Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.

C14 from Bardwell Park to Museum

Cleanliness: Very good!

Hope you had a properous Queen's Birthday, if you were in [most of] Australia. Folks in WA, the UK, Canada and New Zealand already had theirs. As I said in 2009:

Don’t you just love living in a commn [sic] sense monarchy? :)

Dang typos. Speaking of mistakes, I'm also 99% sure that isn't a picture of Her Majesty. Maybe someone from Ireland can help me out, didn't she just visit you?

After much head scratching, I finally got retro MIDI sound working in Windows 3.11 and PC DOS 7 in QEMU! Wow, that was a mouthful. Here’s how you do it, with a caveat.

Execution Summary

In its default ./configure-ation, QEMU emulates a Sound Blaster 16 card which can be detected and used in Windows 3.1 with the bundled Windows Sound Blaster 1.5 drivers. Unfortunately, with MPU401 disabled this means no MIDI support, on any guest OS. As of writing this post, there’s no way around this.

Fortunately, QEMU also emulates Ad Lib, that early generation sound system that pre-dated SoundBlaster and has rudimentary MIDI support. Like SoundBlaster, Windows 3.11 can also use it out of the box without additional drivers.

As a caveat: if you install any drivers for Sound Blaster before or after doing this, Ad Lib apparently loses control of MIDI and subsequently you don’t hear anything. I’ve yet to find a workaround for this, but as soon as I do, I’ll post it here.

Building QEMU with Ad Lib support

For what I've been told are performance reasons, QEMU doesn't include Ad Lib support by default. Browsing the hundreds of pages of duplicated documentation online, I was told the solution to this was to build QEMU with the following option:

./configure --with-adlib

This no longer works. This does:

./configure --audio-card-list=sb16,adlib

I use QEMU exclusively for older OSs and have no need for the other sound cards it supports; if you want others you’ll want to add them there.

Windows 3.1

This should be a blast from the past for those of you who did this back in 1992… I was 6 at the time! My earliest memories of our first home computer were with a Sound Blaster card, so this was new to me :).

1. Fire up your QEMU DOS VM (that’s a lot of acronyms), then launch Windows 3.1. If you needed to be told that, how did you build your own custom version of QEMU?

2. Go to Control Panel, then Drivers.

3. Click Add…, choose Ad Lib from the List of Drivers, and hit OK. You’ll be prompted for a Windows 3.1 install disk, or you can put in a different path. I tend to keep setup files on the virtual drive C for this purpose; it’s not like I don’t have space for it!

4. Quit Windows, then launch it again. Ah the days when rebooting your "OS" was that simple!

5. Go back to Control Panel and choose MIDI Mapper. Choose Ad Lib general from the Name list box, then hit Close.

All done! Now you can launch Media Player and play CANYON.MID in all its electronic, MIDI glory!

Why are you running Windows 3.1?

While its come in incredibly handy for a few paid jobs (spur of the moment things that earn some serious brownie points, then later more seriously!), our first family home computer ran Windows 3.0 and later 3.1.

My ultimate goal is to recreate that first system with all our classic software and games on my modern hardware. I’ve got all the original disks, made images of them, and am ready to go! I’m a sucker for nostalgia :’)

But without more consumer spending, businesses won’t spend more. A robust economy can’t be built on inventory replacements. ~ Robert Reich

Exactly. This is another reason why my American friends should be viewing the reports that Chrysler "paid off" their governments debts six years early with nothing but scepticism. Paying off debts due to demand from governments refreshing their car fleets rather than from private consumers is tantamount to smoke and mirrors.

I'd also argue if the US government were serious about creating jobs and helping the environment they'd put people to work improving public transport instead, but that's just my no good greenie side asserting itself again.

In a homage to Steve Rubel’s verbosely titled Tumble post, I’m saying Why Adopting A Scorched Earth Policy, Dismantling Two Blogs and Jumping to Tumblr in a Single Weekend May Not Be Such a Good Idea.

Standard Chartered territory

It’s a pun on a bank, and "chartered territory". I thought it was funny.

Firstly, despite its sudden transformation from a nerd site to a meme aggregator for alleged hipsters and teenage girls while I had my back turned, Steve is not the first well known blogger or journalist to move to Tumblr as their platform of choice. Robert Reich, a Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and whom I have much respect for, has been posting detailed entries on his Tumblr blog for years now. What makes Steve’s move different from the others who preceded him is he’s moved to the platform exclusively.

