Tour of Tsue Chong Fortune Cookie and Noodle Factory - Seattle, May 4th, 2017

(from the You Should Try The Unfortune Cookies department)

Hi everyone,

We got a chance to tour the Tsue Chong Fortune Cookie and Noodle factory in Seattle's International District.  They're family owned and have been making noodles for 100 years.

We got up nice and early and lined up outside:

Soon our tour guide arrived.  He gave us a quick history of the company, then led us inside:

He took us to the 3rd floor - apparently it's a bit quieter there.  We started at the place where they make rice noodles and fried chow mein noodles:

After trying a couple fried chow mein samples, we then moved on to the wheat noodle area.  After giving us some sample noodles to munch on, he showed us the machines that cut the noodles and the noodle drying area:

We then moved on to the fortune cookie machines!  They used to make their fortune cookies by hand.  Then - they got nine machines - four of which are working today.  The rest have been cannibalized for parts, since the company that made them is no longer in business.

One of the machines no longer folds the cookies - it just makes round discs.  They call these "unfortune cookies".  They're still quite good!

These machines make one cookie at a time.  They had a newer machine that makes 4 cookies at a time.  You can see it over there:

After trying some fortune cookie samples, our tour was over.  We wandered around the corner to the small factory store:

and bought some cookies and noodles to take home.  Then - we escaped into a beautiful sunny Seattle day!

Dana surprised at the sun, maybe?

This was a fun tour!  And - it was nice visiting a part of Seattle history!

Cheers,
Paul

It's Alive - My Original CompuServe Homepage

(from the Mists of History department)

Hi everyone,

A long time ago, CompuServe provided a homepage service for their members - "Ourworld", they called it.  I used the whopping 5M of space to create a homepage, with all of my interests, my writing samples, my band's page, etc.  It was my little oasis on the web.

Then, in 2009, CompuServe discontinued the service, and deleted all the sites.

Unfortunately, I didn't find out about that until after the fact, when my site was long gone.

For years, I had assumed my old homepage was lost, but poking around the Internet Archive last night, I found it!

Well - most of it, anyway.  There's some missing art, and of course, most of the links are broken.  But - all of the text is there.  And - I might be able to find the missing pieces.  I do have backups of this... somewhere.

So - without further ado, Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 2001-ish, and let's explore:

Paul Pietromonaco's Home Page

Cheers,
Paul

P.S.  There's a good tip for getting your pages back here:  How can I view a page without the Wayback code in it?

Saying "farewell" to a part of Sony history....

(this is adapted from an entry I originally published on the Yellow Dog Linux community forums)


Hi everyone,

Well - it looks like one of PS3 Linux's ancestors is finally calling it a day. Sony is shutting down the PS2 Linux site: http://playstation2-linux.com/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1251

I'm fairly sad to see this go. I contributed many, many PS2 builds of Mozilla, Firefox & Thunderbird to this site. In fact, I attended the Mozilla 1.0 release celebrations, based on my membership there. See here: http://playstation2-linux.com/projects/mozilla-ps2

I learned much about the ways of the Sony from this site. In some ways, what we do with PS3 Linux is based on lessons learned (or unlearned) from PS2 Linux. Much like Yellow Dog Linux, PS2 Linux was also derived from Red Hat Linux, via Kondara Linux. It allowed full access to the PS2's Emotion Engine - including the twin Vector Unit processors. Only the cryptography functions were restricted so that you couldn't copy PS2 games directly.

That website was also the place I met some like-minded PS2 Linux enthusiasts. One of them is now a PS3 Linux moderator with me at the Yellow Dog Linux community forums. We met trying to compile the PS2 version of Firefox with gtk2 and freetype. Good times.

It's worth poking around the site a little bit before they shut it down for good. There's a lot of knowledge locked up in there.

Cheers,
Paul

P.S. For those of you who have never seen the PS2 Linux kit - it was quite impressive. It came with a keyboard, mouse, special network adaptor, hard drive, special VGA cable and two DVDs of source code & binary code. Here's the bundle:

Playstation 3 versus Xbox 360 thoughts...

