Rubenerd

Last night I left my mobile phone at work. It was great!

Om Malik reminded me of this great quote:

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.

I went to get coffee this morning at my local favourite, and the barista asked if she could ask a question after delivering the brew to my table. You just did! I chortled.

She asked why I’m always frowning, and if I was okay.

I’ll admit I’ve had a lot weighing on my mine of late (haven’t we all?) but I was surprised that I was wearing this on my face the whole time. I didn’t think I had been.

Frowning feels a lot like bad posture; you’re oblivious to doing it until you make a conscious effort to notice and correct it. Sure enough, I went back to typing and could feel myself frowning as I was catching up on my morning RSS, then again when replying to an email, and again when I accepted the day’s meeting invites.

I wonder how much I’ve been subconsciously informing my morning mood with this expression? I smile at the baristas and wish them a good morning, but I guess I’ve been regressing this whole time.

If WordPress spits out the above error message when installing plugins or themes, you might not have the required PHP curl installed, or a mismatched version.

Assuming you’re using PHP 7.4, you’ll want to install php74-curl or php-curl on FreeBSD, NetBSD/pkgsrc, or Debian-based Linux distros.

This a perfect case study in bad error messages. A layperson would see that error and assume an invalid archive means… an invalid archive. It’s technically correct, and entirely meaningless, to say a non-existent download would also be an invalid archive.

It’s the 04th of April, which is 2022-04-04. With significant figures exclusively on the day or month, this means today is 404. That’d be fun to reply to work email with as we head to the beach, not to be found.

It reminds me of that Michael Franks song Barefoot on the Beach, which I guess qualifies for our Music Monday this week:

Safely out of reach;
From faxes and the telephone

Wait, I don’t like the beach. Sun burns my skin, and sand gets into my shoes and between my toes and gah! Maybe a coffee shop in the shade with a book?

I like dates like this. Brilliant, fabulous, modest people like you and I that use ISO dates can appreciate it, alongside the global DD/MM/YYYY standard, and even my American friends.

I got a great email from Alexander saying that my silly post about blogging finally convinced him to start writing. That’s great news!

And while I thought about creating my own little blog many times in the past, and definitely for several years, this post gave me the final push to actually try it. Just because you worry that nobody is going to visit your blog, and all the hard work you’ve put in was just wasted for nothing, that shouldn’t be a reason to quit. I guess it’s the same feeling people have when opening a YouTube channel or any other social media type of web presence (although this is a blog, and not social media).

So far he’s discussed an adventure his father had with backups, and some pontifications about types in the C++ standard library with some surprising performance results.

Please check him out and subscribe to his web feed. His domain is in Germany, but he writes in English. And he didn’t even bring up my unfortunate last name :).

We haven’t had a featured bird picture from Wikipedia in a while! This beautiful avian specimen is the African emerald cuckoo, taken by Charles J. Sharp.

From Wikipedia:

Bruszewo-Borkowizna [bruˈʂɛvɔ bɔrkɔˈvizna] is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Sokoły, within Wysokie Mazowieckie County, Podlaskie Voivodeship, in north-eastern Poland.

That’s clearly the wrong article. Let’s try again:

The African emerald cuckoo (Chrysococcyx cupreus) is a species of cuckoo that is native to Africa. As a member of the Cuculidae genus, the African emerald cuckoo is an Old World cuckoo. There are four subspecies … [and] its range covers most of sub-Saharan Africa.

I still use QEMU for a bunch of my vintage computing stuff. I have physical kit, but sometimes its useful to do testing on my modern machines. I also cheat and use it to install certain classic OSs direct to CompactFlash cards, which I then plug into old computers as replacement hard drives.

QEMU can emulate an AT, ISA-era PC with the -M isapc option, but for many years it was broken. I might be getting my wires crossed, but I’m fairly sure I read a newsgroup thread discussing various issues, and that fixing it “wasn’t a high priority”. I was disappointed, but didn’t blame them.

I’m not sure when it was fixed, or the awesome contributor who made it possible, but I tested it on a lark recently and it’s possible to invoke the option again! This means we have ISA cards back, and best of all, it gives us native Cirrus VGA support in mid-1990s retro OSs again without extra drivers.

Here’s an example of booting Windows NT 3.51, one of my favourite retro OSs because its such an oddball mishmash of win32 and Windows 3.x UI:

qemu-system-i386 \
	-M isapc \
	-m 64 \
	-hda harddrive.img \

The installer detected the Cirrus 5430 card and installed the appropriate drivers, meaning we get full 16-bit colour and high-resolution graphics on first boot! Here’s the Display Settings window in Control Panel, complete with its Windows 95-era CRT preview graphic and 3.x UI:

The OS reports the following details for the detected card:

Chip Type: CL 5430
DAC Type: Integrated RAMDAC
Memory Size: 2 MB
Adapter String: Cirrus Logic Compatible

Curiously, Windows NT 4.0 can go to 1024×768 with 16-bit colour, but NT 3.51 drops back to 256 colour on anything higher than 800×600. I haven’t yet tested whether installing a newer Cirrus Logic driver would unlock those higher modes, but I suspect that’d do the trick.

This is why I adore these classic Cirrus Logic cards. They’re used everywhere, and has excellent support in these vintage OSs. Nothing beats Matrox’s Mystique and Millennium for 2D quality, but Cirrus Logic makes everything easier.

The next OSs to test will be BeOS, OS/2, Red Hat Linux, and maybe some classic 32-bit BSD with XFree86.

From their 1987 album Actually:

We check it with the city;
Then change the law.

The significance of this cannot be overstated, for people living either side of it!

The island of Singapore is separated from Malaysia by the Strait of Johor, a body of water wider than a river, but narrower than anything else. The British first build the Causeway connecting the two sides with road, rail, telegraph lines, and water pipes. It was destroyed during World War II in a failed attempt to thwart advancing Japanese forces, and since reconstruction has been a focal point of relations between the two sides. There’s a ton of history behind this crossing, but I’ll leave it at that!

People forget that Singapore was a part of Malaysia and its predecessor states. The original island was ceded to the British by the Sultan of Johor, and it briefly became part of the modern Malaysian state in the mid 20th century. Families can trace their histories both sides, and both counties share (at least in part) a linguistic, cultural, and culinary identity.

Photo of the empty Causeway from the Singapore side by Lionel Lim.

My economics professor once commented that Johor on the Malaysian side is the closest Singapore has to a hinterland. Workers cross in the thousands every day in trucks, cars, and on motorbikes. You can get the local SBS 170 bus across, and a Malaysian KTMB train. It was normal growing up there to tell my parents “I’m off to JB for the day”, or to cross for events, school camps, and trade shows. The traffic situation on the causeway is regularly featured on radio and TV news alongside the Tuas Second Link.

The political situation between the two sides range from warm to tepid, depending on those in charge on either side. But in an alternative universe I can imagine Lee Kuan Yew giving a very different speech to the one he gave when Singapore was ejected from Malaysia. It’s interesting to think the Causeway could have remained a state border had certain events played out differently.

The Causeway has only been closed a few times in its history, but the gates were lowered in 2020 as Singapore went into isolation to contain Covid. So it was a joy and relief to see my Twitter and RSS feeds flooded with grateful and excited people crossing again this week. It was a glimmer of wonderful news in a world that’s in sore need of it.