Category Archives: random updates

Usborne collection of 1980’s computer books!

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usborne

Back in the 1980’s home computers were a new and exciting thing, and with these machines came very technical manuals.  But us young children wanted to program, and thankfully companies like Usborne filled the gap by providing programming books geared towards kids!  It was a golden age as every machine had a basic interpreter.  Then for some reason software companies (Microsoft/IBM) didn’t think it was a good thing anymore bundling in languages with their OS’s, or worse thinking that development tools should be a source of revenue and pricing amateurs out of the market (seriously SCO, $5000 for a C compiler?)  But now thanks to the common carrier network we all have (the internet) the rise of open and free software hackers have taken things into their hands, and we are back to empowering users.

So I thought it was interesting that Usborne opened up a bunch of it’s older books.  All available in PDF, free for personal use.

First computer library

Introductions to programming

Games

Adventure games

You can see their page with full details here.

 

Merry Christmas from Japan!

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So yeah, I’ve been crazy busy this holiday season, between work and vacation so updates have . well not been forth coming.

I wanted to touch on old StarWars games for the new movie, and even got to play Star Wars on a x68000!  If it were the 80’s I would super recommend one.  But in this day/age it’s plagued by poor draw distances, poor wire frame 3d, and just poor game play.  It is probably more of a fault with the arcade version that was revolutionary for it’s time, then it rotted and was ported out.  Something like Frontier puts Star Wars to shame on low grade 68000 based hardware.

But the sound, sure was awesome!

I also want to do some passable review of the retro freak!  I picked up one for about $150 USD. It is expensive, there is no doubt about that, and it is emulation.  I also picked up a NES on a chip console clone for about $13 USD.  At the same time I can score a MegaDrive for about 30-40 USD, and 25-30 for a SNES.  Which brings me to an interesting observation:

There is next to NO Mega Drive stuff.  There is far more Saturn, and very few Dreamcast, but I’s seen maybe 15 Mega Drive carts.  Meanwhile I’ve found Famicom/Super Famicom stuff almost everywhere I look.  My favorite is the local chain “Book Off” that almost always has a nice retro section, along with used PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 stuff.

Otherwise, I have horrible to non existent internet in the house I rented (it is like the yacht in Hong Kong from a few years back), so I’ve been forced to spend my time in internet cafes for 12+ hours a day.

Oh yeah, Tokyo is just like London.  After 6pm, everyone goes home, the stores close, and there is nothing open.  After 10 the trains stop and that is that.

While I’m on the subject of living in the future, and working physically wherever, the Microsoft Surface is a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE thing.  Granted I didn’t pay for this one, but it’s wifi chip is utter crap, it is prone to locking hard, and the kickstand and detachable keyboard is a JOKE.  I know Balmer wanted in on the iPad action, and then the Surface RT, eventually became just another PC, but damn a laptop this is not.  The only nice thing I can say is that it boots fast.  Which is something you’ll be doing lots of.  The fan is noisy and distracting, the display is OK, but nothing fancy in this modern age.

I currently had to go out and buy 2 USB Ethernet adapters and bridge the cafe’s internet so I could connect this POS.  I give the Microsoft Surface Pro v3 a 1/5*.  AVOID DO NOT BUY.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

In the “neato” section, I did find an eval copy of Citrix.  And a NIB quality box of Postal 2!  I didn’t know there was any updates so that was a surprise.  But now I see it is on sale over on Steam, for $7.50 Hong Kong Dollars.  I would do some give away but I also found out that my account got converted. YAY.

steam is now in HKD

Steam is now priced in Hong Kong Dollars!

Which means I cannot give anything away as apparently I now live in a poorer area and get subsidized games. I guess that is to make up for censored and restricted catalogs.

So yeah, I am alive.

And MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!

Crazy to think that 2016 is literally around the corner!

Snoopy – a basic packet sniffer for Windows

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

A few days ago I wrote a basic packet sniffer / analyzer for Windows for fun. I was working with raw sockets for another application and out of curiosity winged a small packet sniffer in just 200 lines of code. I actually used it already several times to resolve some firewall port blocking issues, instead of spinning up Wireshark, so I decided to release it to public.

The good:

  • Portable, a single, tiny exe
  • Easy to use
  • Doesn’t install any driver like libpcap
  • Extensible, just 200 lines of simple code

The bad:

  • It’s very basic and doesn’t allow anything outside of simple unicast TCP, UDP and ICMP, most importantly layer 2, broadcasts, multicasts, etc are out of question
  • Currently it doesn’t directly support filtering, however you can just pipe it to findstr to filter for anything you want

Raw socket limitations are possibly the biggest issue, but if you just want to find out simple stuff like traffic going to a given port or ip address it’s a perfect little handy dandy tool to carry around.

To use snoopy you specific IP address of the interface on which you want to listen:

snoopy1There also is a verbose mode which shows some more detailed protocol information:

snoopy2Today I decode ICMP message types, TCP flags, sequence, ack and window numbers and DSCP, ECN, TTL and Dont Fragment flags for IP. I’m thinking of embedding /etc/protocols and /etc/services in a .h file to resolve them on the fly.

Bug reports and suggestions most welcome!

