Info-Mac-Request@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (The Moderators) (11/21/89)
Info-Mac Digest Mon, 20 Nov 89 Volume 7 : Issue 206
Today's Topics:
Anyone know of an Auditing Init
Apple // emulators
Bitmapped font editor?
Cassette/video tape labelling
Circuit analysis on the Mac
Crazy floppy crash
Drive access questions
file servers
Improved Sound File Packing
inexpensive AT file transfers
Information station stacks
In Use Question
Macintosh ImageWriter
mac memory limitations.
MINIX for the Macintosh
MPW and C
Request for Cheap File Transfer over AppleTalk
Sampled Sound Files
Take A Letter
Wingz 3D Graphs
Your Info-Mac Moderators are Bill Lipa, Lance Nakata, and Jon Pugh.
The Info-Mac archives are available (by using FTP, account anonymous,
any password) in the info-mac directory on sumex-aim.stanford.edu
[36.44.0.6]. Help files are in /info-mac/help. Indicies are in
/info-mac/help/recent-files.txt and /info-mac/help/all-files.txt.
Please send articles and binaries to info-mac@sumex-aim.stanford.edu.
Send administrative mail to info-mac-request@sumex-aim.stanford.edu.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri 17 Nov 89 10:54:21-PST
From: ROHAN%ASTRO.SPAN@star.stanford.edu
Subject: Anyone know of an Auditing Init
I am looking for an auditing program. A program that logs the amount of
time selected applications are used. Does anyone know of such a beast?
(public domain or otherwise).
Thanks in advance
Rick Rohan
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 89 16:21 CST
From: "tony bible, iowa state university" <GVAEB@ccvax.iastate.edu>
Subject: Apple // emulators
Does anyone have any experience with Apple II emulators that run on the
Macintosh? I have seen at least -- maybe at most -- one ad for such a beast,
but I have never heard any reports from real people who have used one. Thanks
in advance for any enlightenment.
Tony
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 89 12:11:42 CST
From: "Lovely Angels Fanatic Cult" <UC528665%UMCVMB.BITNET@ricevm1.rice.edu>
Subject: Bitmapped font editor?
Is there a PD font editor somewhere that will help me generate bitmapped
(i.e. QuickDraw) fonts? I guess that Fontographer will create a bitmap
once you've laid out the LaserWriter font, but for what I want to do
I don't want to go to the trouble.
Thanks in advance!
craig s. cottingham
uc528665@umcvmb.missouri.edu
Oh, one other thing: How do I go about adding a font to a HyperCard
stack? The Technical Introduction to the Macintosh indicates that
resources can be attached to a document (rather than to the System);
can the same be said of fonts?
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 89 13:51:39 EST
From: gateh%conncoll.bitnet@forsythe.stanford.edu
Subject: Cassette/video tape labelling
On the subject of labelling, there are are four cards in the Stack Ideas
provided with Hypercard for labelling 3.5" disks, cassettes, and 8 mm and
VHS video tapes. And of course copies of these may be used to catalog your
collections as you create the labels.
They are quite nicely designed, I might add, although I might change a
font face here and there.
Gregg TeHennepe | Minicomputer Specialist
gateh@conncoll | Connecticut College, New London, CT
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 89 11:04:50 EST
From: Tom Coradeschi <tcora@pica.army.mil>
Subject: Circuit analysis on the Mac
Recently, I posted:
========
Does anyone know of a source for circuit simulation software for the Mac?
I've been told that there's a version of PCAP? or something like that
available. I know that PSpice is available, but it needs a Mac II to run,
and we don't want to do that if we can help it. Email to me and I'll
summarize.
tom c
========
I was looking for circuit analysis software, ie, V(t), I(t), power, energy,
etc., for RLC type circuits. The following folks were kind enough to reply
to my posting, and I thank them. However, all the responses were for digital
logic type applications, and mine is purely analog in nature. The following
two packages were recommended:
>From Claus Franzkowiak <cfranz@WRDIS01.AF.MIL>
& Brad Goodman <bkgoodman@lynx.northeastern.edu>
'Logic Works'
Capitano Computing Systems LTD.
