How’s that for Richardsonian Romanesque?
]]>
How’s that for Richardsonian Romanesque?
]]>
Northwestern University
]]>
At the Art Institute of Chicago.
]]>
]]>
As the name implies, Fiskfélagið is mostly known as a seafood restaurant. But their presentation of this lamb dish deserves note. The vapor is caused by cauliflower, which has been prepared in liquid nitrogen and is thus quite cold when it’s spooned onto the lamb. The full description is:
Grilled Leg of Lamb in Herbs, Smoked Loin of Lamb with Red Onion & Plum Tomato, Cauliflower Purée, Button Mushroom & Rosmarin Birch Sauce. From Kvelduhverfi.
]]>
The fantastic thing about Icelandic typewrites is that they contain all the glyphs necessary for reproducing North Germanic languages:
The four pangrams above use all of the letters for Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, respectively.
]]>
Netatalk is an open-source UNIX implementation of AppleShare, designed to provide services to classic (1984-2001) Macintoshes. Though Apple's own server products have moved on, and no longer support client Macs running the classic Mac OS, Netatalk will still serve files to machines as early as a 512K from 1986.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a great deal of development on the problem of Mac/Unix integration, primarily at research universities such as the University of Michigan (where Netatalk was born, around 1990) and Columbia University (Columbia AppleTalk Protocol, circa 1986). As such, it's no surprise that a lot of work went into making Unix-based AppleShare servers fit in as fully as possible on the Mac desktop. CAP and Netatalk didn't just serve files, they also provided centralized print queues for LaserWriters and even supported rare AppleTalk-based time synchronization protocols, such a "timelord."
This attention to detail also extended into the very icons that showed up when a Mac user mounted a shared volume from a Unix machine running software such as Netatalk. But these icons are really only visible on machines running System 7 and older — ever since Mac OS 8, the Finder's own default icons for AppleShare volumes take precedence over the custom icons that were built into the Netatalk dæmon.
These now-lost icons were incorporated into the source code in a very interesting way. Unix software could't easily contain the icons in their native format of Resources — special kinds of information, stored in a separate "fork" of files — because Unix file systems, not to mention non-AppleTalk network protocols, would lose this information by not understanding it. Instead, the raw bits for each of the 128 pixels in each 32 by 32 icon was encoded as hexadecimal information in C-language header files in the source code. A sample from icon.h looked like this:
static const unsigned char apple_atalk_icon[] = { /* default appletalk icon */
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x9F, 0xE0,
0x00, 0x04, 0x50, 0x30, 0x00, 0x08, 0x30, 0x28,
0x00, 0x10, 0x10, 0x3C, 0x07, 0xA0, 0x08, 0x04,
0x18, 0x7F, 0x04, 0x04, 0x10, 0x00, 0x82, 0x04,
0x10, 0x00, 0x81, 0x04, 0x10, 0x00, 0x82, 0x04,
0x10, 0x00, 0x84, 0x04, 0x10, 0x00, 0x88, 0x04,
0x10, 0x00, 0x90, 0x04, 0x10, 0x00, 0xB0, 0x04,
0x10, 0x00, 0xD0, 0x04, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF,
0x40, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x3F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x00, 0x00, 0x07, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x05, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x05, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x05, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0x08, 0x80,
0x00, 0x00, 0x08, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80,
0x00, 0x00, 0x0A, 0x80, 0xBF, 0xFF, 0xF2, 0x74,
0x00, 0x00, 0x05, 0x00, 0xBF, 0xFF, 0xF8, 0xF4,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x03, 0x9F, 0xE0,
0x00, 0x07, 0xDF, 0xF0, 0x00, 0x0F, 0xFF, 0xF8,
0x00, 0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFC, 0x07, 0xBF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC, 0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC, 0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC, 0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC, 0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x1F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF,
0x7F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFE, 0x3F, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFC,
0x00, 0x00, 0x07, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x07, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x07, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x07, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80,
0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80,
0x00, 0x00, 0x0F, 0x80, 0xBF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xF4,
0xBF, 0xFF, 0xFD, 0xF4, 0xBF, 0xFF, 0xF8, 0xF4
};
This encoding was actually nearly identical to the XBM bitmap format, and if you know what you're doing you can recover the Mac representation of these hex codes using modern tools.
Let's see what they looked like.
This was the default icon for an AppleShare icon, connected through the traditional Datagram Delivery Protocol (in other words, before the advent of AFP/TCPIP.) It appears identical to Apple's own icon for AppleShare servers, and was used if Netatalk wanted to present itself as normal Apple server.
The globe amidst the files and folders on the platter tells you this is an AFP/TCPIP server — a representation of a "wide-area", rather than local, network. This also appears to be the same icon as Apple used for their AppleShare IP product, and was also used when Netatalk servers wanted to fit in and look exactly the same as a real Apple server.
