Time to break the silence. Break ranks, really.
沈黙を破る時期になってきている。列を乱すことになるかも分からない。
(By my contract, I'm not supposed to talk about this stuff in public, but, when conditions become as they are, those terms becomes unconscionable.)
契約上、こういう話を一般的なところに出していないはずですが、こういう状況になって、条件が変わった。常識外れといってもいい。法外にもなってきた。
Hmm. I'd like to break the silence, but I'm not sure where to start.
さて、説明しようと思ったら何を何処から言い出していいでしょう。
When I started working as an assistant English/language teacher (ALT/AET) here four years ago, I had intended to run a regular blog talking about the experience. But I realized that, contract aside, there were moral issues about the information, too much personal information to wash out, and figuring out how to make an interesting blog that doesn't breach someone's right to their own information took more time than I could put in on it.
四年前、外国語補佐として努めることにした時、こういうブロッグで定期的にその様子を話すことも考えていたが、一つ気がついた。例えば、契約に個人情報を大切に守ることが明確に書いていなかったとしても、人のことを勝手に一般なところに喋るのは道徳にかかわるものです。学校で起きることは全部個人情報に染まっている。個人情報を言わずに、人が喜ぶような話だけを残して面白いブロッグを書くのがかなり難しい。個人情報の権利を破ることせずにブロッグすることは時間掛かるばかりです。余裕がなく諦めた。
Working in IT, I understand that sort of thing all-too-well.
元々情報技術ですから、そういうことよくわっている。わかっていないとダメです。
Anyway, I find myself, after four years in a job that I knew was a dead-end, facing a two-month contract and then a three-month chasm, with unknowns beyond that. If I were single, no big deal. If my wife and I had no children, well, it would not be easy on my pride, but it would not be an impossible situation.
さて。最初からこの仕事は行き詰まりに向かっているって言うこと知ってた。四年後、正にそうなっている。今現在の契約は二ヶ月しかない。その後は3ヶ月の深い裂け目を直面しています。その向こうに何の約束もない。もし、まだ独身だったとすると、大丈夫でしょう。たとえば、家の嫁さんとの間に子供二人ができていなかったならば、自尊心が打たれる以外は何とか免れるでしょう。不可能の状況ではなかったでしょう。
But we have two children, and if I don't get work in June, we all don't eat, and they don't go to school.
でも、子供二人います。六月までに別の仕事を手に入れないと家族は食べれない。二人の子供は学校に通えない。
The last several summers, I've made ends meet by working summer or part-time jobs, graveyard shift sorting packages for the parcel post or sorting and checking orders for a cake manufacturer, eight-plus hour shifts as a guardsman waving the red wand around at fireworks displays and roadwork sites, concerts, etc. That way I was able to stretch the already tight budget across an always unpaid August.
この四年間、夏はほとんどアリバイとに過ごして財産を繋いでいます。宅急便で深夜の仕分け、ケーキ屋で深夜の仕分けと検品、花火大会や道路工事やコンサート現場で８時間以上の番、誘導灯を振ったりして、既にきつい予算を引き延ばして、学校の仕事の無い八月の間を無事に渡ってきた。
(See, I'm not really a teacher employed by the shool board. I'm an uncertified assistant, a temporary worker, no less, employed by a staffing agency. A scab by some interpretations.)
あのね。教職員ではありません。教育委員会の下で努めていません。ただの資格のない補佐だけです。派遣社員です。人の意見によってはスト破りにすぎない存在です。
But three months is too long a stretch, and we don't know whether our company will be able to get the contract again in September.
しかし三カ月は少し延びすぎることになるでしょう。また、九月になるとうちの会社がまた契約を引き受けるかどうか分かりません。
There are laws, you see, to protect somebody or other from the evil that would occur if we were allowed to work too long for the same school district.
ご理解していただけるかな？法律があるって。誰かを守らなきゃイケない。つまり、我々外人等が長い間同じ教育委員会の下で努めることがあれば何か悪いことが起きるでしょう。
Well, this is going to be a long rant, and I want to translate it, so I'm going to stretch it across several posts.
怒鳴り散らすか。泣き喚くか。話が長引くでしょう。訳したいし。また後の投稿に続くかな。
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Everybody's Beautiful in English Class
There's a problem with sharing all the interesting and funny things that happen in class. It's called, "personal information". In a legal sense, I have to wash whatever I share of identifying data -- names, dates, places, and all the details that make it a smooth read. In a moral sense, I'm not the only one there, so I really don't have the right to act unilaterally with the information.
(This is the fundamental reason why gossip is wrong, even when it isn't "bad". But that's a rant for another day.)
That said, with care, I think I can share a few things.
For instance, two days ago, I joined the lead teacher for a jr. high 2nd year (8th grade, in US terms) class.
You know the age group. In the statistical mean, they have been struggling for almost two years with their hormones and, at the same time, trying to understand the adjustments as they are being helped as gently as is possible (ergo, not very) to make the transition from the walled gardens we call elementary schools to the adult world. (Run-on sentence, yes.)
Well, the subject of the lesson was, what was it? Oh, yeah. It was a poster made by a Japanese volunteer to help Cambodian children learn to read.
And the lead teacher was trying to explain the phrase, "You see, ..."
It's easy to confuse the phrase with "... as you see, ..." [ご覧のとおり== go-ran no toori] and similar phrases. It's also easy to see it as just an intensifier. [ほら！ == Hora!]
I thought I'd try to help:
If you're familiar with Japanese pseudo-onomatopoeia, I don't need to explain that. I, myself, get confused easily. But I knew what he meant. It would be similar to an American boy intoning "36-24-36", or whistling while drawing the hourglass shape in the air. I think, in fact, this particularly young man did draw the hourglass shape in the air. (From him, it was a bit unexpected.)
Pon -- rhymes with "bone" -- would be the sound a bump makes, kyuu -- rhymes with "Q" -- would (probably) be sound of the para-Chinese reading of the ideogram that means, "steep, sudden". In this case, vertical more than steep or sudden, I think.
Well, my wife (no, really) when we married, was awfully close to 36-24-36. A bit narrower at the hips than that, a bit more shouldered than busty. Something like the reality behind those idealized female superheros we used to see in (American) comic books before the manga invasion. But it's not uncommon in Japan.
