QEMU 1.7.1 Stable released

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce that the QEMU v1.7.1 stable release is now available at:

http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-1.7.1.tar.bz2

v1.7.1 is now tagged in the official qemu.git repository, and the stable-1.7 branch has been updated accordingly:

http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/stable-1.7

This release contains 62 build/bug fixes, including important fixes for crashes at certain guest system memory sizes, and unplugging of virtio devices.

Thank you to everyone involved!

In a surprise move, Microsoft opens up the source to MS-DOS & Word for Windows.

I couldn’t believe it!  You can find the official announcement here.

So this is MS-DOS 1.1 & 2.0 source code.  Pitty it’s not 3.x but heck, it’s a start!

Also the Word in question is 1.1a however it does seem to include the OS/2 bits which was a big surprise.

I haven’t tried to build any of it, as I just got up but I know what I’ll be doing today!

8086tiny de-obfuscated!

I came across this site, which is from the author of the winning IOCCC entry, 8086tiny!

It’s ballooned from just under 4kb to 28kb, but still incredibly tiny!

For anyone interested it’s features:

  • Highly accurate, complete 8086 CPU emulation (including undocumented features and behavior)
  • Support for all standard PC peripherals: keyboard, 3.5″ floppy drive, hard drive, video (Hercules/CGA graphics and text mode, including direct video memory access), real-time clock, timers, PC speaker
  • Disk images are compatible with standard Windows/Mac/UNIX mount tools for simple interoperability
  • Complete source code provided (including custom BIOS)

It’s worth checking out for some old time PC/XT nostalgia!

Visual Studio 2005 Express editions

I found myself in need for J# of all things for something with work.  J# is the MS answer to migrating Java code to .net.

Anyways it turns out I was able to find the web installer, but the link for generating a license code no longer exists.  However, the ISO’s never needed the code.  Except they aren’t available for download.

Or so I thought.

Turns out they are still there, but MS pulled the pages.

I figure it’ll help someone out there.

Blinking lights…

I almost cannot believe I’m going to post this, but so many of my machines don’t have LED’s to blink for hard disk activity it is driving me nuts.

Well thankfully, for windows there is a solution:

diskled

So what it does, is it’ll poll  \PhysicalDisk(_Total)\% Disk Time every 30ms, and if it’s doing something it’ll blink the icon colour.

Why is this cool?

It’ll even work with RDP.  So your server can be on the other side of the world, and you’ll know what’s going on.

It's cooler than it looks

It’s cooler than it looks

 

Web Rendering Proxy

(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

WRP is a HTTP proxy service that renders web pages in to GIF images associated with a clickable imagemap of the original web links. It basically allows to use historical and obsolete web browsers on the modern web.

See a gallery of today’s news sites. All links are clickable!

CNN via Internet Explorer 1.5

CNN via Internet Explorer 1.5

 

Reuters via IBM Web Explorer

Reuters via IBM Web Explorer

 

BBC News via Mac Mosaic

BBC News via Mac Mosaic

 

Reddit via NextStep OmniWeb

Reddit via NextStep OmniWeb

 

netscape3

Netscape 3.x visiting DNA Lounge

 

For more background information and screenshots you can see my previous post on the matter.

There are two versions. Cocoa-webkit for Mac OS X and QT-Webkit for Linux/BSD/etc. The script can be downloaded here.

Surfing Modern Web With Ancient Browsers

(note this is a guest post by Tenox)

[Update: A full HTTP Proxy version has been made in this post.]

I spend a fair amount of time working with legacy operating systems. Apart from being obsolete themselves they suffer from a common problem – the web browsers are simply unusable on a present day Internet. You start by getting JavaScript error on google.com and it only gets worse once you go further. Try going to microsoft.com with IE 1.5 or qnx.com with the last version of Voyager. This just doesn’t work. With rapid progression of web standards, the situation will only be getting worse in time. Something had to be done.

Quite a while ago I’ve came across Opera rendering proxy for mobile browsers. This got me thinking. If you could render a web page on a proxy server to a simplified HTML, say 3.x., this would make a lot of web browsers happy! Also, for some unrelated purposes I have been using webkit2png which allows to create a whole web page snapshot in a single png image. What if such image had an image map of clickable regions pointing to the original links?

The idea was born, but was it possible to implement and would it work? Webkit2png was quite far from having all the required functionality. Fortunately though after some additional research I have stumbled upon picidae network. To my utter surprise they actually made all or even more functionality that I wanted in their picidae.py script. All that had to be done to adapt picidae to my purpose was to save the image as a GIF image, generate a simple HTML page with imagemap, an input box and strip all the unwanted stuff.

Webrender.py came to life. It’s a cgi-bin application that resides on a machine in the middle. It renders a gif image and spits it out to the browser together with a simple web page, containing a URL and search input boxes plus the gif and image map.

After some initial debugging and massaging out few bugs the solution worked perfectly! I could finally get the old browsers happily navigate modern websites! Check out some examples:

Internet Explorer 1.5 on microsoft.com

Internet Explorer 1.5 on microsoft.com

 Yes! You can finally browse microsoft.com with IE 1.5 🙂

Netscape 4 visiting netscape.com

Netscape 4 visiting netscape.com

Or go to netscape.com in Netscape 4.x browser. This was impossible just a few hours ago!

How about some other browsers:

QNX Voyager going to qnx.com

QNX Voyager going to qnx.com

 

Mozilla on UnixWare

Mozilla on UnixWare

 

Old Firefox on Haiku

Old Firefox on Haiku

 

CNN on Mosaic

CNN on Mosaic

 

apple-mosaic

Apple.com using Mac Mosaic

 

IBM WebExplorer on OS/2

IBM WebExplorer on OS/2

 

RiscOS !NetSurf on Wikipedia

RiscOS !NetSurf on Wikipedia

 

netscape3

Netscape visiting DNA Lounge

 

NextStep OmniWeb on Reddit.com

NextStep OmniWeb on Reddit.com

 

Enjoy!

Update: A full HTTP Proxy version has been made in this post.