Tag: random musing

The Pandemic Nightmare

Note: Typically, I don’t publish or discuss my dreams publicly. This one, however, I felt compelled to share.

I walk through the aisles of the Target store in Tulsa. (For those who live locally: 71st and highway 169.) It’s 11:35 AM, March 20, 2030 according to my iPhone. I push the cart down towards the pharmacy section. I put a bottle of Tylenol in the cart for my mother, who is at home. Then, I amble towards the counter.

The line is extremely long. There are about a dozen people in front of me. Some have carts, some do not. One is holding a basket with a vitamin bottle in it. The people filing out are repositioning their N95 masks. The line moves at a decent pace, about one person per minute.

Finally, it is my turn. A short Cherokee woman, about 5’4″ with long brown hair with blonde highlights, asks in a small voice, “what will it be for you today?”

She shows me a small printed menu. Chamomile, lavender, peppermint, honey, rainforest, spring blossom, … ah. There it is. Cinnamon bread.

“Cinnamon bread”, I politely respond.

“30 seconds for 4.00$, 60 seconds for 8.00$, or we can do the premium package for 10$.”

“Premium package?” I ask, being quite unfamiliar with more options than just duration.

“The scent will surround your whole body, instead of just being a scratch and sniff card,” she replied. “It’s an aerosol spray. You can turn around in the chamber for the entire duration, which will be 60 seconds.”

A full 60 seconds in the chamber… with the scent around my entire body, not just in a scratch and sniff card? How exciting!

“I would love the premium package. Can I still tap and pay with Apple Pay?”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course you can. Just tap, then follow me.”

I tap my iPhone against the reader, then walk behind the counter, leaving my cart in the waiting area. She leads me to a small chamber made of clear plexiglass. It’s just big enough for someone of my size. Next to it, there is a chamber that would be more suited for heavier set people.

She opens a small hatch and I stand inside. She closes the door. I take my N95 off. The smell rains down from the ceiling. I twirl around, closing my eyes and feeling warm and happy. I almost begin to dance, my arms flailing in slow, rhythmic movements as I breathe in deeply.

There is a slight ding. The scent stops. I walk out and take a quick gasp before putting the N95 back on. The inside of a Target store still smells how I remember it.

I look at the woman and quickly apologise. “I’m sorry, I know the mask has to go on as soon as the door is open, I just…”

“Don’t worry about it. Most of my customers enjoy the smell of the store, some more than the scent chamber itself.”

Just then, I see two uniformed Tulsa Police officers walking up the main aisle. I quickly run to my cart.

“Everyone hold it,” one of the two officers shouts. He’s a stern looking man in his 40s with visible stubble and a head suit covering his hair. His partner is younger, with thick glasses and a machine gun carried on his back.

The officer looks at the woman behind the counter. “Picking up a prescription, sir?” she asks, timidly.

“Ma’am, we have reason to believe you are running an illegal scent shop here. You know President Cornyn outlawed the sense of smell in 2029.”

“This is a pharmacy counter. That’s all!”

“Why is everyone fidgeting with their masks, then?”

I try to push my cart into the main aisle, towards the grocery section. The younger officer sees this, and immediately takes out his machine gun and points it at me. “HALT!”, he shouts.

“I just wanted to finish my grocery shopping,” I say in a breaking voice as I begin to cry. I reflexively put one hand to my head, desiring to survive this encounter. I use the other to hit the Emergency button on my iPhone, to clear all data from the past 10 minutes so they can’t use it to determine what I was doing.

“What were you doing at this counter?”

“I was… asking where the minerals and supplements were.”

“Then why were you going the opposite direction? Alright, hold it ma’am, you’re under arrest for suspicion of smelling!”

I awaken to my alarm. The sun is peeking out through the blinds of my window, and I can faintly hear Mum watching TV in her room.

This pandemic cannot end soon enough.

The Retro Lab: Introduction

Welcome to my latest series of articles, The Retro Lab, where I will be detailing my excursions into the art and hobby of retrocomputing.

This article will serve as a general overview of what I hope to accomplish, and a bit about my background and why this will be fun for me 🙂 If you just want to see the meat of this, skip to the section “And now, in the present”.

My history with computers

When I was very young, my family had a 386 running DOS and Windows 3.1. The only thing I cared about were the games, of course. I don’t remember a lot from this era, because I was so young.

When we were with my grandpa, I loved to play on his XT clone. It was a Leading Edge Model D with 20MB disk running DOS. I inherited this computer when he passed and it is still in my closet. I treasure it. Some of the games it had were a text adventure game called “CIA” and Wheel of Fortune. The real magic for me, though, was in the BASIC interpreter. It was amazing to type in some commands and see this big huge loud complex machine do what I tell it! This is what hooked me on programming and is why I chose the field I did.

The next computer we had was a Canon StarWriter Pro 5000. I’m not sure what hardware it has – and it’s also in my closet, so a careful tear down may be a future article! – but I know it ran GEOS. I loved to write little comedy skits and song lyrics as a child, and it was cool to have all of them on a single 3.5″ floppy disk instead of taking all the paper in the house.

