I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for 'sweeps'.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?

Thanks.

j/b

metal content: heat gun is metal.

"jusme" wrote:

I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for 'sweeps'.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?


I know for septic systems, a box with heater strips is used to create minor
sweeps. Hopefully Bruce Bergman will pipe up. If not, I'll query my
brother who is a master electrician. Maybe he has an opinion or can ask
around.

I've made impovised metric tubing by warming inch tubing and either
shrinking it in a ring or shoving a turned piece of metal inside so it would
fit those push fittings.

Wes

"jusme" wrote in message
...
I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for
'sweeps'.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?

Thanks.

j/b

metal content: heat gun is metal.


I have heated 2 inch electrical conduit with a torch. Buggered some pieces
but then got the hang of it. At the time I did not have a heat gun. Should
work fine on 2 inch, I don't know about 4".

Ivan Vegvary

Yes, and NO! :-) Assuming you are running an electrical circuit in this electrical PVC (? SCH 40) conduit the new 2008 NEC says that "field bends shall be made only with bending equipment identified for the purpose." This would exclude an industrial heat gun. Art. 352.24; Bends - How Made.

However, I think the "key" to the situation is in the sentence just before the one quoted above . Bends shall be so made that the conduit will not be damaged and the internal diameter of the conduit will not be effectively reduced.

It shall not be used where subject to ambient temperatures in excess of 50*C (122*F).

My thoughts: This conduit melts at close to 122 degrees F, I think. IF it is going to be exposed so an inspector can see that the diameter is not greatly reduced, and that the chemical characteristics have not been effectively changed by heat; i.e. burned, crystallized spots, etc. and the ambient temp is acceptable grab the heat gun and go to work.

Keep it mind: Minimum radius for that conduit. Keep the gun at a distance and keep it moving . Keep the pipe rolling so you heat all the way around and for the needed distance to make a gentle bend. Wear gloves (? welding gloves). If you have an attachment to help spread / flare the flame it would help heat a larger area more evenly. You may want to angle the gun about 15 - 30 degrees off parallel to avoid burning spots and leaving others cold.

I know someone who heated some over a large burner on his electric range, but it was only 3/4" or 1" conduit and much easier to handle. It will seem as if you're getting no where and all of a sudden it is flopping around if you get the heat too close. Be ready to back off on the heat distance to maintain needed heat as in delicate brazing. Be prepared to hold the angle you want while the pipe cools again. I would not douse it with water to cool it as you may crystallize the pipe.

Let us know how it works out.

Plan B: Determine how much off set or bend you need. Find someone with the proper equipment, usually an electrical contractor, and have them make you the bend or offset.

I DO NOT recommend this and DID NOT recommend it to the other fellow referenced above with the smaller conduit. "It is illegal"! per above reference - but it can be done (with smaller conduit) just not easily. When you finish you may wish you'd spent the money for the sweeps. ;-)

Hope everything goes well, regardless of which route you choose.

Al

===========

jusme wrote:
I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for 'sweeps'.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?

Thanks.

j/b

metal content: heat gun is metal.

"Ivan Vegvary" wrote: (clip) I have an industrial heat gun. (clip)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If you mean an electric heat gun, like an industrial strength hair dryer, it
won't do it. I would recommend an oxy-acetylene torch with a medium size
rosebud tip. You need to reach close to red heat, evenly distributed over
the length of the bend.

With a smaller tip, you can do wrinkle bending by going to red heat halfway
round and then pulling in the bend--one wrinkle at a time.

Leo Lichtman wrote:
"Ivan Vegvary" wrote: (clip) I have an industrial heat gun. (clip)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If you mean an electric heat gun, like an industrial strength hair dryer, it
won't do it. I would recommend an oxy-acetylene torch with a medium size
rosebud tip. You need to reach close to red heat, evenly distributed over
the length of the bend.

With a smaller tip, you can do wrinkle bending by going to red heat halfway
round and then pulling in the bend--one wrinkle at a time.




Sounds like bending *metal* conduit. He's talking PVC.

Al Patrick wrote:


Let us know how it works out.



Second Thought: Do NOT get back on here and confess that you did it in a non-compliant way or with non "identified for the purpose" equipment.

Your inspector might read this newsgroup! ;-)

Al

On Sat, 5 Apr 2008 12:29:49 -0500, "jusme" wrote:

I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for 'sweeps'.

For slight bends in the 4-degree to 22 degree range you can bend it
yourself, or for long sweeping bends just dig the ditch in a long
curve and force the bend in as you drop in the pipe.

But for 45 or 90 bends you are much better off buying the sweeps
pre-made - depending on whether this conduit is for LV electric, MV
electric (semi-conductor jacketed cables) telephone or fiber-optic
cables they all have minimum bend radius requirements. And the
inspector from the power or phone company is going to be very picky if
you don't meet the requirements they asked for.

If your homemade bend is smaller than the minimum bending radius of
the cables, or has a kink in it that reduces the ID past the OD of the
cable and the pulling grip, the cable will be difficult or impossible
to pull through the conduit. And you'll have to dig it all up and do
the whole job over, this time with the right factory made sweeps.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?

Thanks.

j/b

metal content: heat gun is metal.

If this is plastic Schedule 40 conduit you certainly can heat bend
it yourself, but a heat gun is not the best choice of tool - not
enough energy for the large stuff, and even heat distribution is
critical if you don't want to scorch the plastic. And if you distort
the plastic at the ends of the length, you'll never get standard
conduit fittings on it.

They make heat bending boxes that are 3' to 5' long with several
long Calrod IR elements inside, a hinged top to retain the teat yet
allow drop-in access with the conduit, and steel "skate wheel" rollers
so you can keep the conduit spinning by hand (rotisserie style) till
you reach the 'plastic stage'.

Then you remove the conduit from the box, bend it into the desired
shape, and set the bend with a spray bottle of cold water.

There are also 'heating blanket' style bending heaters, but they are
much slower and a pain to work with.

You could improvise a heat-box bender of your own with a clean gas
barbecue, a set of steel caster rollers to carry the conduit as it
spins and warms up, and a block so the partly closed BBQ lid leaves a
gap for the conduit to hang out at the ends as you spin it by hand.

And you can adjust the heat a lot easier than a heat gun, and the
length of the heated zone by how many burners you light.

-- Bruce --

On Sat, 5 Apr 2008 12:29:49 -0500, "jusme" wrote:

I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for 'sweeps'.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?

Thanks.

j/b

metal content: heat gun is metal.



Yes, you can. Job benders for PVC are nothing more than a heat box
you lay the pipe in.

I think..with 4", Id (carefully) use a rosebud on your torch, if you
have one.

And if possible, bend it around something like a drum or whatnot.

And wear gloves, its gonna be HOT

Gunner



"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

On 2008-04-05, Al Patrick wrote:

Yes, and NO! :-) Assuming you are running an electrical circuit in
} this electrical PVC (? SCH 40) conduit the new 2008 NEC says that "field
} bends shall be made only with bending equipment identified for the
} purpose." This would exclude an industrial heat gun. Art. 352.24;
} Bends - How Made.

