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Linux Software

Panicking In Morse Code 218

Posted by CmdrTaco from the dit-dit-dit-dot-dot-dot-dit-dit-dit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When an i386 running Linux panics, a function in the kernel called 'panic_blink' causes the system's LEDs to blink. Andrew Rodland recently posted a creative patch to turn that steady blink into a useful message in morse code!"
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Panicking In Morse Code More

Panicking In Morse Code

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  • Reminds me of what the internet was like back in 1968. [lostbrain.com]

    Note: this is a parody.
    tcd004
  • When my system says "Someone set up us the bomb!" in morse code when my harddrive failes! ;)

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Joy... (Score:2)

    by larien ( 5608 )
    10 comments and the site's down. Did anyone grab a copy before we killed the site?

  • Hah! (Score:1)

    by Rgb465 ( 325668 )
    The storys only been up a few minutes, and its already been slashdotted..
  • on the SE or SE30 (SE i think), when there is a hard drive problem, the drive light blinks SOS...the 'O' is a little drawn out, but it's readable.
  • Server /.'ed in morse code
  • Down already...
    Quickly! Someone translate the blinking lights on the box and post the story for us!!!

  • This reminds me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Teknogeek ( 542311 ) <technogeekNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:20PM (#3923296) Journal
    ...of Wolfenstein 3D.

    If you translated the beeping in various levels of the third episode, it was a message in Morse Code telling you to defeat Hitler!
  • From the article:
    Actually, it was pretty simple. It was also my first module ever. I had a lot of fun writing all of this stuff, but people keep indicating that maybe some of it could actually be useful. If that's the case, so much the better.
    Reminds me of a quote I read not too long ago. I don't remember the source. It might have even been Slashdot. "Coding is like sex. Occasionally something good results, but that's not why we do it."
  • Want to impress ME?

    Use the LED's on your laptop to give yourself the output of your decrypting of your grandfather's 45 year old messages about the location of secret Nazi/Japanese gold caches in the Philipines, while you are being Van-Eck phreaked in a jail cell.

    Extra bonus: Doing all this while next door to a priest who is intimidating you from "getting the job done".

    -Donut

  • Uhm? (Score:1)

    by NWT ( 540003 )
    ... Linux panics
    WHAT? Oh bloody hell, Linux actually panics??? Someone shoot me ...
  • Personally I've run into 1 kernel panic in the 3 years i've been running linux. and it was my fault. Now if someone could create a patch for xp, i'd be much more likely to see this morse code stuff =)

    Logik

  • I can just imagine (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:25PM (#3923316) Journal
    The variety of panic messages beyond the usual meaningful information

    I can't do that dave

    I'm melting ....

    beam me up, scotty

    feed me

    I wonder if there is a morse code to voice coverter device out there? that would be a neat module to have to plug in as a peripheral

    of course, if the code goes fast enough, you can gain the ability to recognise whole words as a sort of warble.

    • I'm sure something like that could be done with Festival [ed.ac.uk], a free open source TTS app... sounds like fun! Then again, if your kernel is borked... :-D
      • Actually, this would be a good idea. The keyboard's LED, if it is red, might be close enough to the infrared spectrum to be noticed by the irda ports many notebooks have. Well, patch the keyboard panic patch with the tcp stack, write a decoder that will receive the slow tcp serial stream, and cross your fingers that portion of the kernel is not b0rked, and you can be sending packets over the keyboard link.

        Well, it wouldn't be a fast link. But the possibilies could include telneting... oh I'll stop there...
    • feed me

      You keep forgetting that a lot of these panicks happen because of updated software. That's why I personally want my kernel to say:

      Who poisoned the freshmeat kernel patch section?

      Now if I can get a sound clip of Tom Hanks saying that, I'm set.

  • Standard for diaganostics would be better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rob.Mathers ( 527086 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:25PM (#3923318) Homepage
    Although this is a neat and creative idea, I think that a better way to diagnose a sick computer would be a standard for a set of diagnostic LEDs or even a small LCD panel as part of the next motherboard standard.
    Some manufacturers of motherboards and whole systems already do this, but it's far from standard, and is typically only useful for POST errors. A full standard would allow O/Ses, as well as the BIOS to access the output device (be it LEDs or an LCD) and display a standard code for whatever the error is, which the user could then look up in the manual, or on the web.
    • Yep, it's on the back of my Dell Dimension.
    • This is a great idea, and would be fairly cheap to add to computers I'd imagine. I don't know about other machines, but the AS/400 has a little display on the front that can post error codes during an IPL (basically a boot) and also has a status counter because it takes so freakin long to get going on some of those boxes. And even if it only worked for POST that wouldn't be bad either... I mean really, trying to decide if the beep is 4 short 1 long 2 short or 2 short 1 long 4 short isn't exactly easy!

