Strotmann.de

Once upon a time at -- Hobbytronic

Yesterday, I was looking for a 3 ½" floppy diskfor an Atari ST. I found one disk without label, and before formatting it, I tool a look what's stored on it. To my suprise, I found some of the first digitized pictures (for me) made on Hobbytronic 1992 (a computer fair in Dortmund) where ABBUC had a booth opposite a company doing scanner and digitizer cameras. So below we have the ABBUC Hobbytronic booth crew of 1992.[Read More]

Posted at 10:41AM May 11, 2009 by Carsten in Atari  |  Comments[0]

Forth on the Vintage Computer Festival Europe 2009

On Booth 23 (me with entry ticket 42, for all numerologicals) I had two RTX2000 single board computer on display.

The theme of the exhibition has been "In space, no one can hear you scream", and for the RTX 2000 machines there was materials collected about NASA, AMSAT and ESA space missions that make use of the RTX 2000 CPU. Both RTX2000 Boards (a "kleiner Muck" and a "Wiesel 2000") were shown working, connected via RS232 to an Amstrad NC100 that was used as a terminal and Forth Editor.

Especially the VME Bus on the "kleiner Muck" got attention, and there will be a follow up project to connect the Muck with an Atari TT (which also has an VME Bus internally).

To be able to judge the processing speed of the RTX2000 compared with a regular CPU, Stefan "Beetle" Niestegge from the Atari TT exhibition helped running a simple benchmark (Primes) on both boards and on an Atari TT. The Atari TT was running BigForth ST on MINT on an Motorola 68030 with 30 Mhz.

As a result we found that the "Muck" with an 6Mhz RTX2000 is about the same processing speed (when it comes to Forth) as the 30Mhz Atari TT. Interestingly the 10Mhz "Wiesel" was about two times slower than the "Muck" and the "TT", which is probably due to some errors in our benchmarking (If someone has worked with the "Wiesel" board and has an idea what can cause this slowdown, please leave a comment).

The VCFe was again a very enjoyable weekend. Unfortunately the weather in Munich was too good, so there were not too much visitors finding their way into the VCFe Exhibition grounds.

The topic for next years VCFe will be "Online Communication". If you have nostalgia for UUCP, Mailboxing and acoustic couplers, please join next year!

Posted at 11:26AM May 09, 2009 by Carsten in Forth  |  Comments[1]

Learning Clojure

Learning a LISP like language and EMACS (again, next try...) [Read More]

Posted at 08:15PM Nov 09, 2008 by Carsten in Programming  |  Comments[1]

'Timemachine'ish backup with ZFS and rsync

Apple MacOS X Timemachine is a nice piece of software. However it does not compress the data, and it only works on MacOS X. I was looking to a similar solution that works also on other Unix Systems (as well as MacOS X) and does transparent compression of the data. The idea is to have multiple backups on one disk, each backup showing the state of the source hard disk or directory at the time of the backup, browsable by the normal file system tools, without storing any data duplicated. I found a solution using the ZFS file system and 'rsync' (rsync is pre-installed on most Unixish operating systems).

Requirements

• MacOS X 10.5 with ZFS R/W (ZFS on MacOS-Forge), Linux with ZFS-FUSE, FreeBSD with ZFS or Solaris/OpenSolaris
• rsync
• external backup hard drive (USB, FireWire, ...)

Step 1: preparing a ZFS file system

writing a GPT label on the external disk (be sure to not format your 'main' disk here!):

createing a ZFS pool on the disk called 'macbook-backup':

enable compression on the new pool and disable ATIME:

the hard drive is now prepared.

Step 2: creating the first (the 'base') backup

next I copy all files from my backup-source directory (or the whole source disk) to the backup:

depending on the size of the data to backup, this will take a while.

Once the backup is finished, we can access all files under '/Volumes/macbook-backup/base'. With the ZFS command I can check the compression-ratio of our backup:

Step 3: creating an incremental backup

The directory for my new, incremental backup will be '/Volumes/macbook-backup/20080804'. So far the new file system does not use any space on the hard drive. Now I do the new backup with 'rsync':

The new backup will only take as much new space on the backup hard drive as there were changes compared to the base backup. But still I am able to browse through the file system at '/Volumes/macbook-backup/20080804' and see all files that were available at the date of the 2nd backup.

Any subsequent snapshots for more backups will be done from the 20080804 file system.