P.O Box 86971
North Vancouver, B.C.
Canada, V7L4P6
(604) 669-6343
>From Mark Edward Toomey <MTOOMEY%UGA.BITNET@CORNELLC.CIT.CORNELL.EDU>
'Digital Magic'
Kinko's Academic Courseware Exchange
P.O. Box 8022
Ventura,CA, 93002-8022
Single User price: $29.95
Site License: $1,200.00
Documentation: $7.50 (for site license only)
As I said, I'm still looking for analog circuit analysis packages. If anyone
out there has one, please let me know. Thanks to the guys who responded to
my first post, and to all who may respond to this one.
tom c
Electric Armaments Division
US Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center
Picatinny Arsenal, NJ 07806-5000
ARPA: tcora@pica.army.mil
UUCP: ...!{uunet,rutgers}!pica.army.mil!tcora BITNET: Tcora@DACTH01.BITNET
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 89 12:22:10 EST
From: 3man%UMass.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu
Subject: Crazy floppy crash
Hello:
While working as a consulting in a Macintosh Lab on campus yesterday,
a woman summoned me--she needed help. When I walked over to her MacSE
she pointed to the screen.... It showed a System Error. The interrupt
switch proved unhelpful so I rebooted the mac. The data disk popped out
and the boot disk started to do its thing. I asked her what happened,
and she said "I dunno <confused look>", so I said that this shouldn't
be a problem. Anyway... The mac finally gets to the desktop. Both file
server icons appear as well as the icon for her boot disk. I insert the
data disk, the drive makes a couple sounds. The window from the data disk
(which was not closed before the last crash) started to appear... (i.e.,
the outline came up, the "open" disk icon came up, but nothing actualy
appeared in the window) and then came the system error. I rebooted (while
holding down the mouse button to eject the disks), took her data disk over
to the Mac ii at the consulting station, inserted it, and (after SAM inter-
cept got done with it...2 secs) the Mac ii crashed. Not a system error,
just a crash, i.e., no mouse movement, etc. Now... This is quite strange.
When the disk was inserted, the mac roms or system or whatever, got past
the "This disk is unreadable/This is not a macintosh disk" stuff, because
I wasn't prompted. However, the Mac must have been trying to read something
that was not possible to read, because it crashed!! I tried running every
recovery program I could, to save the files (SUM, MacTools, etc) and not
much really happened. In Mactools it said that EVERY file had an error,
and could not be copied, one of the progs recovered the files (Word 4.0
files), but the size of the average recovered file was about 500 bytes!
These were term papers I was trying to recover. I gave the disk to a
friend who says he has some other recovering programs, but for the time
being, she lost all her data. Does anyone know how it is possible that in-
serting a disk into ANY mac makes it crash??? Any help would be greatly
appreciated.
-John Greene
+-------------------------+-----------------------------+
! Bitnet:3Man@UMASS ! 204 Pierpont !
! CompuServe:70406,1421 ! University of Massachusetts !
! Phone: (413) 546-5181 ! Amherst, MA 01003 !
+-------------------------+-----------------------------+
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 89 14:17:43 EST
From: "Dana Cartwright, Syracuse Univ, 315-443-4504" <DECARTWR%SUVM.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: Drive access questions
I have just joined this discussion group, so permit me to start off with
several questions.
1. How do I reliably determine the number of drives in a Mac (I'm thinking
of physical drives, not RAM disks nor networked servers) and their
drive numbers?
2. For removable media devices which support multiple densities, how do
I determine the current media density?
Pages V-470/471 of Inside Mac suggest that the answer to #1 is that the
drives are sequentially numbered starting at 1, but I cannot persuade myself
that real Mac's (I have a IIx at home and a IIcx at the office) work this way.
A PBControl call with csCode=23 does not appear to return the values
stated on V-471 (I always seem to get a 4 for a floppy disk drive). I use
Think C 4.0.