Available here: http://www.tenox.net/out#snoopy

 

NVIDIA GRID – GPU Virtualization under Windows

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

I spent a day evaluating NVIDIA GRID K1 card, which is a GPU for high end, graphics intensive desktop virtualization (VDI) deployments. Otherwise called vGPU. What does it actually mean?

gridk1As you can see on the stock photo, the card doesn’t have VGA, HDMI, DVI, DP or any video output port what so ever. The output happens purely through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) extension called RemoteFX. On VMware and Citrix it works little bit different but I will be covering Windows / Hyper-v installation only.

The GRID K1 is somewhat similar to Quadro card so the driver is not your usual GeForce package, but the experience is quite similar nevertheless. Upon installation you see 4 different physical GPUs in Device manager:

grid1This works similarly to having multiple CPU cores that show up as separate processors in the OS. Here is a first fun fact: you can’t actually use any of these directly, as they simply have no output port and can’t display any graphics… Instead, you have to use Hyper-v with RemoteFX extension:

grid2Then for each guest machine, you add a RemoteFX graphics card as hardware:

grid3In order to use RemoteFX you need to Remote Desktop (RDP) to the guest machine. The protocol is fortunately available since version 7.1 so even Windows 7 can use it. However only Enterprise editions of Windows support it.

Inside the guest VM you see a virtual RemoteFX Display Adapter in the Device Manager:

grid4And as you can see Direct3D is available and enabled. Note that this is over RDP to a VM! The VM’s console curiously displays following message:

grid5Hard to show on static screenshots, but I have to say that RemoteFX user experience is noticeably better compared to a regular RDP. Everything works smoother and faster, scrolling pages, moving windows is a snap. You can play videos / YouTube, etc. But I was more interested in real use case which are high end 3D applications. So I proceeded to install Steam…

remotefx2Yes! this is GTA V running over Remote Desktop in a VM!

remotefx3The frame rate sucks quite considerably, even in safe mode, but it was playable and quite responsive (no lag). I actually spent couple of hours going through it and except for low FPS had no issues.

I also spun up this Wyse Thin Client terminal:

20151111_215651146_iOSdisconnected my RDP session and reconnected from the terminal… poof the game was still going:

20151111_232610662_iOSI even got sound out of the little thing.

I suspect that the low FPS is rather to do with small GPU horse power and vRAM assigned rather that with remote viewing or NVIDIA itself. Unfortunately in Hyper-v it’s impossible to control or fine tune assignment of GPU resources to a particular VM beyond simple on/off switch. The K1 card supports 32 users, so I was only getting 1/32th power and RAM. Perhaps I could have spawned 32 VMs with GTA. Or Call Of Duty multiplayer….

In ending notes I have to conclude that this is a rather interesting technology. According to NVIDIA, Cloud is future of Gaming. In fact they already have cloud game streaming service:

http://shield.nvidia.com/game-streaming-with-geforce-now

Beware of campers who now will be able to disconnect from online games for months at a time.

 

QNX Updates

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

A few interesting things have happened in QNX area in a last month or so.

First of all, there is a QNX BSP for Raspberry PI:

qnxrpiIt’s an early developer release, not fully complete, but it does boot and work. It adds an interesting os beside RISC OS and Plan9 to the Pi family. The BSP is available from SHC Products. They have a binary and source code version.

Secondly, in the archaeology department, this has surfaced:

qnx12bootqnx12c

But even more interestingly I’ve found a beta / preliminary release v0.4 of QNX:

qunixStay tuned for more…

You can run VxWorks too!

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(this is a guest post from Tenox)

VxWorks is an embedded operating system that typically runs on things like Mars probes, Boeing 787 or Apache helicopters, but today you can run it too! WindRiver has an evaluation target that you can run on an Intel CPU, meaning you can spin it up on your favorite hypervisor at home.

Go to this page: http://www.windriver.com/evaluations/bsp/ register, download the two ZIP files and follow the instructions.

VxWorks running on VMwareVxWorks comes with two shell modes C and admin. In C shell you execute C code and you can write simple programs or even patch existing running code like they did on Mars Pathfinder. This is the default one with -> prompt. You can enter to admin shell by typing “cmd”. If you are familiar with KSH “vi” mode you can use it for history and editing command line.

The evaluation target is very basic and limited. If you want to do and learn more stuff, you need to download evaluation of VxWorks Platform and spin up the VxWorks Simulator, or build your own target. This is a picture of a slightly older version running on Windows:

vxworks-emulatorThe operating system was also recently featured in Forbes…

Local mirrors:

For my dear friend snejannatr

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Password strength

Yes I see you trying to login as me.  Yes I blocked your Russian and Ukrainian addresses.

What are you so desperate to see here?

There is no deep secret files, or drafts.

If anything I get into trouble for revealing too much when I do find stuff.

Take it easy man, there really isn’t anything to see here.

WYSE Unix Virtualized

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(this is a guest post from Tenox)

wyseunix

WYSE Unix Virtualization Challenge has been officially won by Mihai Gaitos of hawk.ro. He received $100 prize via PayPal. Congratulations!

WYSE Unix has now been virtualized and can run in Qemu via Curses mode, or modified Bochs due to character map issues and vanilla VirtualBox!

wyse_on_bochswyse_on_vboxMihai has posted some gory details of the installation challenges on his website.

Ready to run image with modified Bochs binary for Linux is available here.
VirtualBox OVA file available here.

For hard core fanatics, the system comes with SLIP/slattach so you should be able to network it much like Dell Unix.

Special thanks to:
Andrew Gong for finding a tape image on eBay
Al Kossow of bitsavers.org for recovering the tape image
Michal Necasek for patching up the original floppy disk image