Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP is a consultant, columnist, author and President of Datacomp Systems, Inc., a consulting and contract programming firm specializing in databases, data presentation and windowing, transaction processing, networking, testing and test suites and device management for UNIX and MSDOS. He can be contacted care of Datacomp Systems, Inc., 3837 Byron Road, Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006-2320 or via electronic mail on the Internet/Usenet mailbox syd@DSI.COM (dsinc!syd for those that cannot do Internet addressing).
RPN Fans - Here's One For You
Before I took over David Fiedler's column, he mentioned in his last installment the ultimate on-screen calculator for UNIX systems. Here now is a simpler one, usable on any system that has a curses package or emulation library. It emulates the HP-16C and can popup on both UNIX and MS-DOS. Support for floating point, hexadecimal, decimal, octal and binary modes is provided. The calculator, written by Emmet Gray of the US Army, has ten registers and supports computer-oriented functions. It was posted to comp.sources.misc and is available from the archive sites that support that group, including uunet.
New Games
New versions of several games were distributed recently in comp.sources.games. These include version 4 of Conquer, a middle earth multi-player game for UNIX systems. Source to the game itself, as well as the patches, is available from the archive sites for comp.sources.games, including uunet. Conquer v4 patches are volume 8, issues 1 - 4.Nethack has also had a major update in comp.sources.games volume 8, issues 6-12. New screens and enhancements were added to this display-oriented dungeons and dragons game.
Galactic Bloodshed, an empire-like war game has also been upgraded this month in comp.sources.games, volume 8, issues 26 - 30. This upgrade gives several new versions to keep those UNIX systems busy.
A new game has also appeared, a two-handed card game similar to Bridge and Spades (especially two-handed Spades). It's a trick-taking game with a trump suit determined by bidding. Cards are drawn from the deck, each player taking a turn drawing one card from the top of the deck. If you desire to keep that card, it becomes part of your hand and the next card is discarded without being seen, otherwise you discard it and take the next card. This yields two thirteen-card hands. Bidding is based on the number of tricks you think you can take, with the last winner naming the trump. Lastly, the hand is played out.
Scoring is simple; if the bid is made, you score ten times the bid plus the number of overtricks. If you go down and don't make the bid, you score negative ten times the bid. The winner is the first player to 250 points.
The author, Scott Turner from UCLA, has asked for help in improving the bidding process. He has provided a program with a very interesting set of bidding options coded as rule based, neural networks, and then a cheating bidder that reads both hands. However, he is not happy with the outcome and is asking for help. The program gives ample statistics for tuning a bidding algorithm and those of you up to a challenge just might want to take him up on his offer for help.
Back To Work
Several serious works also appeared recently on the networks. For those diehard fans of vi type editors comp.sources.misc recently distributed "stevie" (ST Editor for VI Enthusiasts), a public domain clone of UNIX's vi editor. This version was developed for the Atari ST, but has since been ported to UNIX, OS/2, DOS and Minix-ST. Unsupported ports also included in the release include Minix-PC, Amiga, and some Data General systems. Thus, stevie appears to be extremely portable. Makefiles are included for all the systems. Stevie's main drawback, for some environments, is that it keeps the file being edited in memory, limiting the size of the file to be edited for systems with smaller addressing spaces or without virtual memory. It was originally written by Tim Thompson, but this latest version was posted by Tony Andrews at onecom!wldrdg!tony. He also will mail diskettes to those who send him a formatted disk along with a self-addressed, stamped disk mailer for returning the disk. He can write Atari ST (SS or DS) or MS-DOS (360K or 1.2M) formats. His address is Tony Andrews, 5902E Gunbarrel Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301.Now that Berkeley has released much of its BSD 4.3-tahoe release to the public, sections of it are being ported to UNIX System V and Xenix. Comsat, the BSD mail notification daemon, was recently posted to comp.sources.misc. Comsat sends messages to users when mail is delivered for them. It uses a daemon approach, and thus does not need to wait for the current command to complete or the user to type a carriage return to the shell. Also included in this port are changes to smail v2.5 necessary for it to notify comsat when mail is delivered. Users control whether or not they get notification using the biff command, which is also included. Since UNIX System V usually doesn't support the Berkeley socket interface, this port uses named pipes, so the notification is limited to the local machine. Those with the socket interface can use the BSD version of the program. Thanks to David MacKenzie for his porting effort.
Foreign Tongues?
In volume 8, issues 65-87 comp.sources.misc has distributed a major effort that will strike people as either a godsend or totally useless. If you need to print foreign languages with their extended character set support, the "cz text to PostScript system" is for you. It is a table-driven system that can be used to convert any "context-free octet-based character set into PostScript." This means that every character in the character set is represented by one or more eight-bit bytes and that only the bytes of that character determine what it prints, not other bytes in the file. This excludes locking shift sequences.Even if you don't need the foreign language support, the posting had an addendum called libhoward that includes several C functions to convert numeric literals to internal representations and perform string manipulation all with error recovery. It's all documented and worth looking at, even just to see how he did it, courtesy of Howard Gayle of Ericsson Telecom AB in Sweden (howard@dahlbeck.ericsson.se).
Yea! Its Back, Maybe?
After a long absence from USENET with no postings, comp.sources.unix distributed the first program of Volume 20. It is a contribution from Barry Books at IBM releasing into the public domain an include file tester. This tester checks include files for POSIX 1003.1 and ANSI compliance. It reports missing items, additional items allowed by the standard, and additional items not allowed by the standard. References to the standards documents are also included in the report. This could prove to be a really useful tool for portability.Unfortunately, after this promising posting, comp.sources.unix has been quiet again. Hopefully, Rich Salz, the moderator, will find time to resume the postings shortly.
Upcoming Releases
Perl, Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language, is going though its beta period on a new version via alt.sources. Version 3 has lots of new features, and next time I will give an in-depth review of this new release from one of the net's most respected authors of "Off the Wall Software".Less, a more replacement (a display pager) is also in beta test with its newest release. alt.sources is wonderful for hints of what is to come. Many authors are using it for beta test distributions.
Another major package is also in its latest beta round; the Extended Portable Bitmap Toolkit appeared recently in alt.sources. This set of tools is used to convert images from one bitmap format to another. It supports many formats and again, next time, a more detailed report.
If you have a pending release you would like covered in this column, drop me a line. My electronic address is syd@DSI.COM and I look forward to hearing from you.