-Dana Cartwright, Director, Academic Computing
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 89 13:49:55 PST
From: doug@nisd.cam.unisys.com (Doug Hardie)
Subject: file servers
I have a small local talk network with mostly Mac+s with 2 floppy drives. I do
have a SE with a hard disk. What I would like to do is set up an environment
where people on the Mac+s can store data files on the SE disk rather than
a large collection of floppies. There are files that mutiple people need
access to and finding the specific floppy can get rough. I need the ability
to retrieve files from the SE, update them and the restore them back to the
SE.
I have tried public folder. It works great for obtaining the files from
the SE. However, to replace them, you have to go to the SE and do it from
there. That is a real pain, since the SE is also used for work, and it
is not real conveniently located. I have tried telnet since there is
a Sun linked in. But it is inconvenient because you have to log into the Sun
>From both Macs. Once you are logged in, it works great. But that also is
inconvenient.
I would appreciate any suggestions or leads for other ways to make this work.
Thanks,
-- Doug
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 89 13:58:00 EET
From: Juri Munkki <jmunkki@hut.fi>
Subject: Improved Sound File Packing
The following file contains the Think C 3.0 source code for
the Delta Sound conversion utility. After processing with
Delta Sound, a sound file will usually compress to a smaller
size with the Huffman (and often LZW) compression algorithm.
This program does not reduce the amount of information in the
file and the process is fully reversible. The source code is
included so that interested people can improve it for their
own purposes.
What does the application do?
1) Start with Old=128.
2) Read a byte into New.
3) Write Old-New.
4) Old=New
5) Go to step 2 if there is more data.
To reverse the process:
1) Start with Old=128.
2) Read a byte into New.
3) Old=Old-New
4) Write Old
5) Go to step 2 if there is more data.
As you can see, the amount of information does not change.
The resource fork is left intact. This means that it is not
useful to try to use this program on files that have the
sounds in the resource fork. A separate resource converter
could be written.
This process will usually save an additional 20% in your
archives. The amount saved depends on the file, but higher
sampling rates usually save more space.
Juri Munkki
jmunkki@hut.fi
jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi
jmunkki@fingate.bitnet
[Archived as /info-mac/source/c/delta-sound.hqx; 15K]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 89 10:36 EST
From: <JRCLARK%UTKVX1.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: inexpensive AT file transfers
People looking for cheap ways to transfer files can use Public folder (in
the archives). The drawback is that the recipient must know that the file
is available in someone's public folder and retrieve.
For 2-way transfers, the Nov. 14 MacWeek (page 11) contained an announcement
that Beagle Brothers would release a $199.95 software program called Flash
that would allow a user to send a file over the network, placing it in a
folder called "From whomever" and displaying a notice to the user that
it had arrived. Files can be sent to groups of users too.
If the above is correct, then it could well be worth checking out. According
to MacWeek, on copy of the software was valid for one entire AppleTalk zone.
It is to ship in January???
Jim Clark
UT Martin
jrclark@utkvx1.bitnet
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 17 Nov 1989 10:40:51 EST
From: ALC@psuvm.psu.edu
Subject: Information station stacks
Anybody have any good examples of Hypercard (or it's ilk) stacks which
are used as information stations. We're developing one here at our Library
and I'd like to see some good examples. I can FTP if you have a site. Thanks
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 17 November 1989 8:04am CST
From: CHAA013@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu
Subject: In Use Question
I installed the recently posted in use CDEV on two machines in my lab.
Everything is fine except that on one machine the indicator is red (good)
and on the other it is light green (not so good). Both menubars are the
same color (blue). The machines are running similar INITs and CDEVs and
are basically identical MacIIs. Any ideas.