The real life changing moment, however, came on February 22, 1997. It was the day we brought home The Pentium. What a beast of a computer: 133 MHz, 24 MB RAM, and an 8 speed CD drive! It was a Compaq Presario 4712, and it came with Encarta 97, Compton’s Interactive Encyclopaedia, The Yukon Trail, Magic Carpet, PGA Tour ’96, but most of all: 15 free hours of America Online.

AOL was amazing to a second grader. They had Nickelodeon online! You could download little sound clips from Nick and Nick at Nite shows. They had games like Slingo (still one of my all-time favourite takes on slot machines, 20+ years later). And they had a graphical portal to Gopher/WAIS. The local school district had uploaded text files full of fun activities for us children on their Gopher server.

That computer was also where I first used Telnet to a computer running Solaris. A few friends and I used talk on it to have our own small chat rooms. My aunt ran an IRC channel and we talked on mIRC. We ended up with a webcam and talked with family using NetMeeting. Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, Infoseek… so many things.

Programming and desires

Enough with the ‘net reminiscing, at least for now 🙂

Something else important to mention is that my grandpa also was an Important Person at a facility, and one of the things he did was computer purchasing. He had catalogues from Compaq, IBM, and various other vendors in his house for that reason. I loved flipping through them and looking at all the cool stuff.

Something I always wanted back then was my own server. It seemed so cool. I was especially attracted to the ProLiants and AlphaServers in the Compaq catalogue. Windows NT and Tru64 looked so cool when I looked them up online.

The other thing that was very attractive back then were the Power Macintosh computers. My Mum was a digital artist back then. The Quadra was a nice system but didn’t compare to what I saw the Power Macs could do!

For my birthday in 1998, I received Visual Basic as a gift. It really cemented my desire to be a programmer. This was such an exciting time and part of the VB6 software was a one year subscription to the MSDN Library. From that library I learned about all the different servers one could run, all the different types of NT, the different programming languages of Visual Studio…

And now, in the present

In the past few years, as I am able and as opportunities arise, I have amassed quite a collection of hardware that I want to set up and enjoy:

A Compaq Armada e500 laptop. This is a Pentium III from the year 2000 and is likely the newest system I want to have in my Retro Lab. It runs Adélie right now; I’ll likely remove the hard drive and install another to run period-accurate software. I will likely run Windows NT 4 or 2000.

A beige Power Macintosh G3 with the Bordeaux personality card. I will be inserting a 10 GB disk and installing Mac OS 8.6 on it. This will run all the classic Mac software that I have collected over the years. It will be one of the main focuses of the Lab.

A few AlphaServers. Most are earmarked for Adélie so I can’t really use them in the Lab, but there is a single DS10L that was set aside for my personal use. I’ll likely install NT 4 on this one, but I need to investigate further on the hardware.

A Sun Ultra 60, Netra T1, and Ultra 10. These are all from ’98-’99 and will make great Solaris systems, to relive the glory days and experiment more with what was my first real Unix. I would like to run CDE again and possibly do some Java tinkering with these. It would be very fun to run a Retro Lab network off of the AlphaServer and Netra.

A Power Macintosh 7100/80AV. More fun Mac stuff awaits on this computer, though I’m not sure exactly what I will do with it yet.

A Compaq LTE 5150. This is actually my original laptop from high school, ca. 2004. I’d like restore it to its former glory and use it for Windows 3.1 and early 95 software. It can also run OS/2. The screen probably won’t do well for most games, but I do have the docking bay to connect it to an external monitor…

An SGI Indy. This will need an SCSI2SD adaptor to reach its full potential since the hard disk died many years ago. I would love to dual boot IRIX and a BSD.

A Dell System 316LT. There are a few older DOS games I have that would run much better under a CPU of this speed. It needs some love; I seem to recall it had an issue booting up the last time I had it out. I could also try and run GEOS.

A Compaq Presario 4850. This is, to my knowledge, the oldest original computer I have that still fully functions. We purchased it on my Mum’s birthday, 1998, for her graphic design software. This, along with the Beige G3, will likely be the centrepiece of my Lab. I plan on running either Windows 95 or 98 on it, and also various other OSes of the era: BeOS, OpenStep, maybe early Linux. I know that the Rage Pro functions in high res in Win3.1 and OS/2 from prior hackings. It’s also the first computer I used to tinkered with XFree86 modelines. It has a factory original Hitachi DVD drive.

Don’t forget the accessories!

Oh yes, I have some great period hardware for the tinkering as well:

HP ScanJet 5s SCSI scanner. Drivers for Windows, Macintosh, and IRIX, at least. I believe there is an attachment to scan photo negatives as well, but I can’t remember now.

Aiptek webcam. Yes, the original one from the NetMeetings of old that I talked about in my history section. Should be very easy to bring up under Windows. I am curious about Macintosh support.

HP CD Writer Plus 7200e. This is a parallel port, dual-speed CD writer and rewriter. One of the cool features I found on this back in the day is that if you send multimedia commands and have speakers connected to the external headphone jack, you can power off the computer and still listen to the CD until it finishes! I found this out one day when Win95 crashed while I was listening to Garbage’s Version 2.0.

