Resurecting The SE

For my last post of the year, I decided to write a little about my SE. I went home for Christmas and brought this nostalgic souvenir back with me. It was in storage and collecting dust, so I thought what the hell, and packed it up with my stuff.



Since the screen is built in, theres not much to hook up. It takes a standard power cord, the keyboard and mouse are ADB, and thats pretty much it. I plug it in, flick the switch at the back and, bing, it starts right up.

I was not surprised that it started right up after so long, what did surprise me is that it knew what date it was. The time was off by less than two hours. It's been over 10 years since this computer was last fired up, so I think thats pretty good!

The last time this machine saw any use was by my sister. She had it set up in her room and used it to play games and write stories. It was considered an old computer at the time, now it's considered vintage. By todays standards it's specs are prehistoric, but back in the day this lil machine was a speed demon. Also, it was the first compact mac to come with a built-in case fan, so it had good longevity.

The machine was originally a dual floppy drive unit, but my dad had removed one and added a 40MB internal hard drive, I'm not sure, but he might have also added some RAM while he was in there.

It has system 7.5 installed on it, which is probably the newest OS that'll run on it. In fact it might run a bit faster with a slightly older version of system 7. Back in the day, I used to keep a system 6 disk around, in order to play Dark Castle. While I was back home I managed to find some of my old floppies, and I brought them with me.

When I got home and set everything up I found that most of those disk's didn't work. I'm not surprised that after so long they would get bad blocks or become corrupted. The only one that worked was the dark castle disk. So I backed that up to the hard drive. I was kinda bummed that it wouldn't read my system 6 boot disk. However I noticed that the machine had Norton Disk Doctor on it. Disk Doctor couldn't repair my boot disk but it did let me see the files. I copied them to hard drive. Some of the files were too corrupted to copy but luckily the system and finder were all right. Next I found a newer floppy that I had kicking around, reformatted it in the mac, moved all the system 6 stuff to it, and presto! I had resurrected my boot disk!

After that, the next step was to restart the machine with my disk inserted and see if she works. She did, and I could now play Dark Castle again, the way it was meant to be played. On the original hardware. I also noticed something that I had forgotten about. Back in the day I used to be a whiz with resedit, and I had customized the system. with new folder and file icons. Sweet!



The next thing I'm gonna do is get some floppies and use the dd command in linux to take some of the disk images I downloaded (for the emulator) and turn them into actual working disks that I can use in my SE. This way I should be able to transfer files from my old mac to my modern desktop computer.

The Dark Future

I'll start off by mentioning that even though science fiction is indeed fiction. It often makes strikingly accurate predictions. For example: In 1865 Jules Verne wrote De la Terre à la Lune, predicting that humans would land on the moon. Many of the details were off but it's amazing how much of it was accurate. Another example that comes to mind are the communicators from Star Trek, in 1966 this kind of compact wireless communication was science fiction, but now with todays cell phone technology, it's a reality we take for granted.

Now science fiction is most often about the future, and there are two main types of futures they predict. A positive future like the one in Star Trek, where science has evolved to solve most of humanities problems, space travel is usually common place, and other than the occasional alien antagonist or evil empire, things are pretty much peachy. The other future is of course the negative one. Often it's a post apocalypse landscape, and technology may be advanced, but it doesn't solve many of our problems. In fact it often creates new problems.



Among these dark future fictions is a sub genre of particular interest to me. The robot take over genre. Movies like The Terminator, The Matrix, 9, and I, Robot, fit into this category.

Here's how the scenario plays out. Computer scientists around the world are working on the development of an Artificial Intelligence. We're trying to build a computer that can not only learn and evolve but is also sentient.

Once this sentient computer is developed, it will likely be put to work, managing networks and systems, keeping track of data, operating equipment. The possibilities for such a computer are almost endless, but we will be trusting it with our information and critical systems.

"As machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control."

-Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems

As new technologies come along we as a society become dependent on them. The same would be true of the sentient AI we will entrust our systems to. Is it fair to assume this AI will diligently carry out the tasks we assign it while asking nothing in return? Sure, machines and computers do that today, but we're talking about sentient machines here. What will the AI desire?

