In 2015, I wrote a custom BBS server in Ruby and had been using it to run the Kludge BBS on a small OpenBSD server in my home office since then.

Last year after writing a lot of C on my Macintosh Plus, I had the itch to write a new BBS server so I could move the BBS to run on another Mac Plus. As with all software development projects, it took quite a bit longer than expected, but last month I finally got far enough with the development to deploy the new BBS on a Mac Plus.

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Amend 3.4 has been released:

• amend-3.4.sit (StuffIt 3 archive, includes source code and THINK C 5 project file)

Changes in this version:

• Fix newline handling in diff generation that was adding erroneous newlines after chunk headers
• Update backend database library with bug fixes
• Fix crash that occurred after saving settings
• Other minor crash fixes

Amend 3.3 has been released:

• amend-3.3.sit (StuffIt 3 archive, includes source code and THINK C 5 project file)

Changes in this version:

• Correctly include C function prototypes in diffs (equivalent to diff’s -p option)
• Bug fixes and speedups in backend database library

Introducing my Wallops IRC client, then returning to work on the BBS adding a serial module to join the console and telnet inputs to allow calls through a modem. I got stuck for a while trying to figure out why writes to the serial port would hang the machine.

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Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I’ve occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.

If I happen to be programming on my Mac right now, you can watch here at my website.

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I was trying to use a V4L2 Ruby module on my OpenBSD laptop but ran into a problem where sending the V4L2 ioctls from this module would fail, while other V4L2 programs on OpenBSD worked fine.

Since I got a few questions recently about kernel development and debugging, I thought I’d write up how I finally tracked it down and fixed it. (Spoiler: it was not an OpenBSD problem.)

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A large update to my Wallops IRC client is available:

• wallops-1.1.sit (StuffIt 3 archive, includes source code and THINK C 5 project file)

This update includes a number of new features and bugfixes:

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As teased on Twitter, the first release of my Wallops IRC client is now available:

• wallops-1.0.sit (StuffIt 3 archive, includes source code and THINK C 5 project file)

A future update will support multiple channels but for now it only supports one channel at a time.

Amend 3.2 has been released:

• amend-3.2.sit (StuffIt 3 archive, includes source code and THINK C 5 project file)

Changes in this version:

• When filtering out already-added files, also filter out the open repo file itself
• Fix a possible crash after committing
• Stop occasionally displaying a cursor on read-only text boxes such as diffs

I tweeted asking if anyone would be interested in a Q&A, and to my surprise, I got many Qs to A.

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It’s a new year and my old computer is still old.

A bug in Amend caused it to crash during a commit, which corrupted the repo beyond repair. I quickly came to realize that using resource files as a database for Amend and my new BBS was a bad idea. I NIH’d the problem and created my own file format that will be a bit more resilient to crashes and partial writes.

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Let’s have a chat. Continuing feature development of my BBS software.

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I review some recent commits covering user authentication and telnet negotiation, then write some ANSI output code and a broken function for returning a number’s ordinal suffix.

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I’m starting on a new project and I needed a cooperative threading mechanism which didn’t exist in System 6, so I created one.

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I started using the Tindie platform in April to sell my WiFiStation kits. I’ve now sold out all of my initial inventory and am not planning on making any more, so I thought I’d offer my opinions of Tindie as a platform for selling things.

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