MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - 2008-03

Posted on 2008-03-27 09:00:09, modified on 2008-03-27 09:00:00
Tags: zoneinfo, DST, Computers

Intro

This year the Daylight Saving Times rules for Australia change: We have two weeks less of wintertime. And the DST change times have been synchronized over all the states. Only problem, how do you make sure your computers know about it?

Find the right times

First you have to find three times which are relevant: before the change, during the changed time, after the change. Since the DST change times have changed from the last weekend in March to the first weekend in April, the times chosen are the wednesdays around the changes: 26 March, 2 April and 9 April.

On FreeBSD:

$ date -r `expr 1206529200` 
Wed Mar 26 22:00:00 EST 2008
$ date -r `expr 1206529200 + 86400 \* 7` 
Wed Apr  2 21:00:00 EST 2008
$ date -r `expr 1206529200 + 86400 \* 14` 
Wed Apr  9 21:00:00 EST 2008

$ perl -e 'use POSIX;print "Date = ", POSIX::ctime(1206529200 + 86400 * 0);'
Date = Wed Mar 26 22:00:00 2008
$ perl -e 'use POSIX;print "Date = ", POSIX::ctime(1206529200 + 86400 * 7);'
Date = Wed Apr  2 21:00:00 2008
$ perl -e 'use POSIX;print "Date = ", POSIX::ctime(1206529200 + 86400 * 14);'
Date = Wed Apr  9 21:00:00 2008

Install the new DST rules

On FreeBSD it is pretty accurate in the CVS repository for HEAD, RELENG_7, RELENG_6 and RELENG_5. If you don't use the RELENG_x versions you can install the port misc/zoneinfo. After that you need to run tzsetup(1). If you have updated your system with freebsd-update(1) you still need to run tzsetup(1)! If you are running jails, they need to be updated too!

for i in /usr/jails/*; do 
        if [ -f $i/etc/localtime ]; then 
		echo $i 
		cp /etc/localtime $i/etc/localtime 
	fi 
done 

If you run Linux, use your package management system: yum install tzdata or apt-get install time.

Or you can do it manually: (The X in 2008X should be resplaced by the value available from elsie.nci.nih.gov)

$ wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2008X.tar.gz 
$ mkdir zoneinfo 
$ cd zoneinfo/ 
$ tar zxf ../tzdata2008X.tar.gz 
$ zic -d zoneinfo africa antarctica asia australasia etcetera \
	europe factory northamerica southamerica systemv 
$ /bin/cp -fR zoneinfo/* /usr/share/zoneinfo/ 
$ /bin/cp zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney /etc/localtime 

Check afterwards

Afterwards, do the checks again to see if changes were successful:

$ date -r `expr 1206529200` 
Wed Mar 26 22:00:00 EST 2008
$ date -r `expr 1206529200 + 86400 \* 7` 
Wed Apr  2 22:00:00 EST 2008
$ date -r `expr 1206529200 + 86400 \* 14` 
Wed Apr  9 21:00:00 EST 2008

You should note that all applications need to be restarted to start using the new tzdata files. This includes all FreeBSD jails.

Posted on 2008-03-25 09:00:09, modified on 2008-03-25 09:00:00
Tags: FreeBSD, zoneinfo

Commit of the day for src/share/zoneinfo:

Changes:
- Calcutta -> Kolkata
- Iraq DST changes
- Syria DST changes
- Saigon -> Ho_Chi_Minh
- Cuba DST changes
- New area America/Argentina/San_Luis

Posted on 2008-03-10 09:00:09, modified on 2008-03-10 09:00:00
Tags: FreeBSD, zoneinfo

Commit of the day for src/share/zoneinfo:

- Chilis DST has been extended for 3 weeks.
- No leapsecond in 2008

Posted on 2008-03-07 19:00:09, modified on 2008-03-07 19:00:00
Tags: Politics

This evening I was walking through Cronulla with Hanorah in a sling while passing the restaurant Sombreros. It's a Mexican food restaurant and they have great sangria.

Only, today there was a huge group of people outside with flags and handing out leaflets. The story goes that one of the workers in the restaurant was sacked because he had to undergo cancer treatment. Oh, and he was on a 457 Business Workers visa.

Such a visa is for employers (i.e. the restaurant) to bring employees (i.e. the worker) into the country (i.e. Australia). It's not cheap and not a choice you make easily. So why did they decide to sack him so easily once he wasn't available? Questions questions questions, but no answers.

