response 96 of 156:

Feb 7 22:58 UTC 1999

   We verified that the new sun-4/690 CPU card was working, and took
64M off it and gave it to Grex, hence our 192M of memory.  The 'new'
6/90 card wasn't booting in its normal (as opposed to diagnostic) mode,
so we took two of the little SBUS daughterboard cards off it, and lo
and behold it came up.  We couldn't boot anything off it, as it seems
to have last been used with IPI disks (IPI being another now dead type
of disk interface like IDE and SCSI), so we're going to have to either
boot from CD rom or clone Grex's boot disk for it.  Neither will be
hard to do, but we're out of time for today.

   All in all, I'm happy.  Grex has needed extra memory for a while
now, and todays addition will help out a lot.  The extra CPU card
that we installed, giving us 4 CPUs that run Grex will be an interesting
thing to watch.  There are some theories that with SunOS (as opposed
to the newer SOlaris) having four CPUs will degrade overall performance
because of contention between the four of them waiting to do things in
the kernel, but I'm not sure about that.  I have heard arguments on
both sides, but Grex doesn't seem to use a computer in any normal way
so our results will be different.  If we need to back out a CPU card
its easy enough to take it out again.

   Next step: more disk for Grex.

response 98 of 156:

Feb 7 23:31 UTC 1999

   Just the newest one.  To test the other one we'll need to do a 
CPU transplant.  I was kinda tempted to do that today, but decided
to be more focused.

response 100 of 156:

Feb 10 20:12 UTC 1999

Carol and I made some spiffy mailing labels with our new color printer. 
They have Grex's logo and return address on them.  I'll use them to mail
auction items to people. 

response 102 of 156:

Feb 22 02:53 UTC 1999

   I worked on getting more memory on Grex today, and didn't
succeed.  The expansion card we have has 64M in it, and I was
going to increase that to 128M for a total of 256M in Grex.
   Unforunately, there is a problem with some of the sockets
for the SIMM memory parts and Grex wouldn't boot with the
added memory.  Going into the diagnostics mode it nearly
instantly found a particular SIMM as being bad.  After trying
various things, I took out the new (2nd) 64M ram bank and
found that the card was still damaged.  There are two sockets
which appear to be be damaged.

   It definitely looks to me like we have some bad sockets,
possibly (probably?) due to problems with the previous owners
of the card.  However, not all is lost.  I've straightened out
the little finger of SIMM sockets before, and that may be all
that is needed.

   Right now we're back to 128M, which while not as good as
having 192M, is still fairly decent.

response 104 of 156:

Feb 24 05:19 UTC 1999

   Grex is now running with its memory card again, thanks to the
efforts of Charles (arthurp).  He fixed the mangled simm sockets
and after some fighting with it, Grex was able to boot up with
this card.  It now has 128M, making for a total of 256M of ram
here.  Several of us have been here in the Pumpkin for the last
hour, waiting to see if any errors would develop.  We've been here
for a little more than an hour now, and all is well.
   Thanks Charles for your efforts.

response 106 of 156:

Feb 24 17:12 UTC 1999

   Wow.  Thats cool.

response 108 of 156:

Feb 24 19:47 UTC 1999

See the coop item on tax deductability of dues, this copier will allow grex
to keep better tax records as a nonprofit.

response 110 of 156:

Feb 26 18:21 UTC 1999

A test version of Backtalk 0.9.6 is now available on Grex.  To try it go to

  http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/pw/bt.new/pistachio/confhome?conf=backt
alk

IMPORTANT NOTE:

    This has been deliberately broken so that you can only join the
    "backtalk" and "backtalk2" conferences.  It will claim all other
    conferences do not exist if you try to join them.  It does some
    different things with item files, and we want to make sure it isn't
    going to drive Picospan crazy before we allow it into any of the
    regular conferences.

    If you want to go back to reading the other conferences, change the
    "bt.new" in the URL back to "bt".

WHAT'S NEW:

  - HTML responses.  You now have the option of using HTML tags in
    your response and item text.  This means pictures, tables, links,
    font changes, and so forth can be done in responses.

    Sanity checking is done on the HTML to make sure you don't use
    any tags that would mess up the page, and to close any tags
    you left open.

    Backtalk automatically generates a (much less pretty) plaintext
    version of all HTML responses so that Picospan users don't have
    to look at HTML tags.

  - Preview button.  Lets you see what your response would look like if
    posted, both to other Backtalk users and to Picospan users.  Very
    useful for composing HTML responses.

  - Forget works better.  Fixed some bugs here.

  - A few more button color options.

  - Updates to help files.

  - More aggressive item indexing.  Item indexing makes Backtalk faster,
    but it used to be so timid about it that it wasn't being done in
    most conferences.

  - Several minor bug fixes.

And various other features not relevant to Grex:  support for password
protected conferences, lastlog maintainance, better user list functions
(turned off here because we have too many users), and better Yapp
compatibility.

response 112 of 156:

Feb 26 19:29 UTC 1999

just tried it, but communicator 4.05 crashed twice at the same spot (scrolling
through responses).  running a powerbook 190cs (68lc040) with os 8.0.

response 114 of 156:

Feb 27 10:16 UTC 1999

Not that fast.  You might want to keep tabs on what people do with html,
becuase it's possible for that to be misused.  

response 116 of 156:

Feb 28 03:43 UTC 1999

YAPP compatability refers to Backtalk working with YAPP the way it does 
with Picospan.  Backtalk itself doesn't seem any different, either way. 

response 118 of 156:

Feb 28 04:26 UTC 1999

Uh-oh.  I'm not sure I like what this represents, Jan.  The strength
of Grex (and M-Net, once) was what the users brought to it.  When the
conferences become more of an impromptu web page where most of the
content is links, Grex will become a poor cousin of SlashDot.  The
inaccessibility of the graphical content to many computers is another
negative to this change.  Up to now, anybody with a dumb terminal and
a modem could be a full participant.  When large parts of the conferences'
content is only accessible using much more advanced (and expensive)
hardware, what becomes of that part of the user base?
 
I fear this will be like the file read feature in party:  most often
used to dazzle rather than illuminate.