27 January 2002
Skyshow Went to the Australia Day fireworks on Saturday night. I cycled into the city to see them, which was worth it (didn't get stuck in a traffic jam -- just had to dodge pedestrians on the way home). The fireworks looked so much better in the city (I went just a little past the narrows bridge). There were fireworks being let off the tops of the buildings in the city, off the narrows bridge, and off the barges in the middle of the river. At one stage, some small tough-ducks were driving past about 50 metres away and letting off some smaller fireworks. One of the embers from these smaller fireworks landed about 2 metres away from me! (on the esky belonging to someone sitting nearby). Sony NEWS I have been looking at reviving an old Sony NEWS NWS-1580 workstation. This is from a line of 68030 based unix workstations made by sony in the early 90's. It had been left off for about 5 years, so wouldn't boot at all. Apparently the problem was with the battery on the NVRAM chip, so I will try and get a replacement for it (its an MK48T02B-25 chip, which was also used in a number of Sun boxes). While I had the system open, I decided to take a few photos of its insides: http://www.jamesh.id.au/images/nws-1580/ While searching for information, I ran accross the NetBSD/news68k FAQ, which gave a button combo to press to boot a system with a discharged NVRAM battery, or new NVRAM chip. Using that combo, I was able to get the system to boot NEWS-OS 3.3 (a BSD-4.3 derivative). Once the system is running nicely, I might look at transfering the OS off the 180MB disk onto a spare 2GB SCSI disk I have (provided I can find the installation tape). I could probably fit two 3.5" disks into the space the current 5.25" disk takes up, which would mean I could put NetBSD on it too. I can also fit in another 8MB of RAM, which should be helpful (it takes standard 8 or 9 chip 30pin SIMMs). I will also look for a AUI -> 10Base-T tranceiver, so I can hook the machine up to the network (6 COMM ports can only get you so far ...). Python On the PyGTK development side, we now have bonobo bindings in CVS, using jdahlin's orbit-python bindings for ORBit2. We now have support for libbonobo, libbonoboui, bonobo-activation, nautilus views and panel applets (most of this work is thanks to jdahlin). I have also been looking at doing some automatic signal/property documentation for GObject wrappers. Rather than calculating all this documentation up front, I decided to use the cool new descriptor support in Python 2.2. This is essentially a generalisation of the rule that maps functions in a class dictionary to methods on instances. Rather than this being a special case in 2.2, functions implement a tp_descr_get() function, which gets called asking the function object to return itself in the…