Kebe Says - Dan McDonald's Blog

So recently I acquired @danmcd on Twitter. It was a long time coming. I was relatively late in early-adopting twitter: late spring 2009. By then someone else had claimed the handle danmcd, to my chagrin.

I was chagrined (in 2009) because I’ve been danmcd at SOMEWHERE since 1988. First .edus, even a .gov and .mil, and of course a series of .coms including my own kebe.com

(Who and/or what is Kebe might be another blog post in and of itself. In the meantime, this answer will suffice:

)

Names are important. Especially in the virtual world, they establish not only presence, but often place as well. I ended up being @kebesays on twitter for a long time. Luckily, Twitter makes handle-swapping relatively easy, so anyone who was following @kebesays got moved over to @danmcd without issue. I still keep /* XXX KEBE SAYS … at the top, because if you see that in my code, it indicates work-in-progress issues; and aren’t we all works-in-progress?

Speaking of names and places: one name and one place that has been associated with Triton and SmartOS - Joyent - will no longer be associated with SmartOS or Triton. Samsung has decided to use other in-house technology for their future, and that work will continue with Joyent. SmartOS and Triton are being spun off to MNX Solutions, where I will be continuing SmartOS development. See the MNX Triton FAQ and my email for more.

Oh and yes, I’ll get to be ‘danmcd‘ at MNX as well.

When Cable TV Was Still Young

Set the wayback machine 40 years plus 6-8 months ago (from the date of this post). Cable TV was rolling out in my suburb of Milwaukee, and it FINALLY arrived at our house. Hurray! We didn't have HBO, but we DID have all of the other fledgling basic cable channels... including Nickelodeon, which was then one of the Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC) channels. (WASEC, and its progenitor Columbus, Ohio QUBE project, are its own fascinating story.) Nickelodeon mostly had single-digit-aged kids programming, but at night (especially Sunday night) it had a 30-minute show called PopClips, which would play the then mindblowing concept of music videos... or as one friend of mine called them, "Intermissions" (because HBO would play music videos between movies to synch up start times... I didn't have HBO so I trusted him). There is a YouTube narrative video that discusses the show in depth, including its tenuous link to another WASEC channel that was going to start airing 40 years ago today...

I Want My MTV

Anyone sufficiently old knows that MTV stood for Music Television. At midnight US/Eastern time on August 1, 1981, it played its space-program-themed bumper, followed by, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.

Now the local cable company pulled a bit of a dick move with MTV for us. It attached it to HBO. If you didn't have HBO, the cable company scrambled MTV, albeit not as strongly as they did with HBO. They scrambled it by making the picture black-and-white, and cutting out the sound completely. LUCKILY for me, we did have "cable radio" which let us not only get better FM reception, but also the stereo broadcast for MTV. Combine them, and I got to see black-and-white videos with proper sound.

Thanks to people's old videotapes and YouTube, you can watch (modulo a couple of copyright-whiners) the first two hours of MTV here. I'd have embedded this, but I'm guessing the copyright-whiners won that battle too.

There's a lot to unpack about MTV being 40. I'm not going to try too hard in this post, but there are some things that must be acknowledged:

• MTV was a generation-defining phenomenon for Generation X. I suppose late-wave Boomers (the last of whom were graduating high school or already in college) could make a claim to ownership of MTV's first audience, but as MTV matured, it was very much initially for us Xers.
• It was initially narrowly focussed. The only Black people you'd see on MTV initially were JJ Jackson or members of The Specials. That changed a couple of years later, however.
• It spawned at least one knock-off: Friday Night Videos, which unlike MTV didn't require Cable.

Of course MTV doesn't play music videos on it anymore, we have alternatives now: YouTube, DailyMotion, and their ilk. And if you miss your MTV, or want to know what it looked like, you really don't have to look hard; many people have uploaded at least some VHS rips, many alas without music thanks to copyright teardowns. But with artist often putting out their old music on their own YouTube pages, some have taken to curating lists of them. Even NPR has curated the first 100 songs!

Two Decades Ago…

Someone pointed out recently that the famous Internet meme “All your base are belong to us” turned 20 this week. Boy do I feel old. I was still in California, but Wendy and I were plotting our move to Massachusetts.

In AD 2001, S9 Was Beginning

OF COURSE I watched the video back then. The original Shockwave/Flash version on a site that no longer exists. I used my then-prototype Sun Blade 1000 to watch it, on Netscape, on in-development Solaris 9.

I found a bug in the audio driver by watching it. Luckily for me, portions of the Sun bug database were archived and available for your browsing pleasure. Behold bug 4451857. I reported it, and all of the text there is younger me.

The analysis and solution are not in this version of the bug report, which is a shame, because the maintainer (one Brian Botton) was quite responsive, and appreciated the MDB output. He fixed the bug by moving around a not-shown-there am_exit_task() call.

Another thing missing from the bug report is my “Public Summary” which I thought would tie things up nicely. I now present it here:

In A.D. 2001
S9 was beginning.
Brian: What Happen?
Dan: Someone set up us the livelock
Dan: We get signal
Brian: What!
Dan: MDB screen turn on.
Brian: It’s YOU!
4451857: How are you gentleman?
4451857: All your cv_wait() are belong to us.
4451857: You are on the way to livelock.
Brian: What you say?
4451857: You have no chance to kill -9 make your time.
4451857: HA HA HA HA…
Brian: Take off every am_exit_task().
Dan: You know what you doing
Brian: Move am_exit_task().
Brian: For great bugfix!