Spikey Pillow

I've got a job as a notetaker for some first year computer science classes. One of which is officially named Introduction to Computing, but known by all as assembly class. (This was my favourite class, once you get over all the tedious number systems stuff and just spend the rest of the year writing 68k assembly).

It's 10am on a Wednesday morning, an unspeakable hour of the day. I only cover one lecture out of three during the week, so there should have been two lectures since I was here last week. Last week the prof gave a class on pointers, which was all well and good. But this week, 2 lectures later, he's still talking about pointers. He's even using the same lecture slides. I feel like I should just submit the same notes I took last week. Pointers really aren't that hard. Why do lecturers need to belabour them so much?

I was really looking forward to carbonated coffee, I mean what could go wrong? Coffee is great, fizzy is good, it seemed like a plan. Well the thing is Coke Cola Blāk isn't just carbonated coffee, it's carbonated coffee with coke and something else. A combination of coffee and coke alone couldn't possibly spawn the evil that is this drink.

I wrote the above three months ago but didn't post it because I was missing something. I just didn't know exactly what it tasted like, until now. Something terrible happened this morning. I went downstairs to make some coffee in my fancy-shamncy coffee machine only to discover that it had been on since yesterday morning. So about two cups of coffee had been slowly concentrated into a thick tarry mass.

That is what Coca Cola Blāk tastes like, burnt caramelised coffee that has been sitting in the machine for about week. Does anyone actually enjoy this? What were Coke Cola thinking? So many unanswered questions.

Lately I've been reading about mainframes as I have to write this wonderful essay about whether or not they have a future. Joy. Here are some odd terms I've come across.

Kneecapping

Let's try not to make our sysadmins sound like homicidal maniacs.

"Some mainframes have models or versions that are configured to operate slower than the potential speed of their central processors. This is widely known as kneecapping, although IBM prefers the term capacity setting, or something similar."
From the Red Book

Parallel Sysplex

We have to make this sound insanely cool.

I guess the suggestion to call it a Mainframe Cluster didn't go down too well in the board meeting. However Parallel Sysplex has all the key features of an awesome tech name: it's made of a several other tech words merged together to give something which sounds cool and expensive but is completely meaningless. I mean, what is a Sysplex? Hmm, if Googlers work in a Googleplex, does that mean we keep our sysadmins in a Sysplex? I know I'd sure like to work somewhere with a name as cool as that.

So finally, I stopped being homeless and no longer have to sleep on couches and in guest rooms (thanks kgmf) and motels. I'm sharing a pretty nice house out in suburbia. It's all very pleasant (lots of trees, no bums), apart from the fact that we have no network connectivity aside from dial up. Since Smart Telecom rather unfortunately took a nose dive last month there hasn't really been much choice of DSL providers, particularly when you need a rather high download quota (the average cap size for any reasonably priced DSL package is 40GB). So we decided to sign up Irish Broadband, since they have no download cap. Well, I guess I can summarize our experience by saying it's week 6 after moving in and we're still using dialup. Irish Broadband's customer support department seems to only tell customers things that will make them feel happy and warm, with complete disregard for reality. So now we're waiting, with the most meagre of connections, for Imagine to set up our DSL line.

I hoped and prayed in the deepest part of my heart that I would never configure my modem, but, alas, here some instructions on how to access the internet 1998 style if you have a Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop. (Non-nerds can stop reading now if they haven't already.)

Lots of people have documented elsewhere how to get Linux to work nicely on this laptop, but none of the have the joy of using dial up so there are no instructions on what drivers to use for the internal winmodem.

The lspci output for the modem and soundcard looks like this:

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)

That's not entirely helpful, Intel AC'97 isn't specific enough. If you go get the scanModem script from the linmodem site it will tell you which actual drivers are needed.

PCIDEV=8086:24c6
CLASS="Class 0703: 8086:24c6"
NAME="Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM "
Vendor=8086
Device=24c6
SUBSYS=1179:0001
SUBNAME=" Toshiba America Info Systems Unknown device 0001"
SUBven=1179
IRQ=11
Test="./scanModem test 8086:24c6 1179:0001"
SOFT=8086:24c6
CODECd=SIL27
COD=SIL
TYPE=ALSA
SLMODEMD_DEVICE=modem:1
PORT="modem:1"
Driver=
DRIVER_=
KDRIVER=
ASOUND=
CODECp=SIL27
CODEC=
COD=SIL
HDA=
IDENT=slmodemd
TST=

This SIL27 part tells us that you have to use the ALSA AC97 modem drivers with the Smart Link slmodemd helper.

If you have ALSA correctly working you should see output like this in dmesg. (If it is compiled as a module you may need to do 'modprobe snd-intel8x0m' first).

ALSA device list:
  #0: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 with AD1981B at 0x34000800, irq 11
  #1: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 Modem at 0x1400, irq 11

If the modem isn't showing up as a device under ALSA you may need to enable support for it in the kernel. You'll need a kernel version >= 2.6.5. The ALSA modem driver is listed as experimental: Intel/SiS/nVidia/AMD MC97 Modem (EXPERIMENTAL) but so far I haven't had any problems with it. These are the kernel config parameters that need to enabled:

 SND=y
 SND_INTEL8X0M=y 

If ALSA is correctly detecting your modem, next you need the Smart Link Soft Modem software. You can get the precompiled binary, which makes installation as simple as sticking slmodemd into /usr/sbin. Otherwise it comes with fairly comprehensive compilation and installation instructions.

If you run slmodemd as root with
slmodemd --alsa
it will it will create a device node for the modem in /dev/ttySL0. You just need to tell wvdial, or whatever dialer program you are using, to use this device and everything should be ready to go.