All ... could you *please* configure your newsreader to fold
outgoing lines at perhaps the standard 72 characters? I'm having to
scroll the window sideways and back several time to read what you post,
or at least I did until I gave up on it as not worth the trouble.

Note that I've folded the one line I bothered to quote,
preceding the extra sections with a '}' instead of the traditional '',
and it wound up occupying four and a quarter lines.

Thanks,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:44:44 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote:
....
All ... could you *please* configure your newsreader to fold
outgoing lines at perhaps the standard 72 characters? I'm having to
scroll the window sideways and back several time to read what you post,
or at least I did until I gave up on it as not worth the trouble.

Note that I've folded the one line I bothered to quote,
preceding the extra sections with a '}' instead of the traditional '',
and it wound up occupying four and a quarter lines.

Try the W key; in slrn that toggles wrap_article. What happens
next (ie, what gets wrapped) depends on wrap_flags. See section
6.134+ in http://www.foory.de/thw/slrn/manual/slrn-manual-6.html

DoN,

How about this. I've selected 60 characters to allow for
quotes, etc. I'll make this paragraph several lines long so
you can tell me if it wraps as it should. Is anyone else
having a problem with my lines not wrapping?

Thanks,

Al

============

DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2008-04-05, Al Patrick wrote:

Yes, and NO! :-) Assuming you are running an electrical circuit in
} this electrical PVC (? SCH 40) conduit the new 2008 NEC says that "field
} bends shall be made only with bending equipment identified for the
} purpose." This would exclude an industrial heat gun. Art. 352.24;
} Bends - How Made.

All ... could you *please* configure your newsreader to fold
outgoing lines at perhaps the standard 72 characters? I'm having to
scroll the window sideways and back several time to read what you post,
or at least I did until I gave up on it as not worth the trouble.

Note that I've folded the one line I bothered to quote,
preceding the extra sections with a '}' instead of the traditional '',
and it wound up occupying four and a quarter lines.

Thanks,
DoN.

On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:26:02 -0400, Al Patrick wrote:

DoN,

How about this. I've selected 60 characters to allow for quotes, etc.
I'll make this paragraph several lines long so
you can tell me if it wraps as it should. Is anyone else
having a problem with my lines not wrapping?

Thanks,

Al

============

DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2008-04-05, Al Patrick wrote:


Note that I've folded the one line I bothered to quote,
preceding the extra sections with a '}' instead of the traditional '',
and it wound up occupying four and a quarter lines.

Thanks,
DoN.


Works for now.

Scott

Rick Frazier wrote:
Al Patrick wrote:

DoN,

How about this. I've selected 60 characters to allow for quotes,
etc. I'll make this paragraph several lines long so you can tell me
if it wraps as it should. Is anyone else having a problem with my
lines not wrapping?

Thanks,

Al

============

DoN. Nichols wrote:

On 2008-04-05, Al Patrick wrote:

Yes, and NO! :-) Assuming you are running an electrical circuit in

} this electrical PVC (? SCH 40) conduit the new 2008 NEC says that
"field
} bends shall be made only with bending equipment identified for the
} purpose." This would exclude an industrial heat gun. Art. 352.24;
} Bends - How Made.

All ... could you *please* configure your newsreader to fold
outgoing lines at perhaps the standard 72 characters? I'm having to
scroll the window sideways and back several time to read what you post,
or at least I did until I gave up on it as not worth the trouble.

Note that I've folded the one line I bothered to quote,
preceding the extra sections with a '}' instead of the traditional '',
and it wound up occupying four and a quarter lines.

Thanks,
DoN.

Most readers can be configured to automatically wrap long lines....

That's what I thought. Mine is configured that way, but I recall
a time or two when I'd get a msg. that just didn't wrap. Possibly
I'd hit a wrong key somewhere and caused it myself. I also have
many TSR's running so one or more of them may have had a conflict.
There is a program or two that work great alone, but I have to
shut them down to work with others ..... conflicts.

On 2008-04-06, James Waldby wrote:
On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:44:44 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote:
...
Al ... could you *please* configure your newsreader to fold
outgoing lines at perhaps the standard 72 characters? I'm having to
scroll the window sideways and back several time to read what you post,
or at least I did until I gave up on it as not worth the trouble.

[ ... ]

Try the W key; in slrn that toggles wrap_article. What happens
next (ie, what gets wrapped) depends on wrap_flags. See section
6.134+ in http://www.foory.de/thw/slrn/manual/slrn-manual-6.html

Thanks! I'll try that.

But it still could be a problem if I decided to followup to the
article in question. My preferred editor (jove) truncates the file it
is reading in the first time it hits a line longer than 1024 characters,
and truncates that line to the length of 1024 characters too. So
a followup with full text to quote would require saving to a file,
folding the lines in the file with another tool, and then reading it in
when the editor truncated.

I could get around this by using emacs instead, but I like jove
for so many reasons. :-)

Thanks,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-06, Al Patrick wrote:
DoN,

How about this. I've selected 60 characters to allow for
quotes, etc. I'll make this paragraph several lines long so
you can tell me if it wraps as it should.

It does exactly as it should. Actually, the suggested length of
72 is to allow a certain amount of quoting anyway, because the typical
screen width is at least 80 characters (what was present in hardware
terminals which could not be changed), and is often the default width on
windows on other systems.

Is anyone else
having a problem with my lines not wrapping?

It will depend on what software they are using as a newsreader.
I just received a suggested command to turn on wrapping in my newsreader
(not yet tested). But it still could create a problem if I opted to
follow-up to one of your articles before the change, because my editor
truncates at the first line with more than 1024 characters in it. That
would be typically somewhere around twelve lines on your screen if not
folded in outgoing.

Thank you,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-06, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 6 Apr 2008 03:44:44
GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

[ ... ]

I'm having to
scroll the window sideways and back several time to read what you post,
or at least I did until I gave up on it as not worth the trouble.

Hit W and slrn will wrap your display for you. No
scrolling necessary.
Also configurable in .slrnrc

% What to wrap when wrapping an article:
% 0 or 4 == wrap body
% 1 or 5 == wrap headers, body
% 2 or 6 == wrap quoted text, body
% 3 or 7 == wrap headers, quoted text, body
% The higher number indicates that every article will be automatically
% wrapped.
set wrap_flags 4

Done now. I'm not sure whether it will work on this version
yet, since it was not included in the sample .slrnrc file (while a lot
of other things were), so I may have to chase down the source and
compile a newer version than what came pre-compiled with Solaris 10.

