Fall at last

[altivo]

Fall in the sense that leaves are falling like mad. It actually got to 80°F this afternoon though.

The colors are finally coming out nicely, but too late. Many trees are already down to bare branches. Sigh. Maybe next year.

Went to Menard's to buy fence posts because we have several wooden posts that are rotting through at ground level. Fixed a loose wire Gary found in the bathroom lighting fixture. He wasn't looking for that, he was just cleaning stuff, took off the globe and bulb and there it was. No wonder that light has been flickering sometimes.

Installed the development environment (editors, debuggers, code management) on the Alpha, then added the Fortran and Pascal compilers. Tomorrow, PL/I if I have time.

Just checked the WCG stats for us_furries and I passed triggur on the far curve today. Now I'm close enough to cabcat to nibble at his tail...

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I love fall so much that I have joined "Autumn Addicts", a community on LJ. :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

C.S. Lewis wrote of being "in love with the feeling of autumn" and in particular traced it to a childhood fondness for the illustrations in Beatrix Potter's book The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.

I dunno if it can be pinpointed that precisely though I agree that Potter's illustrations capture the feeling well. I do know that the flora where I live now is very similar to the place where my grandparents lived when I was quite young. Oaks and maples, sedges scattered among the grasses, semi-rural with a fair amount of space. I loved visiting them then, and especially at autumn when the trees began to color up.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Theres a sense of hurry in a way.

This one warm day, when your boots are crunching
through the dry woods, will not last.

Theres also the scent, summer gone, no more smell
of loam or dark hot breezes at three in the morning.
Now its all high winds and rustles and deadwood.

Of course, its also the time when you remember
the summer gone, before you had to go back to the
gaol of school, and before the woodsmoke and fresh
cold scents of winter, with the festivals and
food and lights of Thanksgiving, Christmas and
New Years.

And then, the doldrums, between New Years and
Spring. When, statistically, most suicides
occur. Not actually an unexpected development
but loud music and the internet may have interrupted
that statistic. ^.~

Autumn is a great time to carry a copy of The Magicians
Nephew to some remote post-industrial place, and read it
in the shuffling leaves and silence.

Thats the kind of place where you might just believe.

@.@

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Very nicely put. It's grey and chilly outside now, but the weekend was quite beautiful. With any luck, we'll have a few more such days, with the sun on the rustling leaves, woodsmoke in the air, and the fallen crunching under our paws or hooves. :)

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Squirrel Nutkin? That Brushtailed crackerjack!

*chuckles* Just kidding, I haven't read a lot of Beatrix Potter's books :(

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nutkin kept teasing an owl with riddles. In the end, the owl ate him.

Potter's stories were sometimes a bit more realistic than today's kiddie tales are allowed to be. Her illustrations though are gorgeous watercolor art and a lot of it is very striking furry/anthropomorphics. Dogs walking on their hind legs and carrying shopping baskets? Hedgehogs doing laundry and ironing? Mice doing embroidery? (Very fine work it was, too.)

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

Fall hit with a vengence here overnight. We are currently experiencing 20-30MPH winds, light to heavy rain and temperatures in the high 50's. Note that the high on Sunday was nearly 90 and now our highs for the next few days will struggle to get into the 60's.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We had a similar temperature drop overnight and are expecting rain later today. The foliage colors really blossomed this weekend, and are brighter this morning than they were yesterday. I hope the sun comes out so we can enjoy them before they all blow away. ;p

[saythename.livejournal.com]

You have an ALPHA?

@.@

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I seem to have two Alphas in fact. If you know what they are, then you probably know that HP discontinued the product line last spring and will drop support sometime in the next couple of years. Consequently, many commercial users are unloading their Alphas or will be doing that soon.

The library system to which my library belongs converted from an Alphaserver DS10 running Tru64 UNIX to a Sun running Solaris a couple of months ago. The DS10 and the backup test server (an old Personal Work Station 433au) were handed to me on the grounds that I "must be the only person in the entire consortium who could find anything to do with them." I made a proposal to turn the DS10 into a web server and public PHP forum for library users, but it was turned down. They just wanted to get rid of the equipment and didn't want to bother trying to sell it. So it seems to be mine to do with as I choose.

