SHAOS

1. ternary computer - 44
2. shaos - 29
3. power macintosh beige debian - 19
4. building no windows skyscraper - 9
5. g4 cube cracks - 7
6. game of life in javascript - 5
7. javascript game of life - 5
8. g4 cube debian - 3
9. "ternary computer" 2009 - 2
10. black g4 cube - 2

Labels: internet

Recently I bought Power Mac G3 (300MHz, 64MB RAM, Ethernet, CD-ROM and no HDD) for $9.99 (plus shipping $32.50):



To make it working I added CompactFlash 2GB (around $10) and CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter (around $5):



Adapter has female IDE connector to allow connection direcrly to motherboard. Also I put new battery ($5) there:



Then I installed Debian Linux on it and got working 300MHz PowerPC G3 system for below than $70. I think it's pretty cheap ;)

Labels: apple, distributed_computing, linux, photo, powermac, ppc

Today I've known one very funny thing - my small native town Troitsk (Russian-Kazakhstan border, population 82400) was pictured in a new American post-apocalyptic movie Babylon A.D. as relatively big city (even with modern train station):



Actually it was nothing close to reality (except for coordinates that are correct), because Troitsk mostly looks like this during last 100 years (and probably will look like this during next 100 years):



This is one of the biggest buildings in town.

And this is real Troitsk train station (with Lenin's statue in the middle):



Both buildings were built around 1905-1910...

P.S. The place filmed for that movie was Poruba (Ostrava) Czech Republic (see more pictures of that place on Google Maps).

Labels: city, humor, movie, photo

I have electronic pen FLY Fusion that can convert anything written on special paper to computer image:



So I decided to start publishing my personal Russian/English notes as handwritten digitized images (some kind of handwritten blog):

Labels: electronics, notes

Again I tested new hardware using my memcpy benchmark - now for my 1st desktop on Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz and my 2nd desktop on PowerPC G4 450 MHz (black G4 Cube). Here you can see not-aligned (nal) and aligned (al) results and also "vectorized" results (G4-450v-nal and G4-450v-al) where memcpy was AltiVec optimized version from libfreevec v1.0.4.



P.S. If you want optimized AltiVec versions of such functions as bmove512, memccpy, memchr, memcmp, memcpy, memfrob, memmove, mempcpy, memrchr, memset, strcmp, strcpy, strlen, strncmp, strncpy, strnlen and swab for everything in your Linux system, then just put (of course after successful libfreevec installation) line /usr/local/lib/libfreevec_libc.so to file /etc/ld.so.preload (you can create this file if it's not yet available) - thanks to Konstantinos Margaritis (author of libfreevec)!

Labels: altivec, cube, linux, opensource, ppc

I decided to use G4 Cube as my second desktop computer. But my first desktop PC is black. So I bought black enamel spray for a reason to paint Cube to black color. The subject to turn black is internal metallic case:

Now I have stylish black colored G4 Cube with Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" on board :)

P.S. Lenny believes that X.org became smart enough to do all configuration by itself (xorg.conf is almost empty by default). In result I had 800x600 instead of 1280x1024, and to make correct resolution working I manually added parameters HorizSync and VertRefresh to section "Monitor" of xorg.conf...

Labels: apple, cube, linux, photo, ppc

OK, I got Debian GNU/Linux on my desktop Power Macintosh G3 "Beige" BUT, to do this I bought MacOS 9 CD for 20 dollars on ebay:



Because I broke pre-installed MacOS by trying to install Debian on this "OldWorld" mac (see here). So, after installing MacOS 9 back I again tried to install Debian (using BootX 1.2.2 from MacOS). After a number of tries of reinstallation of both I realized that MacOS 9 and Debian CAN'T live on the same hard-drive, because they are breaking partition table for each other...

So I'd decided to go to ebay again - now for SCSI drive. 18 GB IBM SCSI drive (1997) with 50-pin adapter was just 30 dollars plus 4 for cable and 11 for shipping.

Important things about installation on Beige G3:

• it will fail to detect printer, simply go back to menu and choose installation again;
  
• bootloader quik requires ext2 partition for /boot (even if it's not needed - I pressed NO later to disable bootloader installation);
  
• it is important to save vmlinux and initrd.img on ZIP-drive before reboot - we will need it in MacOS for BootX loader - so go to shell and do chroot /target then mount /dev/hdd4 /mnt then cd /boot then cp vmlinux /mnt and cp initrd.img /mnt then umount /mnt then exit and exit to go to menu back;
• then just finish installation process.

So now I have MacOS 9.2.2 on EIDE hard-drive and GNU/Linux on SCSI hard-drive - separately they work fine. After boot computer goes to MacOS first and then using BootX loader I can choose to go to Linux (copy vmlinux and initrd.img to Linux Kernels first).

Inside Linux I traditionally have Russian user interface:


P.S. After installation of Debian 4.0r7 from NetInst CD I found that during installation it's magically transformed to Debian 5.0 "Lenny" that was released just now ;)

P.P.S. So if you need cheap PowerPC machine for Linux, DON'T buy Beige G3! Better choice is Blue&White PowerMac G3 that can be bought just for $9.99 (plus $32.50 for shipping) in some places (300 MHz, 64 MB RAM, no HDD) - see here story how I got it

Labels: apple, beige, linux, macos