cable,
otherwise, I would not have been able to do the wiring in PC, which
is a desk-top tower model. But finally, everything worked.
Then we tried to install MicroStation, I had difficulties freeing
about 30Mbytes from my DOS/Windows partition. I trew out: Coral Draw
4.0, MS Works, and part of AutoCAD R12. Now I am thinking about
buying a 1.2G drive. (My Linux partition also gets the cramps once
in a while.) But then I have to do my 5 1/5 drive away, or buy
another controller card.
It is a nice CD-ROM drive, because about 57 Mbytes of software was
installed in a few minutes.
IQ
Some IQ tests, which I found after (not during) I read
rec.org.mensa:
(follow-up)
I am recovering from an infection in one of my nose cavities.
That explains why I have not been writing the diary lately.
I am drugged with Doxycycline, which sometimes gives me a
funny sweet taste in my mouth (apparently one of the lesser
side effects).
This morning, Annabel did not cry at all.
After I had put her down,
and taken of her coat, she stretched out her arms to one of the
woman working there. When I waved my hand, she did not reply.
This morning she was already quite happy when we put on her coat,
and got her bag. It is obvious she enjoys going there.
(But she still complains if she has
to take a bath.)
What I know about You
I added the following link in my home page:
Many people tried it, before I added the logging to it.
Interesting that people choose such a link. It also gave me some idea
of how many people visit my home page.
Monday, January 22, 1996
Installing a new hard disk
Last week we bought a new hard disk (1.2 Gbyte, because that's the
cheapest per Mbyte), and Friday I decided it was time to install
it in my PC at home.
I had just done a major rewiring after installing the CD-ROM
drive. Now I had to go in a same kind of adventure
adding the new drive. I managed to get everything working again by 2 o'clock in
the morning, and learned a lot more about PC hardware.
First birthday of Brian
Today is the first birthday of my little nephew Brian. He is the
second son of my youngest sister José. And because he
is a hundred days younger than Annabel,
Annabel is one year and a hundred days old.
Live From New York
(A JPG image taken from here)
Sound of a stapler
We have some special stapler, which we use to makes books out of
A4 sheets that have been printed with the following command:
/Utils/psutils/bin/psbook !*|/Utils/psutils/bin/psnup -pa4 -2 -q |lpr
This afternoon, I was playing with the stapler, and noticed that
is made an interesting sound, when pressed and released. The
sound seems dies out, but when is just before
is dies out completely it gains volume again, with a slightly different
vibration.
Lots of snow today
The past days have been cold, with a rather strong wind from the
east, that means a high chill-factor. No fun to drive on your bike.
At the end of the morning we started to get some snow flurries,
but it became stronger and stronger. Now it looks like there
is about 5 cm (2 Inch) of snow outside.
Susan left early, because
she never biked in the snow before, and she did not want to
drive in the dark.
Brave Art
Nancy Delaney
shows some pictures of herself
before and
after
the reconstruction of her self after mastectomy. Its is brave
to up these pictures on the web, but her self-portrets are
also very artistic.
(This page was announced by Daily Planet.)
Drink water from your own cistern,
And fresh water from your own well.
Should you springs be dispersed abroad,
Streams of water in the streets?
Let them be yours alone,
And not for the strangers with you.
Let your fountain be blessed,
And rejoice in the wife of your youth.
As a loving hind and a graceful doe,
Let her breasts satisfy you at all times;
Be exhilarated always with her love.
For why should you, my son, be exhilarated with an adulteress,
And embrace the bossom of a foreigner?
There is some gene bank
that says they can keep your gene records for a thousand years or more.
Do you believe this? Read what they offer, it is funny.
The American Computer Museum
(broken link?)
is on 234 East Babcock Street,
Bozeman, MT 59715. Isn't that the city
where Robert Pirsig from `Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' lived?
I received an email from James Blustein, about a more efficient method for
calculating the number of elements (bytes/words) which are required to
store a certain number of bits. I am grateful that he mentions me in the
change log
of his Bit Vectors in C package. Compared with the time he invested
in writing this excellent, well-documented package, my suggested improvement
does not deserve much credits. It was only that I had written some bit
vector procedures before, that I knew of this. I added
him to my list of hackers.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Today Bert and Corneliese, close neighbours and friends, are flying to
Japan. He is going to work on the
biggest super-computer in the world (its main memory is 38 Gbytes)
at the National Aerospace Laboratory.
She is going with him, because she is his wife.
I made a Valentine card for my
girl-friend.
Bob Jerkins has an interesting page about
Pentagon tilings.
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