Arcana

1. Random MIDI files

2. Band Names I'd like to see

3. Bobotie

4. Cast of "Lost" wallpaper

5. NetBSD on the Fujitsu Pencentra 130

1. Random MIDI files

     ... all that remains of a discarded ambition to transcribe my book's tunes into listenable MIDI files as a resource for callers and musicians.

Abergenny
The Accomplished Maid
Adson's Sarabande
Alchurch
The Alderman's Hat
All Alive
Alterations
Amarillis
Anna Maria
Apley House
The Archbishop
Argeers
As Quick As You Please
Bar a Bar
Chestnut
Dick's Maggot
Easter Thursday
Fandango
Newcastle
 

2. Band Names I'd like to see:

Swingali

Ebola Cheerios

The Emulsifiers

Bandemonium (taken)

Swingali

Melange a trois

Meanderthals

Rock n Rule

String Theory

The DeFibrillators

The Hot and Bothered String Band

Like a  Sturgeon

Schlock Therapy (someone did use this, but the band is now defunct)

A Recipe for Bobotie

courtesy of the South African embassy

Bobotie is one of the best-known South African dishes, and like sosaties, chutney, sambals and some preserves it was brought here by Muslim slaves in the late 17th Century. It was traditionally made from left-over meat (the roast leg of mutton from the Sunday meal was served as bobotie on Monday). When made from minced left-over meat – be it mutton, beef or venison – the bobotie will have a much finer texture than when made from fresh meat. The same ingredients are used, with a slight change in cooking times.

Ingredients
1 kg minced mutton or beef.
2 medium sized onions, peeled and thinly sliced.
30 ml (2 table spoons) sunflower oil.
15 ml (1 table spoon) medium strength curry powder.
5 ml (1 teaspoon) turmeric.
30 ml (2 table spoons) white vinegar or lemon juice.
15 ml (1 table spoon) sugar.
5 ml (1 teaspoon) salt.
2 ml (1/2 teaspoon) black pepper.
1 slice white bread (3 cm thick).
250 ml (1 cup) milk.
2 large eggs.
75 g seedless raisins.
45 ml (3 table spoons) fruit chutney.
Grated rind of 1 lemon.
2 bay leaves.
6 - 12 almonds, blanched and quatered.
6 lemon leaves.

Preparation

Parboil the onions in a little water until just opaque, then drain (reserving the water), chop and fry in the oil until golden. Add the curry powder and turmeric. Fry for 2 minutes, stirring all the time, then add the vinegar or lemon juice, sugar, salt and pepper.

In the meantime, soak the bread in the milk, then squeeze dry, strain in the milk and set aside. Crumble the minced raw meat into a pan with the onion water and a little boiling water. Cook for 5 minutes.


Next, lightly mix the meat, soaked bread, onion mixture, 1 egg, raisins, chutney and lemon rind (if used). Pack into a buttered casserole, add the bay leaves, cover and cook in the oven for 1 ½ hours.


Remove from the oven and stick the almonds and lemon leaves (turned into little cones) into the meat. Whip up the remaining egg with the milk – add about ½ cup more to make a full 250 ml (1 cup) – and carefully pour on to the meat (over the back of a spoon) to make a smooth layer. Return the casserole to the oven, turning the heat down to 150 degrees C., and bake (uncovered) for a further 30 minutes, or until the custard has set.


SUGGESTIONS – serve bobotie with fluffy white rice rather than the yellow rice, and apricot chutney, and with cucumber or apple sambal, plus a mixed salad.

Cook the bobotie in the Argentinian way by cutting off the top of a pumpkin big enough to hold the bobotie mixture. Scrape out all the pips, brush melted butter over the inner surface, lightly roll a little sugar inside the pumpkin with a damp cloth, rub a little sunflower oil over the surface and fill with the bobotie mixture. Replace the lid and bake at 180 degrees C (standing in a shallow baking tin) for 1 ½ hours, or until a skewer can just pierce the pumpkin shell (it must not be mushy).

"Lost" Wallpaper (1024x768 here)

NetBSD on the Fujitsu Pencentra 130

This details my attempts to get more use from an old Pencentra 130 tablet PC, originally running WinCE 2.11. I apologize for the scattered quality of the notes - when or if I get the system really working I'll rewrite it!

get the HPCMIPS boot kernel "netbsd.gz"  here:  ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/hpcmips/installation

get the bootloader pbsdoot.exe from same place ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/hpcmips/installation

These two files can be put anywhere accessible from your Pencentra, but if you put it in Program Memory it will disappear after any netbsd boot. I put mine in the internal flash storage, which shows up as "Storage Card",  as opposed to an inserted flash card, which would be "Storage Card1"

get the actual operating kernel from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/hpcmips/binary/kernel/netbsd-GENERIC.gz  and put it on your install flash card. Can be in a DOS/WIN partition (but not NTFS).

Grab all the *.tgz files from  ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/hpcmips/binary/sets and put them on your install card.

Be sure memory slider in control panel/system is moved as far to the left as you can (maximum program memory)
Use "-h" in the options slot of pbsdboot, this will use your terminal (as neither the Pencentra keyboard or touchscreen get recognized).
Be sure the name and location of the boot kernel is correct. Case IS important in the name.
You must use a null modem connected to a computer running a terminal connected to a serial port, 9600 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. I used 'HyperTerminal', the Windows XP accessory usually included in their distribution.

Press "Boot"

If you get stuck at a prompt that just says "db>" type "continue". You can also exit out of the install program (sysinst) and use the bash shell included in "utilities/tools".

