test-drb July 2010

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

162 participants
213 discussions

Before the iPad, there was the Newton • The Register

by woyciesjes＠sbcglobal.net

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/26/newton_messagepad_120/ -- --- Dave Woyciesjes --- ICQ# 905818 --- AIM - woyciesjes --- CompTIA A+ Certified IT Tech - http://certification.comptia.org/ --- HDI Certified Support Center Analyst - http://www.ThinkHDI.com/ Registered Linux user number 464583 "From there to here, From here to there, Funny things are everywhere." --- Dr. Seuss

13 years, 9 months

old transistor datasheets

by dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu

Does anyone here have PDF datasheets for Motorola mpsu05 and mpsu55 transistors? -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

13 years, 9 months

OT? Scrapping electrionics (was Lot of PDP-11/84 on ebay in Boston)

by kelly＠catcorner.org

>>> In North West New Jersey scrap high density circuit boards are $0.70 >>> per pound. Steel is about $200 per ton. >> >> After processing fees, I got $3.40/lb for my last load of junk (which >> was based on the actual content). Whoever is paying $0.70 is making a >> boatload of money. >> >> Pat >> > >I got about $1.50 a lb for circuit boards a few weeks back (stuff that was >under 5 years old). The older boards (80's or earlier) should be worth much >more. I hate the thought of scrapping, but my basement was full of old systems that I couldn't give away. So I've been trying to find an inexpensive means of doing so. Either New Jersey is special or I'm asking the wrong people. Most places CHARGE to take populated circut boards here. These are PII and PIII motherboards without CPU. Some even require special universal waste forms, fees and tracking be used. The highest quote I've gotten is paying $0.70 per pound (down 0.05). The lowest that has quoted so far charges $5.00 per pound for motherboards and $10 per monitor. I'd love to find someone paying $1.50 per pound. I've tried all my google-fu and can't find anyone. Here is the site with the highest rate so far: www.rockawayrecycling.com Kelly

13 years, 9 months

wild and wooly Canon Cat prototype on eBay

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

http://cgi.ebay.com/Collectible-Swyft-prototype-Canon-Cat-Works-clean-/1705… item #170516611792 for those that hate me for posting eBay auctions...stop hating, stop guzzling the haterade. Bye bye.

13 years, 9 months

X from a distance (was Re: Colour Digital Logo on DECwindows Login)

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

On 7/28/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: > ... heaven help you if you > try to run an X client from a few hundred network-milliseconds away. I > regularly run X clients in Wisconsin and display them in Florida... I used to occasionally run X clients in Wisconsin and display them at Pole via ~1mbps sat link (1200-1600ms RTT). It was painful but it would usually (eventually) work. -ethan

13 years, 9 months

Colour Digital Logo on DECwindows Login

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On 7/28/10 4:24 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote: > Well I definitely know very little when it comes to X. I don't have xdpyinfo > as far as I know (it seems to be a Unix thing, I am running VMS 5.4). Ahh, for some reason I assumed you were running Ultrix. The xdpyinfo program is a fairly standard part of the X distributions, though, and it's likely there somewhere. > Exceed offers the following settings for the server visual: > > Auto Select > GrayScale > PseudoColor > StaticColor > StaticGray > StaticGray (Depth 1) > TrueColor Ok, that's a good selection that should support pretty much any client. > I got Exceed to create a trace file, this is what it showed after I started > the login program: ... > Cannot find color 'decwblue' Ah-HA! > Clearly that last entry is of some significance! I found a definition of > decwblue and added it to the Exceed rgb.txt file. With that I got a colour > logo. Excellent! Good sleuthing! > However I still get a horrible fine-grained black and white pattern > for the background, rather than a smooth colour as shown here: > http://toastytech.com/guis/DWlogin.gif. It is the background you get when > you start the X server and before a client has connected. There don't seem > to be any errors related to that though. Yes, that's the default X backround pattern. The default background for xdm should be settable in its resources via its app-defaults file. But...does DECwindows use something other than ordinary xdm by default? Do SHOW PROCESS and find out; I don't recall. > There is also an error in the log above reading a font, is the font supposed > to be on the X server or downloaded from the client? Standard X fonts reside on the server. I say "standard X fonts" because there's a trend in current X development to do font handling on the client side. That won't be happening here, though. > After I got the colour logo, I then logged in and got some other errors in > the log too: > > 3 > OpenFont: decw$cursor > 3 < C:\Program > Files\Hummingbird\Connectivity\11.00\Exceed\Font\misc\deccurs.wff > > Warning: Access refused on ChangeHosts request based on security setting in > Xconfig. > > Warning: Access refused on ChangeHosts request based on security setting in > Xconfig. > Connection read error at 144525 > > Not sure what ChangeHosts means and what the implications are. I'm not sure what that is either; I've never seen a message like that. I'm betting it's Exceed-specific. > Anyway I have some colour now and it looks more like I would like it. Excellent! -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

13 years, 9 months

Osborne HD distro floppy?

by cclist＠sydex.com

I've been asked by a collector not on this list if anyone has a copy of the floppy " "Drive C for the Osborne Computer" kicking around. Let me know and I'll pass it on. Thanks, Chuck