My MSDN Universal archive. In 2002 I found an MSDN Universal subscription at a flea market for 15 USD. I activated it and have all the CDs, and also sent a special request for them to send me the Archive CDs which included BackOffice 4.5 and a few other goodies.

Unfortunately my back and neck are not up to carrying a CRT. I have a flat panel from 2006, a 17″ ViewSonic, that seems to be very close in specification to what we could have had in 1998 for way too much money 😉 Hey, with everything else being so accurate, a little cheating on the monitor isn’t so bad!

In conclusion

This was a lot longer than I had originally anticipated, but it also covers a lot of ground. Over the coming weeks, I hope to bring up a few of these computers and document the processes. Until then, happy hacking!

Libre software and moral absolutism

I’ve been pondering what to write in my blog now that I no longer lead Adélie Linux. There isn’t a great amount of things to write about around my day job making libre networking software, and there’s even less to write about my “spare time” projects. (Mostly because that spare time is spent playing with my cat, my Mum, or my video games.)

I had originally planned for this blog to cover travel and photography around Oklahoma in addition to tech. For obvious reasons, this isn’t something I’m able to do at this time. There are only so many ways I can photograph the gardens around my flat, and inter-city (let alone inter-state) travel is not exactly possible in 2020.

There are actually a lot of tech subjects I would love to cover, but a lot of them revolve around non-libre software. After spending so many years in the communities I have, there seemed a very real sense of shame in the thought of writing about it. However, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realise it is not shame I feel.

It is embarrassment. It is a sense of letting my friends and colleagues down by feeling anything other than contempt for running proprietary software.

But I do. I absolutely enjoy using my iPad Air 2. And I have dozens – maybe hundreds – of articles in me about retro computing with classic versions of Windows, Mac OS, and Solaris. Game consoles are another fun hobby of mine that I want to share more widely.

So this is the dilemma I face. To continue to write nothing but articles about Linux would be to hide a part of me that is real. Is that what I want from my life? I don’t think it is.

This is not a rebuke of libre software, nor is this some admission there is nothing left to write about it. The future will always be bright with libre software, and I have plenty of articles left in me with regards to libre software, I’m sure. But I think it’s about time for me to admit to myself, and the world, that I have other technological passions as well. And it’s time to stop being embarrassed about it.

The state of FLOSS and the tech industry

I’ve read an article today, in ZDnet, mourning how desktop distributions seem to wax and wane. It really made me think about how to properly convey what I feel to be the root issues with desktop adoption of Linux (and the wider CS industry), and why I think most people are very, very wrong about it.

Most people, normal people, they do not care about shiny. They don’t care if their email client or word processor is written in C++, Rust, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or FORTRAN. They just want something that is simple to use and allows them to accomplish their tasks. It feels like most programmers and designers have lost that concept. I’ve met people in this industry who thought that they could sell people their products based on metrics like memory usage and number of packets transferred. Very excited people tell me how they use MapReduce and AngularJS and MongoDB and MariaDB (sometimes all four at once), like they deserve an award for Most Use of All Available Frameworks And Patterns Released This Decade. There’s a great article I read recently that puts in no uncertain terms: You are not Google. Even Google isn’t Google. Following these “trends” may make your product seem “trendy” to other developers, but all you are doing is wasting your time while leaving your users under-satisfied. Focus more on your software and how it can help people, and less on how it can help your résumé.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen libre software developers put up on their homepages that they now offer Flatpak images and are very excited to tell you that. Nobody knows what that means outside of developer circles! Do you think your grandparents care that your word processor is available in Flatpak or Snap? Do they even know what that means? In addition to this, Flatpak and Snap are anti-solutions. They don’t solve any real problems; they only serve to create new ones. What if a user or distribution wants to use ALSA instead of PulseAudio? What if a user or distribution uses an alternative to systemd? What if a user wants to use sound from their existing session at all? What about CPU architectures that aren’t supported by all developers, like ARM, POWER, or RISC-V? Focus more on your software and how it can help people, and less on following the trendy new shiny.

My personal hope for this industry is that we gain stronger distributions with better focus, and that developers leave packaging to the distribution packagers. This would allow us to have a few different desktop distributions. Distributions could be working together on a common frameworks, like KDE, while having specific plans and goals in mind. Gentoo and Arch for the tinkerers; Gentoo with more focus on source building, Arch with more focus on a tightly integrated system. Adélie and Fedora for the general public; Adélie with more focus on stability and portability (X11, PPC/ARM), Fedora with more focus on incubating new systems. Obviously there would be distributions that would pop up with unique goals; their work could be integrated later in to a main distribution that is aligned with it.

I feel like this could really be a way forward towards more wide adoption of Linux, on the desktop and beyond. I hope we can work together towards it.

(As a small aside that I wanted to note: I hope “The Year of the Linux Desktop” never comes. I hope that we usher in an Era of the Linux Desktop.)