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Messages - Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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196
Applications / Re: What is the best CD Based imaging software
« on: December 15, 2015, 02:55:40 pm »
Hi

I used to use Acronis home backup software to make images of my machines which worked fine on os2. We have know upgraded our systems to Ecomstation they back up ok but have mixed results when restoring a image. Can anyone recommend an Imaging software which can run of a cd that works with ECS and the JFS file structure.

Regards

Denzil1977

AFAIK there is no incremental backup solution available any more that does this with JFS support, the last vendor of such quit the OS/2 business in 2007 or thereabouts.

I work around this by creating a compressed partition image with DFSEE one or twice a year, then I can restore the partitions as they were at a certain point in time and then let the backup software write over the restored partitions, this effectively gives me the same result with only a 10 to 15 minutes extra work involved but much faster restore times. And appears to be more reliable if anything.

It can also be handy to keep some of these images if you have made a mess of a certain installation and want to start again.

197
Marketplace / Re: OnCmd
« on: October 25, 2015, 08:04:48 am »
Visual Prolog, it has a somewhat rudimentary but fully functional dbf based database engine that is not recommended for massive databases but works fine with smaller ones and the RAD portion even though old is excellent. The Danish company that makes it continued to sell 5.2 to those that nagged them for years after they ceased OS/2 and Unix development but I gather they are no longer willing to supply copies. However I have the full "freeware" version of 5.2 as an ISO that has almost all of the tools that the full version has but creates executables that start with "no commercial usage allowed", and if you get along with it, I may have an extra license of the full version somewhere that I bought cheaply for my personal use in 2002 when they announced that the software would become Windows only.

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Visual_Prolog

I doubt OnCMD will do anything, the problem existed in the QNX version that pre-dates the OS/2 and Windows version by a number of years, this is not a bug, but an inexplicable design choice and will require lots of re-coding and testing to fix. The company was extremely polite and helpful over the phone, but could not help in any meaningful way.

198
Marketplace / Re: OnCmd
« on: October 24, 2015, 08:20:46 am »
In reply to your (now deleted!?) post, the last contact info for the gent behind Base32 was:
Maxxum Technology International
63 Armagh Terrace West
Marton, New Zealand
Tel: +64 6327 5521
Fax: +64 6327 5520

The company is now called "ITL Aviation Limited" and is still around although by now out of the oil and software business . Note that there is an Asian company of the same name that has no relation to this one and has a funny homepage with their logo photoshopped on impressive looking buildings

Actually a Kiwi rather than an Aussie as I had remembered it, the gent that runs the company is called Brendon Edward Deere and he posted to OS/2 groups from time to time  in the 90's.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000609141919/http://www.maxxum.co.nz/prod01.htm

And as for your interest in R:Base, the 16 bit version worked extremely well in its time, cannot remember using the 32 bit one.

Have you tried Lotus Approach? Excellent database program, the OS/2 version had bugs in the join creation code that would sometimes make it crash while creating joins, but once they were created the resulting database was stable. Although outdated I still prefer the development interface to Microsoft Access 2016 and Filemaker 14 even if the DBF backend lacks the sophistication of the latter two. On the other hand the use of dbf files meant that it could be used with all kinds of third party utilities if needed.

199
Setup & Installation / Re: Soundblaster live & Sander's driver
« on: October 12, 2015, 03:31:22 am »
Are these two not two parts of the same unit? One (AMD) being a HDAudio UART and the other a HDAudio A/DAC?

It is very common with modern chipsets and even some older NVIDIA ones, the basic HDAudio or 97 interface hardware being on the southbridge and a cheap A/DAC chip handling the actual hardware interface, sometimes on a PCI/PCIe lane, sometimes on a USB bus, in those cases the driver should be generic and talk to the UART.

200
Marketplace / Re: OnCmd
« on: October 10, 2015, 07:09:51 pm »
Well, I have no intention of making wonders with OnCmd but from what I've seen it does do what it was meant to do.
(I wasn't planning on using it for "production", just curious.)

Do you know if Base32 is available somewhere?

I'm not at all familiar with x2C or Watcom C, perhaps you could give some more info about what the "goal" would be?

The problem with ASCII only, means no extended characters whatsoever in the database itself or code, no graphic symbols when  porting from old DOS code, no NLS characters in the data (no ð or þ for instance) not even accents, so no French é or Swedish ö or ligatures like æ. Since dBase and Clipper had no real problems with character sets in the database file this entirely artificial limitation sort of blew my mind when I bought a license in the late 90's, especially considering how good the rest of the code was, and how $#%!#$! expensive my triple target developers license was.