Now things get interesting. This is, obviously, a Sun Microsystems logo, rising from the networked platter. When I was in college in the 1990s, a cluster of SparcStation 20's used similar software (actually CAP, mentioned above) to serve AppleShare volumes to students. Here's the logo is in its 1990s glory:
The Netatalk package checks if the machine its running on reports as Ultrix, and if so displays this charmingly-tilted Digital Equipment Corporation logo. Ultrix was, apparently, in active development between 1984 and 1995, and DEC itself was swallowed up by Compaq in 1998. Its logo looked like this:
I'm not quite sure why a dæmon represents a Digital VAX, but that's what shows up when Netatalk is run on this platform. Dæmons (small processes running in the background and listening for information on specific ports) are more closely associated with Unix, most specifically with BSD. The icon seems an odd choice for a VMS-based system.
Speaking of cartoon characters...
This one takes some explaining. If Netatalk senses its on an "_IBMR2" system, it deploys the "hagar" icon shown to the left. This is probably a reference to IBM RISC systems, specifically the RS/6000 which was advertised in the early 1990s with the following ad campaign:
Last is this generic icon, which Netatalk used if it couldn't determine a specific platform icon from the list above. So to be precise, this is the generic Netatalk icon for situations where the software was not trying to masquerade as an actual Apple server. I'm not sure of the state of thinking about icon design and copyright in the 1990s, but my guess is this icon was developed in case there was a problem with using Apple's own visual representations of servers — thus the option the administrator could set to either use special icons, or the Finder's default ones.
I should finish by saying that all these icons were drawn from the source code to Netatalk 2.2.x, and that it's possible that earlier releases had even more platform-specific icons embedded. But the other thing to keep in mind is that steadily fewer people have seen these icons since 1997 — the release date of Mac OS 8, which stopped supporting custom server icons. (Any guesses as to how many instances of Netatalk are currently running on top of VAX/VMS in 2012?)
For icons that died out nearly fifteen years go, it seems fitting to give them a final resting place on the web somewhere.
]]>
To the left, a 1989 Mac Portable that weighs 13½ lbs more than a MacBook Air. Center, a Sun JavaStation — sort of like an X Terminal without X. And right, an SGI Indy — a RISC-based IRIX workstation from about 1993.
]]>
Talking about “original” or “indigenous” musical instruments in Iceland is tricky. Unlike the continental Scandinavian countries, there’s little evidence of medieval musical culture — far fewer paintings, wood or stone carvings, that depict actual instruments. In fact, the earliest depiction of the national instrument, the Langspil (a bowed zither) is from 1836 — and from a French travel narrative, no less:
Twenty years later, the first signifiant work on the Langspil was published, a guidebook on how to play:
At its most basic, the Langspil is a variant of the instrument Americans know as a Dulcimer. Such instruments, which can all fall under the general term Zither, have a long history in Europe. A large part of the original settlement of Iceland came from Norway, and a zither known as the Langeleik are pretty well-attested there — the earliest surviving from the 16th century. (I’m not sure whether the current thinking is that the Langeleik/Langspil travelled with the Norwegians during the 9th century settlement period or much later.)
Regardless, we can probably treat the Icelandic Langspil as a local adaptation of a common European instrument class. In the engraving above from 1836, we see a farmer playing the instrument with a bow, instead of plucking with fingers or a pick. In modern instruments being produced today, both methods are supported. Sometimes the practice is to unhook one of two larger strings when bowing, reconnecting it when the player wants to use a pick. Below, a researcher plucks various strings while holding some of them down against the fretboard:
Of course, there’s a slippery slope between the specifically-Icelandic Langspil, and any zither produced in Iceland. Is the difference in the shape of the instrument, or its ability to be bowed, or the decoration carved or painted onto its surface? Below, an uncle-and-nephew team of Icelandic instrument makers consider a conventional zither, left, and a Langspil, right:
Both were made in Reykjavík in 2011, and both can be strung and played in a similar fashion. Besides the physical difference in the bodies’ design, the placement of the fretboard on the Langspil is different. But in general, as with all folk instruments, individual examples exist in a spectrum of different design choices and stylistic traditions, rather than inhabiting fixed positions such as Violin/Viola/Cello.
]]>
If you’re in Reykjavík in December you spend most of your time trying to photograph the sky, which gets really interesting around sunrise and sunset. The picture above is from about 2:30pm local time, and you can see the orange glow of the setting sun in some of the buildings’ windows.
The church at the top of the hill is Hallgrímskirkja, which was under continual construction from the late 1930s through the 1980s.
]]>VITS ER ÞÖRF ÞEIM ER VÍÐA RATAR.
The inscription is a citation from the Hávamál, — the Words of the High One, from the Poetic Edda which inspired Snori Sturlusson to write his Prose Edda. The first preserved text of the Poetic Edda is from the 13th Century, but it probably preserves parts of much older narratives. Why choose this particular medieval text for a new academic building?
The first word, cut off in my photo above, is vits, which we have in English as “wits” and serves perfectly well as the cognate it is: knowledge, cunning.
