Monthly Archives: February 2013

As much as I appor censorship

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I’m willing to let people have their embarrassing comments redacted where needed.

Also I’ve never received a dime from any vendor or advertiser.  So what ever I have to say is mine, and mine alone.

“Just let them say whatever they want.”

You’re god damned right I will say whatever I want, and I’ll defend anyone who wants to say whatever they want.

 

Gamespy shuts down…

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From their site:

Why is this closure happening, then? It’s a business thing, and like most business things it’s not easy to explain or understand unless you spend all day crunching numbers and paying bills. Which I don’t. So here’s the simple version that even I can comprehend: Ziff Davis wants to run an efficient, focused company, and managing several different sites that all cover videogames isn’t exactly the model of efficiency. Even though GameSpy had its own unique voice that was separate and distinct from those of our sister sites, and there has always been value in that, it’s hard to argue with that logic. Even if it does totally suck.

So yeah, another one bites the dust.

Other greats from a top ten include Byte and InfoWorld.. Oh well.

Virtual Acorn – Fun with Virtualized RISC OS

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(this is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

VirtualRPC-SA let’s you run virtual RISC OS on a Windows or Mac OS X host similarly to VMware, VirtualBox or Qemu. The company page features this picture:

acorn1… in reality you you probably don’t want to do that!

As of time of writing of this article there is a sale going on! You can buy VirtualRPC-SA for only about $100. My primary reason for getting it was porting aclock to RISC OS. In addition to the VM I also purchased the original compiler and developer tools (DDE). It allows to target the funky 26 bit CPU. Otherwise GCC is available for free.acorn-cVirtualRPC comes “pre-installed” with the RISC OS in a virtual ROM image. The OS at first glance is quite nice looking and seems fun in to explore and play around. You can browse the web and use a bunch of weird applications from alien world. You can find a lot of software apps here and here and here. However I personally could not use this for anything more serious.

riscos-webPorting of aclock to RISC OS was by far one of most difficult ones if not the most difficult. To display text on the screen you need to use system calls directly, for which you use a special function called _swi() or _swix(). There is no concept of sleep() so I had to improvise an empty loop. Fortunately there are screen codes that allow to position the cursor, clear screen etc.

void cls(void) {
     (void) _swix(OS_WriteI + 12, 0);
}

The result is far from pretty but it will do for v1:

aclock-riscosSome funnies, which actually weren’t that funny at the time:

A directory separator in RISC OS is “.” (yes a dot) for example: root.folder.subfolder.file. The C compiler expects .c as a file extension as it would on any normal OS. The problem is that naming file aclock.c would make a directory aclock with c file in it. Fortunately, or maybe not, extensions in RISC OS are prefixing, not postfixing a file. So you have c.aclock or o.aclock. Except, as previously explained c and o are directories. You can see c and o folders in the screenshot above. Are you confused yet?

Interestingly RISC OS does have concept of a command line interface and a terminal window. However try to figure out the commands!

  • dir – change directory aka “cd” on the planet Earth
  • cat – list directory aka “ls” or “dir” in your normal OS

riscos-cmdThere is more, so I encourage you to try yourself just for the fun!

