We immediately ran into a problem when trying to connect the Cisco console ports to my Digi Portserver II/16: While both ends are RJ45, neither uses anything that could be described as a standard pin-out.
After a bit a of research, I discovered that a Cat5 cable wired as follows works for Cisco consoles. Note that the cable is directly -- the end labelled "Cisco" in the table must go to the Cisco unit, or the cable won't work. I recommend labelling the ends somehow.
| Digi End | |||||||
| Pin 1 | Pin 2 | Pin 3 | Pin 4 | Pin 5 | Pin 6 | Pin 7 | Pin 8 |
| DCD | RTS | GND | TxD | RxD | SG | CTS | DTR |
| w/Gr | Gr | w/Or | Bl | w/Bl | Or | w/Br | Br |
| w/Br | w/Gr | w/Bl | w/Or | Or | Bl | Br | Gr |
| RTS | DTR | TxD | GND | SG | RxD | DSR | CTS |
| Pin 1 | Pin 2 | Pin 3 | Pin 4 | Pin 5 | Pin 6 | Pin 7 | Pin 8 |
| Cisco End | |||||||
Note that I use "w/" as an abbreviation for "White", "Bl" for "Blue", "Gr" for "Green", "Br" for "Brown", and "Or" for "Orange".
]]>First up was The Giant Skull:
... And a submarine ...
... And a cube with frogs on each face ...
... And a can of sardines.
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It was the first time I've used GarageBand for anything more serious than messing around with the emulated keyboard. While the interface wasn't as polished as iPhoto, it was easy enough to figure out that I was able to put that clip together without a tutorial or manual. I'm still not sure what the right way to trim a selection is and the steps to export to MP3 were definitely not intuitive, but it was overall a success.
I definitely have a new appreciation for how much work goes into quality multimedia. That little 15 second clip took over an hour to put together, and I wasn't the original content creator for the majority of it. Professionally developed soundtracks must be extremely labour intensive!
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The article included many (and I mean many) examples like this:
$ cat /home/public/cs601/unix/access.log | grep -v '/images'
I cringed. Real greybeards wouldn't waste processes like that. <mood="curmudgeonly">Bah</mood>.
]]>For approximately 20 regular users.
Ok, it's overkill. So why'd we do it?
This really gets the heart of a different question that comes up from time to time: What is the MetaNetwork for? Why are the folks involved excited about it?
The answer to both the 3rd ircd and the MetaNetwork itself is the same: It's a sandbox, a model of the Internet. As the Wiki says:
It's essentially a mini-Internet for folks that already know and (usually) trust one another. This is cool once you realize that this is much like the Internet looked circa 1971 or so. The MetaNetwork allows us to play with interesting things without actually doing it on the Internet. One prime example is being able to provide a redundant root DNS server using Anycast . this would not be possible on the Internet without a fairly substantial amount of money.
So the purpose for adding the 3rd ircd? Because we can. Because it gave Jim and I a chance to learn how more complicated IRC server routing works without having to spend a pile of pile administering large servers that thousands of users are relying on. Because playing in a sandbox is fun.
]]>Proper use of symbols, when they are available, is important to me[1]. It's not just an aesthetic thing—symbols carry meaning. Meaning-rich symbols correctly used make written language more expressive.
Which is why I would cringe when viewing this website in Safari. Firefox, Opera, and even Internet Explorer would correctly render — as an emdash. Safari would too—sometimes. Usually not. It was fairly hit-or-miss and I couldn't figure out why.
I mean, every page told the browser to render using UTF-8:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
What was going on?
Eventually I figure it out: Apache was disagreeing with me[2].
# Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is # always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation # of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as # a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page # is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you # are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security # reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing # which encourage you to always set a default char set. # ###AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 ### Changing to utf-8 so that emdashes render correctly, among other things AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
There really isn't a moral to the story, I merely wanted to be sure that I had this documented somewhere for the next time I run across it. I hope to save wear and tear on forehead ;-).
Footnotes:
1. From the opposing point of view, I'm also a fan of ASCII because I think that widely-used information exchange standards are so important that having a standard trumps having a correct standard. More on that in a future post.
2. The triple-comment (###) is what I use to distinguish my own comments from the default comments. It makes it easier to grep for.
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It not only emulates screen curvature, the headache-inducing pixel spacing and blur, and the wonderful block cursor, it even emulates baud rate! Running this thing at 300 baud makes me pine for the good old days, when we wished the future would hurry up and get here to rescue us ;-).
Sadly, it still has a lot of rough edges (not saving preferences is a big one). However the sudden spike in interest lead James to comment:
Given the fact people seem to like this so much, I will try to get time to finish it off and put out a semi-respectable release. Keep an eye on my website over the coming months.
I'd love to see this polished up. I'd really use it as my "xterm" some of the time — I love text terminals and other bits of assorted computer nostaliga. I already use a reasonably-modern (compared to my old VT100!) text terminal on a Digi box to admin my servers out-of-band.
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