Þörf, “to need,” has disappeared in modern English, but is still present in Modern German as dürfen and Swedish as tarva. (The proto-Germanic word probably looked something like *ɵurfan.) So the first half-line is something like “Wits are necessary…”
Moving on to the second half-line: I always like to think of Þeim as “them” because it basically is, in a dative case here. Skipping to the end of the half-line, ratar, Zoëga’s dictionary of 1910 actually cites this verse in its definition of rata: to travel; rata víða: to travel widely. The verb “to be” is then used to build this construction meaning “for those that travel far.” So the message is: You’ll need smarts if you want to travel the world.
I don’t know if the inscription goes on around the back side, but if it does so, it continues:
dælt er heima hvað.
“Dæll” is an interesting adjective, meaning gentle or easy. But this passage from the Havamal is also cited in Zoëga, for the use of dæll in the set phrase above “anything will pass at home.” If I had to guess what the words are literally doing here, it would be something like “Easy: that’s what home is.”
Interestingly, the connection between idiocy and “the home” — in either the pure domestic sense, or in the context of international travel — is one common to many Germanic languages. Think of English’s “homely”, which has a sense of “OK for inside the house, but probably not a beauty.” Swedish goes even further, with hemsk, literally home-y, translating as “horrible.” The Icelandic Web of Science has an entire page on the question of the linkage between the home and cowardice and unmanliness, which cites this exact verse from the Hávamál. “Ekki þótti það karlmannlegt,” they write, “að sitja alltaf heima og fara ekkert.” (It wasn’t thought manly to sit at home all the time and not travel.)
The payoff for translating these lines by hand is then you get to compare your work with W. H. Auden! Yes, everyone’s favorite 20th-century poet translated the Hávamál himself, and rendered this particular verse (in its entirety) as:
Who travels widely needs his wits about him, The stupid should stay at home: The ignorant man is often laughed at When he sits at meat with the sage.
So this stanza sets up a tension between the expertise and knowledge required for the well-traveled, versus the low expectations present at home. An interesting message to hover over the heads of those studying at the University of Iceland in 2011.
]]>
The National & University Library of Iceland rests on a field of snow. The sun has mostly set here by 4:30pm.
]]>
Who amongst us isn’t in the market for a Langspil — an Icelandic bowed zither? These Langspils were for sale in a store in central Reykjavík; they run the gamut from diatonic to chromatic, four-string to three-string.
]]>
This weekend’s task was to fix up a rare “portable” Unix computer from Sun Microsystems. Best-known in the 2000s for enterprise hardware, Sun in the 1990s was equally dominant in desktop Unix workstations, before the rise of Linux on commodity x86 PC’s.
Yet Sun workstations, with their 20” CRT monitors and large, flat ‘pizza box’ cases, were nearly impossible to bring into the field — or between offices. Sensing a market, Sun introduced their SparcStation Voyager in 1994 as a portable system that offered much of the power of Solaris, their operating system, and the SPARC RISC processor, in a machine small enough to bring onto an airline.
Portable power came at a price: $14,000.00 for the color model. I saw only one in person during the 1990s, and I think it belonged to a Sun salesman. It’s safe to say the number made — not to mention the number surviving — is pretty low. In fact, the Voyager is peculiar enough to warrant its inclusion at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
After sixteen years, it’s not surprising if a few hardware gremlins have to be exorcised before a given Voyager will work correctly. As shown above, the battery which stores the nonvolatile RAM — the settings for the clock, which hard drive to boot from, etc. — will eventually give out. The result is a scrambled configuration, and, amusingly, a randomly-generated password protecting the machine which you have no hope of figuring out. Unfortunately the Voyager’s battery is built into the nonvolatile RAM chip itself — a bit of vertical integration which helps save space, but makes fixing an expired battery more complex (and expensive). Here’s the back of the machine with the case open:
The original combination battery and memory chip is in the lower-right corner, above the port marked “A”, and has a yellow barcode sticker on it. This chip has long since been End-of-Life’d, but miraculously there’s a pin-compatible replacement still available for about $30. Here’s the old chip, top, with the replacement on the bottom:
The new chip plugs right into the open socket on the vertical motherboard:
The new chip is a good few millimeters thicker than the old one, which can make clearance a bit tight. In fact, my original IDPROM chip was nested in a thin plastic guiding frame, which reduced the risk that you would bend a pin as you inserted a new chip. There’s no room for that luxury with the replacement, which nestles right up against the plastic case:
Once the new chip is in place, we’ll reboot and see if the machine’s bogus password is cleared:
A rare case where an error message is good news: the Voyage’s memory has been cleared so completely that it’s back to its factory state, trying to boot over the (absent) network. The “ok” prompt will allow us to issue a boot command from the SCSI drive and we’ll be up and running:
… all the way into OpenWindows, at which point you can pause and reminisce about the Unix Wars of the 1990s:
On some kinds of Sun workstations, you may find that your machine’s Hardware Ethernet (or M.A.C. number) has been wiped during the process. This wasn’t the case on my machine, but if it had been there’s a great page of instructions online on how to write the relevant bits back to the chip at a low level, which looks something like this:
Once your Voyager is up and running, you can enjoy the delights of Solaris 2.3-2.7, for example the written-in-itself HotJava browser:
