Since Christmas 2000, I've held an annual barbecue for the local open source hackers. The seventh, and the last to be held at Wantadilla, took place on 23 December 2006. It was also probably the most active of all. The weather was cooler than expected, and we spent the entire time inside.

Daniel O'Connor brought along yet another USB infrared receiver, for which we had intended to commit support to lirc, but as Daniel (maintainer of the lirc port) says, the code turned his stomach. From my experience last month, I can only concur.

Bernd Wulf brought a number of things: more home-made wine, which tastes as good as many commercial wines, a digital radio receiver, and also a MicroVAX II as a present for me:

Image title: vax 3          Dimensions:          2816 x 2112, 2265 kB Make a single page with this image Hide this image Make this image a thumbnail Make thumbnails of all images on this page Make this image small again Display small version of all images on this page All images taken on Saturday, 23 December 2006, thumbnails          All images taken on Saturday, 23 December 2006, small Diary entry for Saturday, 23 December 2006 Complete exposure details

 

Took it in and managed to find a functional VT320, but no real cable to fit it: the one I had was a flat 25-25 pin connector, but the VAX console port was 9 pins. Discovered that the short end of a Laplink cable would do the job, but it was too short, so we ended up having to prop up the front of the monitor so that it would work:

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Unfortunately, Bernd has never had the thing working, and it didn't boot; my guess is that there's no system on the disk. I'll have to do some investigation about that.

I didn't really get all the details of the radio receiver, but it seems to be quite an interesting piece of equipment.

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When I have time I'll get Bernd to tell me about it in more detail.

David Newall and I have been sparring about the utility of HTML for years, and we continued today. It at least had the advantage of giving me a lesson in style sheets; maybe I can now get tables to look less bad.