Video: C Programming on System 6 - Carl Update, Test Suite, Malloc Tracing
I've been working on Carl, my IMAP e-mail client, for the past few months.
I've been working on Carl, my IMAP e-mail client, for the past few months.
Subtext 4.0 has been released:
c33a6abe15e7f071 59a18d936dce7c43 5d9619f80d6c53d1 cdd26fabf06712f7
0f4bdcd08b57b568 125d8ddcab5ad97f 1f5dd586
I attended the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 18 and made some things.
Over the past year or so, I've been working with other BlueSCSI developers to add Wi-Fi functionality to their open-hardware SCSI device, enabling Wi-Fi support for old Macs and other vintage computers going back some 36 years.
I've been operating Pushover's public-facing API for over a decade now and I thought I'd pass on some advice for those creating a new API.
Pushover's API might be unusual in that it is used by a wide range of devices (embedded IoT things, legacy servers, security cameras, etc.) and HTTP libraries, rather than mostly being accessed from JavaScript in the latest web browsers. It also doesn't process sensitive financial information, so the advice given here may not be applicable to something operating like Stripe's API.
As a frequent reader of the retrobattlestations and VintageApple subreddits, I see a lot of photos of CRT screens that show significant scanlines resulting in images like the one on the left.
With a simple post-processing tip on the iPhone (though there is probably a similar technique for Android phones), it's easy to fix this photo after it's been taken so it looks like the one on the right:
I recently acquired a 3M Whisper Writer 1000 communications terminal circa 1983, and restored it to working order. This is a short session of it dialing into my Kludge BBS (hosted on a Macintosh Plus circa 1986) over its internal 300 bps modem.
I attended the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 17 and wrote two new programs.
In 2015, I wrote a custom BBS server in Ruby and had been using it to run my 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 my 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.
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.
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.
I was trying to use a V4L2
Ruby module
on my OpenBSD laptop but ran into a problem where sending the V4L2 ioctl
s 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.)
I tweeted asking if anyone would be interested in a Q&A, and to my surprise, I got many Qs to A.
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.
Let's have a chat. Continuing feature development of my BBS software.