Re: [PATCH] Experimental IDE oops dumper v0.1

[jbradford@dial.pipex.com]

> > Talking about dumping oopsen, would there be any usefulness in outputting
> > crash data to the PC speaker, using a slow, (~300 bps) modulation that
> > would survive being captured on a cassette using a walkman with a
> > microphone, then decoded using a userspace program from a sampled .au file?
> 
> This is easier and less error-prone than copying the oops down by hand?

Well, it is easy to make a mistake writing it down...

> I remember using 300 bps.  On a closed electrical circuit without acoustic 
> couplers, you still got line noise.  Acoustic couplers put the speaker and 
> microphone right on top of each other and surrounded them with a muffler to 
> try to minimize ambient noise from the room...

WHAT?  I have captured 1200/75 'prestel' style modem communications on tape, and played them back through a speaker, in to a phone handset, and had them faithfully reproduced on a terminal.  Having said that, trying to use a 300 bps accustic coupler with a GSM phone wasn't successful, because you get some kind of inductive interference from the phone.

> > Just thought it might be easily implementable, as it doesn't have any
> > pre-requisits, (other than having a PC speaker, which *almost* everybody
> > has).
> 
> Not everybody has a tape recorder, though.
> 
> And the -ac branch already does output in morse code.  Try taping that and 
> writing a user mode interpreter for it, if you like...

Hmmm, that might be worth doing, because it gives you a way to automatically recover the data, rather than typing it in again, (which is prone to errors).

John.