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New Exhibit for the Museum

I got given a new exhibit for the Museum this morning that was quite exciting, Fred L presented me with a frame of Magnetic core store, he apologised for not being able to tell me what machin it came from, but it’s a very interesting and exciting addition to the museum. I’ll get a photo of it, hopefully tomorrow, and in due course hope to build a display case showing various forms of memory, with this being a primary exhibit.

Wikipedia link
Core memory at Columbia University
Detailed description of Magnetic Core Storage

Nice site with computer history on it

Oh, and my 1Gig CF card arrived for the Nikon today – I would not like to imagine how large a 1G core store would have to be!

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New Camera

I finally got hold of a Digital SLR – a Nikon D70 second hand to go with my existing Nikon lenses. It produces some great results, but shows some inconsistencies in software implementations – especially Gallery.
The D70 has an EXIF tag it adds to pictures if they are taken rotated to portrait orientation, and it then displays those pictures rotated on the rear LCD screen. If you open those pictures in Nikon’s photo editing software, they are shown in the correct orientation. If you load them into other photo editing software, they are shown in landscape orientation, requiring rotation.
OK, so I can live with using the Nikon software for now. I’ll look into writing a filter for Photoshop to rotate the image, and delete the EXIF tag at a later date, or see if there’s some other piece of software that will do that for me.
I then tried to upload them to Gallery, and admittedly I’m still using Gallery 1, so that might be a cause of my problem, but it might lie elsewhere. Anyhow, I loaded the photos into Gallery Remote, and that rotated the images correctly – so I didn’t need to hit the rotate button – I proceed to upload the images, and they display all in Landscape orientation :-S – Doing a search on the Gallery site tells me that the version that I am using 1.5.1 should support auto-rotate, but it’s not working, so it looks like I’ve got more searching to do.

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CentOS threatened with FBI for “hacking” a web site.

A Jerry A. Taylor appears to need to get a clue – despite the fact that he has “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation” , when his hosting provider mussed up, he decided to threaten CentOS, as obviously the fact that the web server was displaying a nice message from them it was their fault.

You really can’t make up stories like this, and this guy is set to become an internet legend.

One of their websites still hasn’t been fixed when I write this.

I actually can’t believe how civil the guys at CentOS kept being in the face of a complete and utter… I would have probably taken them up on thier offer to send in the FBI, and let them be had for wasting police time.

Centos full email exchange

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Computers and Mice

Computers should be kept away from mice – they don’t mix! I have just got my Sharp MZ-80K out of the box from the loft ready for my computer museum exhibition for National Science Week on Thursday and Friday.

I opened the box (yes, an original 1979 box), and inside to my horror I see small shreds of paper. I’ve seen this before – the cats brought a mouse in, and it managed to hide out in my office at home when it was just a store-room. We cleared that room out a few years ago, and moved the MZ-80K up into the loft out of the way. Anyway there was distinct evidence in the box of mouse related activity, and upon further investigation, the little blighter has eaten the bottom half of about 15 pages of my Hisoft Pascal manual – fortunately I have a photocopy of that manual, also in the box, but untouched – the animal only goes for original paper.

So I clean out all the remains of the mouse nest, get the machine out of the box, perform a cursory examination of the inside of the machine – one wire chewed through, but it’s just one of the wires connecting the led that displays keyboard state – no worries there, that can be fixed in due course. Ok, plug it in and switch on – the sound of the monitor powering up, and immediately down again – hmmm, something not right here – I guess there’s a fuse just blown for some reason.

I check the fuse in the plug – that’s ok, right how about the resistance between the neutral and power on the plug – that’s too high to be a primary winding on the transformer – time to take the power supply apart.

As soon as I start to take the PSU apart I realise there’s something amiss mainly due to the number of peanuts falling out of it… Some old fashioned form of capacitance – nope just a mouse’s winter store – when the blighter was in my office it must have found the bag of peanuts for the birds and relocated a number of them inside the power supply – must be causing a short somewhere, sure enough the primary input fuse has blown on the PSU, and I’m going to have to try to replace that tomorrow – I’ll take the machine into work, and see what Ian thinks of it. There’s going to be some damage to some components I think, but hopefully nothing that can’t be fixed. After all, this thing was my first computer – my parents bought it for my in about 1979, and its been through a lot – it would be a shame to lose it to a mouse.

2006014Mouse/DSCN0247.jpg
more photos of the damage can be viewed here

And finally, talking of the 70’s check out the David Gilmour concert on Radio 2 – you can watch some of it by pressing the red button on any BBC TV channel, or listen to it on the Radio 2 listen again service – I just love the sax in Shine on you Crazy Diamond.

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The beast lives again

After my last post, things have moved on… Apaft from the amazing smoking BBC model B, everything survived science week. And tonight I brought home the repaired power supply for the MZ80K, plugged it in, and it all works again – some of the keyboard switches are a little sticky, but it didn’t take very much work to revitalise them – I love old robust technology.

museum/DSCN0268.jpgmuseum/DSCN0271.jpg

At one time I tried to build an add on graphics board for the MZ80K, and my soldering skills were a little less than perfect when I was at school. I soldered directly onto a static RAM chip, and ended up blowing the chip slightly – 8 cursors on the screen at a time, and an upset machine. It was a little worrying, but I was able to order a replacement chip, and a socket to mount it in ( I learned that lesson ) . I soldered the socket onto the board, inserted the chip, and everything worked again. The socket can be seen on the large version of the right hand photo – it’s blue, and near the middle of the circuit board.