Steve Swinnea
University of Texas at Austin
CHAA013@UTA3081.bitnet
CHAA013@UTA3081.cc.utexas.edu
------------------------------
Date: Thu Nov 16 17:20:58 1989
From: microsoft!t-jims@uunet.uu.net
Subject: Macintosh ImageWriter
I was hoping someone could give me suggestions on what to get. My fathers
company has been using a couple of ImageWriter II's for a couple of years
now. These things are pieces of junk, they work fine for about six months
then they start to consistantly jam about 1 in every 10 pages. He's done
everything possible, had them cleaned, lubed, tractor mechanisms adjusted
etc.. He has finally resolved himself to selling them and is in the market
for some new printers. So I need to know what's best. These printers will
be responsible for high volume printing, must have tractor feed, need to be
able to print thick bond or mailing lables, need to have a reasonable driver,
and this is important, THEY MUST NOT JAM. I realize that things happen but
in the case of the ImageWriter II it got down right rediculous. I have been
told that the best sort of mechanism is a bottom feed printer with tractor
pull rather than push. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Jim Sather uunet!microsoft!t-jims
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 1989 10:25:55 PST
From: daniel essin <essin%mizar.usc.edu@usc.edu>
Subject: mac memory limitations.
Supercard sounded like it was the perfect solution to the limitations of
hypercard. It has multiple, resizable windows, multiple stacks, language
extensions, animation, AND you can build double-clickable applications that
you can distribute royalty-free.
Well, I finally decided to build a stack for my 8 year-old's mac plus.
The stack had one card with 3 fields, the first two generate random numbers
between 1 and 12 and the third accepts an entry and checks to see if number
entered is the product of the first two.
The mac plus has a pruned down system 6.0.2 that takes 296K.
Of course I built the stack and the standalone application on my 5 meg macII.
When I tried to run the stack on the mac plus it said "This application
requires a minimum of 735K to run.
Now what good is a standalone hypertext application generator if its product
can't be run on the machine most likely to be in the hands of the target
audience for the product. Is this product a rip-off or am I just being too
demanding?
|-------------|
| ___________ |
| | | |
| | | |
| |_________| |
| |
| |
| -- |
| |
|_____________|
dan essin (opressed by the mac) essin@mizar.usc.edu
------------------------------
Date: 15 Nov 89 23:32:27 GMT
From: archetyp@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu (Joseph R Pickert)
Subject: MINIX for the Macintosh
MINIX for the Apple MACINTOSH
MINIX, a UNIX V7 clone that runs on the IBM PC, Atari ST, and Amiga has now
been ported to the Apple Macintosh. The system is described in detail
(including a 250-page listing of the complete source code, in C) in the book:
Title: Operating Systems: Design and Implementation
Author: Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Publisher: Prentice-Hall
ISBN: 0-13-637406-9
We are now discussing the possibility of having Prentice-Hall sell the
Macintosh version, as they do the IBM and Atari ones (Amiga is also under
discussion). If they say yes, it will be available for around $100, including
all the source code on diskette. If they say no, we write it off under the
heading "you win some, you lose some" and throw it away. They have already
definitively vetoed the idea of giving it away or having a third party sell
it, since this might cause legal and other problems with the version they are
really interested in, for the PC (and AT, 386, etc.) A GNU-type solution is
not acceptable to them.
Their hesitancy comes from their perception that the Macintosh market for this
product is very small. A brief description of MINIX follows. Please note
that this software does not run in place of your current Macintosh
software, but rather in ADDITION to it. See below for more details. If you
would have an interest in buying it, or you are a college professor and
would be interested in reviewing the program for Prentice-Hall or using it
for a course on operating systems, please respond to the electronic mail
address specified at the end of this message. If we can collect hundreds of
names and (postal) addresses of potential customers, maybe we can convince
them it is worth doing. Otherwise the future of MINIX will be the 386/486.
What is MINIX?
MINIX is an operating system that is compatible with version 7 of the UNIX
operating system. MINIX comes complete with ALL the source code to the
full operating system and all the utility programs; source to the C compiler
and compiler tools are also available. MINIX is NOT public domain; it is
copyrighted by the Prentice-Hall publishing company.