StarWars in traceroute…

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$ traceroute -m70 216.81.59.173
traceroute to 216.81.59.173 (216.81.59.173), 70 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 10.128.128.1 (10.128.128.1) 4.986 ms 1.822 ms 5.001 ms
2 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) 10.422 ms 9.753 ms 8.008 ms
3 haye-core-1a-ge227.network.virginmedia.net (80.3.176.117) 12.505 ms 17.845 ms 11.620 ms
4 haye-core-2a-ae3-0.network.virginmedia.net (212.43.163.117) 13.546 ms 15.411 ms 11.667 ms
5 brnt-bb-1c-ae9-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.174.181) 10.390 ms 14.591 ms 11.220 ms
6 brhm-bb-1c-ae8-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.174.126) 15.027 ms 14.014 ms 12.930 ms
7 manc-bb-1d-ae9-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.174.130) 16.903 ms 21.537 ms 17.406 ms
8 ams2-ic-1-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.188.158) 35.233 ms 35.239 ms 37.181 ms
9 20gigabitethernet1-3.core1.ams1.he.net (195.69.145.150) 35.612 ms 56.460 ms 47.099 ms
10 10gigabitethernet2-1.core1.par2.he.net (184.105.213.102) 52.228 ms 35.102 ms 36.546 ms
11 10gigabitethernet7-1.core1.ash1.he.net (184.105.213.93) 110.801 ms 119.820 ms 108.558 ms
12 10gigabitethernet1-2.core1.atl1.he.net (184.105.213.110) 125.420 ms 131.480 ms 125.539 ms
13 216.66.0.26 (216.66.0.26) 127.439 ms 127.575 ms 120.875 ms
14 * * *
15 episode.iv (206.214.251.1) 161.032 ms 157.648 ms 159.122 ms
16 a.new.hope (206.214.251.6) 163.121 ms 164.012 ms 157.602 ms
17 it.is.a.period.of.civil.war (206.214.251.9) 160.246 ms 167.533 ms 165.775 ms
18 rebel.spaceships (206.214.251.14) 158.946 ms 159.426 ms 159.989 ms
19 striking.from.a.hidden.base (206.214.251.17) 170.597 ms 156.394 ms 158.955 ms
20 have.won.their.first.victory (206.214.251.22) 164.299 ms 161.829 ms 165.064 ms
21 against.the.evil.galactic.empire (206.214.251.25) 156.892 ms 162.278 ms 162.140 ms
22 during.the.battle (206.214.251.30) 169.562 ms 159.530 ms 161.576 ms
23 rebel.spies.managed (206.214.251.33) 165.335 ms 177.317 ms 165.066 ms
24 to.steal.secret.plans (206.214.251.38) 159.017 ms 171.165 ms 158.219 ms
25 to.the.empires.ultimate.weapon (206.214.251.41) 162.347 ms 159.575 ms 161.645 ms
26 the.death.star (206.214.251.46) 159.988 ms 161.026 ms 170.766 ms
27 an.armored.space.station (206.214.251.49) 159.919 ms 159.620 ms 159.103 ms
28 with.enough.power.to (206.214.251.54) 159.763 ms 158.581 ms 164.685 ms
29 destroy.an.entire.planet (206.214.251.57) 158.816 ms 162.657 ms 158.504 ms
30 pursued.by.the.empires (206.214.251.62) 160.536 ms 163.812 ms 162.702 ms
31 sinister.agents (206.214.251.65) 162.774 ms 156.732 ms 158.407 ms
32 princess.leia.races.home (206.214.251.70) 159.533 ms 169.740 ms 157.241 ms
33 aboard.her.starship (206.214.251.73) 170.212 ms 160.525 ms 162.511 ms
34 custodian.of.the.stolen.plans (206.214.251.78) 160.029 ms 160.111 ms 164.432 ms
35 that.can.save.her (206.214.251.81) 159.387 ms 157.979 ms 174.848 ms
36 people.and.restore (206.214.251.86) 167.935 ms 168.145 ms 159.991 ms
37 freedom.to.the.galaxy (206.214.251.89) 159.007 ms 159.340 ms 171.348 ms
38 0-------------------0 (206.214.251.94) 159.061 ms 166.413 ms 157.890 ms
39 0------------------0 (206.214.251.97) 159.067 ms 162.940 ms 168.481 ms
40 0-----------------0 (206.214.251.102) 161.080 ms 162.901 ms 166.444 ms
41 0----------------0 (206.214.251.105) 159.524 ms 157.525 ms 159.574 ms
42 0---------------0 (206.214.251.110) 175.453 ms 163.357 ms 161.374 ms
43 0--------------0 (206.214.251.113) 159.551 ms 164.186 ms 181.264 ms
44 0-------------0 (206.214.251.118) 160.984 ms 166.130 ms 166.033 ms
45 0------------0 (206.214.251.121) 159.808 ms 160.962 ms 158.835 ms
46 0-----------0 (206.214.251.126) 160.306 ms 192.033 ms 183.749 ms
47 0----------0 (206.214.251.129) 159.206 ms 164.633 ms 157.775 ms
48 0---------0 (206.214.251.134) 160.612 ms 157.489 ms 158.674 ms
49 0--------0 (206.214.251.137) 162.269 ms 163.983 ms 164.089 ms
50 0-------0 (206.214.251.142) 161.552 ms 179.032 ms 163.963 ms
51 0------0 (206.214.251.145) 161.382 ms 162.914 ms 162.299 ms
52 0-----0 (206.214.251.150) 164.658 ms 181.340 ms 167.787 ms
53 0----0 (206.214.251.153) 165.318 ms 160.934 ms 164.243 ms
54 0---0 (206.214.251.158) 166.160 ms 165.575 ms 160.236 ms
55 0--0 (206.214.251.161) 328.388 ms 160.293 ms 164.426 ms
56 0-0 (206.214.251.166) 165.254 ms 162.842 ms 166.021 ms
57 00 (206.214.251.169) 164.655 ms 231.742 ms 162.731 ms
58 i (206.214.251.174) 163.695 ms 166.912 ms 164.269 ms
59 by.ryan.werber (206.214.251.177) 162.599 ms 162.630 ms 159.312 ms
60 when.ccies.get.bored (206.214.251.182) 168.640 ms 164.424 ms 159.427 ms
61 read.more.at.beaglenetworks.net (206.214.251.185) 173.392 ms 159.583 ms 160.446 ms
62 fin (206.214.251.190) 163.855 ms * 164.961 ms

Pointless? probably, but fun none the less!

The config was done with VRF’s, which you can read more about here.  To me it is just route maps revisited, if only Cisco did something like a router hypervisor with isolated instances of the router but I guess we can’t have everything :(