Category Archives: random updates

Leonard Nimoy passed away.

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st5-016

Leonard

To say that Star Trek influenced many nerds of today is a massive understatement.  From the over estimating engineer, the surly physician, the cocky captain to the logical science officer the show had everything that children of all ages could not only appreciate, but aspire to be.

It was sad news to wake up to find that Leonard had passed from complications with his pulmonary disease.  Even though he quit smoking some 30 years ago it simply wasn’t enough.

We are fortunate in this digital age where we can celebrate his life’s works, and remember him for the role that made him a world recognized icon.

st5-004

The final frontier

Indeed a role model to many has departed to that final frontier.

Leonard Nimoy was 83.

 

CS1685:

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So I’ve been playing with some C# in trying to mess with other stuff in some insane fun.  Anyways I was getting this weird compiler error trying to build my c# components:

warning CS1685: The predefined type ‘System.Func’ is defined in multiple
assemblies in the global alias; using definition from
‘c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\mscorlib.dll’

Well that is strange.  Everything still worked, but I was getting screens full of this crap, so I was missing anything that didn’t build correctly from the CLI, so I had to find the source.  I found this nice tip, by adding the following into the source, and compile again.

System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute x = null;

And running the compiler (yet again), I got this:

c.cs(17,33): error CS0433: The type
‘System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute’ exists in both
‘d:\proj\zmq.net\b\System.Core.dll’ and
‘c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\mscorlib.dll’
System.Core.dll: (Location of symbol related to previous error)
c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\mscorlib.dll: (Location of symbol
related to previous error)

What is this? There is a System.Core.dll in my work area?

11/05/2010  09:53 AM           667,648 System.Core.dll

Sure enough, there it is.  I don’t know why it’s there, I don’t remember putting it there.  Even though I wasn’t directly referencing it, for some reason it was getting pulled in.

D:\proj\zmq.net\b>c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\csc c.cs /r:netm
q.dll
Microsoft (R) Visual C# Compiler version 4.0.30319.18408
for Microsoft (R) .NET Framework 4.5
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

c.cs(17,52): warning CS0219: The variable ‘x’ is assigned but its value is never
used

Now I can delete the added line, and I’ll get a silent compile.

Yay.

Coherent sources released under a 3-clause BSD license

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coherent

Print ad for Coherent

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, or just not that familiar with what Coherent is, it’s a clean room re-implementation of version 7 Unix. What is unique about Coherent is that AT&T sent a team, which included Dennis Ritchie to evaluate the source to make sure that they hadn’t stolen Unix, and they concluded:

“that looking at various corners I couldn’t find anything that was copied.”

So Coherent was free to continue to sell their discount Unix like OS for the bargain price of $99 USD. I had plans on buying a copy as the older versions even supported the 8086, and 80286 however by the time I finally got enough RAM and disk space to make the purchase worth while, Linux was freely available. I believe that Coherent was the first OS to be killed by the Linux juggernaut, followed by SCO Xenix.

So it’s a little late to the party, open sourcing may have helped back in the early 1990’s although it’d seem like an utterly crazy move at the time.
Better late than never, this includes source dumps, and some RCS data, along with random tgz’s and a binary distribution of version 4. Without any doubt this will either help emulators better emulate the machine state Coherent expects, or perhaps fixing Coherent to run on more modern machines.

Coherent was also famous for it’s large, and well documented manual. Luckily the sources to the manual are also available.

So without further ado, here is the pages with the sources to coherent.

On final note of interest is that the Mark Williams Company was founded by Robert Swartz, who’s son Aaron was quite influential until the time of his death.

You ever get that feeling you’re going nowhere

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And no matter what you are do, this program simply will not run?  You think it’s something platform specific since building it is such a major pain with so many moving parts that you are bound to screw something up.

CRASH!

CRASH!

And then, while looking at the call stack, something looks familiar: I’m crashing at the same place on two different platforms with two different compilers.

It isn’t much, but even consistency lets you know you’ve at least got that much going.

Its that time of the year again

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provider issues….

Dear Customer,

In the past month we sent out a survey to our customers requesting feedback on the services you receive from us and in particular the location. We carried out this survey due to the situation we have with our current provider in Germany. We have been fighting long and hard in an attempt to rectify long standing issues with them with regards to stability and reliability. Instead of improving, the situation has become worse to the point where servers are randomly powered down because a DC technician has knocked a power cable out and hardware is failing with no replacements being actioned despite our requests. More recently, we’ve had issues with them working on their network and ‘forgetting’ to plug servers back in.

As you can imagine, this kind of service impacts greatly on you, our customers, and it’s not something we can continue to accept. Despite our best efforts a resolution with them has been unattainable so we have had to make the decision to move customers with immediate effect.

It’s really not their fault, so time to backup again, and get ready for the shuffle.

Maybe it’s time to move to CloudFlare.