nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) (01/10/90)
The PC packet drivers hide the difference between Ethernet cards and also allow multiple protocols to use the same Ethernet card. I'm hacking at them to provide automagic location of the I/O port associated with the board. I'm doing this by searching for the Ethernet address. Since we know the manufacturer of the board, we can verify that the manufacturer prefix is correct. I'm also trying to automagically determine the interrupt vector. I'm disabling interrupts, generating an interrupt on the board, and then checking the 8259 to see which interrupt vector has an interrupt pending. It isn't working. If someone else has done this before, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Unfortunately, I can't automagically find the I/O memory because some 386 BIOSes remap system memory into every hole they can find. Oh, and all this magic is overridable by manually specifying the port number. The defaults will be to use magic. You can force a parameter to be magically determined by specifying a '?' in place of a number, -- --russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu]) Russ.Nelson@$315.268.6667 Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee. A recession now appears more than 2 years away -- John D. Mathon, 4 Oct 1989. I think killing is value-neutral in and of itself. -- Gary Strand, 8 Nov 1989. Liberals run this country, by and large. -- Clayton Cramer, 20 Nov 1989. Shut up and mind your Canadian business, you meddlesome foreigner. -- TK, 23 N.
sartin@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Rob Sartin) (01/11/90)
In article <NELSON.90Jan9220037@image.clarkson.edu>
nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu writes an awful lot about "magic" considering
he's writing about computer programming. What's the obsession with
"magic"? I see it among many hackers. It is as if we want to hide the
(hopefully logical) way things work in order to maintain the priesthood.
Why not explain to users and other programmers how things work and not
foist it off on "magic". If you're good, you don't need the false job
security created through obscurity.
I've created many a program that I've never had to look at again because
I explained how and why it worked. I consider one of the stronger
measures of my success at hacking to be the amount of time I *don't*
spend dealing with old "magic" that no other "wizard" could figure out.
Sorry about that, just a pet peeve (down, boy! Sit!).
Rob Sartin internet: sartin@hplabs.hp.com
Software Technology Lab uucp : hplabs!sartin
Hewlett-Packard voice : (415) 857-7592bjaspan@athena.mit.edu (Barr3y Jaspan) (01/11/90)
I certainly don't want to start a flame war, so I'll make just one short command on this: In article <4622@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>, sartin@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Rob Sartin) writes: > In article <NELSON.90Jan9220037@image.clarkson.edu> > nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu writes an awful lot about "magic" considering > he's writing about computer programming. What's the obsession with > "magic"? I see it among many hackers. It is as if we want to hide the > (hopefully logical) way things work in order to maintain the priesthood. Sometimes a program has to do something that there is simply no "clean" way to do, or the "magic" is so much faster or memory-efficient or whatever that it justifies the grossness of the kludge (such as goto's in bizarre sorting algorithms). In general, though, I agree with your comments. ----- Now, this group is supposed to be about what we have been hacking on lately. Well, lately I wrote a fairly useful (although not complicated) library that implements "dymanic objects" -- essentially arrays that resize themselves as you add more elements. The library has functions DynCreate, DynAdd, DynDelete, DynDestroy, etc. It's awfully usefull when you are reading in an unknown number of items (ie: lexical analyzers which don't want to impose an identifier length limit, etc) and need to store them somewhere. On the other hand, I've never seen bcopy() so abused. If this sounds interesting to anyone, I'm happy to give away the source (it should be very portable). ----- See? I got in a flame and a discussion about hacking, all in one economy sized message! Barry Jaspan, MIT-Project Athena bjaspan@athena.mit.edu
vmr@psuhcx.psu.edu (Victor M. Ricker) (01/12/90)
"Any technology significantly advanced is indestinguishable from magic." Sometimes its easier to just say "magic" when you KNOW that your audience will never understand what the hell you are saying. -Vic Ricker vmr@hcx.psu.edu