MINIX features:
* System call compatible with V7 of the UNIX operating system.
* Full multiprogramming (many programs can run at once)
* Kernighan and Ritchie compatible C compiler
* Shell that is functionally identical to the Bourne shell
* Emacs-style, multi-window full-screen editor
* Over 120 utilities (cat, cp, ed, grep, ls, make, roff, sort, etc.)
* Over 140 library procedures (atoi, fork, malloc, read, stdio, etc.)
Additional MINIX for the Macintosh features:
* MULTIFINDER compatible.
* HARD DISK support.
* SERIAL LINE support with terminal emulation.
* VT100 virtual terminals in Macintosh windows.
Future features:
* IEEE Standard P1003.1 compatibility (POSIX)
* [Maybe] ANSI Standard C
Description of MacMINIX
MacMINIX operates on any Macintosh (Mac Plus, Mac SE, or Mac II) with
at least 1 megabyte of memory and a hard disk. [To compile large
programs, you may need more memory].
To the native Macintosh Operating System, MacMINIX is just another
application. Your Desk Accessories, Inits, and other software will
continue to function as before. If you use MultiFinder, MacMINIX will
run in its own Multifinder partition, allowing you to run your other
Macintosh programs concurrently.
MacMINIX provides a window for each tty device, and text can be cut and
pasted in and between windows. Other "standard" Macintosh windowing
operations (scrolling, hiding, moving, etc) are also supported.
MacMINIX comes with all the tools included with the PC version.
This includes (but is not limited to) the following:
animals, ar, ascii, at, atrun, banner, basename, cal, cat, cc, cdiff
chgrp, chmem, chmod, chown, clr, cmp, comm, compress, cp, cpdir, crc,
cron, date, dd, df, diff, du, echo, ed, expr, factor, fgrep, file, find,
fix, getlf, grep, gres, head, help, kill, ln, login, lpr, ls, make, mined,
mkdir, mkfs, mknod, more, mount, mv, od, passwd, paste, pr, prep, printenv,
pwd, readall, readfs, rev, rm, rmdir, roff, sed, sh, shar, size,
sleep, sort, split, strings, stty, su, sum, sync, tail, tar, tee, term,
termcap, test, time, touch, tr, traverse, treecmp, tset, tsort, tty, umount,
uniq, update, uudecode, uuencode, vol, wc, who, whoami
In addition, many more tools (ash, uemacs, jove, uucp, mail, less,
to name a few) have been made available in the comp.os.minix newsgroup.
For more information, see the book cited above or read the comp.os.minix
newsgroup on USENET. This is an active newsgroup, with all kinds of
discussions about MINIX. About 7000 messages have been posted to it in
3 years.
If you think you might want to buy MacMINIX, or are a professor who might
use want to review it or use it for a course, please send
Your name
Your postal (i.e. snail mail) address
Your email address
Your telephone number
to: archetyp@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu
Followups and discussion should go to comp.os.minix.
Joe Pickert
Andy Tanenbaum
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 89 21:05 EDT
From: <KOZLOWSK%UOTELG01.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: MPW and C
printf in an MPW C application sends output to the desktop.
How can send it to a window, either created by
(1) the MPW shell before the MPW C application is run, or
(2) the MPW C application itself.
Some code would be appreciated because I tried to follow the MPW C
manual (by using "open" in the C library) but it doesn't seem to work
the way I'm reading the manual.
Thanks in advance.
Jim Kozlowski
KOZLOWSK@UOTELG01.BITNET
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 89 08:36:40 EST
From: "Bret Ingerman 315-443-1114" <INGERMAN%SUVM.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: Request for Cheap File Transfer over AppleTalk
Mark Zimmerman asks about cheap file transfer over AppleTalk nets without
having to use TOPS or AppleShare.
Well Mark, you're in luck. There is an application called Public
Folder that is made by, but not supported by, Claris. You put this
utility on each Mac and you can then transfer files from one to the other.
I think that it is free and that it is in the archives. If not, let me know
and I will upload it.
