Miscellaneous stuff

Index

And more.

Kernel panic with Pentium 4 and MSI 865PE Neo2-LS
zsh on systems with crippled chsh
4-voice MIDI for mobile phones
Random junk
Music greater than life
Games I’ve beaten

GNU/Linux

Pentium 4 & MSI 865PE Neo2-LS

Keywords: APIC, error, 60, 60(60)

The box was running just fine with Linux 2.4.x. Then, on day, when the hard drive received some damage and I had to replace it, I installed Linux 2.6 on it. That is when I started having the following warnings right after the partition table was read.

APIC error on CPU0: 60(60)
APIC error on CPU0: 60(60)
irq 185: nobody cared!
 [<c010876a>] __report_bad_irq+0x2a/0x90
 [<c0108860>] note_interrupt+0x70/0xb0
 [<c0108b70>] do_IRQ+0x160/0x1a0
 [<c0106b70>] common_interrupt+0x18/0x20
 [<c0104030>] default_idle+0x0/0x40
 [<c029007b>] xfrm_get_type+0x2b/0x120
 [<c010405c>] default_idle+0x2c/0x40
 [<c01040eb>] cpu_idle+0x3b/0x50
 [<c0364949>] start_kernel+0x1c9/0x220
 [<c0364370>] unknown_bootoption+0x0/0x160
handlers:
[<e0863ea0>] (ide_intr+0x0/0x1e0 [ide_core])
Disabling IRQ #185

Solution was to set On-Chip ATA(s) Operate Mode from Native Mode to Legacy Mode. (BIOS: Integrated Peripherals -> On-Chip IDE Configuration -> On-Chip ATA(s) Operate Mode). Problem solved.

Optimising GNU/Linux with gcc options

There has been lot of discussion about compiling GNU/Linux from scratch, and performance boost related to it. I have never been a big believer of this – except for applications such as multimedia encoding.

How much does optimisation really matter?

zsh

Willing to use zsh but can’t change your default shell or zsh is not globally installed? The obvious answer is to execute zsh in your login-shell start-up script.

test -e /path/to/zsh && exec /path/to/zsh

The previous seems to work just fine, but just wait and see what happens if you try to do tar -cf - foo bar | ssh host 'tar -xf -' or simple scp to computer where zsh is installed. It won’t do a thing.

Not so obvious workaround is to modify your rc-files a bit:

.bashrc. Just add the following to the end of the file.

# scp will break if we start another shell here
test -x /path/to/zsh -a ! "$SSH_CONNECTION" && exec /path/to/zsh

.profile or .bash_profile. Add the following (leave out the .bashrc part if you already have it) to the end.

# zsh may have been started in .bashrc but in case it wasn't (SSH), do it here.
# scp will never get this far so it's ok to launch zsh here
test -x /path/to/zsh && exec /path/to/zsh

4-voice MIDI

After purchasing SP-MIDI-capable mobile phone I started converting some tunes I liked into 4-voice MIDIs (as my phone only plays four voices at a time). Here are some of them.

barbers_adagio.mid - Barber’s Adagio for Strings - This tune actually has five tunes playing at a time, but as this doesn’t bother me much, I have decided to release it.
ff7_vincent.mid - Vincent’s Theme (from Final Fantasy VII) - This is a trimmed-down version of file stolen from the game itself. Please make sure you have the game before downloading.
ussr_nat_anthem.mid - USSR National Anthem. Don’t ask why but I like it.

Commodore 64

Moved to separate section.

Random junk

t/ - Random pictures, screenshots etc.

Music greater than life

Sometimes I find a tune that seems better than anything else before. I keep listening to it for hours without an interruption, day after day. There has to be something special about those tracks. The tracks are (probably) mostly chip-tunes, but there are exceptions.

The list.