It will be interesting to see what this does when an article is
sent to the editor for a followup. If the folded lines are sent folded,
I will be fine. Otherwise, I may occasionally hit problems with lines
over 1024 bytes long -- unless I switch from jove to emacs. Yes, I know
that emacs is more powerful, but I'm very familiar with jove, having
used it since about 1985 when I ran it on systems too small to handle
emacs properly. :-)

Thanks,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-07, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 7 Apr 2008 03:56:35
GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:
On 2008-04-06, Steve Ackman wrote:

Hit W and slrn will wrap your display for you. No
scrolling necessary.
Also configurable in .slrnrc

[ ... ]

set wrap_flags 4

Done now. I'm not sure whether it will work on this version
yet, since it was not included in the sample .slrnrc file (while a lot
of other things were), so I may have to chase down the source and
compile a newer version than what came pre-compiled with Solaris 10.

Your version number is identical to mine. One would
think it should have all the same options regardless of
platform.

It worked fine. Of course I had to exit slrn and re-enter to
get it to re-read the .slrnrc. (Hmm ... I wonder whether there is a
command to do that?) Another one that I saw in the web page you (or
somebody else) pointed to is one to change the default number of
articles in a newsgroup before it asks whether you want to read a subset
of the whole. That one also is not in the sample .slrnrc which came
with the system. (It is part of the /opt/sfw which is built form the
"Software Companion" DVD (used to be CD) of net source programs that
someone has compiled for Solaris and added to the package.

The .slrnrc that comes with both the FreeBSD and
Debian ports both have the wrap option template...
actually, I just checked the old .slrnrc that I was
using on Red Hat 6.2 and even that had the wrap option
included. I'm guessing it was 0.9.7.x.

Interesting. I wonder why the Software Companion version
lacks that? And what I *really* want is to find the Troff source for
the full documentation, so I don't have to fire up a web browser
whenever I want to read about it. (Hard to carry the browser with me
when I head to the john. :-)

It will be interesting to see what this does when an article is
sent to the editor for a followup. If the folded lines are sent folded,
I will be fine. Otherwise, I may occasionally hit problems with lines
over 1024 bytes long -- unless I switch from jove to emacs. Yes, I know
that emacs is more powerful, but I'm very familiar with jove, having
used it since about 1985 when I ran it on systems too small to handle
emacs properly. :-)

I use nano because my first unix MUA was Pine, so I
got used to pico. Even though nano was smaller, it
actually had more features. The one that sticks in my
mind was the "search & replace all instances of x with y"
Pico still doesn't have that feature even in the latest
release... and nano is still smaller than jove. ;-)

I actually started with jove on a BBN C-70, which had a standard
unix line editor, and BBN's text editor (for their e-mail mostly) but
not a screen based editor like vi. So -- I got the source to jove
(spotted mention of it in comp.unix.wizards which I got in digest form
then) and compiled it on the system. The administrator of the system
then installed it so others could use it too, since I did not have root
privileges. Then I got my first unix system at home -- a Cosmos
CMS-16/UNX (Motorola 68000 with v7 unix) which also did not have vi, so
I compiled jove on it too. As a result, I've never really learned more
about vi than what I need for editing jove's configuration files, and
for recovering a system which won't boot fully.

But there are things in jove which I particularly like, such as
the wrapper to call the system's spell(1) command (which I've modified
to include a private dictionary) and the feature to automatically expand
acronyms (which I use to automatically correct my most common typos and
genuine misspellings. :-)

Yes -- I'm sure that all of that can be done in emacs, using the
built-in lisp, but I already know how to use jove for this without
having to learn enough lisp to write the equivalent. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

I always like to thanks folks who take their good and valuable time to help
me with my problems. I am a little late this time.

Thank you all for some good input.

j/b


"jusme" wrote in message
...
I have some 4 inch, grey, electrical conduit and I need to run but some
portions will need to have slight bends. They want real money for
'sweeps'.

I have an industrial heat gun. I can guess, too but does anyone have
experience bending this with heat, in this size?

Thanks.

j/b

metal content: heat gun is metal.

jusme wrote:
I always like to thanks folks who take their good and valuable time to help
me with my problems. I am a little late this time.

Thank you all for some good input.

j/b

No problem. We thought you needed a little time to try out all the
suggestions. ;-)

Hah., I am old and don't have that much time.


"Al Patrick" wrote in message
news:wNOdnQXDg_AkembanZ2dnUVZ_hOdnZ2d@telpage...
jusme wrote:
I always like to thanks folks who take their good and valuable time to
help me with my problems. I am a little late this time.

Thank you all for some good input.

j/b

No problem. We thought you needed a little time to try out all the
suggestions. ;-)

I don't know the average age of this group, but have a feeling there are
a few here who aren't far behind you on the birthdays.

jusme wrote:
Hah., I am old and don't have that much time.


"Al Patrick" wrote in message
news:wNOdnQXDg_AkembanZ2dnUVZ_hOdnZ2d@telpage...
jusme wrote:
I always like to thanks folks who take their good and valuable time to
help me with my problems. I am a little late this time.

Thank you all for some good input.

j/b
No problem. We thought you needed a little time to try out all the
suggestions. ;-)

On 2008-04-13, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 7 Apr 2008 19:48:55
GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

[ ... ]

That one also is not in the sample .slrnrc which came
with the system. (It is part of the /opt/sfw which is built form the
"Software Companion" DVD (used to be CD) of net source programs that
someone has compiled for Solaris and added to the package.

If you'd like the more complete slrnrc sample, let
me know.

I can probably get a more complete one by downloading the latest
sources. Thanks.

[...]

As a result, I've never really learned more
about vi than what I need for editing jove's configuration files, and
for recovering a system which won't boot fully.

Same here. The whole idea that I have to perform
4 keystrokes to get out and save what I'm working on
seems counter to the usual unix command line philosophy
of minimalism.

:-) But then, for jove, ^X-^\ to save, followed by ^X-^C to exit
adds up to perhaps six counting the hold-down of the CTRL key with each
pair. :-)

And now to go *really* OT, I've just had the
wonderfully fun time of recovering data (news spool
among other things) from a ufs2 drive that started
throwing a bunch of DMA errors, and wouldn't even
fsck. Eventually I rewrote the partition table and
mounted with -rf. I think I've finally managed to
get everything that matters.

I wonder if zfs is as great as "they" say.

Well ... I'm using it, and find it easy to recover from a
damaged drive. (Actually -- from a drive which decides to become
invisible on reboot.) I'm running it with raidz2 (double parity), so I
could run quite a while with a failed drive, even without a hot spare
ready to start when something goes down. To deal with the failed drive
I simply unplug the bad one, plug in a normally formatted replacement,
and type "zpool replace c5t11d0" (with no second drive argument it
assumes that you are replacing the drive with another in the same slot),
and it tells me that it is now "resilvering" the array, and in a few
minutes all is happy again.

I have encountered a problem with trying to use amanda to back up
the pseudo partitions -- but it may be because it has already backed
them up with the parent partition (root). Just to be sure, I'm using a
second script to clone each partition, back up the clone using gtar, and
then destroy the clone. The clone protects me from changes during the
backup operation.

