Yeah Right.

Some of you have probably already found this link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/making-microsoft-nicer-through-patents.ars. I had to laugh my ass off when I read it. Can you say “Scared shitless about a new Justice Department Probe?” Knew you could.

Microsoft has always operated like the right hand of the Antichrist. Many even believe Bill Gates is the embodiment of the Antichrist himself. You will hear them quote things like “His deeds and doctrine will eventually expose him to the world.” Well, it appears that Microsoft itself has recognized the merit of that quote. They are now on a massive PR campaign with a book, interviews, and Bill Gates giving away tons of cash to try and divert attention from themselves. I’m just waiting to hear either Bill Gates or Microsoft is “giving the land to Isreal” followed by 3.5 years of peace.

Let’s be real here. Microsoft has been Patient Zero when it comes to Corporate AIDS. Every company which gets in bed with them eventually contracts a “Wasting Disease” which rots it away. Just look at that poor bastard who developed the Mosaic browser! MS shafted him with a “percent of sales” deal, then bundled the browser into the OS (which still wasn’t an OS at the time) for free.

How about Lattice? Remember MS selling private labeled Lattice C compilers and their agreement not to develop their own? Remember when MS suddenly launched their own C compiler and it was incompatible with all previous object libraries? Is Lattice even in business anymore?

Then there is Novel. Remember when Novel was the king of PC network file servers and purchased DR DOS? MS used every underhanded and blatantly illegal trick it knew to make it almost impossible to get a reliable Netware connection. Then corporate America emptied its colon on MS for such underhanded tactics. Novel purchased DR DOS, which was far more robust than any release of MS DOS, and suddenly the Antichrist found itself burning on the corporate cross. It entered into a “negotiation” period with Novel to “improve cross networking functionality”, but mandated they stop all development on DR DOS while the negotiations were occurring. Next thing you know, MS comes out with a new release of DOS, breaks off negotiations, and starts shipping its own, far more buggy, networking products. Novel, for all intents and purposes, went out of business. Now, almost an actual company again with SuSE, it gets into bed with MS one more time. The Linux community has re-written most of the OpenSource licenses to basically remove Novel’s ability to ship much, if anything, with SuSE.

Now we have MS doing pratfalls, chuckling about how much it had in common with Spain during the days of the Conquistadors, and basically promising to “wear a condom this time, honest injun!”

Of course, when they find out three little things, it will probably all backfire. One, like every expression on the face of the planet, some find it offensive. Two, there’s actually a film company called Honest Injun Films Ltd. Three, the massively religious group most likely to recognize the antichrist find condoms offensive.

Once again, MS could get it right even when they try to steal it.

Logikal Solutions is proud to announce that “The Minimum You Need to Know About Service Oriented Architecture” ISBN-13 978-0-9770866-6-5 has been declared a finalist in the 2009 Eric Hoffer Awards. This award competition is much more general that there is no category for computer related books, they must compete with all other business and reference books.

Many of you reading this may also be aware that “The Minimum You Need to Know About Service Oriented Architecture” also won a Best Book Award from USA Book News, which does have a category for computer books.

Some of you might have guessed this post was coming given my prior post about needing a floppy to install some DOS software. When I installed my 64-bit version of OpenSuSE 11.1, I did not have a floppy drive installed on my machine. Indeed, it was even disabled in the BIOS. (Some of you might even remember from a prior post that the BIOS only supports a 3.5” floppy, not 5.25”.)

It ought to be a simple thing. Once I found a 3.5” floppy and a cable long enough to reach the bottom of my machine from the next to top drive bay things were looking up. You can forget about getting your LS-120 drive recognized as a floppy drive. I tried everything. Yes, you can stick a floppy in it and if there is anything on the floppy Dolphin will show the icon, but you couldn’t format an empty floppy there on a bet. You also cannot get either DOSbox or dosemu to recognize the thing as a floppy, which is the ultimate goal.

There are a lot of instructions on line when it comes to adding a floppy drive after the fact. Most of them only worked for one person at one time. All of them “assumed” the reader would do certain things automatically, thus left out critical pieces of information.

After you’ve done the hardware part, you need to open a terminal window and change to root. Once you’ve done that, you need to edit a file named fstab. I humbly suggest you make a safety copy before editing. Please note that you have to be careful about what editor you try to launch. Most of the on-line places will tell you to use vi. I don’t live in a cave, eat my own young, or foul my nest, so I don’t use vi.

roland@linux-uz4n:~> su

Password:

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.save

linux-uz4n:/home/roland # madedit /etc/fstab

You need to add the following line to the end of the file. Make certain you leave a line with only a carriage return on it at the end of the file.