Posted at 03:24PM Aug 05, 2008 by Carsten in Operating Systems  |  Comments[0]

uEmacs fuer Solaris und OS2 (alt)

Dies ist ein Eintrag aus meinem alten Wiki und der alten "strotmann.de" Homepage von 1999, welcher aber immer wieder einmal nachgefragt wurde und den es daher auch im neuen Blog gibt.

• Der Texteditor MicroEmacs. Eine 32 Bit EMX Version des MicroEmacs für OS/2 2.x und höher (Binärdateien und Sourcen für OS/2).
• MicroEmacs 99 (JASSPA); Binärdatei (ELF) für Solaris 7 x86.
• MicroEmacs 4.00 (orig); Binärdatei (ELF) für Solaris 7 x86.

Binärdateien für SUN Solaris Unix Version 7 (SunOS 5.7) für Intel Prozessoren (nicht SPARC). Es ist die original MicroEmacs 4.00 Version und die JASSPA MicroEmacs 99 Version verfügbar. Unbedingt die benötigten Resourcedateien von der jeweiligen Homepage besorgen.

mEmacs für OS/2 2.x, Warp (3), Warp 4, Aurora, eComStation

Dies ist die 32 Bit Version des MicroEmacs 4.00 Texteditor. Ich habe die Quelldateien der 3.12 EMX/GCC Version von Ralf Seidel (siehe Datei readme.os2) mit dem Quellcode 4.00 von Daniel Lawrence zusammengeführt. Die verwendete EMX Version ist 0.9d, es wird also die EMX Runtimeumgebung emxrt.zip ( http://hobbes.nmsu.edu oder http://www.leo.org) benötigt.

Ich habe einige Änderungen an dem Quellcode in os2npm.c durchgeführt um auf eine erweiterte Bildschirmauflösung von 50x132 Zeichen (XGA) schalten zu können. Diese Auflöung wird durch den Befehl "set $sres XGA" in der emacs.rc eingestellt. Die Bildschirmauflösung kann auch durch den OS/2 Befehl "mode con1 coYY,XX" vor dem Start von MicroEmacs eingestellt werden. XX ist die Anzahl der Spalten, YY ist die Anzahl der Zeilen.

Einige Änderungen in den Quelldateien file.c und german.h verbessern die Unterstützung der deutschen Sprache.

Bei Fragen oder Anregungen zur OS/2 Version schreibt mir eine Mail via Internet-Mail: carsten@strotmann.de.

(English translation)

• Port of the texteditor MicroEmacs for OS/2. This is the 32bit EMX version of MicroEmacs for OS/2 2.x or above. Binaries and Sources.
• MicroEmacs 99 (JASSPA); binaries (ELF) for SUN Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7) x86.
• MicroEmacs 4.00 (orig); binaries (ELF) for SUN Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7) x86.

mEmacs binaries for Solaris 7 x86

Binaries for SUN Solaris Unix Version 7 (SunOS 5.7) / Intel (not SPARC). The original MicroEmacs 4.00 version and the JASSPA MicroEmacs 99 versions are available. Please don't forget to download the resourcefiles from the distribution-homepages!

mEmacs for OS/2 2.x, Warp (3), Warp 4, Aurora

This is a 32 Bit version of MicroEmacs 4.00. I used the MicroEmacs 3.12 emx/gcc port of Ralf Seidel (see file readme.os2) and merged it with the 4.00 Source from Daniel Lawrence. The emx version used is 0.9d, so you need emxrt.zip ( http://hobbes.nmsu.edu or http://www.leo.org).

I changed the Source os2npm.c to use a extended screen resolution XGA 50x132. You can set this resolution with "set $sres XGA" in the emacs.rc file. You can also change the screen resolution before starting MicroEmacs with the OS/2 command "mode con1 coYY,XX, where YY are the rows and XX are the columns.

I also changed file.c and german.h for german language support.

If you have questions about this port, feel free to contact me via Internet-Mail: carsten@strotmann.de.

Screenshots

• MicroEmacs 4.00 (OS/2) Screenshot:
  
• JASSPA MicroEmacs (Solaris OpenLOOK):
  

MicroEmacs Downloads

• JASSPA MicroEmacs 99 Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7)
• MicroEmacs 4.00 Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7)
• MicroEmacs 4.00 OS/2
• MicroEmacs 4.00 OS/2 Source

• The MicroEmacs Homepage  (broken!)
• MicroEmacs Site for various Systems
• JASSPA MicroEmacs
• German MicroEmacs Site

Posted at 11:08PM Jun 28, 2008 by Carsten in uEmacs  |  Comments[0]