14th of March, 2003 ANTE·MERIDIEM 10:52

Yes, The Clap were good, in the end—much better than hearsay and their previous performances had lead anyone to expect. The two axe-wielding giants (well, one giant(ish) and one intimidating stick insect) made people laugh and go “cool” in pretty equal measure. So, well done Ste and Karl, we’re all proud, we hope the next one is soon and better. Pictures and links at Ste’s^[1] page, whence he links to some further pictures from Cliph.

Let me muse on beer for a second; it occurs to me that Heineken probably tastes pretty good in Holland. I mean, Budvar tastes pretty excellent in the Czech Republic; the strength of the alcohol and the taste of the beverage make just the right combination. In the Temple Bar Music Centre, moderately sober, Budvar tastes crap, and I assume this is because it’s much less strong, as are most continental beers that get exported here. So, given that I’ve only tasted the Irish version of Heineken, I’m probably quite mistaken on this issue.

So, yeah, with regard to boring Unix stuff; XFree86 4.3.0 won’t work, full stop, on the machine, neither under NetBSD nor Linux. The installed version on Linux is 4.2.1, and that works pretty good. Since I had a copy of the 4.3.0 source tree to hand, I built a copy of the server + driver module with RADEON_DEBUG turned on under Linux, and did

# (sleep 15 && killall XFree86) &
# XFree86

and the debug output included a modeline, which is a plus—I can shove that in /etc/X11/XF86Config, and use a driver module which doesn’t access the BIOS. (It normally accesses the BIOS to get information on the screen size and capabilities; a modeline includes most of this info already.)

Unfortunately, that invocation didn’t give anything useful on the screen, so I’m going to have to build a server + driver for XFree86 4.2.1 on NetBSD with BIOS access turned off to have a decent chance of it working.

^[1] http://​netsoc.​tcd.​ie/​~ste/​index3.​html