She still has a good figure.
I, myself, have rebelled against those overly idealized charicatures of beauty. So I was shaking my head and chuckling a little, thinking to myself something like, "How do I help you really understand what beauty is?"
He, of course, misunderstood my reaction.
But female figures kept coming up, of course, so I had to keep calling out, "Everybody's beautiful!"
Which is something I really wish I could get these young men and women to understand.
(This is the fundamental reason why gossip is wrong, even when it isn't "bad". But that's a rant for another day.)
That said, with care, I think I can share a few things.
For instance, two days ago, I joined the lead teacher for a jr. high 2nd year (8th grade, in US terms) class.
You know the age group. In the statistical mean, they have been struggling for almost two years with their hormones and, at the same time, trying to understand the adjustments as they are being helped as gently as is possible (ergo, not very) to make the transition from the walled gardens we call elementary schools to the adult world. (Run-on sentence, yes.)
Well, the subject of the lesson was, what was it? Oh, yeah. It was a poster made by a Japanese volunteer to help Cambodian children learn to read.
You see, some Cambodian children can't read the danger signs.Or something like that. (Yes, illiteracy is part of the problem with landmines.)
And the lead teacher was trying to explain the phrase, "You see, ..."
It's easy to confuse the phrase with "... as you see, ..." [ご覧のとおり== go-ran no toori] and similar phrases. It's also easy to see it as just an intensifier. [ほら！ == Hora!]
I thought I'd try to help:
My father-in-law often says, "見てみ" [mite-mi].(That's actually closer, I suppose, to ,"See!" or "See, here." But, really, we humans are usually kind of sloppy with interjections.)
Your father speaks Japanese?
My wife's father.
ああ。ジョエル先生の奥さんのお父さん・・・[Joeru-sensei no okusan no otousan, ... == Joel-sensei's wife's father, ...]
ええっ？ジョエル先生、結婚してる？[Ehh? Joeru-sensei, kekkonshiteru? == Huh? Joel-sensei is married?]
美人なの？[Bijin nano? == She's beautiful?]
Of course.
もちろんって。[Mochiron-tte. == "Of course." (He says.) ]
ポンキュウポン？ [Pon-kyuu-pon?]
If you're familiar with Japanese pseudo-onomatopoeia, I don't need to explain that. I, myself, get confused easily. But I knew what he meant. It would be similar to an American boy intoning "36-24-36", or whistling while drawing the hourglass shape in the air. I think, in fact, this particularly young man did draw the hourglass shape in the air. (From him, it was a bit unexpected.)
Pon -- rhymes with "bone" -- would be the sound a bump makes, kyuu -- rhymes with "Q" -- would (probably) be sound of the para-Chinese reading of the ideogram that means, "steep, sudden". In this case, vertical more than steep or sudden, I think.
Well, my wife (no, really) when we married, was awfully close to 36-24-36. A bit narrower at the hips than that, a bit more shouldered than busty. Something like the reality behind those idealized female superheros we used to see in (American) comic books before the manga invasion. But it's not uncommon in Japan.
She still has a good figure.
I, myself, have rebelled against those overly idealized charicatures of beauty. So I was shaking my head and chuckling a little, thinking to myself something like, "How do I help you really understand what beauty is?"
He, of course, misunderstood my reaction.
ポンキュウキュウ？[Pon-kyuu-kyuu?]And I couldn't help laughing a little.
キュウキュウキュウ？[Kyuu-kyuu-kyuu?] ポンポンキュウ？[Pon-pon-kyuu?]And a few other combinations, and I was having trouble not rolling on the floor. Pon-poko-pon, and visions of tanuki playing in my head. I had to do something.
Everybody's beautiful!Misunderstood, I'm sure. I wrote it on the chalkboard, just to be sure the students got it. Things quieted down a bit and the lead teacher finished explaining the phrase, "You see."
But female figures kept coming up, of course, so I had to keep calling out, "Everybody's beautiful!"
Which is something I really wish I could get these young men and women to understand.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
rice shortages
Saw this old post from last September (August 30 in the States, I guess):
However, I have somewhat of reason to jump, when it comes to throwing food away in Japan. Some years ago, when I lived out in the country in the middle of Hyougo Prefecture, my wife and I were out for a walk and saw a wheat field burning. We were naturally worried, but when we got close, we saw that the farmer was watching it burn, keeping the burn under control.
We asked whether we could help try to put the fire out or something, and he said, no, he had just made a mistake in planting the crop and had to clear his field. It was some sort of 麦 ("mugi" == "wheat", but probably barley), intended for making beer or some other kind of alcoholic beverage.
The mistake? The stalk was too short for the powered (mini-) harvesters he had available. (Should put a picture of one of those miniharvesters up.)
I was shocked. Aghast, really, although probably too polite to show more than disappointment. One of the few things I physically miss in Japan is wheat. There just is not enough, and, what there is, usually has most or all of the germ ground off.
Think of your favorite American brand of starch mislabeled bread.
Well, okay, only about half the bread in Japan is really that bad, but good, whole grain bread is hard to come by. What they think of when I ask for whole grain is the commercial stuff you buy in the States that is basically white bread with about 10% whole flour and cracked wheat kernels added, that usually tastes slightly like cheap vinegar.
Anyway, my Japanese at the time was not up to making the kind of request I wanted to make, and it was a bit too late, anyway. It would have been an awful burden to him to have him stop the burn in a corner of the field so I could come back and harvest a bit of it by hand. But I really was feeling mixed feelings. Even just ten pounds of fresh (unpearled) barley would have been wonderful.
News on the radio this morning about how the rains have destroyed the rice harvest this year for many farmers in Japan.Jumping to conclusions. And as it turned out, the price only went up about 10% for a few months, and now it's back down to normal.
I don't really listen, so I didn't catch that the problem is the mudslides, not just the water content. So I was thinking, I hope they don't just throw it away, just because it isn't going to be high grade race. We're going to need all the rice we can get this year.
However, I have somewhat of reason to jump, when it comes to throwing food away in Japan. Some years ago, when I lived out in the country in the middle of Hyougo Prefecture, my wife and I were out for a walk and saw a wheat field burning. We were naturally worried, but when we got close, we saw that the farmer was watching it burn, keeping the burn under control.
