Essay...

There is always someone who says something well. Here's one of those.

Mom (continued)

My mother passed away on April 18th, at 5:30pm. My brother and I were walking her dog when we were called back to the house.

She had suffered so much and had been grieving off and on for two months that I was just able to sit next to mom, hold her hand, and say my good-bye's.

All I can say is that she will be missed.

Mom

In early February, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

We knew that something was up since the summer (2006) when her stomach started bothering her and she stopped eating as much as she needed. At one point, my wife pointed out how much weight my mom had lost, and then one day I noticed.

The good news (if there is any) is that she has 6-12 months. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy in the hopes her symptoms can be held in check for a while. Chemo is brutal on my mom and she frequently has a few rotten days after the treatments. Since I am two blocks away, I am trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Both to help out, and to remember. My mom's pretty independent and definitely doesn't want to be babied.

We have discovered that her neighbors are really good neighbors. That's always a plus. My mother-in-law has been very helpful too, assisting with appointments (since my mom is not allowed to drive any more).

At any rate, my usual sporadic posting activity will be even more sporadic...

Hah, correction

As I ponder a more serious post, I noticed that the GNO/ME post mentions that GNO supports up to 32 "processors". That should, of course, be processes.

More on GNO/ME

This is really fascinating! GNO allows up to 32 concurrent processors. On an Apple IIGS. Like, wow this is impressive and must have been really really wild when it first came out.

I figured out where a lot of my problems came from - somehow I had corrupted two of the GNO distribution archives. Once I realized that, I got fresh copies and all seems well... almost all.

It appears that the larger commands fail quietly (sometimes locking up the machine). I'm guessing that this is related to the amount of RAM in the machine. With 1.25MB, I'm left with about 200KB available (GNO sits on top of GS/OS, so that's really not that bad).

Anyway, I'm working on something useful to do with it ... :-)

The Truth

truth

Unix ... for my Apple IIGS

This is pretty cool. I finally spent an hour installing GNO (full name is GNO/ME) on the Apple IIGS. Basically, you end up with a multiprocessor machine in a 16 bit world. I got it working with a new 512MB CF card I had purchased - I have 4 32MB ProDOS formatted harddrives and a 384MB HFS formatted volume too.

There are a few flukes, and I need to figure out what I can do with it, but it has a Unix-like shell. I'm pretty sure I can get some form of terminal going (probably not TCP/IP). Security is not the greatest (ProDOS and HFS filesystems are strictly single user - you have access to everything on the system).

Now I wonder how I can use it. Development? Have no clue, but it is pretty impressive: 1.25MB, 8MHz, 16-bit.

Yum continues to get hosed periodically...

I'm not sure why. Anyone who has an idea - I'd love to know. In the meantime, I continue to following my yum unhosed directions.