I spent a few hours this evening perfecting my soldering skills. I’ve created two ‘Y’ cables that split Cat5 cable into both ethernet and serial comms. I have one end plugged into my server and the other end is currently in my office. Between the two locations is the normal Cat5 wiring with no modifications. The serial connection is removed before the cable hits the switch and nobody notices.

Once I’ve tidied it all up I’ll do a writeup. I’m also trying to connect my Mac Classic to the rest of my house using a serial cable. Cleverly I’ve made a Mini-DIN 8 to DB9 cable and wired it backwards. It spews junk to my terminal and that’s about it. I’ll be fixing that tomorrow then.

Clocks go forwards tonight so we all lose an hour. Whee, I now get to resync back to School Wakeup Time and BST at the same time. There’s going to be lots of groggy zombieness on Monday morning.

Went into Scunthorpe to do some shopping, and it pissed it down all over us. I bought an umbrella and it went inside-out within half an hour of using it.

Spending the weekend at Amy’s. As usual I have my Macbook with me, and once again it’s being really rather useful. This time it isn’t remotely connecting me to a VPN, or anything special like that; this time it’s doing some video editing with iMovie.

Amy’s digital camera records video, but only in 1 minute segments. She’s recorded some video from a live music session in a local pub and wanted a way to stitch them back together to put onto YouTube. My first reaction was to use Windows Movie Maker since it comes free with XP and is fairly easy to use. However, after half an hour of faff we came to the conclusion it didn’t like her computer or camera’s video.

First we had to find the software which, unusually, wasn’t available by default on the machine. Then once it was installed, it happily complained that .mov files aren’t valid Windows Movie Maker files. Yeah nice one Microsoft!

iMovie, on the other hand allowed us to glue the videos together, add cheesy titles and render back to a video suitable for sending to YouTube.

My Mac seems to be developing a fault, or is just being strange. If I show a fairly complex image on the screen and twist the lid hinge (as though adjusting the screen so I can see it better) the display corrupts. It’s not major screen corruption, but the odd random pixel will display the ‘wrong’ colour. It’s as if the screen draws all pixels of one colour the inverse of what they should be. I have a feeling it’s a heat issue.

I came across a really interesting hack to power, control and run a wireless access point, all from one piece of Cat5 cable. It relies on the way 100 meg ethernet only uses two pairs in the cable, leaving two other pairs unused (a fact exploited by some network admins who need to run more machines than they have cable runs for by using a splitter).

I don’t have a wireless access point on my roof that needs power, serial and data comms. However it got me thinking. Currently my serial terminal is sat on a table next to my server, which is a bit pointless. It’d be much more useful downstairs. I don’t want to run a long serial cable around my house though, the place has enough wire creatively hidden as it is.

So what I plan on doing is creating two ’splitter’ boxes; one end will have a standard RJ45 socket for a long piece of ethernet cable, the other end will have a short ethernet cable with plug, and a short serial cable with plug. Two of these devices, one on each end of a regular ethernet cable, will allow me to squirt serial and ethernet down a single cable run.

I’ll have to use software flow control though, and probably lower the baud rate to overcome any interference, but it should be good enough for a text terminal. If it works, I may build another pair to send serial comms into my office to hook my A1500 up to my server for file transfers.

From Wikipedia:

Focus stealing is when a program not in focus (e.g minimised or the in background) places a window in the foreground and redirects all keyboard input to that window. This is considered a major annoyance by most users because the program may steal the focus while their attention is not on the computer screen, such as when typing while reading copy to the side. This will cause everything typed after the window appeared to be lost.

(From their entry on Focus Stealing)

Not only might it cause you to lose work, accidentally delete data or send things to the printer, but it really disrupts your workflow. A few minutes ago I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and had Outlook open in the background. Without warning it just forced its way to the front to ask me the terribly important question of whether I want to AutoArchive my emails.

Would have been much better if it’d flashed the task bar at me instead. With the exception of a critical event such as a battery about to run out, a hard disk in danger of catastrophic failure, or something else where there is an immediate danger of data loss/hardware damage should the user be interrupted.

It’s not just Windows that does this. Yesterday I managed to disable my UPS on my Linux server, but kept the USP software running. Being a critical event, the UPS software started sending alerts to every logged in console in the hope I would see it. I did because it smeared all over my IRC client’s display.

This is a valid time when focus stealing is appropriate. Unfortunately it then became highly irritating since the error message kept appearing even when I was attempting to fix the problem. It’s not easy reading documentation or editing config files when

Broadcast message from (root):

Device ‘BelkinUPS’ is not responding, blah blah blah fix it now blah blah

Is being scrawled all over your screen every 30 seconds.

I have made my WYSE serial terminal work with my Linux server. After yesterday’s confusion and frustration I went back to Maplin and bought a few things that made the task very simple. I bought a properly wired DB9-DB9 null modem cable, a DB9 gender changer and a DB9-DB25 adapter.

All it took was for me to connect the DB9 serial cable to the second serial port of the terminal, plug the other end into my server and run a getty. This is how easy it should have been yesterday, but it seems I was using a wire not designed for connecting between PCs and the terminal. God knows what it’s for, but it didn’t work.

I’ve written up a small Drupal book about my method to make this work. Read it here.

