The collected works of PymbleSoftware - Page 5

VenomousPinecone wrote: Oh it is sketchy here in the states. The Dow suffered its greatest one day loss today, in the span of an hour.

I am not afraid because I trust the sun will rise tomorrow. As long as the sun shines, I can figure out how to thrive.

At least you don't have an earwax eating communist nationalizing 60% of the only functional industry because "ïts not fair that companies are making profits". One statement from our national disgrace and 8 billion wiped off the share market, just like that.

Oh and here lately, the latest male fashion is to wear burqas when doing armed robberies. Extra stylish.

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/ ... Origin_300



R.

Thanks!

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/ ... her_update

R.

Ryan Fox wrote: *just shakes his head and continues working in Softimage*

Q: When is a Maya nut not a Maya nut...?
A: When he's using Softimage..

MisterDNA wrote: In BTtF3, Doc and Marty burn out the DeLorean by trying to run it on whiskey. Doc was smart and any redneck can make moonshine. Why not further distill the whiskey into pure (more or less) ethanol and burn that? It would have worked, though the seals on the fuel lines would need replacing in a few years.

Maybe because the writers were lazy hollywood hacks.

I had a Samsung Galaxy Tab for a while before they were released to market. I actually liked it more than I was expecting. I only had it a short while and only played with a few Android Apps and flicked through a few ebooks... I have tons and tons of ebooks I have collected over the years and I think a tablet like an iPad or Galaxy Tab would be a nice toy to have, just for playing with and reading, that I can not come close to justifying at the moment.

I am thoroughly sick of coding mobile Apps now, I probably won't release an iPad App unless I get paid alot upfront.

R.

I see more and more of them on the train every morning with some dolt playing a stupid game on them.

R.

sybrfreq wrote: bump... I can't find that video of steve jobs for pixar saying how the octane is a tool and not a toy. Does anybody know the video I am talking about? it would be neat to add to this list if it is bookmarked or squirrled away.

youtube search is giving me apple rants and race cars

If you mean the one in this thread, then I think its been removed...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13253&p=104218&hilit=jobs+octane#p104218

GeneratriX wrote: Maybe KTechLab ?

Brilliant.

http://ktechlab.org/


R.

Congratulations, I too, am envious.

R.

Let me congratulate you and again express my envy

R.

Very cool.

I worked on a SGI Power Challenge based flight sim for the air force and had access to another flight sim in Ada on I think it was a Crimson or something. I was responsible for the avionics processors, MIL-STD 1553 bus and ARInc-429 bus.
Actually there was more hanging off the machines than there was in the machines... racks and racks of specialised stuff..


Where I work is near a tourist trap called Darling Harbour... There is a retired flight simulator from one of the air lines and anyone can go fly it for a price... Not cheap though if I recall.

There was also an amateur effort here locally, but I think it was PC based and real instruments wired to I/O cards..

THe out the windows displays are not as impressive as you might think and the was a simple projector system.. and lower resolution than you might expect...

I am also a licensed pilot with endorsements for low level work like crop dusting and cattle mustering.

R.

I would comment but it I always get a request timeout trying to download it.

R.

emachine wrote: Does anyone know how to do instruction by instruction tracing under IRIX? I.e. I want to run an application on my Tezro and generate an execution trace of every instruction executed including program counter, the raw instruction, and if a load or store the memory reference.

On my PowerPC box I would set the single step bit in MSR which causes a SIGTRAP on every instruction, so I just catch the handler, look at the context, save what I want, and then return. I have been mining the web for someone doing something equivalent on SGI but haven't been able to find anything.

Anyone have any pointers? I don't want to have to go find an emulator running Linux/MIPS and hack the sh** out of it to get a simple instruction trace lol.

Thanks,
--E

Not sure if there is anything that works at the level you describe but ProDev workshop has a profiler at the C/C++ level and there is par and prfstat..

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ch=prfstat

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... z&srch=par

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... &srch=padc


Why do you want to look at things at the assembler level...? You could always run things through spim (in nekoware if I recall) .. xspim will show you all registers and memory and everything but it is only for MIPS I or MIPS II so nothing newer the R3000, IIRC. Again, this leads back to the question.. why..? If you strip (man strip) a copy of the binary what does single stepping dbx do..?

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... /ix01.html

R.