(from the Endless Arguments department)

Hi everyone,

I sent a friend of mine an e-mail with some thoughts about PS3, Xbox 360 and even PS2 architectures. Just so it doesn't get lost, here it is. Enjoy!

Cheers,
Paul

This might be easier to digest. ^_^

Here's the PS3 final dev kit - the prototype dev kits were much bigger.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/726/726255p1.html

That's a much more manageable size.

The PS3 has 256 megs RAMBUS XDR main memory and 256 megs GDDR3 VRAM GPU memory. However - the GPU can access main memory - apparently up to 440 Megs max. There's probably a speed penalty in that, I'm guessing.

By contrast, the Xbox 360 has a unified memory architecture - 512 Megs of GDDR3 RAM shared between the CPU and GPU.

PS3 has a hyperthreaded PPU (PowerPC) and 7 SPUs - one of which is reserved. This means 2 PPU threads and 6 SPU threads. This means kind of 2-8 threads, at any given time, depending on what you're doing.

The Xbox 360 has 3 cores, hyperthreaded PowerPC. This means 6 full threads - probably faster clock speed than the PPU too. To my way of thinking, these architectures aren't that radically different in terms of performance. Sure - pure Vector math benchmarks may favor the PS3, but real world?

meh.

I don't really see any advantages one way or the other here. In fact, the Sony architecture might annoy standard PC developers, who haven't worked with the PS2 very much. ^_^

I mean - develop an application for the PC - heck let's make it dual core. Now, port it to Xbox 360. Optimize for 6 threads. Runs well. Now, port to PS3. Initially, you're probably running on the PPU - two threads. Performance sucks. (Some companies release it at this point. ^_^) Smart developers start pawning pure math functions off to individual SPUs. They are incredibly fast, but there's only so much pure math you can do on them. Performance basically equals Xbox 360, if you optimize enough. Hair is pulled out constantly.

Alternatively - do PS3 dev first. Run great. All math functions designed to run independently on SPUs - advanced physics included. Port to XBox 360. Performance sucks. Now start consolidating SPU functions as independent threads and take advantage of the triple core. Performance basically equals PS3, with possibly simplified math approximations - which you don't notice on an HDTV anyway.

This is what I'm seeing in the real world based on the available games.

For example, I've been playing games developed on the PC/Xbox first. Best example of this is The Orange Box. Most of the time, it's fine. Sometimes, though, it slows down terribly. Valve didn't want to do the PS3 port at all - they handed it off to EA UK. Now, patches are on their way.

On the other hand, I have the Burnout Paradise demo. It was originally developed on the PS3 and ported to Xbox 360. It looks stunning on the PS3, but word on the street is that the Xbox 360 version looks great too.

I don't think you're gonna see any big differences between the two until developers abandon DX9/DX10 architecture, and start thinking outside the box. You'll see start to see radical games like this from established PS2 companies like Insomniac and Naughty Dog, since they don't do any DX9/DX10 architecture, and understand the Vector Unit concept.

There are several groovy things that you can do with the PS3 architecture. Remember that, unlike the PS2 which had no GPU, the PS3 has the RSX - which is an nVidia 7800 equivalent - for its GPU. You can feed the pixel and vertex shader pipelines in the RSX from the SPUs directly. Now we're starting to talk - write physics and AI code on the SPUs, and then send it to the RSX's pixel and vertex shaders. No main CPU (PPU) overhead. Or - use full motion HD video on surfaces, courtesy of the SPU. Apparently, one or two SPUs can decode h.264 video streams at HD resolution.

By the way - that's the reason that everyone is having such trouble emulating the PS2. The GS chip in the PS2 is not a GPU - it's a frame buffer manager/compositor. The GS writes to video buffer memory using a 2560 bit wide pipeline - using low latency DRAM!!! This is crazy talk. The GS has 1024 write bits, 1024 read bits and 512 read/write bits, even though it's only 4 megs! No current graphic card uses this kind of craziness. The PS2 doesn't really use pixel or vertex shaders - it uses one of its vector units in a pure "read the frame buffer, do some crazy math on it, and write the frame buffer back" kind of a way, thanks to its huge pipeline. The EE
is pretty straightforward - it's a MIPS core with two vector units. A dual-core Intel can simulate it rather well - or a Cell for that matter.