We asked whether we could help try to put the fire out or something, and he said, no, he had just made a mistake in planting the crop and had to clear his field. It was some sort of 麦 ("mugi" == "wheat", but probably barley), intended for making beer or some other kind of alcoholic beverage.
The mistake? The stalk was too short for the powered (mini-) harvesters he had available. (Should put a picture of one of those miniharvesters up.)
I was shocked. Aghast, really, although probably too polite to show more than disappointment. One of the few things I physically miss in Japan is wheat. There just is not enough, and, what there is, usually has most or all of the germ ground off.
Think of your favorite American brand of starch mislabeled bread.
Well, okay, only about half the bread in Japan is really that bad, but good, whole grain bread is hard to come by. What they think of when I ask for whole grain is the commercial stuff you buy in the States that is basically white bread with about 10% whole flour and cracked wheat kernels added, that usually tastes slightly like cheap vinegar.
Anyway, my Japanese at the time was not up to making the kind of request I wanted to make, and it was a bit too late, anyway. It would have been an awful burden to him to have him stop the burn in a corner of the field so I could come back and harvest a bit of it by hand. But I really was feeling mixed feelings. Even just ten pounds of fresh (unpearled) barley would have been wonderful.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
What's wrong with the economy?
I'll tell you what's wrong with the economy:
Too many greedy people.
And the worst greed of all is when people are making well more than they need to get by, and still insist on working 80 hour weeks.
Chronically working too hard does not display any sense of social responsibity. It's bad for your health and for your family life, too.
It's the same kind of behavior that made Microsoft and INTEL too big. And GM and AIG, too. It's not good for the company either, in the end.
If you have more than enough, be responsible. Share the work.
Too many greedy people.
And the worst greed of all is when people are making well more than they need to get by, and still insist on working 80 hour weeks.
Chronically working too hard does not display any sense of social responsibity. It's bad for your health and for your family life, too.
It's the same kind of behavior that made Microsoft and INTEL too big. And GM and AIG, too. It's not good for the company either, in the end.
If you have more than enough, be responsible. Share the work.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Fedora on an old clamshell iBook
I have an old clamshell iBook. I'm editing this post with it, in fact. Firefox 3.5 beta 4 on Fedora 10.93. (Fedora 10.93 is what Fedora 11 release candidate is currently called.)
Startup is slow. No doubt about that. But once things are running, it's quite useable.
I am currently triple-booting it, with Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10, and Fedora. Not in VMs, of course, I have to re-boot to switch, and all that. Here's how I did it:
First, dual-booting Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on these old Macs is not really difficult at all. You just need installable media.
The last officially installable version of Mac OS 10 that runs on these old clamshells is 10.2, Jaguar. I'm not going to point anyone in the direction of the tools that help run later versions. (Was it post-facto or X-post-facto?) I've never gone there, myself, although, if Apple drops PPC support in 10.6, I may do so. (No love for INTEL from me.)
I don't want to get on-line with Safari 1 or Firefox 2, and I've wanted to keep this clamshell in use for my kids, so I've been trying to get Fedora running on it for a while. But they want to play Bugdom and Nanosaur, and I have some dev I think I may want to get back to that requires old systems, so I want to triple-boot it.
About a year ago, I bought a 160G disk and installed it. (Directions can be found elsewhere on the web, I don't have time to put all the pretty pictures I took up.) Only the first 120G was visible to Mac OS 9, and trying to format beyond that with Mac OS 10 prevented Mac OS 9 from booting. So, I needed a machine with a battery that worked anyway, so I bought an iBook G4 at the end of summer and installed that 160G hard disk on the G4. Runs very nice, have it triple booting Mac OS 10, Fedora, and openBSD. Mac OS 9 runs via classic on it, of course.
The iBook G4 was fairly straightforward. This iBook has not been.
First, Fedora would not install with the 160G drive. gparted would refuse to make a 1M partition and the installer would refuse to install the boot stuff in anything bigger than 1M. (More on that further down.) This was not the case with the iBook G4, only with the iBook G3.
First and a half. You must have more than 192M of RAM to boot Fedora. Live Ubuntu was painfully slow, although it did actually boot. An old live Fedora also was painfully slow, but did boot. Fedora 8, 9, and 10 would not boot. That's okay. You want to max the RAM anyway. Don't get the old 66 MHz RAMs, they're way too expensive. 100MHz RAM works just fine in most cases, and it's way cheaper.
And get 512M. Apple doesn't guarantee it, but it usually works, and you really want all the RAM you can get.
Second, Fedora walks on the Mac OS 9 drivers every way I've been able to install. That means that when you select the Mac OS 9 partition to boot from, Mac OS 9 won't boot. Classic will run, in Mac OS X 10.2, but Mac OS 9 won't.
That means you need to make sure you can boot up Mac OS 9 from something else, and the only other thing available on the old pre-firewire clamshell iBooks is the CD drive. (No booting from USB on these.) Catch 22 if your Mac OS 9 install CD is 9.1 and you update to 9.2.
If you do update to Mac OS 9 9.2, copy the Mac OS 9 partition off to a USB drive and burn a bootable CD ROM with that. (CD-R/W probably will not work.) And don't complain to me if it doesn't work, I haven't tried it here, I'm just speaking from theory. (Yes, I should try it. But I wouldn't have time to post this if I did.)
Third, well, it takes a long time. Even if you have installed a DVD drive in the machine, you probably want to use the netinstall CD. Otherwise, you'll be waiting for the install to finish, and then you'll be waiting forever for the first update to finish. Think in terms of more than 12 hours after you select the packages and start the downloads.
Fourth, well, if you don't have any nostalgia (or other reason to use the old systems), Fedora by itself was quite straightforward. Except for the 120G limit on the hard disk size. (I tried it last summer when I thought I had some extra time.)
So. Procedure:
HD -- 30G or greater. (The G4 had a 30G hard disk in it, so I used that.) Get a USB enclosure for the drive that you'll be removing.
RAM, as I said, more than 256M, recommend 512M.
Mouse. You want a mouse with at least two buttons. I promise you.
Backup your data, of course.
