Hurry up and wait

[altivo]

No fox sighting today. It was gloomy much of the day and began to rain in late afternoon. However, while working in the barns I found three small bird eggs lying in the sand on the floor. One was broken, the other two intact. They are about 1 cm. across and 1.5 cm. long, dull bluish gray with tiny brown speckles, heavier at the large end. They may be barn swallow eggs, as the barn swallows returned at the beginning of the week. However, they were just repairing their old nest on Wednesday, so it seems unlikely that they had three or more eggs already. That is the only nest in the barn or near the entrance, but it is on the ceiling rafters about eight feet above the floor and eight feet horizontally away from where I found the eggs.

I'm assuming that some predatory egg thief, like a rat perhaps or another bird, took those eggs from their rightful nest, wherever it is. But I'd have thought egg pirates would eat their spoils on the spot, rather than carry them away so delicately only to abandon them later.

Went to the spinning study group meeting only to find out that I was the only one there. (Other than Toni, at whose shop it was held, anyway.) Two others were expected, but called her to say they were turning back at the last minute because one's sister had just been in a wreck. I hope she's OK. And I had finished a nice skein of blended dog hair and wool, too. Maybe I'll get a photo of it and post it.

Finally, after six months of battling with it on and off, I have gotten the graphics card in the Alpha workstation at home to talke to Linux. Or rather, gotten Linux to recognize it. The only other device that ever gave me so much hassle in Linux was a Compaq proprietary sound chip. Several factors combined to make this particular video setup such a bear. First of all, the card is an S3 Trio 64. These were among the industry leaders in their time, but that time was around 1991 or so. They have long since become obsolete. Linux still has drivers for them, but they really haven't been properly tested and debugged in recent releases, while the GUI system was completely redesigned. Result? The S3 card and driver don't seem to work. I kept trying different settings but finally gave up this week and reported it as a driver bug. I did get some immediate response, so someone may in fact fix it. In theory this card should work with the VESA standard driver too, just not with all its features fully enabled. Couldn't get that to work either. Then yesterday I tried getting it to work as a totally dumb VGA interface, which in theory is supposed to work with nearly everything, at least on Intel style hardware. That didn't work either. Finally a light went on. The drivers had all been complaining that there was an addressing conflict, and that they couldn't find the Video ROM BIOS.

I did some poking around with utility programs that read and write raw data to the PCI bus, and discovered that the card is not being configured properly. Linux doesn't quite do "Plug and Play" the way Windows does. The end result was that the video chip thought its BIOS was at one address, while the OS driver thought it was at another address. The card goes back to this "broken" configuration each time the system reboots. So I put a command to set the BIOS address into the system startup files. That did the trick. The VESA driver works, or almost does. The screen still tends to flicker whenever it gets updated, which is not good. But information derived from the log written by the VESA interface may well provide the necessary clues for the real S3 driver, too.

Comments

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

Those sound about right for barn swallow eggs and those little guys aren't always the brightest when it comes to nest location. We had a pair build a nest on one of the aisle walls, right behind where some bridles are hung up a couple years back. Dunno why they thought that was a good location. As soon as the young'uns left the nest we knocked it down so they wouldn't do a second batch in there.

Could also be pigeon or dove eggs, I guess. From my experiences in TX, I learned that they're probably the worst nesters in all of bird-dom and will lay their eggs in some truly stupid locations.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We have mourning doves but not the rock pigeons here. I think mourning dove eggs are large and plain white. These are probably the barn swallow eggs. They weren't hanging around as I'd expect them to be this morning. The nest doesn't seem to be damaged, though, and I can see the new edge of mud blobs that they had just applied to it on Monday and Tuesday. Evidently something got the eggs, and since the nest is on a ceiling beam, not easily accessible, I conclude it had to have been another bird or else a rodent with climbing ability. Odd that they weren't all broken and eaten.

I agree, barn swallows don't always seem too clever about location. We had them start a nest in a stall right over the horse's head once. Gary knocked that one down because he hates having them poop on the horses. They moved to the arena where they pasted a nest to a smooth enameled metal wall. That lasted a week or two, but not long enough. When the mud dried out, it fell off the wall, taking the eggs with it. That was the last we saw of barn swallows that year, but the next year they came back and built a sort of duplex nest over the aisle of the barn. We've left that one there and they return to it every year to raise at least two broods, usually one in each side of the "duplex."

Other than the little black pile of poop under the nest, they aren't a problem. Since they eat mosquitoes, I'd just as soon have them around. XD

[saythename.livejournal.com]

I don't think Alphas were meant to be graphical in the
way we mean it today. If I'm not mistaken they were
"superminis" for science reasons.

Of course I could be wrong.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Alphas served in many different capacities, not only as scientific machines, but as business processors and as graphical workstations. As it happens, the one I have here in the house is the "Digital Personal Workstation" that was designed to run a choice of three operating systems (Windows NT, Unix, or OpenVMS) and was indeed meant to operate almost entirely in a graphics-based mode.

It has a full gigabyte of RAM and could be expanded further. It runs at 433MHz, which sounds slow today, but was fast for the time when it was built and is even faster considering that it isn't Intel. It performs quite credibly when compared to a Pentium III at, say, 1.8 GHz..

The issue with graphics cards is two-fold. The DEC console software (equivalent to BIOS in an Intel style machine, but actually a mini-UNIX in itself) only recognizes cards from a given list, and is sometimes confused by those that have been invented since it was created (around 1998 or so.) Then, I want it to run both Linux and OpenVMS. Each of those has its own requirements. Finding a card that is compatible with all three and doesn't cost hundreds of dollars has turned out to be tricky. The "best" choices are scarce, no longer made, and tend to sell for $250 or more. The S3 Trio 64 is a compromise that should work, but only gives an 800x600 display. Unfortunately, Linux support for it on the Alpha platform turns out to be dubious.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Well, keep tweakin, its always very
satisfying when you get a problem like
that solved.

[deffox]

Your fox might relocate with the loose dogs. While it sounds like they aren't a threat to her, they are to the kits. She is probably staying in the open area so she can confront or lead the dogs off without the dogs discovering the kit's home.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Those are my thoughts too. The dogs are a constant pain, fox or no. We do not let ours run loose like that, period, but the neighbors on both sides are near morons.