All in all -- I've found zfs to be a lot easier to work with
than previous RAID systems on Sun platforms.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:11:21 -0400, Steve Ackman wrote:
... 13 Apr 2008 22:46:46, DoN. Nichols ... wrote:
On 2008-04-13, Steve Ackman ... wrote: ...
:-) But then, for jove, ^X-^\ to save, followed by ^X-^C to exit
adds up to perhaps six counting the hold-down of the CTRL key with each
pair. :-)

I see 8 keystrokes. It takes nano 3 to save and exit.
^O ENTER
And yes, : is two keystrokes.
....

It's straightforward (although a bit tedious) to define Jove
macros and bind them to single keys, as described in sections
15.4 and 15.5 of "Jove Manual for UNIX Users". So a single
keystroke can do as much as you like.

Using emacs rather than jove, I've got save-buffers-kill-emacs,
save-buffer, replace-string, command-apropos, isearch-forward,
goto-line, replace-regexp, query-replace-regexp, compile, etc
bound to the F1-F12 keys.

-jiw

On 2008-04-14, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 13 Apr 2008
22:46:46 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:
On 2008-04-13, Steve Ackman wrote:

[...]

:-) But then, for jove, ^X-^\ to save, followed by ^X-^C to exit
adds up to perhaps six counting the hold-down of the CTRL key with each
pair. :-)

I see 8 keystrokes. It takes nano 3 to save and exit.

Where do you get eight? I get that only if I release and
re-press the control key for each of the four characters to be sent. I
can actually hold the control down while all four of the others are
pressed -- and there is no need for an ENTER after any part of that
sequence.

^O ENTER
And yes, : is two keystrokes.

And now to go *really* OT, I've just had the
wonderfully fun time of recovering data (news spool
among other things) from a ufs2 drive that started
throwing a bunch of DMA errors, and wouldn't even
fsck. Eventually I rewrote the partition table and
mounted with -rf. I think I've finally managed to
get everything that matters.

I wonder if zfs is as great as "they" say.

Well ... I'm using it, and find it easy to recover from a
damaged drive.

Wow. A really and truly member of "they." ;-)
I guess in this context though, "they" has to consist of
the subset of those using zfs on FreeBSD.

Hmm ... *that* one I don't fit. I run OpenBSD for some purposes,
but nothing which needs enough disk space to make running zfs worth
while.

(Actually -- from a drive which decides to become
invisible on reboot.) I'm running it with raidz2 (double parity), so I
could run quite a while with a failed drive, even without a hot spare
ready to start when something goes down. To deal with the failed drive
I simply unplug the bad one, plug in a normally formatted replacement,
and type "zpool replace c5t11d0" (with no second drive argument it
assumes that you are replacing the drive with another in the same slot),
and it tells me that it is now "resilvering" the array, and in a few
minutes all is happy again.

Sounds way too easy. ;-)

I wonder what pattern is used to represent the disks on a BSD
flavor? Sun's Solaris, for quite a while, has been using
/dev/{r}dsk/c.t.d.s. to specify a disk partition, where "c." specifies
the controller (a Sun Blade [12]000 has three before you start shoveling
in PCI cards -- "c0" is the internal which normally only talks to the boot
DVD-ROM, and perhaps an optional installed tape drive. "c1" is the
fibre channel -- two internal disks and some amazing number of possible
external ones -- 120 with the housings which if have (if I had twelve
housings instead of just the two which I have), and "c2" is the external
fast-wide Ultra SCSI. Beyond that, you get all kinds of things when you
start installing dual VHDCI connector controllers in the available PCI
slots.

On the old SunOs 4.1.? it would have been /dev/{r}sd? instead,
with you left to figure out which controller each was on by the number
of disk designators skipped. OpenBSD is similar, except that it
/dev/{r}wd? on the IDE buss on the old Sun Ultra-5 and Ultra-10
machines, and (IIRC) /dev/{r}sd? on the ones equipped with SCSI disks.
I haven't checked to see what they call the fibre channel drives, since
until the latest release (just now) they could not handle multiple CPUs
on the UltraSPARC machines, and I did not want to slow one down to
single CPU mode. :-)

I have encountered a problem with trying to use amanda to back up
the pseudo partitions -- but it may be because it has already backed
them up with the parent partition (root). Just to be sure, I'm using a
second script to clone each partition, back up the clone using gtar, and
then destroy the clone. The clone protects me from changes during the
backup operation.

All in all -- I've found zfs to be a lot easier to work with
than previous RAID systems on Sun platforms.

There isn't much of a track record for the FreeBSD
port of zfs yet; like ~1 year. One of the pages I was
reading indicates that all the Solaris features of zfs
aren't available (yet) on FreeBSD zfs. Also, nothing
in the Handbook AT ALL on zfs. I'd hate to be using
Solaris docs, only to find a FreeBSD discrepancy at a
crucial moment.

If you care, I could send you either the raw man pages (zpool
and zfs) or I could feed them through groff and send them to you as PDF
files. The latter would eliminate problems with missing macro packages.

It will be interesting to see when OpenBSD adopts zfs.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-14, James Waldby wrote:
On Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:11:21 -0400, Steve Ackman wrote:
... 13 Apr 2008 22:46:46, DoN. Nichols ... wrote:
On 2008-04-13, Steve Ackman ... wrote: ...
:-) But then, for jove, ^X-^\ to save, followed by ^X-^C to exit
adds up to perhaps six counting the hold-down of the CTRL key with each
pair. :-)

I see 8 keystrokes. It takes nano 3 to save and exit.
^O ENTER
And yes, : is two keystrokes.
...

It's straightforward (although a bit tedious) to define Jove
macros and bind them to single keys, as described in sections
15.4 and 15.5 of "Jove Manual for UNIX Users". So a single
keystroke can do as much as you like.

Yes -- depending on how many existing bindings you are willing
to do away with. :-) Back when I admined at work, I had ^X-^\ (upper
case version) defined to do the ^X-^\ followed by ^X-^C, and I taught
the users who were using it for e-mail to use that instead of the
separate save and then exit sequences so they would not send e-mail
replies with no new text added. :-)

Using emacs rather than jove, I've got save-buffers-kill-emacs,
save-buffer, replace-string, command-apropos, isearch-forward,
goto-line, replace-regexp, query-replace-regexp, compile, etc
bound to the F1-F12 keys.

I've got some bindings in jove, including F7 as spell-buffer
while in either usenet or e-mail editing. I forget what the other
bindings are, as I seldom use them.

But I also have the /bin/spell script enhanced to pick up a
private dictionary from the user's home directory, and the
expand-acronyms feature defined to translate my most common misspellings
and typos into proper English. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-15, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 15 Apr 2008
01:49:26 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:
On 2008-04-14, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 13 Apr 2008
22:46:46 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

[ ... ]

:-) But then, for jove, ^X-^\ to save, followed by ^X-^C to exit
adds up to perhaps six counting the hold-down of the CTRL key with each
pair. :-)

I see 8 keystrokes. It takes nano 3 to save and exit.

