(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Thats right, the new beta version of Web Rendering Proxy runs natively on Windows. Single EXE, no libraries or dependencies required. Only Chrome Browser.
I took a Internet Explorer 1.5 for a spin today while WRP was running on my Windows 10 PC. Worked just fine.
I have added Prev/Next buttons so that you can easily “scroll” through long pages.
ISMAP support has been added, proof:
You can download a preview build on github.
(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
There hasn’t been a major update to WRP (Web Rendering Proxy) in 5 years or so. Some new features have been added thanks to efforts of Claunia but the whole project was mostly impeded with mass migration of the whole Internet to SSL/TLS/https. It does semi work somehow thanks to sslstrip but the whole stack is an unmaintainable pile of crap which I’m not going to update any more.
A new rewrite from scratch is well under way. This time written in GoLang and using Chrome DevTools Protocol. Things should be much more stable and future proof.
Far from complete but I have a fully functional prototype now working in just under 100 lines of code:
UPDATE 1: You can play with it if you want. Please do not submit any bug reports just yet, as this is just a development version. Note that WRP is currently not a true HTTP proxy but rather browser-in-browser. Proxy may be supported later.
UPDATE 2: As of today online setting of size, scaling and scrolling is supported. I’m specifically happy about the scrolling feature albeit it probably needs a better user input, like prev/next page.
Windows version still doesn’t work due to an upstream bug, which is probably easy to fix.
ISMAP is currently in development.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Apps for Windows NT RISC… Alpha AXP, MIPS and PowerPC. Happy downloading.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Today I have discovered Yori. So should you. No one can be told what Yori is, you need to take the red pill and see if for yourself.
Also more stuff from malxau.
(this is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
This is a lame duck, low effort post. If you already know it’s 🤦 obvious. However this question seem to be asked a lot on the intertubes. I was stupid and searched for it too. I hope this will help someone else, as there is no good readily available answer out there.
Problem: I want to have SNMP on my Comcast/Xfinity/AT&T router so I can monitor current bandwidth usage.
Research:
Nope or very hard / unsupported.
So is it possible at all? Yes, but with a separate device.
Comcast/Xfinity routers have so called “Bridge Mode” which essentially turns them in to a DOCSIS modem without the router / firewall / wifi access point. AT&T has a passthrough mode which works similarly.
Solution: Turn on Bridge/Passthrough Mode in your vanilla router and buy a WRT firmware router / access point. I got Linksys AC3200 for $99 on Amazon. Ssh to the router and run: opkg install snmpd. 🤦
Done.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I have recently acquired this artifact:
It’s the Microsoft BASIC compiler for XENIX 286 Operating System. Compiler as opposed to just BASIC interpreter, it can produce executable a.out files, similar to C compiler for example.
Carefully removed the shrink wrap. Inside were couple of 5.25″ floppies, registration card and a manual:
Interestingly the 32 year old disks read just fine on a first attempt. I need to start backing up important files to 5.25″ floppy disks as they seem to outlast everything else.
Thanks to efforts of Michal Necasek from OS/2 Museum now you can run Microsoft XENIX 286 in Virtual Box.
The disks can be installed in to XENIX running on Vbox following a few simple steps:
tar xvf /dev/fd0
./msinstall /dev/fd0
Upon installation you invoke the compiler like this:
bascom demo.bas
./a.out
And it produced an a.out executable which worked perfectly fine.
It’s fun to write BASIC code in vi editor, which I just realized I never done before.
Curiously the compiler also worked on the brand spanking new Xenix 2018, or rather I should call it Open Server 6, which you can download here.
The BASIC compiler is available for download from my archive along with the manual in pdf.
(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I spend most of time in a day staring at a terminal window often running various performance monitoring tools and reading metrics.
Inspired by tools like gtop, vtop and gotop I wished for a more generic terminal based tool that would visualize data coming from unix pipeline directly on the terminal. For example graph some column or field from sar, iostat, vmstat, snmpget, etc. continuously in real time.
Yes gnuplot and several other utilities can plot on terminal already but none of them easily read data from stdin and plot continuously in real time.