It's likely the AI will want to learn and expand itself. In the beginning humans might be very accommodating of this. After all, it will improve the AI's ability to do the tasks we ask of it. But what happens when the AI seeks to know too much? What will we do when it's desire for expansion exceeds what is necessary for our purposes? What will we do when it puts it's own needs and desires ahead of our own? Will we even know when this happens?

The AI might not be satisfied with simply expanding itself, it may want to make copies of itself or even further develop sentient programs. Imagine that, programs writing better programs, robots building better robots. At this point it's not hard to imagine a total take over. The machines will be in charge, and if they see us as a threat, they might even start an all out war on mankind.



So far this is just science fiction, but the foundations of this scenario have already been laid. Our society is already dependent on machines and computers. Computer scientists are hard at work on creating an AI. Military robots that can fight humans and win are now a reality, and continue to be improved. Humanity may one day find it self battling a robot revolution.

For further reading I recommend: Warnings Of A Dark Future by Harry Porter.

#! Tweaks

Yesterday I installed Crunch Bang 9.04. Today I added Wbar and a shutdown item to the main menu.

You'd think It would already have a shutdown option in the menu, wouldn't you? Well it did, kinda, but it didn't work. There was a menu item called "Exit", that brings up a box with buttons. Among them are "Reboot" and "Shutdown", but they didn't work. The best you could do is go to the login screen, and that doesn't have a shutdown button either. Weird, eh?

Of course any linux noob knows that you can shutdown in the terminal with sudo shutdown -h now but I can't expect my girlfriend to do that every time, and besides, I might not want her to know my password.

The first step was to edit the sudoers file. I knew of this file but had never altered it before. It turns out it has some special protection built into it. I entered sudo EDITOR=nano visudo in the terminal to get into it. Then I added this: ALL ALL=NOPASSWD:/sbin/shutdown to the end of the file. I found out the hard way that the spaces between the ALL's are very important. Then You save the file. Make sure it's saved as "sudoers" and not "sudoers.tmp"

The next step is to add the shutdown item to the menu. This can be done thru the menu, Preferences/Openbox Config/GUI Menu Editor. Click the "New item" button, under Label write shutdown, make sure that action is set to "Execute" and under execute put terminator --command="sudo shutdown -h now". If you wanna make one for "reboot" simply change the -h to a -r.

Next on my list was installing Wbar. This was easy. Download the debian package for Wbar here, and WbarConf here. Once you've downloaded them, find them in the file manager and click on them to install.

After both debian packages are installed, get to the terminal and type wbarconf to bring up the configuration GUI. Here's where you can add your favorite apps to Wbar. If you go to file and settings you can tweak Wbar. I prefer to have it at the top. Now is probably a good time to add WbarConf to the main menu.

The next step is to add it to the autorun file. You want Wbar to come up every time you log in right? In the menu go to Preferences/Openbox Config/Edit autostart.sh and on the last line add (sleep 6s && wbar -bpress -above-desk -pos top -isize) & . The first time I did it I only added (sleep 6s && wbar) & It started up when I logged in but wouldn't use my settings. It was coming up at the bottom of the screen and partially obscured by the bottom panel. The revised line fixed this.




Another thing I've done is customized my conky script. This is a must for any Crunch Bang user. It's really easy to edit the config script, from the main menu go: Preferences/Conky Config/Edit conkyrc. This brings up the script. I'll post mine, If you want to try it, simply copy my code into your config file and hit save. Easy peasy. Now here's my script:

background yes
use_xft yes
xftfont HandelGotD:size=7
xftalpha 0.5
update_interval 4.0
total_run_times 0
own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 250 5
maximum_width 250
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes

default_color green
default_shade_color red
default_outline_color grey
alignment top_right
gap_x 12
gap_y 48
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
override_utf8_locale yes

TEXT
${font Arial Black:size:36}${alignc} ${time %I:%M %P}${font}
${alignc}${Time %a %b %d %Y}

${font Mono:size=9}${execpi 60 DJS=`date +%_d`; cal | sed '1d' | sed '/./!d' | sed 's/$/ /' | fold -w 21 | sed -n '/^.\{21\}/p' | sed 's/^/${alignc} /' | sed /" $DJS "/s/" $DJS "/" "'${color red}'"$DJS"'${color}'" "/}
Uptime: ${alignr}${uptime}
CPU $alignr ${cpu cpu0}%
${cpugraph cpu0 ffcc00 ff0000}