      • Re:Standard for diaganostics would be better (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well PC BIOS's ouput to a certain port a number indicating where in the boot process the BIOS is before initiallizing the display adapter.

        If your PC has an ISA slot you can get a card which displays the diagnostic progress code on a little 2 digit led display.
    • At least on a bunch of the HP Netserver models we've used - LX Pro, LH3, LH4, etc. They seemed to have dropped it on the smaller 2U and 1U models like the 1000 and 2000 due to lack of space or something.

      It's too bad there's not a standardized motherboard resource (built-in PCI device, etc)for LCD displays like this; OS and app vendors would then be able to utilize it out of the box.

      The idiotic thing is the displays on our LH3s and LH4s didn't show much and were useless, even with the "interactive" buttons that let you cruise around like on a printer. If they could display system load, temperature, yadda yadda they would be be much more useful.

      Of course we know the logical conclusion to LCD displays on the front of computers -- someobody will have to have a full-blown 6" color LCD display on the front of the machine...

    • One of the cool things about Cobalt RaQ servers [cobalt.com] is the LCD on the front panel. There's a simple driver control program that can be used to spit out the text (or bit-graphics, apparently).

      We have about 120 of these in our data center and we tech occasionally play practical jokes on or leave messages for one another on them. =)

      • Someone gave me a RaQ4 because his house power was too flaky and the box kept rebooting.

        Well after bringing it home and reloading it from the "network gold disk" I started using it. After a short while, the box became very slow to respond. The load had gone up to 33 (yes, the O'Reilly Performance Tuning book says the load shouldn't go over 2.0 x the CPU count -- this went up to 33 on idle). It was the damn LCD control app. Once I chmodded it to -x, the load hasn't gone over 0.02 in over a year. Of course the LCD is useless now, but its better than having the whole server useless.

        I brought it up to my friend (who was managing about 800 of the bastards at an ISP) and he replied, "oh, no wonder the damn things are so freaking slow".

        So, lately I've been reading up on the System Installation Suite [sourceforge.net] so that I can setup my own tftp server-based install of Debian. If you also anticipate Sun dropping support for these bad boys, you may want to look into it too. It would be nice to have the box feel like a normal one and who knows, maybe the lcdproc isn't such a resource hog now. Maybe the market will be flooded with them once they're abandoned, and SISuite will breathe new life into them.
    • It is an optical diagnostic port. You just don't know it yet. If you don't know Morse code, never fear. Hook up a phototransistor to the DTR line on a RS232 port of a laptop or PC and run any readily avaliable Morse reader freeware/shareware. You now have a non-contact diagnostics scanner to display the code. You may want to enlist the aid of a hardware type to build the RS232 optical pickup. It is a minimal hardware and software solution to not knowing Morse code. This is fully compatible with all the existing hardware and does not require new hardware.

    • A full standard would allow O/Ses, as well as the BIOS to access the output device (be it LEDs or an LCD) and display a standard code for whatever the error is, which the user could then look up in the manual, or on the web.

      Hmm...imagine the abuses this could be subject to if it became standard. Banner ads in your browser would fight each other to display a message on the LCD (or LED, or whatever) output device...

      Good thing that wouldn't be a problem in Linux, only in Windows...

    • IBM RS/6000 AIX servers have a feature like this.

      They actually define codes for every hardware initialization technique and server OS startup routines.

      If some setting is mucked up in the network startup script, the LED has a code for that. If your SCSI bus is screwed, ther's a code for that too.

      The only problem is the machines take 15 minutes to boot and the codes vary between models, so you need to leave a manual with the LCD codes in your computer room!
    • I administrate a bunch of IBM's AIX boxes and they have this. A nice little LED that handles POST sequence and error conditions.

      Oh yeah, and you can log on and put up your own numbers, to find it physically in crowded data centers. 8)

      =Blue(23)
  • So, instead of one loooong signal it will send:

    ... --- ...

