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The planets aligned. After a dozen or so abortive tries, I succeeded in getting Windows NT to install on the Alpha. It's interesting to discover how primitive an old friend can look after enough years have passed. This is NT 4.0, which may in fact be the only version of Microsoft Windows ever to have had support for its entire lifespan on a CPU other than the Intel line and compatibles. Even so, it's much too long in the tooth to actually be useful in most cases today. Support was dropped back in about 2001, so if I had the last service pack it would at least be Y2K compliant. Alas, Microsoft has removed the service packs from its support site. Dual booting with VMS seems not to be a good idea either, since NT appears to confuse the hardware clock so badly that VMS then thinks it is somewhere in the past and panics over all the file dates being in the future. Oh well. It was an interesting experiment.
(EDIT: Minor correction. It appears that version 3.51 of NT also had Alpha support, at least for a time. And it's the Y2K defect that causes the conflict with VMS. NT leaves the hardware clock set to 1989, turning off a bit that indicates a post 1999 date or something like that. Then when VMS is booted without readjusting the clock, it is thrown into the past by 20 years and thinks the HD is corrupt due to all the dates being "in the future." Linux makes the same complaint.)
Vet came today to give the ponies their first vaccinations of the season. I was at work, but I understand everyone behaved reasonably well. Of course it wasn't strangles vaccine day. Neither Archie nor Tess likes that one and they make a big fuss about it. Needles don't bother them, but getting stuff squirted up their nose does. Myself, I think I much prefer that approach to vaccination. The dogs used to get a kennel cough vaccine the same way.
A mess at work, thanks to the stupid "Conficker" worm. No, as far as I can tell, we didn't have it. But when I learned that it can spread on USB flash drives, I realized that I had only protected against such things coming in via the internet. We have a word processing station that is completely isolated from the net in everyday use, but people use USB drives to bring documents into and out from it. Bad me, I hadn't been keeping the antivirus software and Windows updates applied. Windows, my nightmare. All the Linux machines are immune to Conficker, of course.
So while the library was closed I went to apply the back updates to that machine. This entails unlocking its security, reactivating its web connection, etc. There were 34 updates to Windows. OK, download 'em. They downloaded, about 28 of them applied, and then one of them caused a crash. Locked up, keyboard dead, display blank. Powered it off physically. Now it won't reboot. "The file ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt or missing." So tomorrow I'll have to boot a live CD or something and copy the kernel back into the system. Goddess knows what else is corrupt now.
(EDIT: Minor correction. It appears that version 3.51 of NT also had Alpha support, at least for a time. And it's the Y2K defect that causes the conflict with VMS. NT leaves the hardware clock set to 1989, turning off a bit that indicates a post 1999 date or something like that. Then when VMS is booted without readjusting the clock, it is thrown into the past by 20 years and thinks the HD is corrupt due to all the dates being "in the future." Linux makes the same complaint.)
Vet came today to give the ponies their first vaccinations of the season. I was at work, but I understand everyone behaved reasonably well. Of course it wasn't strangles vaccine day. Neither Archie nor Tess likes that one and they make a big fuss about it. Needles don't bother them, but getting stuff squirted up their nose does. Myself, I think I much prefer that approach to vaccination. The dogs used to get a kennel cough vaccine the same way.
A mess at work, thanks to the stupid "Conficker" worm. No, as far as I can tell, we didn't have it. But when I learned that it can spread on USB flash drives, I realized that I had only protected against such things coming in via the internet. We have a word processing station that is completely isolated from the net in everyday use, but people use USB drives to bring documents into and out from it. Bad me, I hadn't been keeping the antivirus software and Windows updates applied. Windows, my nightmare. All the Linux machines are immune to Conficker, of course.
So while the library was closed I went to apply the back updates to that machine. This entails unlocking its security, reactivating its web connection, etc. There were 34 updates to Windows. OK, download 'em. They downloaded, about 28 of them applied, and then one of them caused a crash. Locked up, keyboard dead, display blank. Powered it off physically. Now it won't reboot. "The file ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt or missing." So tomorrow I'll have to boot a live CD or something and copy the kernel back into the system. Goddess knows what else is corrupt now.