Bret Ingerman
Syracuse University
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 89 13:57:00 EET
From: Juri Munkki <jmunkki@hut.fi>
Subject: Sampled Sound Files
The following .sit file contains six sampled sounds that
have been converted with the Delta Sound program. (The
application is included in the archive.)
The conversion process changes a file so that the difference
between two bytes is stored instead of the original values.
For sampled sound this means that the range of the data is
reduced and thus the Huffman (and sometimes LZW) compression
algorithm works much better.
Total Data Comp. %
File Name Size Method Size Saved
Am I on Air? 14237 Huff 13637 4%
Good Morning Vietnam 43848 Huff 40275 8%
ibegyourpardon 13976 Huff 11441 18%
SwitchOff 43802 Huff 39135 11%
Wacky Guy 24165 Huff 20161 17%
Your Highness 29394 Huff 24524 17%
======= ======= =======
165K 146K 12%
Am I on Air? 14237 Huff 9709 32%
Good Morning Vietnam 43848 Huff 36042 18%
ibegyourpardon 13976 Huff 8208 41%
SwitchOff 43802 Huff 29580 32%
Wacky Guy 24165 Huff 15826 35%
Your Highness 29394 Huff 20983 29%
======= ======= =======
165K 118K 29%
The first listing is for normal files that have not been
converted. As you can see, only 12% were saved for these
files. The second listing is for the included archive.
This time, 29% were saved: a 17% difference.
Juri Munkki
jmunkki@hut.fi
jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi
jmunkki@fingate.bitnet
[Archived as /info-mac/sound/delta-various.hqx; 174K]
------------------------------
Date: Fri Nov 17 07:35:38 1989
From: microsoft!joelm@uunet.uu.net
Subject: Take A Letter
Take A Letter, which I wrote ages ago, was my solution
for dealing with shareware documentation. I was aiming
for a simple, low-overhead way of including documentation
with shareware that didn't require the user to use an
editor to view it. Just double click on a file, and bingo,
the documentation appeared. You could print it or save it
as text. Never really needing graphics or multiple fonts or
styles, I wrote Take A Letter to strictly deal with text, in
a single font.
I must plead guilty for not offering any improvements to the
program, as I'm dealing more with PCs than Macs these days
(no boos and hisses please). Since it came out a few years
ago, several similar shareware programs have appeared, such
as DOCtor, that allow you to mix graphics with text. Take A
Letter is still lean and mean though, and is perfect for
dealing with "text-only" documents.
As I'm locked out of ftping from this site, please e-mail me
if you can't find Take A Letter and I'll have someone post
it to the archives.
Joel McNamara
uunet!microsoft!joelm
All opinions and statements are my own, and are not representative of my employer...
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 89 11:51:40 MST
From: Bob Bolt <BBOLT%UALTAVM.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu>
Subject: Wingz 3D Graphs
I recently posted a message trying to get information on why 3D graphs
in Wingz could not be used in other applications using standard copy and
paste techniques. Well, all is now well. Informix is shipping version 1.1
to all registered users at no charge and this new version fixes this
problem (sort of). The graphs paste into other applications now with all
parts intact, but the lines are converted from hairlines to 1 point lines.
Other than that, it works great.
This is a fine product with excellent user support, although my one
experience with technical support was less than satisfactory (maybe he
was having a bad day). Many of the problems have been resolved and a
number of new features have been added, including a change from the ugly
buttons (OK, Cancel, etc) of version 1.0 to standard Mac buttons.
All in all, this is a worthwhile spreadsheet to own. With Microsoft
charging an outrageous fee to upgrade Excel, it is refreshing to see
a company which is not looking to gouge its user base for every dime
they have.
==================================================================
Bob Bolt Bitnet: BBOLT@UALTAVM
Instructional Tech Centre CI$: 75410,2754
University of Alberta AppleLink: BBOLT@UALTAVM.BITNET@DASNET#
==================================================================
------------------------------
End of Info-Mac Digest
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