    The Morse Code Alphabet [demon.co.uk]

  • Doesn't seem /.ed to me here's the text (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Linux: Panicking In Morse Code Submitted by Jeremy on Saturday, July 20, 2002 - 08:12

    Digging through the source code of a recent kernel, in the file 'linux/drivers/char/pc_keyb.c', above the definition for the function 'panic_blink', one reads the following comment: /* Tell the user who may be running in X and not see the console that we have
    panic'ed. This is to distingush panics from "real" lockups.
    Could in theory send the panic message as morse, but that is left as an
    exercise for the reader. */

    Andrew Rodland stumbled across this comment, and as he explains, "not being the kind to step down from a challenge (unless it's just really hard), I decided to write morse code output code." His patch against Linux kernel version 2.4.19-rc1-ac1 (plus preempt) actually modifies the kernel to report a panic in morse code! Andrew also submitted a small sample module for generating test panics.
    From: Andrew Rodland
    To: linux-kernel AT vger.kernel.org
    Subject: [PATCH -ac] Panicking in morse code
    Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 01:13:00 -0400

    No, it's not 1 April.

    I was researching panic_blink() for someone who needed a little help,
    when I noticed the comment above the function definition, not being the
    kind to step down from a challenge (unless it's just really hard), I
    decided to write morse code output code.

    The option panicblink= has been hijacked to be a simple bitfield:
    bit 1 : blink LEDs
    bit 2 : sound the PC speaker.

    the blinking option depends only on pc_keyb.c. the pcspeaker option
    depends on kb_mksound() actually doing something. At the moment, both of
    these mean i386. The call to panic_blink() in panic() is still guarded
    by an i386 #ifdef, anyway, for the moment. The default is to blink only,
    because I figured the beeps would be too annoying. Opinions?

    It recognizes letters, and digits, and treats everything else as a
    space. The timings are tunable by #defines. It repeats the message
    indefinitely. And it should only bloat the kernel by a few hundred
    bytes, although if someone wants to wrap this in its own config option,
    well, that's good too.

    Anyway, here's the patch. It's against linux-2.4.19-rc1-ac1+preempt, but
    I suspect it applies against all recent -ac. If 2.5 has this, it will
    hopefully apply with some fuzz against that, too. I don't have a tree.

  • Here is what it says... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kenthorvath ( 225950 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:30PM (#3923342)
    Three dits!

    Four dits!

    Two dits!

    Dah!

    Windows! Windows! Rah Rah Rah!

  • ...to bring Linux on the Desktop

    Really

  • Perhaps a more useful hack would have been to have the blinky lights signal SOS when a server is being slashdotted. They could have checked it out when submitting this story.

    Here's some more ideas:

    1. Blinky lights go crazy when portsentry reports block yet another attempt at port 80 (best learn how to replace worn out blinky lights first);

    2. Blinky lights make pretty patterns depending on up time of machine (Oops, now I'm flamebait since Windows users will never see pretty blinky lights);

    3. Blinky lights go wild whenever a human female is within 10 feet of machine (unlike the machine's owner who may or may not notice, depending on the task at hand -- oy, did I really say that?);

    I love blinky lights and thank the gods every day that I don't have adverse reactions to them. Now if I can just find a female who doesn't cause adverse reactions, I'm doing good!

  • Winamp plugin (Score:3, Funny)

    by prof187 ( 235849 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:43PM (#3923386) Homepage
    I donwloaded a winamp plugin that would flash the LEDs with the oscilliscope(sp). Anyway, I thought it was pretty neat untill I tried being productive with it turned on. Turns out that it actually just switches the caps/num lock on and off. So in the middle of my text, i'd Get TExt LiKE THIs. It was neat, but annoying if I planned on typing.
    • theres one from mac hack that would make your dock icons bounce up and down in the dock with the music. Unfortunately it rapes the event que, making it difficult to even move the mouse to shut it off. useless but cool.

  • This IS Slashdot, right? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:44PM (#3923389) Homepage
    Just checking. I can't believe no one's mentioned the part in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon [cryptonomicon.com] where Randy "prints" out the "message" (trying to avoid a spoiler) on his laptop's LED.