Partitions: 512M is probably enough for Mac OS 9, but you'll want more for the old apps that must be the reason you're wanting to multi-boot it. I used 1.5G, and that leaves enough room for the Mac OS 9 virtual memory space (576M).
I suppose you can put Mac OS 10 and Mac OS 9 on the same partition, but my set of superstitions suggests against it.
For Mac OS 10, you probably want about 9G or more to boot from, with another 1.2G for swap. That makes 10G if you leave the swap on the boot drive.
I used 9G for boot and 1.5G for swap. There are other places you can read up on moving the swap space off the boot partition for Mac OS 10, so I'll set that topic aside, here. Except for one point: drive label issues are much simpler on the clamshell iBooks. Plus side of a minus point, there.
(I have used Mac OS X 10.2 on a 5.6G hard disk, and it's okay, but I was continually watching the freespace and moving stuff off the main drive on that setup. And I only had 192M RAM in it at the time, so I wasn't losing a lot to swap space. I did move swap space off the boot partition for Mac OS X, just to force myself to keep room for the swap space.)
(Oh. The theoretical 8G limit on old machines. That does not cover the clamshell iBooks, even though some people within Apple, even, have been confused on this point. I have the README files to prove it, along with the booting system. 'kay?)
(Hmm. That 8G boot partition limit on the biege G3 desktops. Put Mac OS X in the first partition, cut it to about 7.5G, and you're golden. Mac OS 8 or 9 will boot above the 8G limit, so put that in its own partition, up above the Mac OS 10 partition. At least, that's the way I remember it. But that's got nothing to do with the iBook.)
The order of the partitions doesn't seem to matter on the iBook. Fedora moves things around, by the way.
You'll want one more partition, about 500M, for moving things between Fedora and Mac OS.
That makes four partitions so far. On the iBook, the partition count is important. You don't want more than 7 partitions total. (Or was it 8?) I like to cut lots of partitions, to keep things separate, but I had to give that habit up for this install. Sort of.
Ergg. Okay, no more than 16 partitions, but the drivers (and some other low-level stuff) are loaded in the first 8 partitions in the old Macs. The first partition you cut will actually be partition 9. So, the number of partitions we are cutting here must be limited to 8.
The partitioning software for Linux will allow you to cut more than that, but then Mac OS 9 refuses to boot and there is no way I could find to get around that.
Leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned, for Fedora to do its stuff with.
Install Mac OS 9. Then install Mac OS X. Or vice-versa. Make sure both are booting.
Get your install media for Fedora ready. (Again, I recommend netinstall. It seems simpler that way. If you're going to do this to a lot of iBooks, set up a private mirror instead of trying to install from the 7 CDs in the current install set.) It takes about a half hour or so at 1M ADSL transfer rates.
I'll defer to the Fedora wiki for how to get the install media.
Insert the netinstall CD, (re-)boot, hold down the C key. Fedora walks you through the several selections, pay attention.
Once you are into the graphical installer, you should use the mouse and its buttons instead of the trackpad and its buttons.
The trackpad driver is set up to take taps on the trackpad as mouseclicks (gag), and it's way too sensitive. Far and away too sensitive. If you don't use the mouse, you'll find yourself missing important setup dialogs because the drivers thought you clicked twice. You don't want that. (I really should write that up on bugzilla, but, you know my excuses about time at this point.)
Now, when it comes time to set up the Linux partitions, select the option to let the installer use the un-allocated space and automatically set up the partitions. But,
also select the option to check the partitions it sets up.
Why? It needs to set up two (count 'em 2) boot partitions for Fedora. (Why!?!?!?!?!? I wish I had time to look at the code on that.)
You were wondering why I was worried about the number of partitions? Heh.
Okay, it needs to cut one very small HFS partition to relay the boot from the usual (Open Firmware) Mac boot procedure from the PPC days. (openBSD allows you to do that on a partition you're booting Mac OS 9 from, but they are using a different technique.) As I mentioned above, that's a 1M partition. It's also marked appleboot or something. Let Fedora's installer handle that.
It needs to cut one partition for /boot in the Fedora file system, to handle the actual Linux boot processes. Currently, 200M is sufficient, but, again, you can let the installer take care of that. The next partition can be cut as an LVM partition, and swap space and other stuff (including the root partition) allocated in there.
So, seven Mac OS visible partitions minimum:
Mac OS 9,
Mac OS X,
Mac OS X swap,
HFS shared partition,
appleboot boot relay partition,
/boot partition,
LVM
and that leaves one more possible partition before Mac OS 9 refuses to boot. I don't remember, actually, if number 16 was actually useable, and I'm not interested in going back to check. So keep it at seven Mac OS visible partitions.
Within the LVM partition, of course, if your hard disk is big enough, you can divide the partitions up as you want. With the 30G drive, I felt it was wiser to just let everything fall into the 14G or so root partition. With 60G, I'd have separated out /etc, /var, /tmp, /home, etc., but I only had 30G. No big deal for what this machine will be used for.
I might, later, dedicate this machine to be a server. If so, I'll load openBSD and no X11, I think. And I'll partition it properly.
The install takes, as I said, a long time. Because the CPU is relatively slow, all the dependency checks take about two to three hours, but once you've selected the packages to install and told it to go, you don't need to worry about that. Just start it in the evening, and come back to it the next evening.
Make sure your family won't be tripping over the ethernet cables. Last summer, I got the install started Saturday night, went to church Sunday morning, and came back in the afternoon to find that someone had knocked the ethernet cable loose. (Broken connector, I'm to poor to fix it.) And the install had timed out and there was no way to recover. Oh, well.
Choosing your packages -- last year, there were still a lot of packages that still didn't run on PPC. Open Java was still not quite there, yet, especially for PPC. Most of the packages run okay, although you'll wonder sometimes when initialization takes a long time, and the splash screen doesn't show up until about a minute after you selected the app. But the responsiveness, once the app starts, is not bad. And, once the first run sets up the initial states, the next startup is quite a bit faster.
Yes, openoffice works reasonably well, too. So do the GIMP and inkscape. (wow!)
One more thing. If mono disgusts you as it does me, you'll want to go back and uninstall the mono packages. Nothing really necessary there anyway.