/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,exec,rw,sync 0 0

Once you do this, you need to create a directory so there is a mount point. I know, the installation should have created this for you, but it didn’t. I think a large reason behind that is the move to Dolphin and changing how storage devices are handled. Many will now automatically mount when connected if you have Dolphin installed. The downside is floppies don’t get recognized.

mkdir /media/floppy

ls -al /media

total 12

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 .

drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 ..

drwxr-xr-x 2 root users 4096 2009-05-08 09:52 floppy

chown root:users /media/floppy

chmod a+rw /media/floppy

ls -al /media

total 12

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 .

drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 2009-05-08 09:58 ..

drwxrwxrwx 2 root users 4096 2009-05-08 09:52 floppy

I’m not certain you have to change the protection on the directory, but I did. I had still had issues. Finally, I went into YAST User management and check the “floppy” checkbox for my user ID. I still had no real success. Then I did the one thing nobody mentioned. I rebooted.

Now I can type dosemu in a terminal window. A DOS window opens and I can do things like this:

Since I’ve had some down time, I decided to work on an annoying matter. I have probably blogged before that I have some older expense files written with a C/Pascal code generator called DataBoss which had its own proprietary file system. These files are well past the window for IRS audit as I converted to another expense tracking application more than a decade ago. Still, the geek in me wanted that data in my new database because I had it. I wasn’t going to get rid of my last Windows partition until I got that data imported into my new PostgreSQL database.

Naturally, I tossed out the floppies which had DataBoss on them long ago. I think they might have been 5.25 anyway, so I was probably screwed no matter what. I poked around on-line and found some interesting sites.

http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/

Believe it or not, this site has a lot of old software. Original disks and manuals for sale. They even claim to buy/trade it.

http://vetusware.com/

Quite possibly one of the best ideas to ever hit the Web. Oddly enough, if the stuff was still being sold by the original vendor, this might be considered a piracy site. Today, it’s a Godsend. There is now a place where all of this great old software can be stored and retrieved for those times when it becomes relevant again. This is especially important in situations where the vendor has gone out of business. If you are as long in the tooth as I am, it is a trip down memory lane. Oh how I wished I still had some of that old DOS software I used to use to send to them.

Remember the Pro-C code generator? (not the Pro*C tool put out by Oracle) I wrote a lot of stuff with that under DOS…tossed it out long ago. The company dropped off the face of the earth. Sadly, now that we have Qt and Gtk on Linux, an OpenSource version of it using both of these underlying libs for the interface and PostgreSQL or another OpenSource database for file storage would probably get a large following. It was a 60-80% solution product like most code generators. I don’t even remember who made the product. I do remember the manual actually came in a binder and without that manual you couldn’t do much. Sigh…

Why would I be interested in such a piece of software now? OpenSuSE has two DOS emulators now. One is DOSbox, which once installed, appears on the KDE menu. It is set up mostly for running games. You cannot access anything which isn’t mounted out in your Linux environment. Another is dosemu. This seems pretty cool. It is an implementation of freeDOS which seems quite robust. There are some adjustments, such as you have to use xcopy instead of copy *.* if you want to copy more than one file. If I have free time over the next few months, I think I will try getting the old versions of “Lords of the Realm” and “Warcraft” running. I actually liked the older versions of these games. Don’t really care for the last version of Warcraft I bought. The old DOS version with cheesy graphics I really liked though.

Of course, once I managed to re-obtain a copy of DataBoss, I found out the utility programs weren’t all ready to run executables. That meant I needed to find a compiler. You guessed it. I tossed out Borland C 3.1 a long time ago. Other than DataBoss and one client, I never used it. I used Zortech for a lot of years, MS when I was forced to, and Watcom when I started my cross platform days. Love of Watcom lasted over a decade. There is even an OpenWatcom project now:

http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Main_Page

Sadly, DataBoss didn’t live long enough to support Watcom. I did force Pro-C to support it at one point.

Not a problem though. I found another beautiful site.

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/21751

A link on this page takes you to the place where Borland is handing out Turbo C and Turbo Pascal gratis.

Once you get a floppy drive functioning, you can see things like this:

Of course, getting a floppy drive working is another blog entirely.

You know…I might even dig through my old floppies and install Vedit again. I used to like the DOS version of that editor…it really blew after it went to Windows.

It’s been a long time coming, but the first major step towards the elimination of off-shoring has finally been launched by the White House. Before the end of the year we should also see the elimination of the H1-B Visa program. I rather liked this quote:

The current law, Obama said, “says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York. “

Under the plan, companies would not be able to write off domestic expenses for generating profits abroad. The goal is to reduce the incentive for U.S. companies to base all or part of their operations in other countries.

Just how may clients do you guys have with a plethora of Caymen Islands divisions/joint ventures/subsidiaries? I’ve got some. Oddly enough these clients are the same ones who have been listening to the inexcusably bad advice of the Gartner Group and riding the off-shoring bandwagon. Given the speed with which the credit card laws got slammed through the first round of voting and their immanent passage in the next round, this shouldn’t take more than a month or two to get slammed through. It’s a win-win for the elected officials doing the voting. They are pulling back in money that had been funnelled out fo the country for years by the same individuals who brought us the global recession all wrapped up with a bow and using it to pay down the debt incurred by the government while sweeping that disaster up.