The gent behind Base32 disappeared around 2003, but I might have old contact info here somewhere, I was just thinking aloud since Martin was wandering if he should contact OnCMD, that tracking down the guy behind Base32 would be a better idea.

X2C is a dBase/Clipper/xBase compatible compiler that pumps out C code that is ready for compiling with a C compiler and would probably work with Watcom as is, as it outputs very clean C code but the current version has only been tested with Borland C++. Just a few modernisations to make it slightly less work to compile in one go and so on, might be all that is needed, it might even be as little as a few REXX scripts. Since the output code is a well defined C subset it might even be possible to merge it with one of the PD Mini C compilers into a program that compiles executables on its own.

You may also take a look at Harbour, it is similar to X2C with more modern syntax, however I think that the OS/2 port only works properly with IBM VAC++  and older versions of GNU C as back ends, neither of which is as user friendly as Watcom in eCS.

201
Marketplace / Re: OnCmd
« on: October 07, 2015, 10:23:30 pm »
Hi Per.

I tried to seach more about On-Line Data and I think that they belong to On-Line Service Corp (OSC)  which is a division of Hogg Fuel & Supply.  So when you have several companies involved the possibilities to be turned into "AS IS freeware" or even open source are low. 

But I'm still trying to find the name of the CEO. At least we can try to turn it "AS IS freeware".

Let me know if you got any name or email from them.

Regards
Should not bother with that, the core engine, while exceptionally fast does not support the use of anything but ASCII as text input, so no matter if you have the QNX, Windows or OS/2 version it is useless for anything that requires more than ASCII input, and that is just about anything these days.

There was an Australian compiler with similar feature set and speed that actually worked called "Base32"

It would make more sense to clean up x2C and port it to Watcom C

203
Applications / Re: Drupal, apache2 and php5
« on: June 26, 2015, 02:34:06 pm »
Developers' salary around those "user-friendly" languages is a nightmare.

that makes sense, PHP is very easy to learn, meaning more people can acquire the skills needed and therefore the skills being worth less

204
Applications / Re: Drupal, apache2 and php5
« on: June 26, 2015, 02:32:20 pm »
Right now I'm not able to tell how it is compared to Joomla (which I have used a few times), but I'd like to know why you state both php and Drupal as useless. Yes, I noticed the illustration but a "steep learning curve" doesn't explain "useless". My experience with something that is hard to learn is that you benefit in the end.
In general the good thing about Drupal is the modularity, you only use what you need and thus get a better performance vis a vis Joomla but still have as good or even possibly better availability of reasonably robust add on modules. Lots of available books and web support as well.

It has a lot of quirks though that make learning it a highly annoying experience and what you learn is not applicable to anything else, and the performance gains are relative to other PHP based applications. Structure of the program also changed quite a bit between 6 and 7 making older books less useful than they were.

PHP processing of any kind can be painfully slow with some language features being downright glacial, I have seen my old dual core server die handling as little as 11 "almost simultaneous" requests at a time and a rented quad core with plenty of memory wasting well over 80% CPU time on 12 "almost simultaneous" requests, in both cases done by myself by simply opening up a web browser with 12 open tabs.

An often overlooked PHP based alternative is Typo3, which is structured much better than the alternatives even if it does not have as many available add-on  modules and some of those only currently available in German, but the better thought out structure makes the learning curve a lot more agreeable than Drupal's. The only real downside it has is that the Danish fundie that started the project sprinkles the source code with Christian propaganda, which can get irritating when you are bug hunting. (https://typo3.org/)

Another PHP based alternative is TikiWiki, despite the name a full CMS rather than just a wiki (http://info.tiki.org), much easier to learn than the others and very fully featured but can be very buggy due to an almost insane development pace and can be bog slow as well if you have all features enabled.

Frankly, all those PHP programs make me appreciate how good and relatively fast the combination of GoServe and REXX was back in the early - mid 90's (http://speleotrove.com/memowiki/MemoWiki.html)

205
Applications / Re: Drupal, apache2 and php5
« on: June 26, 2015, 01:58:22 pm »
Both PHP and Drupal are completely useless.

Perhaps a bit unfair, the performance of Drupal is in most cases better than other PHP based applications and the structure of 7 is slightly better than previous versions. Feels like a rocket compared to Joomla.

Having said that I stopped using Drupal at version 6 due to the text handling bug (which is more of a PHP bug really), it was just too weird to use a text processing tool that did not correctly process text ...

