[comp.sys.apple] BrkCursor

jason@madnix.UUCP (Jason Blochowiak) (03/12/90)

In article <3576.25f3b1bf@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> q4kx@vax5.cit.cornell.edu (Joel Sumner) writes:
>If them machine crashes in SHR Mode, Hit <Ctrl-T><Return>.  That will put
>you in the text screen so you can see the break address and the register
>settings.
	You could, of course, just write an Init that patched the Break
Vector, which fiddled with the softswitches to automatically turn the text
mode on...

	Speaking of which - can anyone thing of anything else to add to
BrkCursor? BrkCursor is my Init that changes the mouse cursor to a red X
when the machine crashes. At the moment (v1.1b), it:
	1) Changes the border color to red (or to black, if it's already red)
	2) Beeps (by calling _SysBeep)
	3) Changes the border color back
	4) Sets the mouse cursor to the X (by calling _QDStatus, _GetMasterSCB,
		_InitCursor, and _SetCursor)
	5) Continues with normal break processing (usually drops you into the
		monitor)

	I can't think of much else to add - I was thinking about the
possibility of doing the _OSShutDown call (yaknow, "You may now safely turn
off your //gs", or whatever it is, exactly), but I figured that it'd be A Bad
Thing to do, because of the possibility of corrupted delayed write buffers.
I also considered putting up a dialog box saying "Your machine has crashed"
with a Restart button that would fake a reset (or somesuch), and a Continue
button that would drop the user into the monitor (useful for folks like me
who still want to be able to see the register contents, etc.). Any comments
from folks out there? Keep it reasonable (no, I'm not going to write an
expert system to determine what went wrong, and fix it, and restart the
program), but I am open to suggestions...

	Oh, one other thing while I'm here: Someone mentioned a developers
utility that would constantly move handles in memory around (when legal), to
make sure that an application was properly locking &/| dereferencing the
things - whatever happened to that?

>Joel Sumner
>q4kx@cornella.ccs.cornell.edu
>q4kx@cornella.bitnet


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                      Jason Blochowiak - jason@madnix.UUCP
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       "Education, like neurosis, begins at home." - Milton R. Saperstein