I have in my posession an Amiga 500, Amiga 1500, WYSE terminal and a Mac Classic.

Today I learned several things:

• PCs running XP can’t read 720k floppies
• Serial communications is still just as confusing as it used to be
• Old hardware doesn’t work like you’d expect
• Given the choice between soldering small, fiddly things yourself, or paying  £5 for someone to do it for you, choose the £5 option

One of my aims today was to get my A1500 reading floppy disks, since originally all that happened was an intense squeaking/grating noise would come out the drive, and the computer would have a bit of a fit and complain the disk wasn’t working properly. This was solved, after much faff, by swapping a diskdrive from the A500 and putting it in the A1500. Seems the drives are the same, apart from the fronts of them.

The original diskdrive in the A1500 was quite damaged, either years of fluff and dust had stuck to the read heads, or they were mis-aligned. Either way any disk put into the drive was instantly rendered a dead disk, and received a neat scratch near the edge that went right through the magnetic layer.

PCs won’t read 720k disks any more, so that makes it hard to copy disk images into the Amiga to write them to floppies. After all, writing Amiga floppies on a PC would just be too simple now, wouldn’t it.

The idea with the serial terminal was to hook it up to my Linux machine. This - obviously - meant I had to go out and buy a USB-Serial dongle for my Linux machine, modern PCs having between zero and one serial ports now. Despite being a no-brand one from Maplin, the Linux machine worked out what it was and said it was called ttyUSB0. Now all I had to do was run a getty and connect the serial cable up.

And this is where the trouble began. The cable I have is a null modem cable, with a male DB25 connector on one end, and a male DB9 connector on the other. PC serial ports are also male DB9 connectors.

In Maplin I saw a DB9 Female-Female gender changer, but it was a fiver and at home I have several female DB9 connectors of my own. Surely it’s not hard to make a genderchanger by hand. Yeah, right… whatever. Soldering to those connectors is hard, especially when nobody seems to provide pinouts of gender changers. Do the pins go straight through, as if the two connectors are soldered back-to-back, or do all the pins cross over? I tried both ways and the best I could get was a bit of random garbage in Minicom.

The rest of the day had me trying various cables I own, all of which look like null modem leads, and none of which worked. I will go to Maplin again tomorrow and get a collection of gender changers and serial cables. I want to hook my A1500 up to my PC to transfer files in addition to making this terminal work.

For a test I plugged my GPS into the terminal and after setting the comms parameters, was greeted with NMEA text shooting up the screen.

So, the next time you complain it’s hard making a USB device work, or that it’s such a pain having to install a driver disk, just remember what it used to be like. Is it 19200,8,N,1 or is it 115200,8,N,1? XON/XOFF or RTS/CTS or both? Or neither? And what serial port are you plugged into? And it takes so long transferring files at multi-megabit speeds doesn’t it.

This weekend away has been an excellent chance to test out my home network and remote access to it. Some of the things I’ve done were just as a test, other things have been really useful.

For a start I allow incoming SSH connections so that I can access my server from anywhere outside. I’ve used this for everything from transferring files to setting off backups of my system at home. To maintain consistency between logins, and to cope with faulty Internet connections, I use screen to keep control of my session.

Tip: Use the following .screenrc option to make your many screen sessions less confusing by printing a list of open sessions along the bottom of your display:

hardstatus alwayslastline "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %Y/%m/%d %0c:%s "

In anticipation of other remote connections I might want to make to my machine at home, I thought about setting up a VPN. There are several options, all described in detail across the Internet, so I’m not going into detail about how to configure things, I’ll just explain what I am using and where I found out the information that made it work. (more…)

I’ve just acquired an interesting collection of old computer kit. I now have:

• An Amiga 500 without PSU
• An Amiga 1500 with monitor and keyboard
• A WYSE serial terminal
• And a USB floppy drive

The A500 will probably end up sitting on a shelf somewhere until I can find a PSU for it. I’ll use the A1500 since it has a hard disk and a monitor; I don’t exactly trust 21 year old floppy disks or have a spare TV to use. The Amiga 1500 has a slightly damaged keyboard, but it’s only a few keys on the numberpad that I’ll probably never press anyway.

The terminal might have a problem that causes it to turn off randomly, but I tested it the other night for about an hour and it seemed OK. Once I’ve confirmed I can connect it to my Linux machine I’ll create a giant serial cable and put it downstairs somewhere. It’ll make a nice IRC client or quick login to my server to check things. I figure I can make a long serial cable from some spare Cat5 cable and DB9 connectors.

I’m in Reading visting Dom and consuming his Internet connection. The drive down was quite uneventful, apart from me taking a wrong turning in some little village. In my defense I was busy shouting outrage at a petrol station charging 108.9p per litre!

After a bit telly and some chattering on the Internet we went to meet Bog, Markie and several others that I know from the Llamasoft forum. Except this wasn’t a Llamasoftie meetup, it was a pre-birthday food & beer for Bog.

Afterwards we went back to Bog’s and had a hilarious time playing the R/C plane simulator on his giant 30″ monitor (running at its native resolution - none of this 42″ plasma telly running at 1024×768 crap). We also watched some HD video and were unable to make it fullscreen, due to fullscreen being too large.  It was great and I want two