aking@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM (Allen King) (09/13/86)
In my pounding on the keyboard these last months, I've come up with the
following observations, questions, and frustrations. They seem to amass
on little sheets of paper and every month or so I have this catharsis
and BLOUMPH, they come out as netmail.
MAKE:
I've experienced problems bringing up the recentnet-distributed
make with the developer's kit. Besides the reported problems with
VOID, my malloc (UNIX's memory allocator, with a small m) seems to
have no memory available for it. Things went farther with Malloc
(GEMDOS's memory allocator), except it barfs parsing blank lines and
comment lines. With those edited out of the makefile, then Malloc
runs out of memory. I'm now thinking that small m malloc is the one,
but my GEMSTART is out of date (I got my kit around 4/86). Anybody
been down these rat-holes too? (and maybe know the way out?)
REPORTING ERRORS:
I have modified make's FATAL routine to pause for a while so you
have more than 50ms to read the error messages. Much GEM PD software
has this problem. Why doesn't ATARI give us at least 200ms so the
image can implant on our retina?
839K DISK FORMAT:
Just found the 410K formatter, which actually gives an extra 113K
on double-sided drives (839K vs 726K). It lets me actually put all of
my mandelbrot demo and compiler and linker on one disk! Do all the
desktop utilities (such as copy) work with it? How is it that Atari
doesn't use it?
RENAMING DIRECTORIES:
Anybody got a program or accessory to rename directories? Its a pain
to creat a new one and copy things around. The copy program I asked for
a few months ago was received and is well used -- every compilation I do.
FLIGHT SIMULATOR:
Would somebody recommend a flight simulator for the ST? What's available?
Has anybody had good or bad experiences?
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UUDECODE: <------------------
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uudecode has been giving me *FITS*. I've tried 3 uudecodes on 2 files
i've gotten over the net. Nothing executes properly. What is less, (almost)
none of the lengths agree.
circle2 accdemo.acc
uudecode from some kind 49710 12032
soul who copies disks (bus errors) (won't boot)
uudecode assembled from 25961 12165
the recent net sources (bus errors) (won't boot)
uudecode on VAX/ULTRIX 25728 12032
downlined with kermit (can't download) (won't boot)
BULLETIN BOARDS:
I've dropped back to using bulletin boards for the moment. I'm also
about to release a fast interactive Mandelbrot demo, and can't see putting
80K of binary over the net. So here is the list of bulletin boards I know
of (not all of which I've called):
ATARI: 1-408-745-2642 -4758 -5360 -5970 -5664
Computer Club II 1-313-334-8877 (Detroit)
(Fresno) 1-209-292-1777
(?) 1-312-283-0559
(?) 1-219-277-5825
Does anybody have a more complete list? Post it, or send me mail
(aking@bfly-vax.bbn.com, possibly prefixed with ucbvax!, possibly prefixed
with ucbcad!.) I'll accumulate responses for 2 weeks and then post.
Seems like a good way to keep from getting reams of uuencoded printout
in my net-mail printout. (I read it in the car at stoplights as I commute,
and the discarded sheets of "M\$ZY'''N7CX\'*5!..." mess up my car!)
Seriously, I'd like to see more mail of the form: "I just placed the following
software with the following great features on the following bulletin
boards: 1-617-...".
Also, would the guy who was going to be moderator (was it) of a
sources something or another (remember all the mail on choosing its
name?) post some status and "wake-up call" so we all know whats going
on.
KERMIT:
What features does the new KERMIT have? does it offer remote
operation (where you only have to go upline once to login) ? Hows
about some statistics display like XMODEM has as the file is
transfered? Are there bulletin boards around with the new KERMIT and
uEMACS on them?
uEMACS:
Same question, uEMACS 3.4. Color, did I hear? and ^x^f like real EMACS!
(wanta know how to blow a file with 2 misplace keystrokes: Think youre
in real EMACS and go to get a file with ^x^f. But you sit in uEMACS
and the disk doesn't spin. So you go to hit ^x^v to do the right thing,
but you know Z is right next to X, and ^z writes your old file right on top
of the one you wanted to get and then quits. P O O F ! (Did they think
they were making it better?)