MEM $alignc $mem / $memmax $alignr $memperc%
${color 00FF00}${membar}${color}

File System ${hr 2}
Swap $alignc $swap / $swapmax $alignr $swapperc%
${color 00FF00}${swapbar}${color}

Root $alignc ${fs_used /} / ${fs_size /} $alignr ${fs_free_perc /}%
${color 00FF00}${fs_bar /}${color}

Media $alignc ${fs_used /media/disk} / ${fs_size /media/disk} $alignr ${fs_free_perc /media/disk}%
${color 00FF00}${fs_bar /media/disk}${color}

Processes ${hr 2}
$processes processes ($running_processes running)
Load Average${alignr}$loadavg
NAME $alignr PID CPU MEM
${top name 1} $alignr ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
${top name 2} $alignr ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
${top name 3} $alignr ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${top name 4} $alignr ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}
${top name 5} $alignr ${top pid 5} ${top cpu 5} ${top mem 5}

Network ${hr 2}
${alignc} eth0 ${addr eth0}
Inbound $alignr ${downspeed eth0} kb/s
${downspeedgraph eth0 33ffcc 000099}
Outbound $alignr ${upspeed eth0} kb/s
${upspeedgraph eth0 ffcc00 ff0000}
Upload: ${alignr}${totalup eth0}
Download: ${alignr}${totaldown eth0}


Goodbye Gnome

Hey! Remember when I told y'all how I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10? I mentioned how I had problems with Urban Terror but after following the most common fix in the forums, (installing pulse audio) I had fixed the problem. Well It wasn't fixed. Urban Terror was still crashing on me here and there, for no good reason. I did multiple searches, scoured the forums for answers, and didn't come up with any fixes that worked for me.

One poignant forum post that struck a chord with me, talked about how gnome was too blame. This guy basically said that gnome was bloated and whoring the cpu, that a lighter desktop environment is much better for gaming. I've never had any problems with gnome in the past, and I wasn't convinced that gnome was solely to blame in my issues with UT on 9.10. Yet I must admit this guy had a point. Gnome, as much as I like it, is a fat bloated whore.

My thoughts floated to Crunch Bang Linux. I used to run Crunch Bang version 8.10 on my secondary computer. I really liked it. I ended up customizing a theme for it using my all time fav, green on black old-school terminal colors. So I do a quick scroogle search and surprise surprise, there is a new version that just came out! Crunch Bang 9.04! So I decided to say good-bye (for now) to Ubuntu 9.10 and download Crunch bang 9.04.



When it comes to options for the download of a linux .iso, there is only one way to go... torrent! The torrent for Crunch Bang 9.04 was well seeded and download fairly quickly. I burnt the boot disk, started my machine with it, and began the installation.

The install went smooth and easy, I didn't try and do any fancy partitioning. (I always use the entire disk.) In case you don't know Crunch bang is based on Ubuntu, so it's pretty easy. Where it differes from Ubuntu is that instead of Gnome it uses the Openbox desktop. It's much lighter than gnome. Less disk space used, and less cpu wasted.

It's not all gravy though. There are trade offs. Gnome is intuitive and easy. Crunch Bang requires that the user does more for himself. Less drag and drop functionality. More working from the terminal. Instead of making a separate user account for my girlfriend, I decided to enable automatic login. (Something I rarely ever do, I'm a security nazi.) Seeing as how you have to manually update the menu when ever you install a new program, I figured it would be easier for her to just share my desktop. If it doesn't work out I can always make a separate user account for her and turn off auto log in. This kind of stuff is easy after all.

Crunch Bang is a minimalist's dream come true. The default color scheme is white text on a black background and the stock desktop is very plain. Crunch Bang just begs to be customized, and customizing is something I very much like to do. Wallpaper, Conky config, and windows theme, all of them I alter to suit my 0ldcøre tastes. I've set them all to the green on black color scheme. (Just like this blog!)

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Gnome or Ubuntu 9.10. In fact, other than randomly crashing Urban Terror, it was doing everything right. I was really loving that Wine integration, but Wine can run in Crunch Bang. For now I've decided to jump ship. (Hopefully this one's stable.) I'll check back with Ubuntu when the next version comes out, but for now I'm running Crunch Bang.

Cheers.