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KEN ABOUT .......... BIG THINGS ;->
by Ken Ross: 
petlibrary@bigfoot.com
Web Site:
http://members.tripod.com/~petlibrary|
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WHY WAS I THERE? Recently I found myself in a 'Focus Group', (I'm sure I've just seen Catbert!), involved with how to 'improve' LineOne's home page. The others in the room(?) included the chap from the opinion poll people, (mobile phone salesman type), making notes on our answers. The rest were newbies and a couple of types that reinforced my views of the punter their ISP aimed at. I sounded like Lee Marvin in a WW2 movie in comparison. The current ad on telly uses Malcolm McDowell to proclaim about choice of universe. Well, that's fine sounding but, as has been pointed out by previous writers in this journal, each ISP has its own partners and places to shepherd you and your credit card(s) towards. The mobile phone salesman ignored the fact that in a few short moments quite a few problems were raised and ignored. One chap hadn't worked out 'how to use the internet stuff', (his words), on his new machine and another hadn't even managed to open any page at all - giving up after over half an hour downloading LineOne's homepage! Other novelties were evident ;-> The fact that this must have been a random sample was a clear indication that the information about how to do things and the capabilities just wasn't available to them (or understandable). My opinion on any ISP's home page? - irrelevant! When you open up the preferences menu you'll find an option to open up with any web page you fancy. (http://sunsite.org.uk/sunsite/archive/) is where I start my forays. After all, to quote somebody else on a different concept, 'once you're there you're half way to anywhere!', and there's no graphics or clutter to slow down lift off. On the Mac, if you use the PPP control panel to connect, the connection speed is displayed. This enables go/no-go options to be carried out with just the matter of making a different ISP active with a couple of mouse clicks. Ed: Ken's mind now hyperlinks off topic - but it's very interesting and useful! The bookmark file in Netscape Navigator is just a variation of an HTML table file that can be edited with Simpletext, to enable the uploading of files etc., (if not using a proper FTP program!). The entry: <DT><A HREF="ftp://username:userpassword@ftp.whatever.com/" is modified from the standard: <DT><A HREF="http://sunsite.org.uk/sunsite/archive/" The insertion of 'username:userpassword@' enables ftp upload to a site on which you have relevant permissions. Similarly you can access http sites like the New York Times directly without having to go through time wasting sign in procedures by something like: <DT><A HREF="http://username:userpassword@www.whatever.com/" The Bookmark file can be found lurking in your Mac's /system folder/preferences/netscape users/ folder. It starts of with the friendly greeting..... <!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1> Well editing it works for me! Back to topic (Ed: Thank goodness for that). Perhaps the fact that I was the most poverty stricken one there made them disregard my points as they were after the views of people who would be spending money through them? The view of a few of the newbies was that the ISP's job was a bit like a magazine with all the adverts and things on offer from them. Magazine is also where they keep munitions and they have to be treated with care in case they blow up :-> CULTURAL DIVERSITY Sort of leading on from that 'focus group' thing was the fact that when I was attending it the news was breaking in the press about 'I Love You' virus. Epidemics can only take hold in a monoculture environment and when any virus reaches a host that can't sustain it the spread is stopped. Amongst my recent experiences was having to deal with Outlook Express and, in comparison to Eudora, I was quite appalled at how unfriendly it was and how it just went away and did things without consulting you (or even warning that it was going to). It seems that this behaviour enables nasty bug creators to unleash stuff on to the unsuspecting PC world via attachments that are acted upon behind the scene by whatever Uncle Bill has foisted onto the punter. The average ISP CD-ROM has IE & OE on it with no other options for signing up with the ISP. The punter, through inertia, stays with that combo. BT sent me a CD recently for their service:
