Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Why do people wear those? XD

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

sofapizza:

iamnotyourboyfriend:

will be 1280x720.

NERD JOKE FTW!!

See mine’s at least 1920x1200.

While DOSBox is a great piece of kit, sometimes you may have more speciailised DOS needs that require the use of a VM. In my case, I use QEMU and so far things are working great.

Getting it

The first step, surprising though it may seem, is to grab QEMU. Fortunately it’s well enough known that most package managers carry it, even MacPorts and Homebrew on OS X do. Its relatively small and builds quite fast.

Creating a disk image

For my needs, raw images work just fine, plus they have the added benefit that they can be easily mounted on the host to modify its contents later.

QEMU comes with the qemu-img utility for creating disk images. This line will create a 500MiB raw disk image:

% qemu-img create -f raw dos.img 500M

Booting a virtual machine

This will start qemu with an extravagent 8MiB of RAM, dos.img as the master drive on the first virtual IDE channel (as a regular machine would probably be configured) and with our bootable PCDOS.iso image in the virtual CD-ROM.

% qemu -m 8 -hda dos.img -cdrom pcdos.iso

From hereon in, its as if you’re installing DOS on a regular machine. Relive the glory days of frequent system crashes, conventional memory ceilings, three finger salutes and those dark blue setup screens!

Mount the disk image on the host

You’ll want to shut down QEMU first (no, really?), then as root mount the disk image to a mountpoint of your choosing. *nix systems would typically employ the loopback device for this.

# mount -o loop,offset=32256 dos.img /mnt

Now you can access and transfer your precious DOS files :)

Justification

Why use QEMU over VirtualBox or other souped up virtualisation software?

QEMU is simple, no messy GUIs to get in the way. It’s portable, and the disk images it uses can be easily mounted on the host just like a regular drive without having to convert it first, even on machines that don’t have QEMU. And finally, speed isn’t really an issue with DOS, so I’d rather have the convenience ;)

Why do you run DOS Ruben?

I seem to always attract troll comments on posts such as this! One of the things I moonlight as is a DOS and CP/M guy, setting up VMs for clients so they can access data locked into obscure file formats and/or abandonware applications. Also for process control software that companies still depend upon but can’t use natively on modern hardware. And finally, Commander Keen. HAPPY?

You ain't seen nothing until you see it represented by an application that isn't Y2K compliant! I suppose the developers figured nobody would be running their otherwise awesome software in 2000, let alone 2011 ;).

The screenshot is of Brown Bag Software's PowerMenu System for DOS, released in 1987. Obviously the date was stored as a two digit integer, but instead of resetting to 0 after 1999, that two digit number just kept incrementing! Curiously, its almost as if they expected this behavior, because the clock's "frame" even expanded to fit the extra digit.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

What better way to celebrate the imminent new year for an introvert? XD Hope the fireworks are good this year

Interesting data from Kobo about sales of eBooks "gifted this holiday" Suffice to say, one author really cleaned up… everywhere :O

Canada
1. "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest" by Stieg Larsson
2. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson
3. "Room" by Emma Donahue

United States
1. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson
2. "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson
3. "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown

United Kingdom
1. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson
2. "The Confession" James E. Mcgreevey
3. "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson

Australia
1. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson
2. "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest" by Stieg Larsson
3. "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson

Rest Of World
1. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson
2. "Dead Or Alive" by Tom Clancy
3. "The 4-Hour Body" by Timothy Ferriss

eBooks are, like, books in, like, E form

Now granted this is from a press release. This means:

1. most likely this was done to generate publicity (mission accomplished!)
2. like Apple with iTunes, we have no way of independently verifying this data
3. what is true for Kobo isn’t reflective of all eBooks, or dead tree books in general

… but still that's a huge accomplishment for Stieg Larsson, an author who passed on before publishers would give him the break he so rightfully deserved. May he rest in peace knowing that his literary works are making people happy around the whole world.

I've been far too busy to read the books, but I've been listening to audiobooks. In one word:

Wowies

Wowies is a word, right? I'd ask Stieg Larsson given he's an author but… you know.

After initially mentioning here that my ThinkPad X40 had no suspend issues on Fedora 14, the reported issues with suspending on that hardware have sporadically started to occur. I don't know why it works sometimes and not other times, unless a recent software update stuffed something up.

Fortunately I have a solution! If your ThinkPad X40 doesn't come out of standby, hold the power button, then hit a random number of keys for upwards of 20 seconds. That seems like a long time and the screen remains dark the entire time, but eventually it wakes up.

Arch Linux never did this on this machine, so I'm thinking its a Red Hat issue, or maybe the latest kernel doesn't like this machine either. Oh well, se a vida é.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Following Dave's instructions as per his interesting new site:

If you agree with these principles, please say so in a place where your expression can be seen and counted. If you mostly agree, or would say it differently, just copy and modify the text, and point back to the original. That’s why it has a CC license. Discuss on the tech-without-borders mail list.

The points, and Dave has them

1. We are people of tech.
2. We live and work everywhere.
3. We value our own freedom, the freedom of people who use our technology and freedom in general.
4. We think there is no meaningful distinction between WikiLeaks and the news organizations covering the stories in cooperation with WikiLeaks.
5. We urge all governments to respect freedom of the press, whether the news originates online or offline.
6. We apply these principles in our work and they are embodied in our technology.

My thoughts, and Ruben has them

On the whole I agree with all of his points, save for #4. I think there is a difference between Wikileaks and news organisations covering the stories with their cooperation, but that's not my primary concern. If we want to make this an all inclusive and time tested list people will be able to reference, we'd be doing ourselves a huge favour by not discussing the flavour site of the month and keeping things more general. Perhaps a more perititent point would be "We are journalists, because we're engaged in debate and discussion". Finally,

Point #2 really spoke to me, as I've essentially used it to attack the Australian governments plan for a compulsory internet filter on several occasions. Forgive the self-quoting:

Welcome to the 21st century Steven Conroy [the senator proposing the mandatory filter]. If you piss off well educated people who have the means to travel, they will simply wave, move away, apply themselves passionately to their jobs in a society that values their contributions [..] and pay their taxes to them instead. It’s your call.

Random footnotes

• I’m glad I can agree with Dave on something again after this confusing piece.

• Because this is TechWithoutBorders, I suppressed my weblog theme’s automatic image border on the logo. Having a sense of humour and using common sense, there’s another point he should include!

• Part of the reason why some things don’t make sense, such as this point, is because they’re entirely meaningless. This means people attempt to find meaning where there is none, like in this point. This point was entirely meaningless.

• In line with Dave’s original piece, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

If only I preferred them to overcast days ;)