The 433au is at my house now, running Debian Linux 4.0 and OpenVMS 8.3 in a dual boot arrangement. Mostly it has been processing SETI@Home data. The DS10 is still sitting here at the library, also running Debian and processing SETI@Home, but I guess I could take it home any time I want.

Just luck and being in the right place at the right time. I should note that neither of these machines has the throughput or performance at end user GUI-style computing that the Pentium 4 desktops have, so it's understandable that no one wants them. But they are interesting and still quite serviceable, plus I have a fondness for VMS that just won't go away. I've always wanted to run VMS on a home machine, and now I can.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Debian is a goodly mix of Linux. On an Alpha
your rockin'!

Its interesting your running Seti on it, I suppose
an appropriate use of the extra cycles.

You should find Galtrader for it too.

^_^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

SETI and SIMAP are the only volunteer distributed computing projects I've been able to find that have suitable client software for the Alphas. Even then, the client is only available on Linux. Apparently when most of the big distributed computing projects switched to the BOINC platform, they just abandoned VMS, as there is no longer even a SETI client available for OpenVMS. Most of them have written off the Alphas as "not worth the bother" too, which seems rather poor planning to me. If they would open source their client module, then others would port it for them, but only SETI has done that. I'm running SETI and SIMAP on both Alphas, but SIMAP has no new work this week.

Now what the heck is Galtrader?

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Galtrader was a great old space game that
ran on the VAX.

Let me rummage...ah...here;

http://www.gamingmuseum.com/gal-trader.html

I was big into that as a kid, your whole
"I've got an Alpha" VMS thing reminded me
of it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh. GALACTIC trader. Yes, I've heard of that, but not being a gamer in any sense, didn't make the connection.

Yeah, the source code is probably in the DECUS archives I have downloaded on a CD but haven't really looked at yet. Likewise Trek and Adventure.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Now how old school is that :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not old enough. OLD school would be Adventure on the CDC 3600 that was the first computer I ever had contact with. It had only tape drives and a magnetic drum, no disk drives at all. To run something like Adventure you had to load the program from tape and play it from the operator's console.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Never did that but I do still have a copy of David Ahl's Basic Games
around somewhere. XD *goes to find it with his walker*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

David Ahl? Isn't that from the TRS-80 era? The name does sound familiar. TRS-80 or Apple II I think.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Originally from DEC, an in-house production,
but it was so popular a commercial version
came out. It was designed so it would be
compatible with most of the varients of BASIC
going around at the time, including, yes,
TRS and Apple.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

*throws digital gang signs that translate to hexidecimal ACE*

Old School! 8 Bit!

XD

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*reflects the gang sign back at you, somewhat altered so that it now says:*

x'DEADBEEF'

;P

[saythename.livejournal.com]

*rubs his chin and ponders*

I wonder if those would run on a PC
or Linux box. Hmm.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The answer to that is yes. There's a VAX simulation program called SIMH. It actually simulates a bunch of old equipment, including an Altair running CP/M. In order to get VMS going on it, you have to join Encompass (the current name for what used to be DECUS) but they have an "associate" membership that's free. Then you register as a VAX/Alpha hobbyist, which entitles you to free software licenses for VMS products. Then you have to get installation media for the operating system. You can hunt around on Ebay but the easiest way is just to buy a CD from the hobbyist website. $30 for VMS complete with networking and language compilers. Install it, get it configured, and then you can go get the DECUS tapes, which are now CD images you download...

I had the VAX emulation running under Linux with OpenVMS 7.3 before I got hold of the Alphas. So I just applied for a new set of hobbyist license keys for the Alpha, and ordered an Alpha CDROM. There are online forums and mailing lists and people are pretty helpful.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Very interesting!

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Invites you on his friends list if your willing.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Accepted. :)

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

80 degrees, huh? 5 more and you'll have what it's like in the evenings around here.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, you don't have to stay down there if it bothers you. ;p I know, I know, with all the complications you have at the moment, moving somewhere out of state would probably be a real nasty bit of work.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Actually, after Pensacola, it's quite pleasent here... I really wasn't complaining, though... just comparing. I guess I came off sounding annoyed. Actually, 90 is what I've gotten used to, so anything less isn't so bad... my mom's been living up north, and she finds the weather here hard to adapt to; she's been a trooper about it, though- which i must confess surprised me a little.