Where do you get eight? I get that only if I release and
re-press the control key for each of the four characters to be sent. I
can actually hold the control down while all four of the others are
pressed --

Ah! Ok. I was thinking CTRL for each pair.
Now that I fire it up and take a look, I see
^X-S-^X-^C on this version. Looks like 6 keystrokes.

I get five, because I don't need to release the control key
between the two pairs -- and there is not the un-controlled 'S' in mine,
but rather a controlled '\'.

And many versions of jove have the '^\' instead of '^S' because
some common terminals, like vt100s, automatically use '^S' and '^Q' for
flow control over modem connections, which could introduce problems if
you hit '^X' just before the terminal needed some breathing space, and
sent its own '^S'. With '^S' replaced by '^\' there is no such problem.

Granted -- not too many people use stand-alone terminals these
days, but I still use them as consoles to servers.

and there is no need for an ENTER after any part of that
sequence.

Hmmm. Maybe not *that* sequence, but it seems to be
a necessary part of this one. ^X-^C-Y-ENTER

Well ... you should expect to be slowed down to think if you
exit an editor without saving the buffer. :-)

I wonder what pattern is used to represent the disks on a BSD
flavor? Sun's Solaris, for quite a while, has been using
/dev/{r}dsk/c.t.d.s. to specify a disk partition, where "c." specifies

[ ... ]

FreeBSD uses /dev/ad0s1a for first partition of first
slice of first disk on first IDE controller... SCSI is
sd, and IDE CD is acd.

O.K.

On the old SunOs 4.1.? it would have been /dev/{r}sd? instead,
with you left to figure out which controller each was on by the number
of disk designators skipped. OpenBSD is similar, except that it
/dev/{r}wd? on the IDE buss on the old Sun Ultra-5 and Ultra-10

[ ... ]

If you care, I could send you either the raw man pages (zpool
and zfs) or I could feed them through groff and send them to you as PDF
files. The latter would eliminate problems with missing macro packages.

Thanks. Those, as well as zdb, are included in the

Hmm ... I didn't even know about zdb -- even though the man page
is there. But -- it is not shown in the "SEE ALSO" links in the other
two man pages. I guess that they really mean the following:

================================================== ====================
The zdb command is used by support engineers to diagnose
failures and gather statistics. Since the ZFS file system is
always consistent on disk and is self-repairing, zdb should
only be run under the direction by a support engineer.
================================================== ====================

base system of FreeBSD 7.0... albeit with a "foreign"
footer:

SunOS 5.11 14 Nov 2006 zpool(1M)

Hmm ... for the latest official version of Solaris, instead of
the free for the download open source version.


From http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS:

To help users to get used to ZFS easily and be able to try all those
nifty features we need decent documentation. It would be best to have a

[ ... ]

Needless to say, this "very important task" didn't
get done before 7.0-RELEASE.

:-)

It will be interesting to see when OpenBSD adopts zfs.

I guess it's not surprising that OSX seems to have
had it as long as FreeBSD.
http://zamwi.com/2007/01/16/why-do-g...-lust-for-zfs/

Interesting to see the general focus for a proposed use for all
of that space. :-)

--
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-17, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 16 Apr 2008
01:43:22 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

Well ... you should expect to be slowed down to think if you
exit an editor without saving the buffer. :-)

Bah! I bet you think "Are you sure?" is a good idea
after 'rm -rf *' :-)

:-)

How about after "rm -rf /" :-)

But if such a feature *is* present, it should be consistent --
unlike MS-DOS back around 3.1 or so. I was already accustomed to unix
(as well as OS-9 -- the *real* OS-9 from Microware, not the Apple
stealing of the same name for an OS), and was fairly new to MS-DOS. I
was running a program which would create several files in a fixed
directory path, and wanted to blow them all away when I was done, so I
made sure that each filename ended in 'X' (which did not apply to any
other files already present). When I was done, I typed:

DEL *X.*

expecting to get rid of only the files whose names ended in 'X'. Well
.... it turns out that MS-DOS of that period (and perhaps the command
line even in current Windows, though I can't test that) implements
wildcarding by replacing the '*' -- and everything to the end of the
filename body with a '?'-- even if there is something following the '*'.
So, it treats it as though you had typed:

DEL *.*

except that since it was not literally "*.*", it did not feel that it
was reasonable to ask "Are you sure?". So -- I blew away all of the
files which were in that directory. Luckily, the things which were
blown away were fairly easy to recover.

Hmm ... I didn't even know about zdb -- even though the man page
is there. But -- it is not shown in the "SEE ALSO" links in the other
two man pages.

I only mentioned it because it came up with
man -k zfs

I see that it does in Solaris too -- but since I expected the
"SEE ALSO" links to cover everything that I needed to know, I didn't
bother doing the "man -k zfs". :-)

BTW -- if you are interested, there is a ZFS admin guide downloadable
from Sun's site. It is 180 pages long.

-rw-r--r-- 1 dnichols family 1270170 May 8 2007 817-2271.pdf

I've got it feeding through the duplex laser printer as I type.

Heading back in the general direction of the subject
line...

You can do *that*? :-)

Welded a 1/2" IP nipple 4" long to a 2x2x1/8 angle.
Drilled a couple of holes in the angle 2-3/4" on center
so it would bolt onto some pre-existing holes in the
back of the lawn tractor. (Pipe is below angle)

Turned down the end of a piece of rebar and drilled
an 1/8" hole through the end. Welded a shoulder to
the other end, and ran it through the pipe.

So at this point, there's a .400" shaft sticking out
the pipe about an inch, ready to receive the stripped
down "backwards facing" front tine rototiller. Did
one row with it as a test, and it's WAY easier this
way than the front mount I tried last year.

On second thought, I may have to dig the camera out
tomorrow...

Please do.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-20, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 17 Apr 2008
21:13:51 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

[ ... ]

But if such a feature *is* present, it should be consistent --

Agreed.

unlike MS-DOS back around 3.1 or so. I was already accustomed to unix
(as well as OS-9 -- the *real* OS-9 from Microware, not the Apple
stealing of the same name for an OS), and was fairly new to MS-DOS. I
was running a program which would create several files in a fixed
directory path, and wanted to blow them all away when I was done, so I
made sure that each filename ended in 'X' (which did not apply to any
other files already present). When I was done, I typed:

DEL *X.*

OH! Now that it's quoted, I see the asterisks. I
was going to ask what "DEL X." meant. (Slrn was
treating the double asterisks as emphasis delimiters,
and I wasn't connecting the color change with invisible
characters)

Hmm ... when slrn uses them as emphasis delimiters for me, it
shifts the color of everything including the delimiters.

expecting to get rid of only the files whose names ended in 'X'.

That's what I'd have expected too.

From any sane OS. :-)

BTW -- if you are interested, there is a ZFS admin guide downloadable
from Sun's site. It is 180 pages long.

-rw-r--r-- 1 dnichols family 1270170 May 8 2007 817-2271.pdf

Is that the same as this one?
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/...s/zfsadmin.pdf

Hmm ... sort of. The one you pointed to is a year and a month
newer than the one which I had -- as well as a bit larger.