Not sure what your intentions are but it looks like BSD has a binary emulation layer that includes IRIX support..
This may or may not be an interesting read..

http://onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/08/08/irix.html?page=1

Not sure what tools are available under *BSDs either.

R.

recondas wrote:

Tabalabs wrote: This is the problem. With USB/Firewire everything gets easier. But where to connect it on old hardware?
- SCSI is out of question, too much work for too little. Or not?
- Network, no way.

Why no way? One of the cheap external drives with an Ethernet port or a linux box running as an nfs server could provide mass storage for your Octane.

NFS and/or SAMBA is more fun with gigabit Ethernet on both ends. I am fortunate that I got a shoebox in my Octane and a gigabit PCI Ethernet card.. I would not be as happy with the Octanes built in 100Mbit. Still I wouldn't have said network no way even with a 100Mbit.

ReadyNAS NV+ makes a nice little SMB/AFP/NFS box and gigabit too..

R.

Tabalabs wrote: Oh yes, I'd die for a PCI card cage...
But since there IS hardware for that, I don't think the hardware is too far away. Remember: There is a complete and working driver for linux, and it cannot be SO different

You've never written a kernel level device driver have you?

I did the Solaris version of a SCSI device driver for large medium changers.. Massive media libraries driven by crypts, drives and a robotic arm for government, big corporates and the like.. I also did maintenance for the OSF/1, HP-UX, early AIX, and WindowsNT drivers... the code all served basically the same function and was a million miles away from each other.. I also did a Linux device driver, while I was a post grad student.. Read the "Magic garden explained" and "Understanding the Linux Kernel" and tell me if they are the same book.

Actually I have been working on this and got bored with it and stopped.
I bought 3 books on USB.
It would require 3 device drivers...
I started a vt6212 driver for a PCI card I put in the Octane. Then you would need another driver for the other USB device class that the IRIX doesn't support ... the slightly more complex one, not OHCI the other one... and handle the USB request blocks for it (URBs)..
Finally.. you would need a upper kernel block/filesystem/class mass storage driver.
After all that you would need userland programs like "usbprobe" or something.
I was going to shut the fuck up about this until I had something I could prove did something at all, even from userspace. Now I will wait for everyone to get bored with the topic again.


R.

zizban wrote: Chime in with suggestions.

I've been paid for cutting code since 1986.

The best way to a project failure is a all or nothing approach on a grandiose and overly ambitious plan. Start small have a small goal then build on it.

Small project, quick and trivial outcome, slightly more involved project based on the foundations of the previous effort and build from there, I've had teams who worked for me deliver stuff on time and on budget and actually praise my leadership publicly.. In one case they had a success after two days, another after a week and then major milestone delivered to user acceptance testing after a little more than a month. Where as I've worked on projects that blew up with panicked project managers throwing everything at it and just hoping the whole thing works with no milestones to measure success or red-flag problems.

Its drinking season here now, with vendors like Sybase, Oracle, etc throwing end of year parties..
And I 've a new Tezro to play with.


I suggest break the project down into much smaller and manageable pieces.

3 drivers are required and even then, that can be broken down into much smaller pieces..


R.

zizban wrote: What do you suggest should be the first small step then?

I have made a very very small step.
I have made a wiki entry under IRIX for Projects, under projects I made a topic "USB mass storage" driver.
More projects can go under the Projects section if there is something anyone is interested in.

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/ ... age_driver

Since I have built about 80% of the wiki from copying bits of posts from the forums and elsewhere, how much confidence do you think I have in an effort like this... ??
Especially when the wiki is not updated for like months at a time if I am not the one to do it..

This is how I had planned to do things.. I might be wrong... I am often 100% wrong, your views may differ...

1. Research and obtain hardware. There are actually several different types of USB mass storage devices as described in "USB Mass storage" (i), (ii) && (iii) ... Decisions need to be made about the type devices supported and the approach to be taken.
2.Test that the device actually works with the hardware. I did this with Gentoo Linux/MIPS with a VT6212 chipset card. Yes, I can muck about with this card under Linux/MIPS and it works.
3. Write userland code to explore the device, using the user land PCI interface. I never got far with this but this is the interest aspect.. not commercial project aspect comes in.
4. roll a simple loadable kernel module. That is no real effort copying from example PCI skeleton but anyway.
5. write userland programs to interact and test the driver.
6. Add step by step by step driver functionality for registration, open, close, ioctls, etc..
7. try to get the driver to display vendor strings, or recognise events.. user land PCI programs can actually respond to interrupts on IRIX.
8. try to get the driver to copy anything at all from IO space to the u_ area.
9. write test cases and debugging.