    Here's [node.to] an LED controller program inspired by that bit in the book.
    • And, by the way, it should be made entirely clear that every human being on the planet should go and read Cryptonomicon. Seriously. If you don't know English, learn it, and then read that book. It's fantastic.

      Just in case anyone here hasn't read it yet and is looking for something to do.

    • Why don't you try reading the thread [slashdot.org], moron. Someone beat you to it, and with a lot more style - moron moderators didn't get it and modded it down.

      (yet another reason for reading at -1)

  • Here's [google.com] a link from the site with the patch and everything.

    Google will also find you morse code tutorials :)

  • Compaq beep of death (Score:5, Funny)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <petedaly@ix[ ]tcom.com ['.ne' in gap]> on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:51PM (#3923415)
    If I didn't know better I'd say that's what Compaq's, or was it old ALRs (remember them?) did when hardware wasn't right.

    A string of varying beeps. This was years ago, don't know if any recent hardware still does it.

    Tech support: Hold the phone close to the system board so I can hear it.

    That was funny.

    -Pete
    • Most BIOS's still do that when they can't start-- you can find BIOS error codes online for most computers, though the beep codes differ between models.

      Nowadays, though, hardware is cheap enough that most people just start swapping out hardware when their computer does something other than the standard short beep on startup.

      Now if we could patch the BIOS's to give errors in Morse code...
      • On my motherboard, ASUS A7V333, which has an integrated sound chipset, it will actually voice speak POST errors either through the sound or PC Speaker. Kindof freaky the first time I heard "Processor Temperature Critical".

        -- iCEBaLM
    • My favorite musical warning was at this ISP I used to work at. We had an old machine that we didn't really do anything with except test out peoples dial-up accounts. One day my coworker was on the phone and the machine next to him starts playing Fur Elise. He panicked and told the customer to hold while he flipped off the computer because the music was a warning that the fan had failed. I was laughing so much. What made it great was when we found microsoft knowledge base articles [216.239.51.100] on it.
    • old ALRs (remember them?)

      Aahhh...I have one sitting in the corner at my $ORK_PLACE. It is made out of a strange material called "metal", if you can believe that.
    • Tech Support: Hold the phone close to the system board so I can hear it.

      It's quite amazing, but not a joke. The beep sound on startup actually tells you what's wrong with the system. If you've picked up any (decent) PC DIY book there should have one section telling you what the beeps mean.

      E.g. One long beep followed by endless short beep is referring to display card problem. I forgot the rest, though.
  • dadadit didadit dit didah dah dadaditditdadah dadahdidit dit didahdit dadadah dadidadit dadadah dadah dadah dit dadit dah dididit didah dahdit dadidit didit dah didadadadadit dididit didah didadidit didadit dit didah dadidit dadidadah dididit didadidit didah dididit didididit dadidit dadadah dah dad dit dadidit didadidadidah

    [translation:

    great, zero comments and it's already slashdotted. ]

    Well, apparently morse code is lame...(stupid lameness filter)

  • Undoubtedly... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mstyne ( 133363 ) <mike@@@alphamonkey...org> on Saturday July 20, 2002 @01:52PM (#3923421) Homepage Journal
    The kerneltrap.org server's led's are furiously flashing:

    [imagine 'slashdotted' in morse here]

    Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
    Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

    Morse != Junk! Damn you lameness filter!!
    • [imagine 'slashdotted' in morse here]

      Why imagine when you can

      dit dit dit, dit daw dit dit, dit daw, dit dit dit, dit dit dit dit, daw dit dit, daw daw daw,
      daw, daw, dit, daw dit dit, daw dit dit dit daw,
  • I remember the Amiga had this along with the "Guru meditation" numbers :)

    *weeps* the memories :'(

  • This is a good page [bobhays.com] for the morse code and common abbreviations used by HAM (amateur radio) operators. You could always have your computer die with QSB? (are my signals fading?)...
  • .- .... .... .... ....