Another time, the lid of the machine came down when I left something on top of the power supply, breaking the corner off the tape deck control circuit board – half a dozen wires now jumper the 2 halves back together, and it still works well today. Try doing that with your modern PC! Mind you – the games are not exactly the height of technology.

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Cobalt RAQs and BlueQuartz

I’ve just come across an interesting development from the Cobalt Raq series of servers. I am probably a long way behind the times, but BlueQuartz is the open sourced version of RaqOS. It can apprently be installed on top of Fedora Core or Centos, and looks to be a nice start to the project.
It doesn’t yet install as easily as RaqOS, that just installed via net boot onto the appliance, and you have to install the host OS first, and then layer the BlueQuartz scripts etc on top of the server, but I’m sure it will become easier – in fact I’ve just noticed that there are people selling CDs that purport to install the whole thing on ebay. Just another thing that I must explore in the future – it would mean that I could set up a more powerful machine with BlueQuartz to replace the Raq that I use as a teaching server.

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Xbox Media Center

I used to run a MythTV server on my network, and had MythTV installed on the XBox in the bedroom using the old MechWarrior audio hack. But of course there were a couple of problems with that setup, not least of which was the reset loop that the XBox got into when power was removed from it for a while.

Well I treated the bedroom XBox to a modchip this week, and invested in an Executer 3CE with the LCD panel and the replacement faceplate from Mr Modchips. Installation was very straightforward, and after a couple of teething problems, with me getting switches set up in the wrong position initially,I managed to flash the X3 bios, and then decided to install XBMC as a new replacement dashboard.

I’m really impressed, the media center connects directly to my samba server and has been able to play pretty much all the video that I’ve thrown at it. It also plays back music and shows photos from my samba server nicely – I’ve not yet got Mame set up on it yet, but I’m sure that can’t be too difficult. The no-tv option on the LCD is great too – you don’t have to have the TV turned on to navigate the menus, they’re shown on the LCD :-), or you can even control it from a web browser on any machine in the house.

Now I have to get another couple of mod chips for the other XBoxes, so that I can have one in every room 😉 It even had Suzy playing with it, so the wife approval appears to be there 😀 She even suggested that I should wire the house for audio so that you can have the music playing around the house.

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When does historical start?

When does history start?

According to the US goverment, under a millisecond ago… Technically I suppose this is correct, but the implications for personal privacy, the implications are huge.
For example, the US law enforcement agencies can demand historical records like telephone billing information with nothing more than a subpoena (no probable cause required), and the court as to comply.
Now, that is all fine and dandy, because things like telephone records are historical and technically can be treated as though they are merely records of the telephone company. (You can argue about the ethics of this one)

The real problem appears to start when intercepting slightly historical data. For example if a telephone company uses it’s masts to determine where you are. If the data is stored on the phone company’s computers to monitor any of a number of things (historical trends for marketing, billing advertisers, monitoring the infrastructure), then this is historical data. But this data is being added to in “real time” – when does history start? Where you were an hour ago? Where you were a minute ago? Where you were a second ago? a millisecond?
Technically these are all historical records, and the US law enforcement agencies appear to think that there is no such thing as “now” except as an excuse to make everything past into history.

Somehing similar applies to “data in transit”, this is protected by wiretap restrictions, but if the agencies intercept electronic data using a store, capture and forward, then surely the data is no longer current – it has been stored for a microsecond or more… Say goodbye to privacy of VOIP calls, or any electronic communication.

More can be read on The register. And the article on wiretapping on Arstchnica.

And just because we live in the UK doesn’t mean we can rest easy – the UK Police Chiefs want to monitor all of our movements using roadside cameras with automatic number plate recognition.

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Analog copy protection legislation

Buy your dvd recorders, capture cards and other recording devices before this new US legislation gets passed. The Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 (PDF) introduces a video and audio rights signalling system embedded into analog media, which means that all new recorders will be able to identify the source of material and make the decision on whether you can record it or not. This must make those hollywood type wet themselves with excitement, as the prospect of having complete control over what we watch, where and when comes ever closer. Of course, the hardened pirates out there will make even more money out of removing the copy protection, and the genuine buying public will be even more inconvenienced by not being able to make a copy of their CD to listen to in the car, because no-one wants their favourite CD to get scratched to death because it gets dropped on the floor of the car.

It will be something to keep a close eye on – remember that they tried to tie us down with Region Encoding on DVD and CSS. It’s a good job I don’t plan on travelling to the USA, they’d probably lock me up for this post. For a more rational commentary see the Ars Technica posting. Just don’t get me started on what I’m paying for when I buy an album, and how many original Compact Cassettes and Vinyl LPs and Singles I have in my loft. :-S