Dave Williams' Computing Pages

I'm still looking for something that will strip web forums down to standard mbox files stored on my hard disk so I can view them with my mail reader. I'll even take something that will monitor specified threads on forums and mirror them to my local hard drive to do local browsing. I can't believe there's nothing like this out there, but if there is, I can't seem to find the right keywords to feed the search engines!
I'm also looking for some way to get a Tk text widget to work correctly with an old IBM 84-key keyboard, with the function keys on the left. Tk expects to see the "enhanced" 101-key inverted-T cursor keys, and doesn't work with the older board's cursor keys. There are ways to get around it in the X configuration and in Tk, but it's a lot of work, and I'm hoping someone has done it before...

Linux tips and tricks

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Cool Linux Stuff

  • Linux From Scratch compile your own working Linux system from the source code. Bootable prebuilt and LiveCD versions are also available
  • User Mode Linux Xen and Qemu and virtualization are all the rage at the moment, but User Mode Linux jacklegs around all that fancy stuff with a patched kernel that runs in userspace. This means it'll run as an application with any version of Linux, not just one with virtualization.

    • TCL/Tk Stuff

  • Whim window manager written in Tk. That means it's completely scriptable... a Starkit is available that runs a copy in Xnest in your existing window manager. Oh... and Whim's main script is 39Kb.
  • TCL-URL TCL news and resources
  • etLinux a customized version of TCL and various TCL scripts to replace most of the init and utility scripts in a Linux installation. It was designed for embedded applications that didn't necessarily have the room for Bash
  • SnackAMP media player in Tk
  • tkHTML widget for rendering HTML
  • FileRunner twin-panel file manager
  • TkRat (Ratatosk) mail reader
  • Adora mail reader Simple, and development stopped in 1999, but it works
  • BrowseX Tk web browser and mail reader

    • Tools

    Free Pascal
    The Free Pascal Compiler (aka FPK Pascal) has been around for a long time, is quite stable, and underlies the Lazarus Project. It builds 32 or 64 bit code on a variety of processors for various operating systems. It is fairly compatible with Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0, with some Apple Object Pascal extensions.
    Free Pascal home site


    Lazarus
    Lazarus is a free, cross-platform workalike of Borland's Delphi. It's a GUI builder and component set built on top of the FreePascal compiler. Borland gave up on their "Kylix" (Delphi for Linux) project years ago, but Lazarus rocks. Downside: it depends on a bunch of graphics libraries you'll probably have to seek out and install individually, but it's worth it if you're an old Delphi geek moving to Linux.

  • Wikipedia description
  • The Lazarus Documentation Project
  • Lazarus home site


    FreeBASIC
    FreeBASIC is an approximate workalike of Microsoft Quick BASIC 4. It compiles 16 or 32 bit binaries under various operating systems. I've used it to port some business applications from DOS to Linux.

  • FreeBASIC home site



    old stuff

    A Blast From The Past - DESQview vs. Windows 3.1!

    For a while (1990-1994) I was writing an online computer industry newsletter. These are the last two issues:
    PC Notes #120
    PC Notes #121