I borked my xorg settings a few days ago when I upgraded the radeon driver. At
first, only my mouse wasn't working -- the cursor didn't even show up -- but
then when I apt-get upgraded, attempting to fix that, it became worse, and
startx locked up the system hard, forcing a powerdown in order to
regain control. Just now thought of what to do; renamed xorg.conf to xorg.conf.disabled, and let xorg decide the config. This never used to work, but it's
working now!
And on awakening a few minutes ago I figured out the problem with my bootstrap code. I was using the trap flag to monitor progress, dumping out several registers on the screen. But I had already switched to unreal mode for the ES segment register, which meant that the dump routine had to take that into account, or avoid using ES altogether (so forget STOS and MOVS). Or I can just turn off the trap flag during that part of the execution, but I'd rather not. At least I can figure out my options now; for days I've been blinded to the real cause of the spontaneous reboots.
Now to the dream that woke me up (in addition to the need to pee)... I was with Bob Dylan (only he looked and talked like Al Pacino) on a college green somewhere in one of my usual dreamworlds, I think it's the one with a high cliff on one side of it, and a hidden river you need to go through some strange series of tunnels or old mine shafts to get to... but anyway, Dylan was explaining to some younger people about a book. I saw the book, and I or my dreamself recognized it (but I can't remember anything about it now except it had some stones arranged on top of it in a square or circular shape), and I commented to him that I had seen that about 35 years ago, in similar circumstances, at Worcester Tech, and that he was there then also (although in the realworld, I don't believe he was, at least I don't remember it). He reminisced with me momentarily, but then he started talking about how he had just threatened a bank teller; and suddenly he started swinging some kind of nonlethal weapon, laser or mace or something, around, pointing at different people. The crowd started chanting something like "if he [something something] jump him", and I hollered from the back, "if you jump him, don't hurt him" in the same cadence, and the chanters took it up. So I assume they jumped him but didn't hurt him; meanwhile I was in some concrete underground parking lot where two buses were trying to fit, going in different directions. The one entering backwards, who normally waited for the other one to finish backing up into his slot, wigged out, backed into the other bus, and was pushing it laterally along the paved surface. As the driver was crushing the first bus against the back wall, I was running out of space, and barely managed to squeeze between the steps of some stored bleachers just in time to avoid being crushed myself. That's when I woke up. Weird shit.
I'm going back to sleep now, or at least try, Yoda be damned. Just had to share that with ya.
last updated 2011-09-08 07:59:35. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com