In just couple of evenings ttyplot was born. The utility reads data from stdin and plots it on a terminal with curses. Simple as that. Here is a most trivial example:
To make it happen you take ping command and pipe the output via sed to extract the right column and remove unwanted characters:
ping 8.8.8.8 | sed -u 's/^.*time=//g; s/ ms//g' | ttyplot
Ttyplot can also read two inputs and plot with two lines, the second being in reverse-video. This is useful when you want to plot in/out or read/write at the same time.
A lot of performance metrics are presented in as a “counter” type which needs to be converted in to a “rate”. Prometheus and Graphana have rate() or irate() function for that. I have added a simple -r option. The time difference is calculated automatically. This is an example using snmpget which is show in screenshot above:
{ while true; do snmpget -v 2c -c public 10.23.73.254 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.{10,16}.9 | gawk '{ print $NF/1000/1000 }'; sleep 10; done } | ttyplot -2 -r -u "MB/s"
I now find myself plotting all sorts of useful stuff which otherwise would be cumbersome. This includes a lot of metrics from Prometheus for which you normally need a web browser. And how do you plot metrics from Prometheus? With curl:
{ while true; do curl -s http://10.4.7.180:9100/metrics | grep "^node_load1 " | cut -d" " -f2; sleep 1; done } | ttyplot
If you need to plot a lot of different metrics ttyplot fits nicely in to panels in tmux, which also allows the graphs to run for longer time periods.
Of course in text mode the graphs are not very precise, but this is not the intent. I just want to be able to easily spot spikes here and there plus see some trends like up/down – which works exactly as intended.I do dig fancy braille line graphs and colors but this is not my priority at the moment. They may get added later, but most importantly I want the utility to work reliably on most operating systems and terminals.
You can find compiled binaries here and source code and examples to get you started – here.
If you get to plot something cool that deserves to be listed as an example please send it on!
(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Recently came across this unfinished port of Minix 1.5 to Acorn Archimedes A310. According to the readme file this is a set of patches that needs to be applied on a standard Minix 1.5.10 code base on a Unix machine. The code then needs to be to transferred to Risc OS machine for compilation. Once complete then you need to manually create boot records and a file system. Sounds like a fun little project.
What I want is pretty standard:
First person to deliver these gets a prize of £100 (that is 100 GBP / Pound Sterling). I strongly encourage to coordinate your efforts via comments.
If needed I can supply licenses for commercial Acorn emulators and C compiler for Risc OS, albeit I only have license for a modern ROOL DDE. I hope ancient version is not needed, but this part of the challenge. Note that I can’t just give away the licenses to anyone, I will only share or purchase new licenses for serious contenders on one to one basis.
Let the challenge begin!
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Microsoft is releasing Windows 10 for ARM64 CPUs and this time, unlike Windows RT fiasco, there will be a full desktop app support including a dynamic binary translator to allow running existing x86 apps on ARM CPU, much like FX!32 on Alpha NT or Rosetta on Mac OS X.
Latest Visual Studio updates now bring official ARM/ARM64 support for Desktop Apps, little hidden, but here is how to enable it.
Being able to compile Windows ARM apps, I wanted to try to actually run them, but … on what exactly? There are some developer evaluation boards. Apparently someone managed to run it on Raspberry PI. Most importantly however you can run Windows 10 ARM64 on QEMU. This is some serious Fun With Virtualization!
Windows 10 ARM64 running on QEMU
I’m not claiming to be the first. Clever people have already done it. I just wanted to make it little easier for the lazier of us. Here is how.
Follow the link above but skip the shady UUP business in step #3 and download ready made iso instead. You can google the iso image from windows.cmd and it will take you to this link. You need the rest of the files like UEFI firmware and virtio drivers.
For the even more impatient here is a ready to run image with Windows pre-installed. Because QEMU now comes with DLL HELL I’m not including it in the archive. You will have to install it separately.
If you want to transfer files in/out of the image a tip from Pete Batard of Rufus:
Create a folder named say “transfer” and add the following option to the launch script:
-hdb fat:rw:transferThis will create a second FAT32 formatted disk, that maps your transfer\
directory to the QEMU virtual machine. In our case, Windows 10 will see it
and make it automatically accessible as “QEMU VVFAT (D:)”. You can even
use this to write file from the VM to the host (though, depending on how
fast Windows flushes its disk cache, they may take a while to appear).