13 years, 9 months

M68000 ASM to machine code table

by aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk

Hi, I am attempting to create an assembler to machine code table, something along the lines of: move.l a3,$12345678 -> $23 $CB $12 $34 $56 $78 Has anyone already done this? I don't mind whether the machine code is referenced in hexadecimal, octal or binary. I just need this to help me out with something - I have tried some disassemblers, but since they often (always?) turn data/text into ASM instructions and create false jumps etc. I am attempting to do it by hand. But before I can do that, I of course need the machine code references to start with! Failing that I will just have to create it myself - I have started, but having realised the number of possibilities for just the move.l instruction I feel that this could be another long project.... Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

13 years, 9 months

Colour Digital Logo on DECwindows Login

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On 7/27/10 6:09 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote: > I would agree that it sounds odd, but the person telling me knows his stuff > and this has been his experience. I'm sorry for how terrible this will sound, but I don't know how else to say it...Where X is concerned, I know my stuff as well, and it really doesn't sound like your friend does. I mean no disrespect either to you or to him by that statement. I have an X11 window directly to the right of the window I'm typing this message in, it's showing colors, and it's being displayed here from another system on the network. I run like this all day, every day. I'm not running Exceed, but a different (current technology) X server, but the concepts and protocol are the same. > I suspect the SHM thing could be why it works on a real workstation, Nope. SHM (more properly "MIT-SHM") is only used for images. (XImage objects in particular, and sometimes pixmaps) Background colors or drawn objects don't use SHM. It's used where image transfer speed is important, like video and animations. > or perhaps it is some DEC-specific thing? Nope. I've run color X terminals (which is essentially what you're doing with Exceed) from DEC X implementations, and they work fine. This is where it call came from, after all: DEC was a member of MIT's Project Athena, where X originated. I've never seen anything DEC specific there with the exception of DDX (device-dependent) code and their window manager. The former is almost by definition vendor-specific, and the latter is too, but perhaps less so depending on your point of view. Some background: An X client program (which includes your login window, it's an X client too) initiates a connection to the X server and does a few things, including optionally making a call to XGetVisualInfo() to get the list of "visuals" that the server supports. A "visual" is basically a target display type that specifies the color depth of the display, and might be something like "monochrome", "8-bit greyscale", "8-bit pseudocolor", "true color", etc. Most X servers support many different visuals simultaneously. The X client then selects the visual it wants to use. (a note for the pedantic: yes, I've skipped many Xlib calls and details here for brevity) It's possible that Exceed does not have any color visuals that the login window X client supports or wants to select. Note that I typed "OPTIONALLY makes a call to XGetVisualInfo()" above. It's possible for an X client to just use the "default" visual, and that is server-specific, and usually configurable. On most X servers, the default visual (actually visual "class") is set on the command line when the server is started. I have no idea of how to set the default visual for Exceed. We can drill down a bit further if you'll log into the machine via Exceed, and run "xdpyinfo" and look at the output. Pay attention to the visual names and IDs that it reports as being available. Are there any color visuals present? Also, look at the default visual ID for the first "screen" entry. See if that visual ID is that of a color visual. If it isn't, but if there are in fact color visuals present, it's possible that the login window X client was written to only use the default visual, which may not be a color visual under Exceed, but might be a color visual on the workstation. It's also possible that the login window X client is configurable via its app-defaults file. We can check on that if you strike out with the visuals described above. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

13 years, 9 months

ANN: liblpfk (IBM LPFK driver library), tumble-0.33-philpem1

by philpem＠philpem.me.uk

Hi guys, A few of you might remember the IBM LPFK bulk-order a couple of years back, and the ensuing chaos of figuring out the control protocol (which was eventually resolved when Michael Brutman found some old IBM protocol docs which covered the LPFK). I figure I've been sitting on the code for long enough: it's time to make a proper release! Anyone who wants to have a play with this is welcome to do so: the code is on my website, under "Code :: liblpfk", or if you'd prefer a direct link: http://www.philpem.me.uk/code/liblpfk/ I've also uploaded my fork of Eric Smith's "tumble" utility, a TIFF-to-PDF converter. I found a couple of bugs (which haven't been fixed seven months later) and figured it was a shame not to share the patches. After all, it is open-source :) URL for that is http://www.philpem.me.uk/code/ -- click "Tumble". At some point I'll give this a separate page instead of just linking to the version-control repository, and may well document the control file format (which IIRC isn't documented at the moment). Somewhat offtopic, but I've also released a driver for one of the Brother P-touch label printers. I needed labels for my spare parts boxes and really didn't feel like making them with a Dymo gun when I had a perfectly good stock database (which is next on the 'stuff to release' list) which I could use as a data source for said labels. Work smarter not harder and all that ;) These were written for Linux, but should work decently well on BSD too. Forget running them on Windows unless you want to port the serial-line (liblpfk) and/or usb-lp (libptouch) stuff across... I didn't (this be a Linux-only ship, yarrr!) Comments, criticism and so on should be sent to the address below. Sensible patches are, as always, gratefully received 8^) FYI: I'm working on getting a copyright release from university for the DiscFerret software. At the moment half the Department of Computer Science is on holiday so this is proving somewhat difficult... PCB design is still ongoing, though a lack of funds means it might be a while before I get prototype PCBs made. I'm hoping to release the firmware, microcode and decoder engine under the GPL or LGPL, and the hardware access library will most likely be distributed under a "BSD-with-attribution" type license (I forget, is that 3-clause or 4-clause?). Either way, it'll be GPL-compatible (for obvious reasons!) and commercial-use-allowed. Thanks, -- Phil. philpem at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

13 years, 9 months

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test-drb July 2010