Notices by linear cannon (linear@nya.social), page 2

i may have spoken too soon about not being able to find it

i would like for my NetWare 4.11 server to have the NFS addon to make it easier to interface with unix-like systems, but the NFS addon seems extremely rare. i can't even find a dumped copy online of a version that would install properly onto this release of NetWare, let alone real disks

i do have the base unix services package that has NIS and FTP and a few other things, since that comes with IntraNetWare and i have the full IntraNetWare package

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me the details of the keyboard controller are different but it's better off for that, and in fact now matches the behavior of my real machine since i replaced the weird buggy keyboard controller with a more normal one

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me the beep you get will depend on what machine you have set up, just like in real life! different machines with different bioses will do it differently

also fun fact, the initial support for the Hyundai Super-286C was contributed by me, with the ROM dumped from my actual machine

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me oh, it does do that, it's just weird. it uses the directory you launch it in to store the config files. i have an ~/86box directory with subdirectories for each machine i have set up and i just cd to the directory before launching it. there are probably better ways but tbh i'm perfectly happy with managing it this way

and also marginally faster execution than real hardware since memory latency effects are also not accounted for, which again, i don't think is really much of an issue unless you're doing something really strange like trying to hyper-optimize quake for 486 processors

it is really cool that i can emulate, to a surprising degree of accuracy, most of the old PC systems i have, and close analogues for the ones i can't emulate exactly, and the only real measurable difference is in extremely niche FPU timing details

86box is the far and away the best pc emulator that exists and i am glad it is around

it is still not quite accurate enough for some of the stuff i do, but it is awfully close

and where it is too inaccurate for me, i don't blame it - i actually contributed changes to make it accurate in the respects i care about, and they were accepted, but then reverted because it was far too much overhead. and that was the right call

my wife just came by to take a photo of me at my desk to use as a living counterexample of someone saying "well at least you dont have to use <specific old technology> anymore"

wherein that specific old technology was indeed on my desk and in use, with spares also on my desk, alongside many other things that someone might otherwise think nobody had used in 20+ years

this is the photo she took

this is the sort of thing you can expect to see if you pass my desk at any given point in time, just with broad variation over time of exactly what old technology, specifically, is present

prolog is such a programming language

i think it's particularly interesting, as i've been learning it, to note how the common best practices have changed quite a bit over time, as the language and expected features of the prolog systems in common use have evolved

idioms and patterns that were once considered good or necessary often no longer are, sometimes for the very same underlying reason

printing and binding someone's published paper just so i can have a copy on my shelf to refer to instead of having to open a pdf on a computer

i'd buy it from the MIT press if it were still in print, but it isn't, and the author later published a version free to anyone for noncommercial use, asking that if you do use it to contact him and tell him what you were using it for. which i was happily about to do, but then i found out that he died in 2020

@pleonasticTautology@shrike.club my dad ran a web+email hosting service and my mom was a web designer, how could i have not had my own website when i was 5 years old

i have now successfully recovered one of at least two childhood runescape accounts and am trying to get access to the other

unfortunately, losing access to my childhood domain names for a while meant that a number of accounts from back then got pretty thoroughly stolen, but i have control over those domain names again and have slowly been recovering old stuff

i never have enough (e)eproms lying around. i should get a stock of them on hand soon, once i can afford to

the way i feel when writing or reading prolog code is very similar to how i have imagined it would feel to either write or decipher a message to/from an alien culture, wherein the message was designed to be entirely unambiguous when assuming no shared context other than the basic properties of the universe we both exist in

prolog practice idea: using prolog to help me play zachtronics games

@Skirmisher@snoot.tube the person writing the job description clearly works at another company entirely and i'm expecting that the job description as written will actually have nothing to do with the real requirements

@Skirmisher@snoot.tube i'm pretty sure i even found the "real" internal job description to match the public one posted by a recruiting agency, and it is alike in only the most superficial of ways

one of the places i just applied for has note in their job description that they are looking for experience with a certain build tool, which they name as though it should be common. but in reality it is an internal build tool of which i can only find two public records that it exists at all, one of which is the job listing (the other a pastebin of a build log from 6 years ago). i plan to point this out in the interview i have with them this week

i'm wondering if this is going to be another "well, actually, you said this is a C coding interview, but this is clearly C++11. let me translate these problems to C99 for you before i solve them" moment like with my last job