Anyway, on the way back I walked past them again and there was a woman standing in front of them with a sign saying "457 bludger wants taxpayers to pay". "457" refers to the visa, "bludger" to a lazy person, "taxpayers" to everbody who pays taxes and "to pay" probably relating to the medical treatment. Fair enough, Australia has a kind of socialistic medical system which gives everybody who is legally in the country access to it.

I exchanged some words with her and she said it wasn't her sign, it was made by the people inside the restaurant. So I asked her if she agreed with it, because if she didn't she shouldn't hold it up. She said that the people inside the restaurant made her do it. So I asked her again if she agreed with it, and I told her that if I was asked to hold up a sign I didn't agree with, that I wouldn't do it. My own pride above that of my employer.

So she started a tyrade about how her tax-money would be used for this. I said that I paid taxes too. She packed her sign and went inside. And I went on with my walk, knowing that she wouldn't change her mind, but at least she was off the street.

From the people protesting outside I heard that she was the owner of the place...

Too bad of the sangria, but the Mexican restaurant El Sol Tortillaria on the Kingsway is now my restaurant of choice for Mexican food in Cronulla.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:09, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

Two gigabyte of memory, first computer with a DVD player / burner and dual core CPU and 120 Gb of diskspace. FreeBSD again. It was also the first computer with a LCD monitor instead of a CRT monitor, thus giving me more space on my desk.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:08, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

FreeBSD again. Nothing excited, except to notice that it was the first computer to have one gigabyte of memory.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:07, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

With my move to the Philips / Origin DNS team, I had to get a computer to run BSDi's BSD/OS on it and to get a feel for it. It didn't last long, it was just BSD and worked the same as FreeBSD for what my role in the team was. So it got to be used for other people when they visited me.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:06, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

This Dell computer was obtained cheaply via the PC-Prive project at Philips / Origin, thus called my prive-del (Literal translation: private-lady-of-the-street). It ran FreeBSD only. I never got the Windows refund because according to the rules and regulations of the PC-Prive project you weren't allowed to modify anything on the system. That also included the painting on the box and the extra harddisk I put into it :-) i

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:05, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

A new computer with a CD-ROM drive! It ran OS/2 WARP 4 for about a year and then it got replaced by something called FreeBSD 2.2.1. All the power I had with OS/2 and it was modular! I didn't understand yet how it all fit together (That kernel compiling isn't really something I do understand), but it allowed me to read my mail and news, play online in a MUD and develop my own programs.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:04, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

This was only a motherboard change, but for the first time I made a real hardware change to my own computer.

The 386 allowed me to run Quarterdeck DESQview, a text mode multitasking program under MS-DOS. This was brilliant, it allowed me to edit my programs in one instance, compile them in a second instance and run them in the third instance. Because the instances ran in the so protected mode, any bad programming my side was immediately punished with an aborted program.

This was also the era of MOD files, the audio format which contains a track part and a samples part. By using a simple D/A convertor on the parallel port of the computer, you can connect the computer to your stereo and play all kind of music. By having two parallel ports on your computer and have two D/A convertors you could have stereo sound! The price of these D/A convertors? 15 resistors, one DB25 male, one tulip plug and one DB25 case: DFL 7.50. Much cheaper than a soundcard, and much more rewarding.

Despite that the operating system was MS-DOS, the command interpreter was replaced with 4DOS, a much more powerful commandline tool which made it much easier to run scripts and do interactive things with the user.

Later the operating system was replaced with OS/2 2.0, which gave me the first feel what a real operating system was and what it could do: pre-emptive multitasking, unlimited memory, an object oriented desktop and a filesystem with long filenames. Further a stream of strange tools became available, varying from a C compiler called DJGPP to an UUCP mail and news retrieval system called UUCP/extended. With the release of OS/2 WARP a lot more communication became possible, including TCP/IP based communication. And for the first time I saw include files with the text "Copyright by the Regents of the University of California." How much did I not know about what that meant.

Programming under OS/2 was a little bit difficult, but thanks to the book OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming by Charles Petzold and the EDM/2 (Electronic Developer Magazine) and the free DJGPP compiler I created a set of nice tools, mostly originated from other X11 applications like Spider and Xlock.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:03, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

This was my first own computer and had a VGA monitor, one 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drive and a very big 40 Mb harddisk. It ran MS-DOS 3.3 and thanks to Cshow (an image viewer), TurboPascal 4.0 and hundreds of games downloadable from Simtel20 and Garbo.uwasa.fi never a dull moment.

Later on the 40 Mb harddisk was replaced with a 100 Mb harddisk which I had to buy in Amsterdam on a sunday evening. A very strange thing now I think about it.

