Ok Button 20 Aug, 2007
I tried to shut down my Mac today and got this error. I guess I should click OK but I don’t really know.
Found Computer Parts 03 Aug, 2007
I’m probably the only person who’ll be amused by this, but I found a computer in the trash last week and brought it home to play with. It had a Windows 98 SE disc in the drive still, but was missing the hard drive, second optical drive, and had an old PCI video card (same general model as my first computer’s!) literally rattling around inside it.
The power supply was bad to the point it wouldn’t POST, so I swapped that out. At some point I finally pulled off the PII-era Intel CPU fan to find an Athlon XP (as you can tell from the graphic above), so the fan was drastically underpowered. That’s probably one reason why it won’t boot an OS and kernel-panics. The 512MB stick of ram only fails tests from 0MB to 511MB so I’m sure that’s not an issue. (Yes I swapped out the processor to a known MB/RAM combo and it still fails to boot.)
The case was kind of random, it’s a Compaq case with obviously the wrong backplane. The motherboard seems kind of cool but there’s a reason I don’t have any working Socket 7 machines anymore, and it’s that the chips were too delicate. I actually have 3-4 motherboards already, just no working CPUs.
If I could find a way to do something productive with bad power supplies, I’d be rich. I can’t be the only one that goes through them quickly.
Today's Useful Information 03 Aug, 2007
“I think we may have a bug in the implementation of NOP.”
Lots of new projects 03 Aug, 2007
I’ve been working busily to get a lot of minor projects out the door in the last week or two. Some have been going on a little longer than that but about half the ones I’m about to list are just days old.
They’re mostly written in Python, although one uses a bit of shell script and one is for interoperability with php.
- pyannotate which lets you do blames for arbitrary data (I needed this for testing wiki blames while at Europython)
- phpreader which lets you read in PHP var_export-serialized data structures into Python
- cherrypick – after seeing git’s hunk-based selector I needed something like that which I could use with an arbitrary diff (say svn or bzr). It mostly works, even!
- pyimagesize and its companion, qgal which are for getting image dimensions quickly and making static html albums, respectively
- countindents for producing nifty little graphs using data in files kept in version control
- multibzr which is probably of use to nobody but me, which will perform branches automatically for a bunch of directories exposed on the web