In his justification post, Steve claims he did this because "Tumblr is a truly unique hybrid" of many other media spheres such as blogs, traditional media and social media, and that essentially it gives him the best social bang for his buck.

It’s highly social, with an incredibly engaged community and connective tissue to the aforementioned hubs. It offers most of the benefits of the large blog platforms (eg Owned media). And, last but not least, it is being used by dozens of traditional and tradigital [sic] media brands like TNW and Sports Blog Nation.

He does have a point. Mmm, pointy. I’ve had a Tumblr account since 2007 (used on and off!) and think it could teach traditional blog platform UI designers a thing or two. I like how easy it is to add entries to my favourites, and reblog something I find interesting. Frankly, I was so happy someone had the guts to rethink how blogs work, nobody had really done that since Radio.

I still have my own site though!

We could discuss the reliability issues that have plagued the site worse than Twitter in 2007 and have sparked their own memes. Ah Richard Dawkins, if only you knew what you’d be unleashing with that term! My favourites of his works are Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker, but The Selfish Gene was also a delightfully thought provoking tome. But I digress!

What’s most troubling about this move however is Tumblr is a silo. The real reason Steve didn’t import his previous two blogs into Tumblr is because he couldn’t. If he changes his mind in the future, he can’t export [easily] either. To leave comments, you need to be in the Tumblr silo yourself. All these may seem like acceptable opportunity costs for access to a site that puts the dated UI of WordPress to shame, but what about the future?

His justification for deleting his previous two blogs bordered on the surreal!

I want to make it easy for Google. The only way to do so was to scorch the earth. Anything more will confuse it. I want one site to earn the +1s, not three.

So he was willing to contribute to the digital dark age, destroy hundreds of links and further give fuel to the traditional media folk who claim the internet is too transient a medium to be taken seriously, so maybe he can game (I’m sorry, “SEO”) the current dominant search engine? I’m assuming he has local backups of his blog, but what about those of us who commented on his words in the past? What about those who cited him in research papers? At best it sounds short sighted, at worst irresponsible.

Ruben the Buzzkill to Ruben the Crackpot

Forgive me for sounding a little like a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t shake the feeling there’s something else going on here. The cost of hosting a static version of a blog archive thesedays is a pittance, and I haven’t seen any convincing evidence that having multiple sites "confuses" search engines; if anything I’ve seen more of the opposite.

I described the situation to a bloke at uni, and his immediate response was "so Tumblr gave him a wad of cash, did they?" and my old man dismissed the move as someone trying to cover their tracks for some reason, either through threat or enticement from a company or government based on something he said about them. I have no evidence of either of these, but it does seem like an awfully short sighted decision for someone who lives and breathes social media.

Perhaps he’s right and I’m just not forward thinking enough to see the big picture; I wouldn’t put it past me! Heck I’m even following him on Tumblr now. I wish him luck, and even more than I’m wrong!

So I checked Technorati.com this evening, that former darling of the blogosphere (do people use that term anymore?) I joined in 2005. Four of the twelve top stories were about American politician Anthony Weiner and his schlong. One third.

It's so disappointing that for all the blatant ratings grabbing and race-to-the-bottom journalism we accuse the mainstream media of pushing on us, blogs seem to be following the same path with vapid news stories that just aren't news. At least when I post pointless entries, they're cute! But I digress.

I guess a sex scandal sells, it's why Clinton was impeached and not Bush.

The latest version of Transmission is reporting availability as an Intel application only now. Firefox 4.0 is [officially] only available as an Intel app, and starting with 4.0.1 the download page is using the Finder icon in place of the Universal one.

It took five years, but it seems bigger players are now starting to leave the PowerPC legacy behind. I'll still be building for both for a while yet though, there are still a lot of souped up PowerMac G5s in use out there.

If you're covering WWDC 2011, I most likely have a nit to pick with you. Apple has not resumed honouring Mac developers as you are claiming, they've started honouring Mac App Store developers.

Don't worry, even the pros are making this mistake, but there's a huge difference. I trust this [un]intentional obfuscation on your part will be resolved ;).

For over seven years I've [largely] abstained from posting animated GIFs. Worries about being distracting aside, their file size also puts strain on my already stretched bandwidth quota.

I guess you could say, I found this too sweet to pass up. Yui's clothes also match my blog theme, you see.