IBM Power Intellistation 275

I noticed that IBM has a 2x1.45GHz Power4 Intellistation in their used section for $700 with a 20" monitor. That's pretty cheap considering the price IBM charges for brand-new ones. A quick move over to the 285 page gets you $9000 for a 2 processor model (in this case 1 processor, 2 cores vs the 275's 2 physical processors). It also has a Spaceball and sound card, oooh the sound card makes it all worth it!

Well if you're looking for a cheap Unix workstation this would be a steal, it's almost better than that $600 SGI Octane2 I missed out on earlier this year. IBM charges $1900 for the GXT6500 graphics card it has by itself! Amazing, you could get two of the workstation and combine them to have 8GB of ram 2xHDD and 2xGraphics for less than the price of one of those cards.

Sun keys and xmodmap

I've tried to get my extra sun keys on this keyboard to work, but apparently you can't make them do 2 key combinations, say "^c" or something like that, oh well.

Anyway I've bound the @ and \ keys as copy and undo respectively because the altgr key on the sun keyboard is the rightmost one on the bottom row.


I tried to remap the backspace key to backslash/pipe key and that works great! Unfortunately remapping that key to the backspace fails miserably. No matter whether I bind it as less or greater it puts less, and there is no altgr functionality so bleh. Same unusefulness goes on with the tilde and escape key swapping. I guess somethings were just never meant to be, at least I'm used to those key positions and use them more often anyway, just thought it'd be cool to get the sun layout going on with my laptop. sigh


*I use the french canadian keyboard so it's the <> key, coincidentally the #|\ key is moved from the leftmost to the rightmost on the sun layout, heh.

eBay

I've bought way too much stuff on ebay lately...I bought a Compaq rackmount which turns on but it gives me a long beep no idea what it means...even after reading all the Compaq manuals.  I stuck the processors in my other rackmount and put the ram in my mom's pc so the money I paid for it was about what it would cost for those anyway.  I also got a processor and 2 hard drives from the guy and those both work well.

I ordered an old Logitech Mouseman as well, the good one with 3 buttons and the thumb indentation.  Ah and an original Happy Hacking Lite keyboard, they are cool =3

and as a side note I've switched my right windows/super key to be my compose key, so I can type things like est-tset and thorn really easily (ß and þ respectively) in addition to my accent keys from the canadian french layout.  go français! lol. >__>;

July

Yesterday we went out to IHOP and I got some regular pancakes and didn't finish them, lol, way too much food for me. Anyway I got some SGI O2s from my friend the other day and turns out one of them is a goner. The chassis is fine but the board/cpu is borked (solid amber LED of d00m).

So I'm trying to get the IRIX 6.5 discs, etc. so I can put a newer OS on it as 6.3 kinda limits us. I cannibalized the ram and now the "good" 180MHz one has 256MB of ram.


I started up 2 new classes this past week. Nothing is really exciting at all, one dude doesn't want us going online with our laptops. As long as he keeps it interesting I wouldn't really mind much.