Finally, after Fedora is installed and running, you need to do one more thing to re-enable booting from Mac OS 9. Get your Mac OS 9 install (or bootable) CD and boot it. (Hold down the C key after the chime, again.) You'll notice that the hard disk is not mounted by the install CD. Run the hard disk setup application in the utilities folder.
You'll see that it says the hard disk is unrecognizable. Select it and click the format button. (eek!)
Well, yeah, be careful here. If you don't click more things than need to be clicked, it will take you to the dialog that allows you to set up partitions. There is an "Options" button, click that. (I'm reciting this from memory, I should check it, but I'm running out of time.) There should be either a dialog or menu selections at this point that allow you to refresh or install the drivers. Do that.
Now cancel the format dialog.
(Of course, cancel the format dialog. I mean, it took you two days to get this far, you don't want to go through that again for no reason.)
Quit the hard drive setup utility and re-boot.
Hold the option key down to get the boot volume selection screen. The Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X partitions are visible with the names you gave them when you formatted them. (Unnamed 1 and Unnamed 2? Heh.) They also have icons which help tell them apart. You can now select the partition to boot and away you go.
One little niggle remains. You can use the Mac OS boot select dialogs to change away from defaulting to Fedora. You can't go back, though.
Except, the next time you update Fedora, it will re-select Fedora for you.
Heh. Fun times.
(Now, I'll see if I can get my kids to play with Fedora on this machine instead of playing Marble Blast on the machines I need to work on.)
[update: pictures from the preparation stage on youtube.]
Startup is slow. No doubt about that. But once things are running, it's quite useable.
I am currently triple-booting it, with Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10, and Fedora. Not in VMs, of course, I have to re-boot to switch, and all that. Here's how I did it:
First, dual-booting Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on these old Macs is not really difficult at all. You just need installable media.
The last officially installable version of Mac OS 10 that runs on these old clamshells is 10.2, Jaguar. I'm not going to point anyone in the direction of the tools that help run later versions. (Was it post-facto or X-post-facto?) I've never gone there, myself, although, if Apple drops PPC support in 10.6, I may do so. (No love for INTEL from me.)
I don't want to get on-line with Safari 1 or Firefox 2, and I've wanted to keep this clamshell in use for my kids, so I've been trying to get Fedora running on it for a while. But they want to play Bugdom and Nanosaur, and I have some dev I think I may want to get back to that requires old systems, so I want to triple-boot it.
About a year ago, I bought a 160G disk and installed it. (Directions can be found elsewhere on the web, I don't have time to put all the pretty pictures I took up.) Only the first 120G was visible to Mac OS 9, and trying to format beyond that with Mac OS 10 prevented Mac OS 9 from booting. So, I needed a machine with a battery that worked anyway, so I bought an iBook G4 at the end of summer and installed that 160G hard disk on the G4. Runs very nice, have it triple booting Mac OS 10, Fedora, and openBSD. Mac OS 9 runs via classic on it, of course.
The iBook G4 was fairly straightforward. This iBook has not been.
First, Fedora would not install with the 160G drive. gparted would refuse to make a 1M partition and the installer would refuse to install the boot stuff in anything bigger than 1M. (More on that further down.) This was not the case with the iBook G4, only with the iBook G3.
First and a half. You must have more than 192M of RAM to boot Fedora. Live Ubuntu was painfully slow, although it did actually boot. An old live Fedora also was painfully slow, but did boot. Fedora 8, 9, and 10 would not boot. That's okay. You want to max the RAM anyway. Don't get the old 66 MHz RAMs, they're way too expensive. 100MHz RAM works just fine in most cases, and it's way cheaper.
And get 512M. Apple doesn't guarantee it, but it usually works, and you really want all the RAM you can get.
Second, Fedora walks on the Mac OS 9 drivers every way I've been able to install. That means that when you select the Mac OS 9 partition to boot from, Mac OS 9 won't boot. Classic will run, in Mac OS X 10.2, but Mac OS 9 won't.
That means you need to make sure you can boot up Mac OS 9 from something else, and the only other thing available on the old pre-firewire clamshell iBooks is the CD drive. (No booting from USB on these.) Catch 22 if your Mac OS 9 install CD is 9.1 and you update to 9.2.
If you do update to Mac OS 9 9.2, copy the Mac OS 9 partition off to a USB drive and burn a bootable CD ROM with that. (CD-R/W probably will not work.) And don't complain to me if it doesn't work, I haven't tried it here, I'm just speaking from theory. (Yes, I should try it. But I wouldn't have time to post this if I did.)
Third, well, it takes a long time. Even if you have installed a DVD drive in the machine, you probably want to use the netinstall CD. Otherwise, you'll be waiting for the install to finish, and then you'll be waiting forever for the first update to finish. Think in terms of more than 12 hours after you select the packages and start the downloads.
Fourth, well, if you don't have any nostalgia (or other reason to use the old systems), Fedora by itself was quite straightforward. Except for the 120G limit on the hard disk size. (I tried it last summer when I thought I had some extra time.)
So. Procedure:
HD -- 30G or greater. (The G4 had a 30G hard disk in it, so I used that.) Get a USB enclosure for the drive that you'll be removing.
RAM, as I said, more than 256M, recommend 512M.
Mouse. You want a mouse with at least two buttons. I promise you.
Backup your data, of course.
Partitions: 512M is probably enough for Mac OS 9, but you'll want more for the old apps that must be the reason you're wanting to multi-boot it. I used 1.5G, and that leaves enough room for the Mac OS 9 virtual memory space (576M).
I suppose you can put Mac OS 10 and Mac OS 9 on the same partition, but my set of superstitions suggests against it.
For Mac OS 10, you probably want about 9G or more to boot from, with another 1.2G for swap. That makes 10G if you leave the swap on the boot drive.
I used 9G for boot and 1.5G for swap. There are other places you can read up on moving the swap space off the boot partition for Mac OS 10, so I'll set that topic aside, here. Except for one point: drive label issues are much simpler on the clamshell iBooks. Plus side of a minus point, there.
(I have used Mac OS X 10.2 on a 5.6G hard disk, and it's okay, but I was continually watching the freespace and moving stuff off the main drive on that setup. And I only had 192M RAM in it at the time, so I wasn't losing a lot to swap space. I did move swap space off the boot partition for Mac OS X, just to force myself to keep room for the swap space.)