-rw-r--r-- 1 dnichols family 1449050 Mar 24 11:57 zfsadmin.pdf

It is now printing in duplex mode, and hopefully will be finished before
the next line of thunderstorms reach here. :-) Then it will be time to
comb punch and bind the new copy and toss the older one -- unless it is
*too* new for the version which I am running. Looks as though it is,
the "cache" disk option to zpool is newer than what I have.

[ ... ]

On second thought, I may have to dig the camera out
tomorrow...

Please do.

It's been way too nice around here the last few days
to spend much time inside.

84 F yesterday, 60 F today with lots of rain and thunder.

I was looking at gallery2
in the wee hours, but it appears to have way too many
dependencies for what I want to do, so for now...

Ready to go
316K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.18-tractor-tiller.jpg

O.K.

Tough to get a good angle
198K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.18-tiller-hitch.jpg

Yep -- until I know what I'm seeing, it is difficult to
understand.

Better "angle"
2.4K http://wizard.dyndns.org/tiller_bracket.png

Yep. Fig isn't it?

My helper
139K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.19-kittymonitor.jpg

Fun. And obviously not a LCD monitor. :-)

Dark meat anyone?
64K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.08-turkeys.jpg

I would have to chase them down first. :-) And I don't own a
shotgun. Other things would probably do too much damage to the meat.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

I remember when the first IBM PC/XT's were produced. We (corporate tech) bought
100 and determined my office was a prime site. I had a $20K home computer at
at the time and was consulting in machine and assembly code.

I set it up and was assigned to determine what software to buy and what printer.

Went to a national sales conference with our (then)
Office Manager/Sr. secretary. She was a few years from retirement, but was
determined to give it a go.

She followed the instructions by step.
Power on the computer
Insert a blank floppy (5 1/4" remember them ?) (I used 8" at home)
and type format cr

The command was for the PC, not XT (hard disk). The hard disk was formated.

I got a call - and expected different - but it was ok. Just rebuild the disk.

I renamed the exe and created a bat file that forced checking for proper format.
Then it ran the new file name with the arguments.

Such is life - the software was enhanced PC software that added a hard disk.
A PC had two floppies and cpu memory.

The printer I chose was the NEC spin term. Not the Qume like I had at home.

Those were early 80 experiences and will be with me for years to come.

Martin

Martin H. Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
TSRA, Endowed; NRA LOH & Patron Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot's Medal.
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
http://lufkinced.com/


Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 17 Apr 2008
21:13:51 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:
On 2008-04-17, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 16 Apr 2008
01:43:22 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

Well ... you should expect to be slowed down to think if you
exit an editor without saving the buffer. :-)
Bah! I bet you think "Are you sure?" is a good idea
after 'rm -rf *' :-)
:-)

How about after "rm -rf /" :-)

I've actually used that intentionally. Didn't want
no steenkin' cautionary prompt. Then again, I did
do a 'rm -rf *' once when I wasn't in the directory I
thought I was. You know, one of those quarter-to-dawn
moments A caution wouldn't have done any good, I'd
still have just hit 'y'.

But if such a feature *is* present, it should be consistent --

Agreed.

unlike MS-DOS back around 3.1 or so. I was already accustomed to unix
(as well as OS-9 -- the *real* OS-9 from Microware, not the Apple
stealing of the same name for an OS), and was fairly new to MS-DOS. I
was running a program which would create several files in a fixed
directory path, and wanted to blow them all away when I was done, so I
made sure that each filename ended in 'X' (which did not apply to any
other files already present). When I was done, I typed:

DEL *X.*

OH! Now that it's quoted, I see the asterisks. I
was going to ask what "DEL X." meant. (Slrn was
treating the double asterisks as emphasis delimiters,
and I wasn't connecting the color change with invisible
characters)

expecting to get rid of only the files whose names ended in 'X'.

That's what I'd have expected too.

BTW -- if you are interested, there is a ZFS admin guide downloadable
from Sun's site. It is 180 pages long.

-rw-r--r-- 1 dnichols family 1270170 May 8 2007 817-2271.pdf

Is that the same as this one?
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/...s/zfsadmin.pdf

I've grabbed that one... guess I'll get to it in my
"spare" time.

Welded a 1/2" IP nipple 4" long to a 2x2x1/8 angle.
...
On second thought, I may have to dig the camera out
tomorrow...
Please do.

It's been way too nice around here the last few days
to spend much time inside. I was looking at gallery2
in the wee hours, but it appears to have way too many
dependencies for what I want to do, so for now...

Ready to go
316K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.18-tractor-tiller.jpg

Tough to get a good angle
198K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.18-tiller-hitch.jpg

Better "angle"
2.4K http://wizard.dyndns.org/tiller_bracket.png

My helper
139K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.19-kittymonitor.jpg

Dark meat anyone?
64K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.08-turkeys.jpg


----== Posted via Pronews.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.pronews.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups
---= - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

Martin H. Eastburn wrote:

I remember when the first IBM PC/XT's were produced. We (corporate
tech) bought 100 and determined my office was a prime site. I had a
$20K home computer at
at the time and was consulting in machine and assembly code.

I set it up and was assigned to determine what software to buy and what
printer.


Bah!

If any other company had brought out that POS, we'd all be running CP/M.


I had a 10 MgHz Kaypro at that time.
Blew the drive doors off of anything IBM built.

On 2008-04-21, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 21 Apr 2008
01:39:33 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:

[ ... ]

Hmm ... when slrn uses them as emphasis delimiters for me, it
shifts the color of everything including the delimiters.

I should have said that nano made the asterisks
visible. Exit the editor back to slrn, and they're
gone again, regardless of whether the line begins with
a .

I have this in .slrnrc ...

% If non-zero, interprete _this_ as underlined text and *that* as
% bold text using underlinetext and boldtext colors, resp.
% If set to 1, do not write _ and * characters.
% If set to 2, write _ and * with spaces.
% Otherwise, if non-zero, write _ and * characters.
set emphasized_text_mode 3

... which seems like it should do the same as yours.
slrn in Debian seems to be behaving as if I have it set
to 1.

I don't have that line in mine (I just checked), so I guess that
it defaults to something like 3 or greater.

In FreeBSD, the setting is the same, yet the
asterisks are visible. Strange. Debian must have
made some sort of "improvement" that broke this.

As did whoever ported it to Solaris 10?

-rw-r--r-- 1 dnichols family 1270170 May 8 2007 817-2271.pdf

Is that the same as this one?
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/...s/zfsadmin.pdf

Hmm ... sort of. The one you pointed to is a year and a month
newer than the one which I had -- as well as a bit larger.

-rw-r--r-- 1 dnichols family 1449050 Mar 24 11:57 zfsadmin.pdf

I sorta figured that, but number rather than a name
left me in doubt.

The filename came from downloading a bunch of files found in a
search for documents related to the Ultra-60 (IIRC).

