Didja hear that the Canterbury tales are now online?

I have to transcribe and transcribe and transcribe today, and MT twiddles certainly constitute procrastination.

Testing!

A couple posts ago I thought I should look up sources on who started the oil well fires in 1991. Here’s what I found:

New Zealand’s Scoop runs a February 19, 2003 press release from the Missouri-based American Gulf War Veterans Association. The release states, in part,

One veteran has now stepped forward and given a detailed account of how he and others in special teams, moved forward of the front, (behind enemy lines ahead of US forces) and then set charges on the well heads. “We were mustered into the briefing tent at which point a gentleman whom I first had thought to be an American began to brief us on the operation. I was concerned because he was not wearing a US uniform and insignias.”

Here’s a link to the releasing organization’s site: American Gulf War Veterans Association.

Here’s a link to a transcript of another unnamed veteran making the same sort of claim. However, a quick peek of the site’s topics casts doubt on the site as a source of reliable information – the site appears to promote a kind of black-helicopters wolrd view, so take it with a grain of salt.

Finally, even highly critical material such as this 1991 report on the environmental consequences of the first Gulf War on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists web site accept the view that the fires were set by the retreating Iraqi Army in 1991.

Frontline also accepts this view, the the context of their very comprehensive review of Gulf War Syndrome.

So, in a very informal survey of available internet materials on the subject, I was able to locate no credible reports of the oil wells actually being ignited by accident, or even by secret operations – the reports above do allege secret activity, but the nature of the reports means that they are insufficiently credible.

However, I’m reasonably sure that my original curiosity on this stemmed not from reports of skullduggery by classified operators, but by deliberate shelling. I found no references to back this idea up.

Bill Mauldin Dies at 81, notes this AP obit at Yahoo.

I ran a pointer to an OC Register story a ways back in which the original columnist encouraged postcards and letters to be passed along to Mauldin, who was described as demoralized by his Alzheimer’s.

The blog entry turned into an alternative means for Googlers to email Mauldin, or such was the weight of public opinion.

I believe that my server may be challenged by incoming connections to that original entry over the next day or two.

That was easier than I expected.

Having changed no configuration files, suddenly MT is reporting input/output errors and refusing to write to disk. This entry is a test, and it replaces a fine expression of oncoming holiday gloom that I will undoubtedly recreate.

Yeesh.

So, I thought was back.

Alas, some fiddly bits hung me up all day. The good news is, now i can complete the entire server rebuild process in a semi-efficient manner! Here’s how i spent my sleep time this evening:

10:45p – 11:00p : swap internal and expansion bay drives on Bellerophon so that I can boot it in SCSI disk mode and se the drives on my desktop machine, a G4 (that CPU saves hours!).
11:00p-12 midnight: install OSX 10.2
12 midnight – 12:45a: Run Software Update
12:45a – 1:13a: copy some user data from old installs in Terminal
1:13a – 1:50a: Install Jaguar Dev tools and updates
1:50a – 2:08a: Install Marc Liyanage’s PHP and MySQL packages
2:08a – 3:17a: Install miscellaneous perl stuff via CPAN
3:17a – 4:04a: poke at oversights until things appear to work. Write this entry. Realize I installed the wrong backup of the databases. Fix. Re-paste this entry in.

Ta-daa! Now I must start the fink install process and off to bed with me.

After I rise, I’ll be swapping the drives back and hoping Bellerophon boots OK. Until then the G4 is masquerading as Bellerophon. After I file my first round of stories with Cinescape, I may need to down things again to fix any further reticent bits and bytes.

Boy, I hope I get this wrapped up today.

I.

think.

I.

may.

be.

back.

*fffssssshhhhhhhfooooo*

(slumps back in chair)

Hardware diagnosis uncertain, for the nonce. No freezes for aboout 24 hours, but I had the primary sites redirected to the 9500, so who knows.

However, I have been frantically recompiling miscellaneous stuff over that period of time, and CPU Monitor has been reporting 100% activity for most of that time. It’s also been down in the 20s-30s and my home reflects the chill.

On a lighter note, last night we were at Target and $8.00 character specific full-scale lightsabers were marked down by 75% in the halloween closeouts. I did not pick one up, but: TWO DOLLARS for a pretty neat toy is the kind of pricing I can get behind.

Slowly, he struggled through the snowbank.

Deductive logic reveals: the freezes seen on Bellerophon are hardware related. Mysterious freezes of all system activity, including video to the screen, under:

* an organically maintained install of OS X 10.1.x;
* a clean install of OSX 10.1.x;
* a clean install of OSX 10.2;
* an updated install of OSX 10.2.1;
* and also under CD-ROM boots of both 10.1 and 10.2.
Thus far, I have not observed the freezes under any OS 9 flavor, but admittedly, I’ve not really banged on it under the venerable OS.

A quick google (not comprehensive, mind you) reveals a few anecdotes of initial series Wallstreets giving up the ghost in similar fashion, under OS X. My Intuiton (TM) tells me it’s the CPU card.

Lucky for me, eBay reveals Wallstreet 233mhz CPU cards going for an guesstimated average of $20-25 each. So I can warehouse the suckers.

For now, I’ve redirected back over to the 9500. Hopefully I can get things rolling again soon on Bellerophon. It’s frustrating: the CPU heats up when performing cloning operations or heavy disk-writes – i.e., the things most required at installation time – and locks. Ah well. It’s a larnin’ thang, intended to be the equivalent of building a car out of spare parts, the proverbial chewing gum, and a dab of sealing wax. Perhaps tonight I’ll dig up some alchemical incantation to see if I can transmute the overheated parts of the CPU into something with better heat-management capacities. Base into noble form.

Oh, and Jason’s show was lovely. This year we were led about a mile through some woods and to a tree where he was wrapped into a cocoon and tied to the bole, in apparent hibernation, to emerge again come spring. Never have you seen 400 young people out in the woods at midnight remain so very quiet.

Once I swapped the internal drives on the ‘book, I was able to mount the appropriate volume to my main box via SCSI dock mode.

After a couple further abortive installation attempts, was eventually able to install Jaguar to the appropriate volume, and the G4 tower was able to boot from the drive.

Naturally, the ‘book, undocked, was not able to boot from the drive. This may be because I have to swap the drives back, or it could, possibly, be because Jaguar has introduced some machine-specific code for the first time in the OS X release cycle. This is unlikely, however: there are reports of a poorly-documented required firmware update for slot-loading iMacs, but the Wallstreet ‘books are explicitly not affected by this problem.

Lordy, this ain’t like the Macs that brought me here. It’s painfully time consuming and trial-and-error – in fact, these are the issues that kept me away from Unix for so very, very long: I don’t find this process of endless experimentation, predicated on a detailed knowledge of hardware (thankfully, I appear to have acquired the knowledge) life-affiriming or creative or a wise, thoughtful use of my time. It’s rather a direct theft of time from my reationship with my wife, and this troubles me. Fortunately, my unhappiness about this has not yet begun to cloud my technical judgement, insofar as when I hit a dead end, I’m not experiencing either blinding headaches or rage.