So I looked around and found that IE was on the vast majority of ISP CDs with a few having NN as alternative. Only Freenetname's CD had any real alternatives, ( but for PPC Mac only ). A Sunday paper offer said 'free CD for every reader.' It was just a limited ISP sign up, (IE & OE etc. again), with the useful advice, (in HTML format to show that the browser worked and to get some revenue right away!), to download assorted software. (The stuff they mentioned was included on Freenet's CD). The capability of bugs being spread around via email doing things with OE has been known for quite some time and yet each new version of it has yet to stop the spread of things like the 'I Love You' virus. Yes, I know that used Visual BASIC but it still needed OE to do the biz in the first place. If it came across any other email client it got stopped. Any non VB kitted out machine also stopped it, so looking at it that way the threat isn't so serious is it? The upside of the scare was that at its peak scared PC owners weren't taking up bandwidth so we Mac owners could get access running at top speed. A final thought about OE. Surely at one point in its history someone must have said 'lets give it more ability to do its own thing without reference to the user in the slightest and while we're at it lets make it scatter bits willy-nilly in the system folder with no earthly means of knowing what they do!' BIG FILE READER - (where's me sticky labels?) Whilst shifting stuff 8bit-wards I found that my large file reader program on the 8000 had gone missing. Despite me shuffling disks it was nowhere to be found, and of course the development stages had long gone as well so it was time to redo things. Most SEQ file readers store the text in memory, which was fine in the days when the most that was dealt with was domestic sized stuff. However, when handling larger text files they had to be split up into smaller lumps. Project Gutenberg has lots of text files in big lumps, (there's a mirror at the Imperial College Sunsite), and some are in the CBM/PET library with file sections occupying most of 170K, (the limit of file size on 1541 / 4040 drives - 3 such files can be fitted onto 8050). The Commodore disk drive is split into blocks or sectors. Each sector contains:
The drive navigates its way through a file by reading the first 2 bytes to itself and then sends the remaining bytes to the computer to deal with. So all that's needed to read text files is a window that can be scrolled up & down. The first stage was to find a means of locating the starting track & sector of the text files on disk and out of the library box came. 160 REM TOM CRANSTOUN This did the job nicely after a few tweaks so it was just a matter of reading the data into a menu array and deleting unwanted parts. After choice of file it was just a matter of reading the required files track & sector into a data array.
Integer arrays are used to save space. In the first run on my 8032, the 2052 data pairs (for a 8050 disk) in the DIMs presented problems in floating point. Using integer enabled it to work without problems. The following bit of code deals with checking the user interface and adjusting program operation accordingly.
(There are options for reading ASCII/PETSCII at the start of the program) The following bit of code deals with printing out the text from one sector of the file.
After final tests PETSPEED was run over it to get a GT version and then it was also ported over to the C64 and petspeed'ed there as well. The C64 version needs a few more tweaks in it as its 80 column ancestry shows in places! Getting the hang of using the printout option needs a bit of practice I've got to admit, but it looks as though this will be cured in the mk3 version that will be posted in the download section of my web site as soon as etc ;-> Ed: The code for the full program is given in the article: Big File Reader. ANOTHER LOT OF LINKS ;-> http://www.leo.org/pub/comp/os/macintosh/Info-Mac/text/html/index.html http://www.djairfix.freeserve.co.uk/ http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/SFRG/ http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/vtsf/mss-3.1/029.html. HISTORY LESSON Whilst watching Destination Moon, at one point there's some stock footage of geared rods etc. drawing across a table. This stock footage turns up in quite a few films during the early 50's. What is it ? - well its an analogue computer used by the US military for working out ballistics tables for the big guns. Destination Moon was made in 1950 and the electronics age had yet to filter through to Hollywood, but to be fair there were only a handful of vacuum tubed computers in the world. (In those days computer was still spelt with an O) ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computor) USA. -18,000 tubes and weighing in at 30 tons. However, there was another machine that launched IBM on the computing road, the Harvard Mk1 of 1943. The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was 8 feet tall, 51 ft long, 2ft thick weighing in at 5 tons with around 75,000 parts. This huge cabinet of relays was obsolescent almost as soon as it was switched on despite the Americans regarding it as a great achievement at the time. The pictures show a very long object that reminds me of farm machinery. (I've not included any of Zuse's work as it didn't really lead to any machine used for actual work at the time.) HAVING A LAUGH? Well Amiga Format is no more and this can be the only explanation for one of the adverts in it - after all to quote the editor of Amiga Active:
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