Digested

November is a grey month, with low clouds, fog and rain. You can see the difference in people. Instead of smiling and talking, everyone is huddled in their coats and fighting a mild depression that will last until february.

I enjoyed getting above all that, literally. Across from Nelson there are well worn trails up the mountain. In an hour you can get to around 4500-5000 ft elevation. Above the low cloud that hangs in the valley. The wind is bracing, the air is clear. Whenever I stop to catch my breath, Olivia my dog turns around and looks at me, willing me further. It seems the elevation energizes her. The sun was shining through the high clouds painting the low clouds shades of pink. Watching the low clouds drift up the valley and run up through the trees as they hit the mountain makes me yearn for a camera, although the majesty would be lost on film.

I've been experimenting with virtualization in an attempt to retire an old Compaq laptop that runs Windows 98. We work on control systems with peculiar software interfaces, some that run on dos, some 16 bit windows. They communicate by serial port, hence the virtual machine. I purchased a USB to RS232 adapter, which is recognized in Linux. It creates a device equivalent to the RS232 port. I installed win95 in qemu, no problem, but for some reason it won't talk to the controller. The serial port works. I dug out from some dark and dusty corner a 2400 baud modem, plugged it in and talked to it with a terminal in windows running virually. But there seems to be some timing issue. So I did the same in VirtualBox, same problem. I tried VMWare, with the same result. Next is to install win98 with usb support, have it see the usb device directly, and see if I can use that to talk to the controller.

After a few hours doing that, I feel the need to get up some mountain to clear my head. I haven't installed windows for years. I haven't missed it at all.