206
Hardware / Re: USB Mouse/Keyboard
« on: May 07, 2015, 12:47:24 am »
   Anyone has experience with this kind of hardware? The problem seems to be the fact the KVM uses just one USB connector for both mouse and keyboard. If I connect the mouse directly on the computer and the keyboard on the KVM, as an example, both works fine (but then I cannot use the same mouse on both computers... sigh!)

I have this problem with sundry hardware, this is mostly motherboard dependent but you can get differing responses between different OS versions and so on, the problem for me is simply that some hardware software combinations do not like the composite Mouse/keyboard controller even though my Belkin KVM supposedly presents the USB as multiple units connected to a hub rather than as composites.

The problem is more pronounced with newer motherboards and on an occasion putting more devices onto the virtual hub helps the USB drivers sort things out for some weird reason. My Windows server box so hates the KVM that it grinds to a halt if it is connected, I ended up connecting to it remotely and just skipping the KVM.

P.S. On one motherboard I could get a generic budget mouse to work while my Logitech trackball absolutely refused to play ball (no pun intended), in some cases I use the KVM as a DVI switch only, your mileage may vary, I find KVM over IP to be a more reliable solution.

207
General Discussion / Re: Business Interoperability Interfaces
« on: May 04, 2015, 07:33:40 pm »
Thanks Ivan and Martin,

Ivan, yes, there is a standard somewhere. Haven't read it all yet but it is mentioned something in the "little" pdf document I linked to in my first post. Seems to be some EU standard with some minor changes to "fit" local laws.
I have to read more to get the full picture.

Martin, this is a system for sending orders and invoices ,and more, between companies and also the authorities as they prefer this format to ease document flow when purchasing.  They import the invoices to their accounting systems. Less manual work for the receiver and faster handling of information.

There is an European electronic documentation foundation that has been issuing standards since the 70's who's name escapes me at the time , electronic document/data interchange (EDI) was  a hot topic during the x.25 era.

According to http://www.nets.eu/no-nb/support/Test%20og%20Implementering/eFaktura%20B2B%20Utsteder/Documents/Imp%20guide%20eng.pdf
The Norwegian EHF format is based on CEN BII, this site has all you need to know about the format/protocol:
http://www.cenbii.eu/deliverables/cen-bii-2/cwa-16558-bii-architecture/
Reads like a it's very complex but actually is not that bad
the Data is housed in UBL forms, which are available from here in XML format:
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl
Lots of XML editors and parsers available for OS/2, the communication bit (CEN BII) should be implementable in REXX with a couple of libs

208
General Discussion / Re: Haiku OS and its Niche.
« on: April 08, 2015, 07:35:45 pm »
- MenuetOS - GNU GPL - last update: 07.04.2015  0.99.96
- KolibriOS - ( MenuetOS Fork) GNU GPL - last update: 5 apr 2015
...and notice that I'm just checking non-linux based OSes.

Why those OSes which has less software, less corporate customers and less community organization than this plaform, has the will and the muscle to develop an open source OS and we don't? Where is the millionaire sponsoring them? Did they stole a bank? Why they don't say that it is imposible to make an OS with their hands? Where is the magic? Where is the trick?
You obviously have never tried to use any of them in anger .... They are in no way usable on a day to day basis

Haiku committed hara-kiri in the naughties when the developers of it went on a rampage against ZetaOS, not realising that by doing so they eroded the BeOs market in general and lost the only BeOs developer that was actually *paying* people to write open source software.

It took the Haiku project over 10 years to go from start to a full release, by then most of the software they supported was 15 years old and the OS design they copied down to a tee was 20 years old and outdated, and almost all interest in it had dried up. If you start a similar OS/2 project today, by the time you finish up with anything useful, you will have a piece of OS that runs 30 year old software and a 40 year old OS design.

IBM intended to have replaced the original design of OS/2 by 1997 with a more up to date and more coherent variant, rather than the rather thrown together OS they had on their hands, replicating the original design in 2025 is such a strange idea........

209
General Discussion / Re: Haiku OS and its Niche.
« on: April 08, 2015, 07:19:02 pm »
FireBee could be another example. And AROS too.
FireBee is hardware, the OS is a separate project

......

I own 3x Atari Falcons and have been mulling getting a FireBee for the last couple of years.

210
Just curious.. I just read the press release that they acquired serenity.. so does that mean they now own ecomstation too, meaning they are completely in charge of the ECS product?

As is explained in the other thread, this is not the case, it seems the eComStation licensing deal is in the hands of XEU/Mensys.

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