With luck, a minute wait and correct typing of the locations and names, you'll see on the terminal screen the 'sysinst' first install menu. If your terminal's set up right (remember, 9600 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop) you can type the letter in your terminal program corresponding to your language.

I had a 2 gig compact flash card, I partitioned it 100 MB msdos, 1900 MB NETBSD. The DOS drive is referred to as wd0e, the NETBSD as wd0f.

I had all the install *.tgz's on a USB drive, dos formatted. You can access them in sysinst by using the "unmounted file system" option. The device is sd0e, the file system is msdos, the base directory is "/" and the actual files will be in "/" as well unless you've put them sonewhere else on the usb drive. If yours are on a msdos-formatted flash card try /dev/wd0e for the device

USB drives can be mounted - look at its /dev location in the kernel messages when you plug it in (mine was sd0) and then do this:

- you can make a mount point called anything you want (mine is called 'thumbdrive' by typing mkdir /mnt/thumbdrive.

- type mount_msdos -l /dev/sd0e /mnt/(your_mointpoint>

If you can mount your new filesystem but aren't actually using it as the root directory "/", try mounting that system (mount /dev/wd0a /mnt/your_mount_point) and then "chroot" to /mnt/your_mount_point.

You may have to mount your /usr, /home, /var, etc. partitions with mount /usr, etc.

To log in at the serial connection edit /etc/ttys (using vi) to turn the console "on" and TTYE0 "off"

A week later, I'm running NetBSD on the Pencentra, but headless - all output is going to my serial terminal; the only thing on the pencentra screen is a line at the top - "builtin console type = D8_00". I'm trying to figure out how to at least print onto the Pencentra screen. A thought has occurred to me - would a USB keyboard work as an input device if the included keyboard is not supported? Inserting a USB keyboard gives a bunch of kernel messages that look hopeful, but key presses don't do anything but light up the upper orange alarm light.

I inserted a wired ethernet card and it showed as as wi0, which I enabled with ifconfig wi0 up and then dhclient wi0. Voila, internet!

Investigate wscons.conf and the command wsconscfg to tie a USB keyboard to a display?

So: still to be resolved - getting the Pencentra screen to actually do something, getting some kind of text input device working. I'm very pleased that the USB ports seem well supported - very hopeful.

   To install packages, download pkgsrc.tar.gz to /usr. I got mine here:  http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc.tar.gz

   go to /usr do gzcat pkgsrc.tar.gz | tar xf -

    This will take awhile. The file is huge, a good argument for making the /usr slice of your NetBSD partition huge as well. On my 2G flash card, the /usr partition is 1200M.

    To install a package, go to the directory in pkgsrc you want and type make, make install, make clean, make clean-depends.

   You will need swap space for this process to happen, and everything I'd read cautioned against using a flash card for swap. I inserted a usb harddrive, made a NetBSD partitionon it, then did:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/<your-mount-point>/swap bs=1k count=32768  to create a 32K file called "swap"

chmod 600 /mnt/<your-mount-point>/swap     to make it read/write for root.

/sbin/swapctl -a /mnt/<your-mount-point>/swap   to turn it on.

swapctl -l   to see if it worked.

    I can make a batch file to mount this when I need it, b ut if you want it permanent, add to /etc/fstab

NOTES:

From the very useful guide at  http://current.aydogan.net/platforms/hpcmips/INSTALL.html :

Configuring /etc/rc.conf
If you or the installation software haven't done any configuration of /etc/rc.conf (sysinst usually will), the system will drop you into single user mode on first reboot with the message

/etc/rc.conf is not configured. Multiuser boot aborted.

and with the root file system (/) mounted read-only. When the system asks you to choose a shell, simply press RETURN to get to a /bin/sh prompt. If you are asked for a terminal type, respond with vt220 (or whatever is appropriate for your terminal type) and press RETURN. You may need to type one of the following commands to get your delete key to work properly, depending on your keyboard:
# stty erase '^h'
# stty erase '^?'
At this point, you need to configure at least one file in the /etc directory. You will need to mount your root file system read/write with:
# /sbin/mount -u -w /
Change to the /etc directory and take a look at the /etc/rc.conf file. Modify it to your tastes, making sure that you set rc_configured=YES so that your changes will be enabled and a multi-user boot can proceed. Default values for the various programs can be found in /etc/defaults/rc.conf, where some in-line documentation may be found. More complete documentation can be found in rc.conf(5).

If your /usr directory is on a separate partition and you do not know how to use ed, you will have to mount your /usr partition to gain access to ex or vi. Do the following:
# mount /usr
# export TERM=vt220
If you have /var on a separate partition, you need to repeat that step for it. After that, you can edit /etc/rc.conf with vi(1). When you have finished, type exit at the prompt to leave the single-user shell and continue with the multi-user boot.
Other values that need to be set in /etc/rc.conf for a networked environment are hostname and possibly defaultroute, furthermore add an ifconfig_int for your <int> network interface, along the lines of
ifconfig_de0="inet 123.45.67.89 netmask 255.255.255.0"
or, if you have myname.my.dom in /etc/hosts:
ifconfig_de0="inet myname.my.dom netmask 255.255.255.0"
To enable proper hostname resolution, you will also want to add an /etc/resolv.conf file or (if you are feeling a little more adventurous) run named(8). See resolv.conf(5) or named(8) for more information. Instead of manually configuring network and naming service, DHCP can be used by setting dhclient=YES in /etc/rc.conf.
Other files in /etc that may require modification or setting up include /etc/mailer.conf, /etc/nsswitch.conf, and /etc/wscons.conf.