    (Think Kevin from Home Alone panicing.)

    called lame for using lots of caps, so here's a whole sentance without caps. bleh.

    also called lame for excessive junk characters. double bleh.

    also warned because it took less than 20 seconds to post. how many different slashdot errors can one get in a single 2 line post? yeesh.
  • well, i'm not sure how long it'll last, but i thought since it seemed to only work on and off, i made a mirror on a free hosted site, (i'm cheap, i know,) but better than nothin :),

    Http://endlessjourney.netfirms.com

    Reece,

    PS. this is a great idea, all PC's should be able to do morse code :)

  • I would rather have a POST code type system (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @02:06PM (#3923474)
    This does seem somewhat bloated. The article claims it only adds a few hundred bytes, but isn't more specific. The encoding of the letters and numbers in Morse seems wasteful, but it can't be done by five bits in one byte the way Alan Cox suggested, since not all Morse characters are 5 symbols long. There would be space in a byte to store all of this information though if the remaining bits were used to store the number of encoded bits. But the real bloat comes in coding all of the potential panics anywhere they might occur. Overall I think I would prefer a system that simply passed a numeric panic number, much like the BIOS power on self test system beeps to inform a user of what failed. More limited, but reasonable for it's size. Or, if you think like Bill Gates and bloat isn't a promise but rather a blessing, then a nice text to speech system would let the computer say why it panicked.

    As to the question of flashing the LED because Morse on the speaker might be too annoying, I say go for the speaker. Those who do know Morse know it by sound, not by individual dots and dashes, and seeing it on an LED is a very different thing than listening to it. If the system has panicked I'm already annoyed, beeping isn't going to be a problem. Just the opposite, if I'm nearby but not looking at the computer I want the beeping to get my attention to the problem.

    And here's the really stupid question: What is this blinking system LED he's talking about???? I have a power LED on my PC, but it's not software controlled. Some PC's used to have a "turbo" LED, but that's been phased out. I sure hope he's not using the hard disk LED. Is he using a Keyboard LED or am I missing something really obvious here?

    • num lock, cap lock, scroll lock
    • But the real bloat comes in coding all of the potential panics anywhere they might occur.

      Perhaps they should just translate some already-existing characters into morse code. Isn't there usually a text error message associated with the kernel panic? If not that, how about the name of the function which caused the panic?
      • That's exactly what it does. It simply transmits the message that was passed to panic(), after snprintf-expansion.

        As for the parent message, it has two modes of operation, currently, keyboard-LEDs and/or pc-speaker, but the latest version (v3) is potentially compatible with any sort of LED or beeper, if someone writes the code. The beeper, in fact, uses the same beep function as the VC's, which was already set up to be multi-arch-compatible in just that way.

        In other words, yes, I _am_ trying to make this reasonably useful. :)

    • Is he using a Keyboard LED or am I missing something really obvious here?
      Digging through the source code of a recent kernel, in the file 'linux/drivers/char/pc_keyb.c', above the definition for the function 'panic_blink', one reads the following comment:
      I would guess both.
    • The encoding of the letters and numbers in Morse seems wasteful, but it can't be done by five bits in one byte the way Alan Cox suggested, since not all Morse characters are 5 symbols long. There would be space in a byte to store all of this information though if the remaining bits were used to store the number of encoded bits.

      Maybe Alan didn't come up with the optimal scheme this time, but you are way wrong about what's possible. In fact, a variable length string of up to 7 bits can be stored unambiguously in a single byte. See my post [theaimsgroup.com], which explains how the code works. Not my idea by the way, but once somebody points it out to you, it's obvious.
    • Coding all the potential panics? I doubt it. I haven't looked at the system, but the intelligent way to do it would be to translate kernel panic messages one character at a time.
  • As an old army telgraphist and hamradio operator I would prefer morse to be sent via the PC speaker instead of some LED's. A human can attain much higher reception speed by using his eara as opposed to using his eys.

    Since I myself is capable of morse ear reception much faster than normal people are able to speak, I would really like to have a morse interface to my Linux boxes.

    Imagine also to get rid of the keyboard and use a simple morse key as input device. Ahhh nirvana at last. //Pingo

  • I've mirrored the comment page and the patch
    here for your pleasure. [x42.com]

    I remember doing this on a embedded FORTH-system in the 80-ies. The only way to communicate with the board when the RS232 was gone was a little piezo-beeper.

  • A cool and excellent hack! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by farrellj ( 563 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @03:09PM (#3923708) Homepage Journal
    Thanx to the people to worked on it...it is silliness like this that make Linux well worth the effort to learn, understand and play with!

    ttyl
    Farrell

  • backdraft (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @03:31PM (#3923773) Journal
    "Hey, I'm getting a message in morse code. Get my pencil, Let's see:

    e r r o r - i n - m o r s e - c o d e - g e n e r z k b g h i l e r l b v c t q z

    Doh!"