(Oh. The theoretical 8G limit on old machines. That does not cover the clamshell iBooks, even though some people within Apple, even, have been confused on this point. I have the README files to prove it, along with the booting system. 'kay?)
(Hmm. That 8G boot partition limit on the biege G3 desktops. Put Mac OS X in the first partition, cut it to about 7.5G, and you're golden. Mac OS 8 or 9 will boot above the 8G limit, so put that in its own partition, up above the Mac OS 10 partition. At least, that's the way I remember it. But that's got nothing to do with the iBook.)
The order of the partitions doesn't seem to matter on the iBook. Fedora moves things around, by the way.
You'll want one more partition, about 500M, for moving things between Fedora and Mac OS.
That makes four partitions so far. On the iBook, the partition count is important. You don't want more than 7 partitions total. (Or was it 8?) I like to cut lots of partitions, to keep things separate, but I had to give that habit up for this install. Sort of.
Ergg. Okay, no more than 16 partitions, but the drivers (and some other low-level stuff) are loaded in the first 8 partitions in the old Macs. The first partition you cut will actually be partition 9. So, the number of partitions we are cutting here must be limited to 8.
The partitioning software for Linux will allow you to cut more than that, but then Mac OS 9 refuses to boot and there is no way I could find to get around that.
Leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned, for Fedora to do its stuff with.
Install Mac OS 9. Then install Mac OS X. Or vice-versa. Make sure both are booting.
Get your install media for Fedora ready. (Again, I recommend netinstall. It seems simpler that way. If you're going to do this to a lot of iBooks, set up a private mirror instead of trying to install from the 7 CDs in the current install set.) It takes about a half hour or so at 1M ADSL transfer rates.
I'll defer to the Fedora wiki for how to get the install media.
Insert the netinstall CD, (re-)boot, hold down the C key. Fedora walks you through the several selections, pay attention.
Once you are into the graphical installer, you should use the mouse and its buttons instead of the trackpad and its buttons.
The trackpad driver is set up to take taps on the trackpad as mouseclicks (gag), and it's way too sensitive. Far and away too sensitive. If you don't use the mouse, you'll find yourself missing important setup dialogs because the drivers thought you clicked twice. You don't want that. (I really should write that up on bugzilla, but, you know my excuses about time at this point.)
Now, when it comes time to set up the Linux partitions, select the option to let the installer use the un-allocated space and automatically set up the partitions. But,
also select the option to check the partitions it sets up.
Why? It needs to set up two (count 'em 2) boot partitions for Fedora. (Why!?!?!?!?!? I wish I had time to look at the code on that.)
You were wondering why I was worried about the number of partitions? Heh.
Okay, it needs to cut one very small HFS partition to relay the boot from the usual (Open Firmware) Mac boot procedure from the PPC days. (openBSD allows you to do that on a partition you're booting Mac OS 9 from, but they are using a different technique.) As I mentioned above, that's a 1M partition. It's also marked appleboot or something. Let Fedora's installer handle that.
It needs to cut one partition for /boot in the Fedora file system, to handle the actual Linux boot processes. Currently, 200M is sufficient, but, again, you can let the installer take care of that. The next partition can be cut as an LVM partition, and swap space and other stuff (including the root partition) allocated in there.
So, seven Mac OS visible partitions minimum:
Mac OS 9,
Mac OS X,
Mac OS X swap,
HFS shared partition,
appleboot boot relay partition,
/boot partition,
LVM
and that leaves one more possible partition before Mac OS 9 refuses to boot. I don't remember, actually, if number 16 was actually useable, and I'm not interested in going back to check. So keep it at seven Mac OS visible partitions.
Within the LVM partition, of course, if your hard disk is big enough, you can divide the partitions up as you want. With the 30G drive, I felt it was wiser to just let everything fall into the 14G or so root partition. With 60G, I'd have separated out /etc, /var, /tmp, /home, etc., but I only had 30G. No big deal for what this machine will be used for.
I might, later, dedicate this machine to be a server. If so, I'll load openBSD and no X11, I think. And I'll partition it properly.
The install takes, as I said, a long time. Because the CPU is relatively slow, all the dependency checks take about two to three hours, but once you've selected the packages to install and told it to go, you don't need to worry about that. Just start it in the evening, and come back to it the next evening.
Make sure your family won't be tripping over the ethernet cables. Last summer, I got the install started Saturday night, went to church Sunday morning, and came back in the afternoon to find that someone had knocked the ethernet cable loose. (Broken connector, I'm to poor to fix it.) And the install had timed out and there was no way to recover. Oh, well.
Choosing your packages -- last year, there were still a lot of packages that still didn't run on PPC. Open Java was still not quite there, yet, especially for PPC. Most of the packages run okay, although you'll wonder sometimes when initialization takes a long time, and the splash screen doesn't show up until about a minute after you selected the app. But the responsiveness, once the app starts, is not bad. And, once the first run sets up the initial states, the next startup is quite a bit faster.
Yes, openoffice works reasonably well, too. So do the GIMP and inkscape. (wow!)
One more thing. If mono disgusts you as it does me, you'll want to go back and uninstall the mono packages. Nothing really necessary there anyway.
Finally, after Fedora is installed and running, you need to do one more thing to re-enable booting from Mac OS 9. Get your Mac OS 9 install (or bootable) CD and boot it. (Hold down the C key after the chime, again.) You'll notice that the hard disk is not mounted by the install CD. Run the hard disk setup application in the utilities folder.
You'll see that it says the hard disk is unrecognizable. Select it and click the format button. (eek!)
Well, yeah, be careful here. If you don't click more things than need to be clicked, it will take you to the dialog that allows you to set up partitions. There is an "Options" button, click that. (I'm reciting this from memory, I should check it, but I'm running out of time.) There should be either a dialog or menu selections at this point that allow you to refresh or install the drivers. Do that.
Now cancel the format dialog.
(Of course, cancel the format dialog. I mean, it took you two days to get this far, you don't want to go through that again for no reason.)
Quit the hard drive setup utility and re-boot.
Hold the option key down to get the boot volume selection screen. The Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X partitions are visible with the names you gave them when you formatted them. (Unnamed 1 and Unnamed 2? Heh.) They also have icons which help tell them apart. You can now select the partition to boot and away you go.