Which is exactly what the 80 gig PS3s do - emulate the EE with the Cell. But - the 80 gig PS3 still has a GS in silicon. That's what Sony removed from the 40 gig unit, and why it can't run PS2 games. The original 20 and 60 gig PS3s have a PS2 EE+GS in silicon. All PS1 games are done with full software emulation on all PS3 consoles.

I've often wondered if the PS3 was seriously gimped during the design phase. The initial PS3 designed seemed more PS2 like - they were prototyping with a twin Cell system - and each Cell had 8 SPUs, not 7. Add a crazy, hi-def GS-like chip, and now we're talking. Sony designers claimed that the second Cell didn't add anything to the performace, but I wonder. Grafting a stock nVidia GPU into this architecture seems like changing out a sports car's wheels for a Humvee's. They're nice wheels, and have some great features - but they really shouldn't be on there. Sony's teams may have caved to pressure from folks like Epic (unreal engine) who now use a lot of Pixel and Vertex shaders on the GPU. They may have freaked out if they had heard that Sony was about to release another console without a GPU.

Hmm - that's a lot to think about. ^_^

Jobs Offers Apple Lisa Early Adopters Store Credit

(from the If it's too good to be true...it probably is department)

Hi everyone,

A friend sent me this tongue-in-cheek post this morning. Made me laugh:

Jobs Offers Apple Lisa Early Adopters Store Credit

Cheers,
Paul

P.S. If you don't know what I'm talking about:
Steve Jobs gives all iPhone owners $100 back

More about the Original Adventure source code

(from the YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD department)

Hi everyone,

You might have seen this posting on Slashdot (or in my RSS headlines) about the original FORTRAN Adventure source code being found in an archive.

Originally written by Will Crowther, Adventure was the first text adventure game. Most people are familiar with a subsequent version that was expanded and edited by Don Woods.

Long thought lost, Crowther's original source code has been located in a backup of Don Woods' Standford student account from 1977.

Matthew T. Russotto has already translated the PDP FORTRAN to g77 (GNU FORTRAN 77) - which means that most modern gcc installations should be able to compile it.

He has a link here: http://www.russotto.net/~russotto/ADVENT/

I've gone ahead and compiled it on my PlayStation 2 Linux box (mips binary) - and on my laptop under Cygwin (x86 binary). I've never used GNU FORTRAN before - very interesting. I might have to peep the source code a bit - last time I used FORTRAN was in 1983 in college.

In the meantime,

$ ./advf4-11.exe
PAUSE  INIT DONE statement executed
To resume execution, type go.  Other input will terminate the job.
go
Execution resumes after PAUSE.
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!!  WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

yes
SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND
FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED
THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID
TO WORK IN THE CAVE.  I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT
ME WITH COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS.
(ERRORS, SUGGESTIONS, COMPLAINTS TO CROWTHER)
(IF STUCK TYPE HELP FOR SOME HINTS)

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK
BUILDING . AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL
STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.

go east
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.
THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.
THERE IS FOOD HERE.
THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

Cheers,
Paul

Anime list from 2003

(from the Invest in CDs? I Thought You Said DVDs! department)

Hi everyone,

When I moved into my new house, I had to pack up a lot of stuff that I had accumulated in 12 years of living in the same apartment. There wasn't time to deal with all of my stuff, so we just left it in the moving boxes in the new basement, thinking we'd deal with it shortly. Two years later, most of my stuff is still in these boxes - including my original webserver for Weasel-bot.com. (Frighteningly, it's a Japanese NEC PC-9821 running Win 95!)

I made the switch to a new webserver to save energy, and I still haven't migrated all of the old data over. (Frighteningly, the new server is a PlayStation 2 running Linux!) Most of the data is pretty useless anyway - the domain has always been more of a hobby than an ongoing concern - but I've restored one webpage that's really cool.

At one point, in 2003, I went thru all of my anime DVDs and came up with a master list. I still haven't turned on that computer - but it turns out that the internet Wayback Machine had archived the list.

I now present it to you, for your shock and amazement: Paul's Anime List

The sad thing? That's from 2003! It has none of the anime I've purchased on DVD since then.

Cheers,
Paul