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15 August 2002 - OK, so I do not have enough to worry about, with Hillary molting for the first time in a year -- which means she is getting BIGGER!
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The new, larger Hillary is on the left -- she still has a part of her old head-top (carapace) hanging on Notice that her new color is lighter than her old shell she spun a web over the small pebbles on the bottom of her tank in the area where she molted; she does not usually spin a web this extensive For more details about this baby, go to
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I was using OS9.2.2 and was sort of experimenting with the OSX startup folder on the hard drive of the Cube. What I wanted to do was to completely separate the OSX from the OS9.2.2 system folders without having to reformat the hard drive into two volumes. So I just dragged the folder onto the desktop. Later, when I had some time, I would reformat the HD.
OK, so when I go to the startup disk control panels, both are still in there, albeit located now on different parts of the HD.
I kept doing stuff on the puter and was logged on to AOL, when all of a sudden AOL quits and I get a message to RESTART, which I do. It happens every so often, and as a matter of fact my little experiment was to see if these anomalies are possibly due to AOL or perhaps to the ingrained octopus-like networking structure of OSX.
It restarts -- the usual startup sound -- the cutesy smiley face icon appears -- but also the happily spinning beach ball! Hey, I was in OS9.2.2 -- why should OSX suddenly become the startup preference? Unless having placed the OSX system folder on the desktop made it the first accessible thing the puter latched onto when restarting??
OK, not a problem, I can deal with starting up in OSX. It is way kewl, but I need more practice using it before I make it my OS of choice.
All of a sudden the friendly smiling face is overwritten by something I had not seen in ages! The classical white letters on a black background of the early days of computers/programming! What a delight -- I must have contacted the virtual puter spirits somehow to tell them that I can not wait to try that UNIX Terminal to see what it does and all -- and they obliged me with some kewl personal message. Let me see what they have to tell me..........
OMG! The first line was a complete shocker!
panic(cpu0): Unable to find driver for this platform: "PowerMac5.1".
HOLY SHIT! This must be what a PANIC ATTACK looks like! WAY KEWL -- ehhhhhhhh -- now what do I do? The cursor is nowhere to be seen -- I assume the screen is frozen. ummmmmmmmm -- I can not take a screen shot, so I try the next best thing -- use the Nikon to take a photo, and the one below is the best of the 4 which I took --
Hehe -- at least the last line has to be a note from the hung programmer when he wrote the program -- panic: We are hanging here...
OK, let me try to locate the original startup disk. Found it and put it in the slot.
I manually restarted the thing, holding down the C key -- and it booted in OS9.0 -- everything looks normal thus far. OK, now let me see what I can do. I dragged and dropped the OSX startup folder back into the HD -- that should do it I guess. Clicked to restart again, holding down the mouse to get the startup CD to eject when the screen lights up again.
Oh, great, startup disk pops up -- the screen is now back where I started -- in OS9.2.2. End of panic attack -- this time! Everything seems to work normally, so I assume that the PA occurred because I was dumb enough to put that OSX folder on the desktop. Had it occurred in a perfectly functioning OSX, I think there is another way of handling it, but since I never had the pleasure of having one happen before, I guess I had better read up on what to do -- just in case. Hey, and it may bring back some of my past progamming skills, which I always found completely logical and more or less easy to work with if one takes their time and does not get distracted while writing code -- my experience was in FORTRAN, which is supposed to be more intuitive to a logical mind than some other platforms. I assume that the language of the panic message was compiled in some form of UNIX code, although I have never seen any (except snippets of it in some books I have) and, thus, cannot be sure.
Checking out some of the stuff on that screen photo, one can notice a date in September of 2001 and times in PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) which suggests that the original program was written perhaps on the west coast, on a Sunday afternoon after 3pm, and from the hung thing, probably by a male who was lonely because he had to advertise his specs in a stupid program and worked on a normal day off -- maybe the weather was bad that day?
The Darwin Kernal, v1.4 is involved (in the search for the problem encountered ??), and no debugger was found (and perhaps not used/programmed -- which was a slight surprise). The program seemed to do a stack backtrace and then checked the exception chain, check for a debugger, then do another backtrace/exception chain thing before giving up and just hanging there! Stacks suggest that the program info was organized on HyperCards, which are sort of virtual index card files for executing links from one routine to another, among other things. I asume that the placing of the OSX folder on my desktop was not one of the things that occurred to the programmer as a potential nono -- or maybe it was?
I would have to check each of the instructions in the coding to figure that out, but they are all hidden files -- which is not really a problem because they can be made visible. I did notice that Perl and Apache designations were used for hidden files/folders done on that date, but I have never used Perl scripting, and Apache probably refers to the server they used. I also noticed a reference to a UNIX keyboard. Does that mean that there are different specialized keyboards for scripters? That is almost logical because they could be designed to make the run-of-the-mill programming tasks easier and faster to execute.
The number groups must refer to chains of UNIX (or other) code, and if they refer to routines/subroutines, as numbers identify them in FORTRAN, the coding must be zillions of lines long -- just guessing here! It has been a long time since I did any programming, but somehow I almost think I could get out the template for a flowchart, the coding paper that sort of looks like graph paper, and start almost immediately where I left off in 1982 when I was a FORTRAN programmer trainee for six months with the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
This was such a fun thang! Now I can be included among the happy bunch of users who have actually experienced a kernal panic! I highly recommend the thrill to everyone.
My analysis of the panic screen is simply based on my previous programming experience which was not, relatively, all that extensive -- and what logic I could conjure up while reading it, and some of my observations may be off-the-wall. Any reader with more real understanding of these things (and some free time) might want to email me at the link below to correct/enhance my notes.
Hey, I just REchecked my curriculum vitae, and I took a graduate course in FORTRAN in 1974 -- although I used FORTRAN in published research as early as 1965! I must be slightly older than I sometimes feel!
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