One little niggle remains. You can use the Mac OS boot select dialogs to change away from defaulting to Fedora. You can't go back, though.
Except, the next time you update Fedora, it will re-select Fedora for you.
Heh. Fun times.
(Now, I'll see if I can get my kids to play with Fedora on this machine instead of playing Marble Blast on the machines I need to work on.)
[update: pictures from the preparation stage on youtube.]
Monday, April 27, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
daydreams
Okay, so I'm having trouble getting out of the daydream mode. I have to go back to work tomorrow, and I have accomplished none of the projects I had lined up for myself over the break -- drupal, finishing my shiftJIS ctype project, getting my BIF dialect of figFORTH moved to C so I can port it to whatever I use, fixing RanBunHyou and extending it for scrambles, etc.
I did almost get Drupal up on my portable. And I sort of got a start on rebooting the shiftJIS ctype project.
Too many things I want to do.
So, I'm going to list the things I daydream about here and see if that helps me get a better grip on my prioities.
So --
First big dream. Buy Apple. (Where do I come up with a cool 60 billion or so?)
Start an open source computer company to compete with Apple and Microsoft.
The web services companies, if the technology were available, Google, Yahoo, etc. would be able to do the things I'd like to do. The only issue is whether we can get the ISPs to quit trying to hold domain names and IP addresses for ransom, but I think competition would eventually take care of that.
The biggest problems are
Can't say that I do.
I did almost get Drupal up on my portable. And I sort of got a start on rebooting the shiftJIS ctype project.
Too many things I want to do.
So, I'm going to list the things I daydream about here and see if that helps me get a better grip on my prioities.
So --
First big dream. Buy Apple. (Where do I come up with a cool 60 billion or so?)
- Bring back PowerPC Macs, starting with a dual-G4 Mac Mini. (Let's see just how much "better" Intel's core really is.)
- Start a line of ARM Macs, not just iPhone and iPods, but netbooks and ARM Minis.
- Add one more ethernet port to all Mac Minis.
- Start a line of Macs for tinkerers, cheap, slots for additional ports, breadboard cards.
- Start a line of Mac Word Processors, essentially netbooks with built-in thermal or light-weight ink-jet printers.
- Etc.
- Freeze all current products, except for security and other serious bug fixes.
- Split it down the product lines. (Some guy who calls himself joudanzuki blogged about this.) Make the APIs all open and free.
- Fund the Wine project and a couple of others, and add paid engineers.
- Start a new OS product, MSWindows Mars, based on BSD code and Wine, under whatever license Wine is under for the MSWindows interface layers, and keeping the BSD license(s) for the BSD infrastructure. But ACLs (Access Control Lists) will be an add-on. The security model will be based on the Unix model.
- Make a real mail system somewhat compatible with Outspook, I mean, Outlook, but designing out the intentional holes. Put the thing under a true open source license, preferably GPL, but at least as open/free as Apple's APL v. 2.
- Etc.
Start an open source computer company to compete with Apple and Microsoft.
- Build and sell systems with free/open hardware design, with drivers licensed under a two-clause BSD-class license so they can be used in either Linux or BSD OSses. Netbooks, home and small office NAS/routers/servers using low power processors (most likely not Intel).
- The run time would explicitly separate the program flow stack from the parameter stack, and explicitly provide a hierarchical local address space access mechanism (with the means to close it off).
- Users in said OS would be effectively virtual systems of their own, running their web, mail, and other external resource browsers as separate (sub-)users not privileged enough to access the primary user's data space or even other browser's data space.
- As a benefit of the user model, secure special-purpose browsers would be implemented to access banks and share credit information with stores, etc.
- Said OS would need a CPU that would cache the stacks efficiently and efficiently implement the address space separation in hardware, so I'd need to design a family of processors optimized to that kind of run-time.
- I'd need to build a language back-end that would take advantage of the OS, run-time, and CPU.
- And then build various front-end languages, post-fix, in-fix, and pre-fix. (Yeah, I like FORTH and C.)
- Etc.
- Design a new standard for information encoding that would have an international encoding and international display/parsing context for use in things like URIs, and include most of the current encodings shifted, so that you could work with just about any language in its own context and not fight the production rules of all the other languages.
- It would also include a binary encoding, so that burying binary data would be less of a problem.
- And it would include separate tag characters so that parsing tags would not be such a headache.
- Extensible IP type addresses would also be defined in the encoding, although I suppose it's too late to replace IPv4 and IPv6 with extensible IP addressing. High-bit extension could be used, although it would require re-possessing most of the current IP addresses. Another possibility might be to start appending the internal, NATted addresses to the router address to get longer addresses, although that would require some standards beyond NAT to allow nested addresses to be physically independent of the router.
- Something like ASN.1 would be built into the encoding, as well.
- Customers would have their own domains, and the personal data server would provide dynamic DNS mapping, so that the customers could even run their own domains on their own servers if they chose to do so.
- Customers would by default be routed IPv6, although I would prefer to use an extensible system, now that the processing resources are available to support an extensible numeric (index) addressing scheme.
- A mail system that would take advantage of the customers' private domains, to allow them to define their own mail addresses as they choose. This would help with spam problems, because the customer could even make up new addresses on the spot for new contacts, then go home and register filters for those addresses, and know who is trying to do what with his or her personal information.
- An on-server mail viewing system that assumes that the user wants to sort most of the mail before looking at it, and lets the user sort based on header and envelope contents, setting up persistent sorting rules that would, for instance, send all posts with variants of "viagra" and the like in the subject or sender headers to a folder labeled "fraudulent medical ads", and so forth: select the text, right-click for a list of context elements to trigger on, left click to commit the rule, and the sorting rule remains in effect until the user edits it. And the destination folders have rules like, hold one week and then dump, or dump oldest first when the folder hits a limit on size or number of messages. (Google mail does get close to this kind of thing, but, yet, not so close after all.)
- Web sites are where I get lost, but the point here is to refrain from restricting the knowledgeable customer, but not expose the less knowledgeable customer to the dangers of letting machines be their proxies. Domain management for customers hosting their own, web hosting for customers who want that, and bulletin boards and blogs for customers who want that. Google already does this one, pretty well, given the technology that's available to them.