From the local computerclub I bought a memory extension board so that the computer had 3 Mb of memory instead of 1 Mb, and found out that RAM disks didn't survive reboots but also that disk-intensive games were loaded much faster now that they were on it.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:02, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

The :YES taught me that while BASIC is fun if you don't know anything else, Pascal is much more fun and thanks to Borland we had Turbo Pascal 3 which could generate blazing fast .COM files. My fractals have never been calculated that fast (in monochrome...)

Monochrome isn't that bad if you can choose between high resolution monochrome or low resolution four colour colour :-)

One of the games I played on this computer was an early version of Hack or NetHack, a game which I never lost my love for. (Still haven't made it past the castle yet... One day I will, one day I will)

Thanks to the hackers at the Philips Thuis Computer club we ended up with an extension board for the :YES which mapped the video memory to the right location and did other kinds of magic and we were able to run all the right software on it: Turbo Pascal 4 (which generated .EXE files which were not limited to the 64Kb data model of the .COM files but allowed to use all of the memory), WordPerfect, Leisure Suit Larry and the rest of the Sierra games.

The :YES had a SCSI interface and I once tried to hook up a SCSI harddisk on to it, but I never managed to get it working.

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:01, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

We never really owned an MSX, it was lent to my father for a short period and during that time it was abused by me discovering the digital world of computers.

The MSX was the first (and as far as I know only) attempt to make a home computer which was compatible between multiple vendors. A Z80 chip, a sound chip, a graphics chip and a two extension ports, of which one was used for a 3.5" floppy drive. Yes, 3.5". Totally incompatible with the P2000T which used the digital recording cassettes, totally incompatible with the 5.25" floppies everybody else used. But it was fast and big.

The graphical capabilties with the lots of colours brought me to the wonderful world of Fractals. Yes, more code to copy from books, while translating the that-basic-dialect-in-that-book into MSX Basic. I still have the book!

Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers

The Philips P2000T was the first computer in my life. Despite having used the Philips VideoPac just to play games, that was all which was done with it. The P2000T was a real Philips computer: Philips used the little data cassette in their voice dictation products, the same graphics video chips as used in their TVs for the teletext services and the ROM module was coming from the VideoPac. The P2000T had 8 kilobyte of memory in it which could be extended to 16 kilobyte: I had to do the dishes for a full week as a payment for getting this done.

The P2000T learned me a lot:

Programming in BASIC, starting with typing over lines of code from example books and later on making my own text based programs. For a project at geography classes at high school I created my own "how to assign land for farming while making sure you don't end up with mineral exhauston" program.

Modems and BBSs: With a huge external modem (not an optocoupler but a real modem) I was able to dial out to Videotex based BBSs with the speed of 1200/75 bps (while other modems these days were 300 bps).

Communication via the radio: During these days the dutch radio had a program called Hobbyscoop, which was broadcasted twice a week for half an hour (once on the FM band, once on the AM band). They had at the end of the program always a five minute segment with of data broadcast in their own Esperanto BASIC version called BASICODE: The real program starts at line 1000 and the BASIC dialect specific things like clearing the screen, putting the cursor somewhere on the screen, waiting for a key etc are done in machine specific BASIC in the lines 1 till 999. So the program would clear the screen (gosub 100), set the cursor to the middle of the screen (gosub 110) and prints "Welkom" (this is normal BASIC) and waits for a key (gosub 120).

To get this data you needed to tape the data broadcast, put the tape on the cassette player next to your computer which was in this case connected to the parallel port of the P2000T, run the Basicode program and play the recording. There you got the newsletter with a lot of information for radio amateurs, satelite trajectory, interesting things in the world of computer hobbyism etc. The casette player next to the computer was also connected to a disco style light-organ and modified not to mute when the plug towards the light-organ was plugged in. As the result everybody had to enjoy and endure the circular-saw sounds when I was downloading the newsletter.

Extending the computer with Uniface: The hobby computer explosion in the early 1980s attracted a group of people which were real hackers and wanted to use it to do the right thing: As described in the previous paragraph, incompatibilities in the BASIC language were overcome on software level with BASICODE and on hardware level they developed the UNIFACE standard: a connector between a specific extension port on the computers and a standardized port on the hardware modules. That way hardware created (the famous Knight-Rider LED strip, the automatic door opener, the railroad-track hardware) would never be obsoleted because all you had to do is build an interface and rewrite the software. Unfortunately I never got further than doing the Knight-Rider LED strip...