It is now printing in duplex mode, and hopefully will be finished before
the next line of thunderstorms reach here. :-)

Man, you must go through a LOT of paper. I actually
prefer reading on screen rather than deadtree.

It is easier to stick my finger or a bookmark to be able to flip
back and view something which I consider related to the current page.
I haven't found an easy way to do that in either xpdf or acrobat reader.

It's been way too nice around here the last few days
to spend much time inside.

84 F yesterday, 60 F today with lots of rain and thunder.

Nice for April normally means 60ish here.

So -- where is "here"? I'm not too far southwest of Washington
DC.

You may
have noticed from the photos that there was still snow
on the ground the 8th. Actually there's still a bunch
of snow in the Home Depot parking lot today where they
piled it up.

While we saw very little snow this winter, and none of the nasty
cold which we sometimes see.

[ ... ]

Better "angle"
2.4K http://wizard.dyndns.org/tiller_bracket.png

Yep. Fig isn't it?

xfig, yeah. If I can't draw it in xfig, I don't need
to draw it. ;-) http://xfig.org/userman/

:-)

I play around with a couple of others -- one is maximally
portable -- jDraft -- written in java -- but a little slow to start.
Each has its strong points. I've been using xfig for a *long* time.

My helper
139K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.19-kittymonitor.jpg

Fun. And obviously not a LCD monitor. :-)

I can move her paw to the top of the monitor a dozen
times before she finally gets the hint and either
repositions herself, or leaves. Often as not, she gets
up, turns around, and then it's her tail I have to keep
moving.

:-)

One of mine likes to hop into my lap -- displacing the keyboard,
and then nudge her head against the hand working the trackball. The
other just doesn't do laps. The pops between us in bed for a maximum
amount of scritching, but does not want to be picked up. Both were
"rescued" cats.

Dark meat anyone?
64K http://wizard.dyndns.org/2008.04.08-turkeys.jpg

I would have to chase them down first. :-) And I don't own a
shotgun. Other things would probably do too much damage to the meat.

They're very accustomed to vehicles. I bet you could
drive by and snatch one through an open window. If you
didn't mind leaving tire tracks across someone's lawn.
;-)

:-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2008-04-21, Martin H. Eastburn wrote:
I remember when the first IBM PC/XT's were produced. We (corporate tech) bought
100 and determined my office was a prime site. I had a $20K home computer at
at the time and was consulting in machine and assembly code.

O.K. I had been playing with 6800 and 6809 systems by the time
the PC came out.

[ ... ]

She followed the instructions by step.

That can be deadly. :-)

Power on the computer
Insert a blank floppy (5 1/4" remember them ?) (I used 8" at home)

Yep! I used three machines with 8" floppys.

1) SWTP 6800 running SSB's (Smoke Signal Broadcasting's) DOS-68
and later DOS-69 on the 6809.

2) OS-9 (microware multi-user multi-tasking OS in 64K total of
RAM & ROM.

3) Cosmos CMS-16/UNX (8 mhZ 68000 based v7 unix -- my first unix
at home.)

and type format cr

One of the most stupid command designs in the Microsoft world.
(Actually, I guess that it came from CP/M in the floppy days.

The command was for the PC, not XT (hard disk). The hard disk was formated.

Of course. That was before the "Are you sure" (with exclamation
marks) days. :-)

I got a call - and expected different - but it was ok. Just rebuild the disk.

It didn't take that long in those days -- even with such a slow
CPU.

I renamed the exe and created a bat file that forced checking for proper format.
Then it ran the new file name with the arguments.

As did I at work when forced to work with MS-DOS/PC-DOS.

Such is life - the software was enhanced PC software that added a hard disk.
A PC had two floppies and cpu memory.

Yep -- or at the minimum, a cassette interface and BASIC in ROM.

The printer I chose was the NEC spin term. Not the Qume like I had at home.

O.K. That was the cup-shaped type wheel wasn't it? I was using
the Hytype I and Hytype II at home.

Those were early 80 experiences and will be with me for years to come.

:-)

Mine started about 1976 when I got my first machine at home --
the Altair 680b (6800 CPU). I've actually still got it.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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On 2008-04-21, cavelamb himself wrote:
Martin H. Eastburn wrote:

I remember when the first IBM PC/XT's were produced. We (corporate
tech) bought 100 and determined my office was a prime site. I had a
$20K home computer at
at the time and was consulting in machine and assembly code.

I set it up and was assigned to determine what software to buy and what
printer.


Bah!

If any other company had brought out that POS, we'd all be running CP/M.

But PC-DOS *was* CP/M -- ported to the 8086/8088 by Seattle
Computer (IIRC) and sold to Microsoft when IBM and Digital Research
(CP/M company) had disagreements*. The first version of PC-DOS still had
CP/M (Digital Reasarch) copyright notices in some of the commands. :-)
Kind of interesting given how upset Bill Gates was at people using his
BASIC interpreter on home-built systems without paying for it. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

* The nature of the disagreements varies with who tells the story.

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On 2008-04-22, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 21 Apr 2008
23:56:04 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:
On 2008-04-21, Steve Ackman wrote:

[ ... ]

I have this in .slrnrc ...

% If non-zero, interprete _this_ as underlined text and *that* as
% bold text using underlinetext and boldtext colors, resp.
% If set to 1, do not write _ and * characters.
% If set to 2, write _ and * with spaces.
% Otherwise, if non-zero, write _ and * characters.
set emphasized_text_mode 3

... which seems like it should do the same as yours.
slrn in Debian seems to be behaving as if I have it set
to 1.

I don't have that line in mine (I just checked), so I guess that
it defaults to something like 3 or greater.

In FreeBSD, the setting is the same, yet the
asterisks are visible. Strange. Debian must have
made some sort of "improvement" that broke this.

As did whoever ported it to Solaris 10?


slrn/0.9.8.1pl1 (SunOS) shows asterisks*
slrn/0.9.8.1 (FreeBSD) shows asterisks
slrn/0.9.8.1pl1 (Debian) doesn't show asterisks

So, I guess it's not the pl1 that's at fault, but
something Debian did.

O.K

(*) and _presumably_ underscores as well. Guess
we'll see.

Yes, it does -- with a different color as well. I can't see
it while in the editor, but IIRC the asterisks produce blue on black
(rather difficult to read), and the underscores make the text and the
underscores light blue (still on black) -- a lot easier to read.

Man, you must go through a LOT of paper. I actually
prefer reading on screen rather than deadtree.

It is easier to stick my finger or a bookmark to be able to flip
back and view something which I consider related to the current page.
I haven't found an easy way to do that in either xpdf or acrobat reader.

Open another instance of it, and have each opened to
a different page?

I tend to expand the viewer program (whatever it is) to full
screen or near that, because my eyes are getting rather tired.

Nice for April normally means 60ish here.

So -- where is "here"? I'm not too far southwest of Washington
DC.

White Mountain Region, NH, close to the VT border.