The web services companies, if the technology were available, Google, Yahoo, etc. would be able to do the things I'd like to do. The only issue is whether we can get the ISPs to quit trying to hold domain names and IP addresses for ransom, but I think competition would eventually take care of that.
The biggest problems are
- that the underlying information encoding is too cluttered by kludges to efficiently process in the way we need to get this kind of stuff to work,
- that the run-times of the various OSses are too cluttered by kludges and cruft from technologies that lead in other directions,
- that the programming languages we have are at once too inflexible in expression and too loose in semantics to support the kind of systems I'm trying to describe here.
- I'm not sure whether the current crop of CPUs can efficiently run this kind of system. I'm pretty sure the Intel CPUs have too much cruft, and not enough memory support for efficiently managing memory. Most of the other CPUs are oriented towards the limited execution model that the 8086 supported too efficiently, too, as a result of having to compete in a market where the 8086 was seen as the leader.
Can't say that I do.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
Came up in another thread just a few days ago, but I can't seem to find it right now. I'd link to that thread if I could, because it was the thread that made me aware of the RFC. Oh, well.
Anyway, I posted this in today's thread, and I don't want to lose track of it, because I want to start setting my filters up this way.
It won't be perfect, but it will surely help find false positives among the junk e-mail.
This looks a bit complex, but you don't have to do it all at once.
Until the Internet has a bit better standards for e-mail, and until the ISPs quit being miserly with domain names, RFC 5233 addresses can help a lot, if used wisely.
RFC 5233 describes a way to implement sub addresses for your primary e-mail addresses. Simply put, you hang a "+" on your basic address, and then you tag some string on it after that.
Let's start with an example basic address:
user@isp.example
(Think of exampleisp.com or exampleisp.org or exampleisp.jp or some such, but the example top level domain is reserved for, hey! examples, where the example 2nd level domains are not.)
A sub address could look like this:
user+subaddress@isp.example (or, something like user+subaddress@exampleisp.com)
Another kind of sub address could look like this:
user#boxnumber@isp.example
If your mail provider supports these, they allow you to make the sub-addresses up as you want, and route your mail to you via the base part. That lets you filter the "to" address by the sub-address.
Okay. Now you know what they are. What else should you know about them? Many ISPs do not yet implement them which may be a problem. Google mail does, which helps a lot.
Obviously, if the spammers can steal your user@isp.example address, they can steal your user+subaddress@isp.example address as well. How does this help?
How do use these RFC 5233 addresses wisely?
First, assume that your base address will soon be harvested, if it isn't already. Thus, your base address of user@isp.example is essentially an alias for user+spam@isp.example . Pre-filter it that way.
Second, set up a suffix for bulk purposes, such as user+bulknnnnn@isp.example . "bulk" is okay, but you might prefer something a little more original to yourself, like "klub" (mix it up), or "hanbai" (Japanese for "sales"). The serial number could also come before, nnnnnbulk, or in the middle, like bunnnnnlk, and you might want to use pseudo-random serial numbers instead of just cycling through from bu00000lk to bu99999lk.
Hmm. bu23645lk would be harder to filter than bulk23645 with the simple non-RE filters that are most common. Okay, for this, let's stick with the sequence number after the tag.
Now you can give "bulk" sub-addresses out when you sign up for stuff on-line, instead of your "important" addresses. Write the made-up address down. Then, when you open up your MUA (your mail browser), you can set up a filter to grab that address and filter it to a filter for that kind of whatever it was to be filtered to. The first few mails you get from them, you find out what domains to expect.
If you start getting unrequested advertisements at that address, you can contact them and tell them they're somehow leaking their users' addresses, or you can change your filter to dump all mail to that address in Round File Q. Or you can add the sender address to the filter so that only legitimate senders for that address go to that folder. And then you can add another filter that dumps any mail to that address that comes from any other sender to the SPAM dump for consideration when you have the time, and/or for automatic deletion.
You can set up similar sub-address suffixes for mail lists. For example, user+listnnnnn@isp.example or user+listname@isp@example .
Then you can do the same thing for friends, family, church, school, clubs, etc. Maybe have filters for user+churchnnnnn@isp.example, user+schoolnnnnn@isp.example, and so on. For family and friends, maybe something user+frankl@isp.example for Frank Lemmon.
(You might expect spammers to try things like automatically cycling through user+joe, user+mary, user+john, etc., so you may want a little more than that. Or, you might adjust the address for joe, mary, and john when the spammers start doing that.)
And if Suzanne Roberts's computer suddenly gets infected with something, and you start getting spam for user+suzier@isp.example, you write her and urge her (yet again) to switch from MSWindowsX 10.77 to Ubuntu 12 or Fedora 15 or openbsd 6 or whatever. Tell her you'll send her a new address once she has either re-installed and MSWindows with service pack 109 or whatever the latest is, or moved to a reasonable OS. And warn her that, until she does, you might lose mail from her in the deluge.
Okay, while she is recovering from that, you have set up additional filters on the sender address, so that the spammers have to at least spoof her address as the sender to get into her folder, and that might actually be enough, but at least she'll have a little of the fear of nature in her, and maybe she'll start being sensible and start looking at alternatives to MSLeviathan.
In case you're curious, this is what private white listing works like. It can be controlled, because you have an idea who and where mail should be coming from, by the receiver address it is sent to. Two or three sets of filters for each address or set of addresses, one that white-lists known senders, one that diverts unknown senders to a "probably-junk" folder, and maybe one that (temporarily or permanently) black-holes known offender senders who have latched onto that group of suffixes.
Finally, you have a set of doorbell or knock addresses that you give out at business meetings and other parties: bellnnnnn@isp.example . You enable filters for the one you gave out last night, then, after a week or a month, you disable them again. Or, if the spam to that address is not too bad, you just leave it enabled and keep using it.
When you get legitimate mail at that address, you reply and tell them the real address they should send stuff for you at.
Of course, with a little time, you can actually set up a domain of your own for cheap with a little help from a place like google.com and a place like dyndns.org. Google will run your mail server for you if you have a web server and a domain name pointed to it.
Of course, there's that thing about letting Google spool your mail, but it is possible. Read the terms of use and make sure that's okay for the kind of mail you expect first.