Power outage now my server asks for fck, what to do?

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 22:29, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:

> My first computer was a board with 256 bytes of ram, speaking 1802
> machine code thru a hex monitor. I bought an s-100 board backplane and
> built it, followed by $400 for 4k of static ram, and looking up the hex
> in the 1802 programmers manual, wrote a program to aid productions use
> of an automatic station break machine, reducing the number of copy
> operations to make a commercial by one and making a very noticeable
> improvement in the on air product, in 1978. I left instructions on how
> to edit it to change the tape machine ballistics as machines improved,
> then went on down the road, In Salem OR to see an aunt who was
> approaching the end of her time in 1994, I called that station to ask if
> my gizmo was still running, and was told it was still in several times a
> day use.  That's eons in a tv stations control room gear life.  And I
> still have a typewritten paper copy on the shelf above me, an a
> broadcast audio cart with several copies of it for backup.

Very impressive!

> I did much the same thing at my last tv station. We had bought a GVG
> 300A/B production video switcher for a song when Penny's closed their
> NYC production house which came with the manuals for its config storage,
> but not with the storage since it was an extra $20k.  So I wrote, for a
> color computer-2, running os9level 1.01, in basic-09, the functional equ
> to their $20k toy. But where theirs had a 2 digit switch to select the
> personality, mine had a video interface with English filesnames, and was
> 4x faster than theirs. Wrote the program on their time and it was in
> several times a day use thru the end of that switcher and another much
> better condition one just like it we got from KTLA, a span of 14 years.
> I retired, and it was dying so when it was finally pulled out, they gave
> me back that coco and its disk drives so they are stocking a box in the
> basement right now.

Ha! This one?
https://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Gene_Heskett

> I also used that comm channel into it as a
> troubleshooting tool on many occasions.

I don't know what any of that means, but I Googled what a GVC 300A was
and I found this:
https://www.grassvalley.com/media/mmqlityv/production_switchers_ds-pub-2-0572b-en.pdf

It looks very complicated and sounds impressive.

I am in regular correspondence with a friend of mine back in the UK
who is a low-level programmer of manufacturing equipement process
monitoring kit. He's trying to resurrect a decades-old business solo
after the previous owners ran it into bankruptcy via mismanagement and
that resulted in him losing a share of the business worth hundreds of
thousands of pounds -- his retirement plan now. That's due in <5yr.

He's found some horribly inefficient code in the Arduino dev kit,
resulting in some checks taking hundreds of times longer than they
should. Given that Arduino is so tiny and cheap, we had thought it
would be simple and efficient, but no. Also given it's in very
widespread use, I think he should productize his more-efficient code,
but it's out of his line of business and he doesn't want to.

But yes, long story short, I can well believe that it's possible to
significantly outperform pro kit with hand-coded stuff now, 10 or 20
or 30 years ago.

I don't do much work on Linux distros but I have been playing around
creating some DOS distributions recently -- PC DOS 2000 and 7.1, Open
DR-DOS  7.01 and so on. It's refreshing to work with code from the era
when a full-featured, modern OS came on a single-digit number of
floppy disks. It doesn't do much by modern standards, but what it does
is still useful and it does it well.


> Now I'm just another 86 year old fart, trying to stay busy with a garage
> full of cnc machinery I've built till the end.

86! Wow!

We've been on this list a long time, haven't we?

>  And alone these days. The
> lady standing beside me on my web pages front page for the last 31 yeas
> passed from COPD a month ago.

Oh no. :'( I am so very sorry to hear that. My condolences.

https://www.wdtv.com/2020/12/08/elladene-dee-heskett/ I presume?

Well, I have no idea if this is any consolation, but you have given me
a feeling of hope. I am 53 now, and I live with my partner of 3 years
and our baby daughter Ada. She came as a big surprise to both of us,
but a very big one to me -- you don't get to your 50s without kids by
accident -- and the biggest of all is that I love being a dad. I
reckon I must be close in age to the age you were when you married
Elladene. 31 years is a pretty significant span, and you give me a
reason to think that maybe I will have another few decades with my
girls. So thank you for that.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053