O.K. I was in Caanan NH back around 1960 for a couple of
winters. I didn't stay. :-)

While we saw very little snow this winter, and none of the nasty
cold which we sometimes see.

This was the snowiest winter in 135 years. I had the
snowblower out 11 times in December, the snowiest month,
then only 6 times the rest of the winter.

Interesting.

xfig, yeah. If I can't draw it in xfig, I don't need
to draw it. ;-) http://xfig.org/userman/

:-)

I play around with a couple of others -- one is maximally
portable -- jDraft -- written in java -- but a little slow to start.
Each has its strong points. I've been using xfig for a *long* time.

Before xfig, I used GeoDraw, also a vector drawing
program, but once I put DOS in the rearview, xfig was
the only thing that remotely resembled it. I guess I've
only been playing with xfig about 10 years.

O.K. I'm not quite sure how long I've been using xfig, but I've
been using X11 starting with a Sun 2/120 which I got about 1985 I think.
I've used xfig since I discovered it -- though the more recent versions
seem to have picked up some extra features.

My helper

[ ... ]

I can move her paw to the top of the monitor a dozen
times before she finally gets the hint and either
repositions herself, or leaves. Often as not, she gets
up, turns around, and then it's her tail I have to keep
moving.

:-)

Oh yeah, and sometimes when she catches sight of the
mouse or even the cursor moving around, she'll chase it
with her paw. That's always fun too.

I remember our first cat (who adopted us, not the other way
around) used to like it when I turned on the self-test mode on an ADM-3a
terminal built from a kit. What that did was send the cursor racing
across the bottom of the screen, filling it with sequential ASCII
characters, producing a scrolling barber-pole pattern. She was
determined to catch that cursor. :-)

One of mine likes to hop into my lap -- displacing the keyboard,
and then nudge her head against the hand working the trackball. The
other just doesn't do laps. The pops between us in bed for a maximum
amount of scritching, but does not want to be picked up. Both were
"rescued" cats.

This one came scratching at our door night after night.
I figured if she's coming every night anyway, I might as
well give her some food and water. That was in NM desert
where the water was attacked even more ferociously than
the food. The dog is Apache and the cat is Navajo. Both
of them chose us rather than the other way round.

And then you took them to New Hampshire? How cruel can you
be? :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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On 2008-04-24, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 23 Apr 2008
04:30:16 GMT, DoN. Nichols, wrote:
On 2008-04-22, Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on 21 Apr 2008

slrn/0.9.8.1pl1 (SunOS) shows asterisks*
slrn/0.9.8.1 (FreeBSD) shows asterisks
slrn/0.9.8.1pl1 (Debian) doesn't show asterisks

SIGH Ever bang your head against the wall only
to discover the wall wasn't actually there?

Yep. :-)

I _ALWAYS_ have my ssh session to FreeBSD in a black
xterm, and the local Debian shell in green. Well, at
some point, I apparently used green to "do a quick
something or other" on FBSD, and forgot to exit.
SO, I was looking at green and black for Deb and FBSD,
but in reality, both terms were FBSD.

O.K.

Once I realized that, it turns out that the Debian
.slrnrc was set to mode 1 emphasis.

That could do it.

I tend to expand the viewer program (whatever it is) to full
screen or near that, because my eyes are getting rather tired.

Still. One can be immediately above the other.
Depending on wm, you generally right click the status
bar to lower whatever's on top to bottom. Pretty
analogous to flipping back and forth between thumb
and index fingered pages.

Right click on the status bar of a CDE dtterm does bring up a
menu which includes "lower" (and offers a key shortcut of ALT+F3, but
even easier is the "Front" key on the left-hand side of the Sun
keyboard. But I often have enough windows below an expanded news or
e-mail window (or a PDF reader) that it takes several clicks to get to
the one in question, and several more to get back to where I started.

O.K. I was in Caanan NH back around 1960 for a couple of
winters. I didn't stay. :-)

I don't blame you. Though way down south like that,
I'm sure the winters were milder than here. ;-)
Then again, winters here are probably warmer now than
they were then what with the Kumbaya effect and all.
Winter of '68/69, IIRC, was one of the years we
couldn't get out the front door after a February storm.
Had to climb out a second story window. People put
tennis balls on their car antennae in hopes that other
cars around a corner snowbank would have a better
chance of seeing them coming.

O.K. I was safely gone by then. :-) I think that the worst
snow I remember from that time may have been about 1964. That was the
winter that I discovered that my MGA could float on top of the snow and
paddle with chains if the snow was flat enough. (The MGA had flat
plywood floors.)

I remember our first cat (who adopted us, not the other way
around) used to like it when I turned on the self-test mode on an ADM-3a
terminal built from a kit. What that did was send the cursor racing
across the bottom of the screen, filling it with sequential ASCII
characters, producing a scrolling barber-pole pattern. She was
determined to catch that cursor. :-)

That must have been about 600 baud or so?

I don't really know what baud rate it was the equivalent of. It
bypassed the serial ports (which were set for 9600 baud) and had its own
timing -- designed for visibility.

Just quick
enough to keep her busy.
Laser tag is fun too.

Yep -- but that cat never experienced that, because I did not
have a laser pointer at that time (about 1978 I think).

The dog is Apache and the cat is Navajo. Both
of them chose us rather than the other way round.

And then you took them to New Hampshire? How cruel can you
be? :-)

The dog was from the White Mountains of AZ, so the
White Mountains of NH weren't that much of a change.
She can't even tell the difference between an AZ and an
NH.

Oh -- a mental giant dog. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:56:04 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2008-04-21, Steve Ackman ... wrote:
... DoN. Nichols, wrote:
....
The filename came from downloading a bunch of files found in a
search for documents related to the Ultra-60 (IIRC).

It is now printing in duplex mode, and hopefully will be finished
before the next line of thunderstorms reach here. :-)

Man, you must go through a LOT of paper. I actually
prefer reading on screen rather than deadtree.

It is easier to stick my finger or a bookmark to be able to flip
back and view something which I consider related to the current page. I
haven't found an easy way to do that in either xpdf or acrobat reader.
....

The add-bookmarks-to-acrobat-reader method given at
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pdfhk...ter/hack15.pdf
works more or less as advertised, but takes a couple of mouse
clicks each way.
-jiw

On 2008-04-26, James Waldby wrote:
On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:56:04 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2008-04-21, Steve Ackman ... wrote:

[ ... ]

Man, you must go through a LOT of paper. I actually
prefer reading on screen rather than deadtree.

It is easier to stick my finger or a bookmark to be able to flip
back and view something which I consider related to the current page. I
haven't found an easy way to do that in either xpdf or acrobat reader.
...

The add-bookmarks-to-acrobat-reader method given at
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pdfhk...ter/hack15.pdf
works more or less as advertised, but takes a couple of mouse
clicks each way.

O.K. It is going to paper as I type. :-) We'll see how it
works. There was no point in staying there and trying it directly
because my browser is configured to use xpdf by default. :-)

Thanks,
DoN.

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