I’m not accustomed to writing restaurant reviews on my website, but I had dinner last night at Caffe Nonna in Nashville. Wow! It was really good food! Jolene and I went for my birthday. It is a small, Italian restaurant with a lot of character. The bread and olive oil was excellent. The olive oil mixture had parmesan cheese and balsamic vinegar. Jolene and I shared their portobello salad. It was perhaps the best salad I’ve ever had. The portabello’s were very tender and marinated perfectly. The generous amount of gorgonzola just made the salad. Jolene had a smoked gouda-filled ravioli and portabellos in a creamy pesto sauce while I had the spicy marinara sauce on angel hair pasta with calamata olives. Both dishes were excellent. Mine was spicier than I had bargained for, but still very unique and flavorful. Jolene’s dish was delicious. The pesto sauce was very creamy. All the ingredients tasted very fresh.

The best part, of course, was dessert. We each had our own, because we wanted to sample their selection. I had the Tiramisu and Jolene had the citrus-ricotta cheesecake. Again, both desserts were excellent. The Tiramisu was light and creamy. The cheesecake was very unique. The ricotta made the cheesecake very light and the citrus mixture poured over it was perfect.

We had a wonderful dining experience at Caffe Nonna and recommend it to anyone in the Nashville area.

I placed an order yesterday for a 50Mhz full-size TTL crystal oscillator. I plan to use it to “clock chip” my old Macintosh IIsi. (For more information on clock chipping, visit this excellent site.) Anyway, the IIsi has a Motorola 68030 CPU running at 20Mhz, half the speed of the 40Mhz crystal that drives it. I plan to replace this 40Mhz crystal with the 50Mhz part I ordered from Mouser Electronics. This form of overclocking should gain me nearly a 25% boost in performance, driving my CPU speed from 20Mhz to 25Mhz. Anyway, I’m really looking forward to performing this surgery. The IIsi’s logic board is removed and my soldering iron ready!

We’re back on the 6bone at home. I lost my IPv6 tunnel a few weeks ago while I was in the process of upgrading / patching my kernel. I lost ip_tables functionality temporarily during the upgrade, so I shut down the tunnel temporarily for security concerns. Hurricane Electric permanently shut down the tunnel after a week of inactivity. I just got ip_tables back yesterday, so I quickly signed back up for a new tunnel. I had to modify my configuration for the new IPv6 adresses, and modify my DNS accordingly. So, ipv6.jonandjolene.com is up again. (Link will not work unless you have an IPv6 stack installed and are on the 6bone) I’m glad to have it working again because IPv6 makes me feel so cool.

Edit: And, for the first time, ipv6.jonsharp.net works. Now that I’ve migrated to Apache 2, I no longer have to use the khttpd ipv6 hack I was using. This means I can actually do ipv6 virtual hosts. <Mr . Burns Voice>Excellent.</Mr. Burns Voice>

I haven’t written about my IIsi clock-chipping results yet because it did not turn out as planned. It took quite some time to perform the mod, and when it was done, the machine only gave me error tones when powered on. Today I had a few moments to better assess the situation. I confirmed what I had feared — that I had cut a trace on the motherboard while replacing the crystal. It was a trace going to the memory slots, which explained why I was experiencing ascending tones indicating a memory problem. I repaired the severed trace today and put the machine back together only to hear the same tones. After testing multiple configurations of memory, I determined that the machine will boot if all RAM slots are empty. Well, it doesn’t actually boot because it says that System 7.5 requires more memory to boot. Perhaps System 6 will boot? Anyway, I may have ended up sacrificing all memory expansion for a 5Mhz increase in clock speed. Pretty bad numbers, eh? Oh well, I’m sure to come across another IIsi logic board someday. :) In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for me, please let me know.

I have long been interested in the Darwin project. It is, after all, the basis for Mac OS X. And it’s open source! Perhaps the aspect that so fascinates me is that it runs on x86 hardware, albeit with limited support. I have played with Darwin since version 1.2.1, when it was quite a bit more raw than it is today. Darwin still remains raw, but many things have improved. With the recent release of OpenDarwin 7.2.1, I decided to upgrade my existing Darwin 7.0.1 installation on my Dell Latitude D600.

I did have a few problems with the installation. The x86 installation of OpenDarwin still requires that you reboot into the installation CD shell, mount the new installation, and edit a file to specify exactly which partition to boot to. (It can be done from the boot prompt as well, but you must remember what partition designation is required.) Also, the Broadcom Gigabit driver for my built-in BCM5705M chipset would not load this time. I was, in fact, very surprised that it was supported under Darwin 7.0.1, but I didn’t understand why it would be broken in a later release. After some help from the OpenDarwin hackers list, (thanks Chuck!) I discovered that the new driver was not compiled fat (with both x86 and ppc code), while the previous one had included x86 support. I was able to replace the new driver with the one provided on the 7.0.1 CD and all is well again.

I now have OpenDarwin 7.2.1 running quite well on my Latitude. I was able to successfully compile XFree86 4.4, which is much nicer than running in Darwin’s VESA framebuffer o’ artifacts. My greatest success so far has been to get GNUstep running. It’s not exactly an easy task. I had to compile GCC 3.3.4 and use it instead of Apple’s provided GCC 3.3. After wading through the documentation, I was treated to a working installation of GNUstep. I have WindowMaker running as well. My goal at present is to get more GNUstep applications to compile and run. I have successfully managed to compile ProjectCenter and GNUMail, but neither will run, complaining about bundles not existing. The bundles do in fact exist, so I clearly have some work to do there.

The fascinating part of GNUstep is that it is based upon the NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP architecture, which has become Mac OS X/Cocoa today. My goal is to create a system which resembles my Mac OS X system as closely as possible on x86 hardware. Using the GNUstep framework, it is possible to port Mac OS X/Cocoa applications to Darwin x86/GNUstep. I find this possibility very interesting. I know that I may not have the time or continuing interest to achieve this goal, but perhaps I can share some of my efforts here and inspire others to do the same.

The best part of the 7.2.1 release? The bootsplash screen is exactly the same as that on Mac OS X. When booting, you are greeted with the gray screen with the Apple logo and spinning progress indicator below. It’s marvelous.

I continue to enjoy playing with OpenDarwin. I’ve now created a startup script for xdm and added it to the SystemStarter. My system now boots directly into the xdm login display from the Apple logo bootsplash screen. Now, the xdm display is absolutely ugly. I have tried to no avail to modify the appearance of xdm. No amount of persuasion seems to make xdm use the Xresources or Xsetup files. As xdm has it’s limitations, I would like to use kdm or gdm. I am having difficulty getting either to compile, however. My GNUstep installation is running quite well, however, and aside from not having Mozilla or Firefox, this is shaping up to be a pretty useful OS.

Okay, I recently purchased a new IIsi motherboard for cheap on ebay and tried my clock chipping procedure all over again, this time being extra careful. When I was done, I was greeted with a successful boot in Mac OS 7.5.5! Now, I haven’t yet been able to find a utility that can confirm that I am in fact running at 25Mhz, but I definitely now have a 50Mhz oscillator in the machine and the machine works very well. The IIsi seems maybe slightly faster, though it is hard to tell at those speeds. Whatever the case, I still feel cool. :)