Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This isn’t really of great interest to most people, but I wanted to write it down just so I would remember, and also just in case it might help someone else in the future.

I just did a major version upgrade of FreeBSD on my home machine. And the printer no longer worked. It’s an old Laserwriter on the parallel port, and when I tried to print to it, the jobs just stuck in the queue and the printer blinked like it was getting data, but nothing ever came out. I also noticed the following message in the system log:

May 3 22:47:43 moe kernel: Interrupt storm detected on “irq7: lpt0”; throttling interrupt source

I did some searching in with the Great Oracle (a.k.a. Google) and found this:

http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=93e0c4fc7f1cb345f9a52787035dd76c&threadid=12015&goto=nextoldest

This contained the answer. I had to edit /boot/device.hints and insert this line:

hint.ppc.0.flags=”0x20″

And voilá! Now it works.

Chuck is trying to start a new meme:

Go to Google. Paste whatever’s on your clipboard right now into the search box and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Report your result — IN YOUR OWN BLOG.

Well, you gotta be explicit in these things. Memes are like religion. They don’t spread themselves. Somebody’s gotta stand on a soap box and shout about it.

Apropos of nothing, this reminds me of my old friend Stu’s joke about religion:

“Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but I think religion is more like cocaine. It makes people paranoid, it makes them crazy, and it makes them give all their money to sleazy characters.”

Anyway, so here are my results:

I got:

Your search – mailparams where pid=274; – did not match any documents.

The only thing that made it funny is that there was a text ad on the side of the page that said:

Sponsored Links
Learn PID Control
Self-Help Training Manuals
Help You Master PID Control
SimpleSolvers.com

I’m curious just what ‘PID Control’ is.