Why not use existing SGI USB devices..? You will be fighting with the device drivers that only support ohci anyway.

That is just the first driver..
Once you have userland access to say a keyboard or other HID then...

Then do similar to the above for a USB class drier.
Then a file system driver.

Oh, and it does not have to be me doing any of this either... its just interest for me.. I have NFS and gigabit networking on most of my SGIs. 'Tis the drinking and business card swapping season, downunder.

R.

i. Jan Axelson, "USB Mass storage" ISBN 978-1-931448-04-8
ii Jan Axelson, "USB Complete" same publisher and should turn up on Amazon.
iii Mindshare books on USB and PCI.

total immersion in any language is key...

1. a Japanese girlfriend
2. working in Meguro and living in Gotanda, Tokyo.

R.

No where near there yet but play nice.

I am neither defending or attacking IBM.
My 9114-275 has a poor build quality on the plastics..
The older white RS/6000s like the J30 were built like tanks..
My 7025-F80 isn't too bad build quality wise..
i am a registered IBM partner for all the good it does me.

R.

What he said..

You have mastered the language if can you pick up a girl entirely in Japanese at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere overlooking rice paddies...

I did not intend to learn some European languages but getting off the train everyday and seeing the same words for exit, the same street signs, ordering food etc.. you just seem to absorb it. Books and CDs help but being there and being forced to use it constantly really makes it stick.

R.

StephenT wrote: Hey all! I represent the Goodwill Computer Museum in Austin, Texas. We've got a sizable collection of most of the usual SGI workstations, but we're interested in restoring a Power Challenge GR and Onyx that we've got in various stages of disassembly. We have the entire enclosure for the Challenge, but only the front panel for the Onyx. All of the boards were removed from both systems and came to us in dusty boxes when we received the collection. We could really use y'all's help identifying exactly what we have in the way of hardware before we get started.

THIS GALLERY contains photos of all of the boards and hardware from those boxes. I omitted photographing boards of which we had multiple identical copies (such as what I believe are memory boards). Each photo has a 3-digit number at the end, so when identifying a photo please use this number. At the bottom of every photo's page is a link to download the full resolution, in case you need to identify chip labels or other surface writing.

We're looking to put a full system back together from this hardware if possible, and this would give us a great start. Thanks so much for your help!

Welcome to the forum and thanks for joining. The machine looks a lot like the machine the Royal Australian Air Force used for a P3 Orion Flight Simulator decades ago. I was responsible for the Avionics Processors and ARInc-429 bus and the MIL-STD-1553 bus... these hung off VME boards in the machine. Some of those images might be VME boards, but what would make things a little easier would be close up shots of where it says SGI ASSY XXX-XXXX ... I tried to read one of those in the images and couldn't. You could also try typing the ASSY numbers into the search at the top right of this page. A closer picture of the connectors might help as well. You have come to the right place, if anyone knows the people here do.

Edit:
The pic 12-7-10 022 looks like the back of a full height hard drive.. like the ones in my Personal IRISes.
pic 12-7-10 021 also the same.
014 and 015 the same.

R.

Hi and welcome.

A green light and chime sounds like "All good" to me... Is it possible for you to try a null modem cable on the serial port and hook up a machine with HyperTerm/CU/Kermit/whatever.. See if you get a response on serial and then "set console g". The O2 might have just decided to go "headless" (See nekochan wiki howTo). If you know the IP address can you ping it if its on a LAN..? ssh or telnet might get you in.

SGIs require sync-on-green monitors.. I googled the monitor you mentioned it seemed prone to faults from what I read. Could you test the monitor on another machine just to rule that out... or try another monitor on the O2...?

you wrote: the last time I used this thing I had a CRT- now I have a 20" Dell widescreen (2005FPW)

It might just be that the O2 doesn't like the monitor or the mode of the monitor, newer monitors have all kinds of modes and menus. If you flick it back and forth between analog and digital a few times..?

Also I have had problems with DVI/VGA adapters in the past..

R.

My guess at it was You Got Mail... YGM.

R.