  • We need Sad Mac "chimes of death"... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @03:42PM (#3923827) Homepage

    One of the (many) cool things that differentiate Macs from PC's is the way the report POST failures.

    Depending on if the video driver was sane or not yet, you'd get an infamous "San Mac" display, followed by a few codes in hex describing what was wrong. If not, you'd get POST-coded beeps.

    What was really cool were the "chimes of death". Each Mac model family had a specific sound that played when the POST test failed. These ranged from the opening to the Twilight Zone theme, to a drum crash, to the sound of glass breaking, to a full-on car crash [mackido.com]. (You get get some of them here [mackido.com], but I KNOW there's a more comprehensive list with samples out there somewhere.) :/

    Ahh, memories...

  • PDP-11 Console LEDs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 80N ( 591022 )
    Back in days before PCs the PDP-11 had a row of 16 or so LEDs that showed the state of the processor. When the Operating System was running its idle loop, the creative people from DEC had programmed it so that a repeating pattern was displayed on the LEDs.

    Each Operating System displayed a different pattern, so sometimes you could walk up to a computer and immediately know what OS was running without touching it. This was a very useful skill for impressing the gullable.

    RSTS - displayed a pattern that cycled from left to right.

    DSM - displayed a pattern that went from the sides to the center.

    RSX - I can't remember what this one did, can anyone else recall?

    • Oh, well, if we're going to descend to ancient hardware blinkenlights stories... (which model PDP-11, BTW?)

      The Burroughs B6700 (and similar models) was a 48-bit word (96-bit double) stack oriented mainframe. The main panel had an array of 12 by 16 lights showing the bits in the top two words (double words) in the current stack. At idle, those would light up with the Burroughs "B" logo.

      Of course the challenge was to come up with code that would load those registers with some interesting pattern and keep it there long enough for the operators to notice.
  • I find this idea interesting - especially since only a few of the kernel hackers actually KNOW
    morse code. AC and BP have ham licenses. Don't know about the rest of the hackers..
  • A company in Lynchburg Va has a patent on this. Most likly they don't even know it but their patent on a one wire control system describes a computer sending (and recieving) morse code as well as sending out warnings via morse code. The guy who "invented" it said he didn't even understand what the patent application said and he already had about twenty patents. The patent was supposed to be for using a single wire control system in places where you can't drill holes to run wires but turns out to be a patent on morse code. They guy whos name is on the patent said there was piror art that he knew of involving mechanical devices so its not a major issue but like so many other ideas, in theory you can't sell this one without a license.
  • Many years I had suggested using Morse Code instead of BIOS-beep error codes.

    At the time, there were many different BIOSes out there, with their own different beep-code values. It seemed that morse code was already the most wide-spread binary communication system in use by humans.

    Now, there's really only two BIOS manufactures you'll see out there, and there's an increasing trend of having more advnaced BIOSes (non-Intel systems) which output error messages in different ways, (on-screen, serial cable, etc) which limits the usefullness of that idea today.

    So... Why not do the same thing with Linux? Output to the screen, serial port, or parallel ports (print it out!). If nothing else, it would allow automation of information gathering, rather than requiring someone be right there, to translate the dots and dashes to messages.

  • OT: Cellphones do Morse! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @10:38PM (#3924957) Homepage Journal
    Way OT.. just wanted to say that I wonder how many people are aware that when their cellphones receive a text message and beep loudly with "dit-dit-dit, dah-dah, dit-dit-dit" their cellphones are actually sending "SMS" in morse code -- SMS, "SMS", get it? :)

    I commute in the masses making their way to and through NYC everyday, and I must hear that four times a day on the train.
    • That's one of the four (well, five if you count silence) options that nokia phones have for message recieved tones. (On the 5165, it's the tone called "special")

      The others are "single beep" (easy to guess what that sounds like), "long & loud" (which spells out "connecting people" in morse code - Nokia's slogan) and "standard" (which sounds like "ooo" in morse - nine long beeps in groups of three).
  • For some hardware functions like that. A nice LCD screen, like IBM UNIX boxes have.. so that when your computer hangs for apparently no reason (like mine) you at least have a clue as to why (unlike mine). Just a nice little hex display or something.. *sigh*

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