Go have fun and port some apps to ARM64 with free community edition of Visual Studio. I’m going to start with Aclock 🙂
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
In a recent blog post Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows I lamented about lack of a good console/cmd/PowerShell text editor for Windows. When researching for the article I made rather interesting discovery. There in a fact has been a native Windows, 32bit, console based text editor. It was available since earliest days of NT or even before. But let’s start from…
…in the beginning there was Z editor. Developed by Steve Wood for TOPS-20 operating system in 1981. Some time after that, Steve sold the source code to Microsoft, which was then ported to MS-DOS by Mark Zbikowski (aka the MZ guy) to become the M editor.
The DOS-based M editor was included and sold as part of Microsoft C 5.1 (March 1988), together with the OS/2 variant, the MEP editor (perhaps M Editor Protected-mode). The official name of M/MEP was simply Microsoft Editor. The same editor was also available earlier (mid-1987) as part of the MS OS/2 SDK under a different name: SDKED. Note that normally SDKED insists in operating in full screen mode. Michal Necasek generously spent his time and patched it up so that it can be run in windowed mode for your viewing pleasure.
However my primary interest lies with Windows NT. The NT Design Workbook mentions that in the early days a self-hosting developer workstation included compiler, some command line tools and a text editor – MEP. Leaked Windows NT builds sometimes include IDW, Internal Development Workstation, which also seem to contain a variant of the same editor. In fact some these tools including MEP.EXE can be found on Windows NT pre-release CD-ROMs (late 1991) under MSTOOLS. It was available for both MIPS and 386 as a Win32 native console based application.
The editor was later also available for Alpha, i386, MIPS, and PowerPC processors on various official Windows NT SDKs from 3.1 to 4.0. It survived up to July 2000 to be last included in Windows 2000 Platform SDK.
The Win32 version of MEP also comes with an icon and a file description which calls it M Editor in NT 3.1 SDK and later Microsoft Extensible Editor.
From time perspective, it was rather unfortunate that this gem was buried in the SDK rather than being included on Windows NT release media. However I can understand that the editor wasn’t very user friendly or intuitive, compared to say edit.com from MS-DOS. It came from a different era and similar to VI or Emacs, didn’t have “PC user friendly” key bindings or menus.
But that’s not the end of the story. The editor of many names survives to this day, at least unofficially. If you dig hard enough you can find it on OpenNT 4.5 build. For convenience, this and other builds including DOS M, OS/2 MEP and SDKED, NT SDK MEP can be downloaded here.
Digging through the archive I found not one but two copies of the editor code, lurking in the source tree. One under the name MEP inside \private\utils\mep\ folder and a second copy under name Z (which was the original editor for TOPS) in \private\sdktools\z folder. MEP was included in Platform SDK, while Z was only available as part of IDW.
Doing a few diffs I was able to get some insight on the differences. Looks like MEP was initially ported from OS/2 to NT and bears some signs of being an OS/2 app. The Z editor on the other hand is a few years newer and has many improvements and bug fixes over MEP. It also uses some specific NT only features.
Sadly the internal Z editor was never released anywhere outside of Redmond. All the versions outlined so far had copyrights only up to 1990, while Z clearly has copyright from 1995. Being a few years newer and more native to NT I wanted to see if a build could be made. With some effort I was able to separate it from the original source tree and compile stand alone. Being a pretty clean source code I was able to compile it for all NT hardware platforms, including x64, which runs comfortably on Windows 10. You can download Z editor for Windows here.
Platform SDK contains pretty solid documentation in tools.chm.
Here is a handy cheat sheet:
Last but not least there is a modern open source re-implementation of Z editor named K editor. It’s written from scratch in C++ and LUA and has nothing to do with the original MEP source code. K is built only for x64 using Mingw. There are no ready to run binaries so I made a fork and build.
The author Kevin Goodwin has kindly included copies of original documentation if you actually want to learn how to use this editor.