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Talkback:126/howell.html

[ In reference to "From Assembler to COBOL with the Aid of Open Source" in LG#126 ]

Owen Townsend [owen at uvsoftware.ca]


Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:25:22 -0700

Edgar Howell:

I was searching for an Assembler to COBOL converter and found & enjoyed your article at http://linuxgazette.net/126/TWDT.html

Could you tell me the conversion tool used to convert assembler to COBOL ?

Do you also know of a PL/1 to COBOL converter ?

I, Owen Townsend, [email protected], website www.uvsoftware.ca have tools to convert mainframe JCL to Korn shell scripts

& mainframe COBOL to Micro Focus COBOL

& EBCDIC DATA to ASCII preserving any packed/binary data.

I have had questions from prospects asking about assembler & PL/1 conversion so would be interested in finding tools for these conversions.

Please look at my web site. You might be interested in downloading my free 'uvhd' utility from www.uvsoftware.ca/libuvhd.htm

- file investigation utility

- displays data in vertical hexadecimal

- great for files with packed/binary data

- browse, search, select, update

I am listing it in the GNU FSF directory.

Thanks, Owen

[ Thread continues here (4 messages/3.22kB) ]


Talkback:152/okopnik.html

[ In reference to "Review of the Plat'Home OpenBlockS" in LG#152 ]

s. keeling [keeling at nucleus.com]


Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:11:53 -0600

[Hmm ... I appear to have, yet again, subtly broken your lovely pinehelper.pl script. I mean, should Subject: be that plain? Production version at end. When I mouse-over the link, I see mailto:[email protected]?subject=Talkback:152/okopnik.html, so I must have broken some quoting stuff in the script. Or maybe you already fixed this, and I should check old mail for the fix? Good idea. :-]

But I digress.

Re: Review of the Plat'Home OpenBlockS

You editors make tough reviewers. I imagine the poor guys at Plat'Home are shaking their heads and muttering "never again" over and over.

In the early days of Linux, all the documentation read like it had been written by one of Ted T'so's worshippers, shipped to Germany for reformatting, filtered through Chef, then translated by Vietnamese into English (out of this was born the LDP). Others aren't so lucky as us in this modern age of ours.

I thought it courageous (though perhaps obviously doomed to failure) to ship you their latest for review. Were you trying to buy and use this thing, or did they think you were only reviewing it for publication?

I envy you that secret weapon of yours. It's fascinating reading to hear you two go at translating their dox into meaningfulness. I hope you passed on your notes to Plat'Home?

And, yeah, frankly, telnet/ftp ought to be locked down to the serial interface *until you* open them up! That is good security. Both of them transmit pwords en clair, dammit. Cut 'em some slack (I humbly suggest).

Have you any experience with Soekris boxes or Mini-ITX form factor? That's likely what you're really looking for (if you weren't just offering to review the thing), though they aren't really "palm sized" either. OpenBSD uses Soekris in demos showing their pf firewall running in parallel on two boxes, cleanly failing over when power's cut on one of them, no transmission loss. Slick.

Interesting review. I think I would have taken the thing with a bit more of a grain of salt than you, but I wasn't there. At least I know this is not the next box to try to move Mom to. :-) However, I've been intrigued by it since I heard of it too.

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Talkback:110/oregan1.html

[ In reference to "Building a simple del.icio.us clone" in LG#110 ]

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]


Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:04:43 +0100

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: alMubarmij <[email protected]>
Date: 2008/8/12
Subject: Building a simple del.icio.us clone .. Files ?
To: [email protected]

Hi Jimmy

I like your topic about del.icio.us script in linuxgazette.net: http://linuxgazette.net/110/oregan1.html

But the script is hard for me to understand how to collect it, I hope you send me a compressed file contains all files I need to apply this script

Thank you very much.

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/2.66kB) ]


Talkback:152/lg_tips.html

[ In reference to "2-Cent Tips" in LG#152 ]

Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Sat, 2 Aug 2008 22:53:01 -0400

Hi, Greg -

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 11:02:39AM -0700, Greg Metcalfe wrote:

> On Friday 25 July 2008 21:02:51 Ben Okopnik wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 11:35:02AM -0700, Greg Metcalfe wrote:
> > > Regarding "2-cent tip: Removing the comments out of a configuration
> > > file":
> > >
> > > I don't like to invoke Yet Another Interpreter (Perl, Python, etc.) for
> > > simple problems, when I've already got a perfectly good one (the bash
> > > shell) running, and all those wonderful GNU programs.
> >
> > You know, I'm often puzzled when people say that. Whether you have Bash
> > running or not, your script launches another instance of it - *as an
> > interpreter.* The memory footprint of bash plus grep is not going to be
> > much smaller than that of Perl, either. You also lose the capability of
> > (easily) writing the result back to the original file. In what way is
> > this better?
> >
> The bit about launching another interpreter is forehead-slappingly correct, of 
> course. I have systems where bash is the only interpreter present. Sendmail's 
> restricted shell is disabled, etc. I wonder if I'm not subconciously making 
> peace with that situation, rather than growling about it.

That would be understandable, certainly. I'm a big fan of the functional overlap that is afforded by the various programming tools plus the standard Unix toolkit - it means that you can usually get the job done even when you're missing your favorite gadget. Believe me, I have nothing at all against 'grep' - especially when it's wearing that Superman cape with a '-E' option stenciled on the back. :)

> My 'dense' actually does other things via switches, such as reporting on local 
> modifications to config files via a mandated '# LOCALMOD date name reason' 
> standard, etc.
> 
> But it just growed, and most of it is far too nasty (non-standard switches, 
> etc.) to ever be seen by the public. I just grabbed the two most relevant 
> lines, and pasted. You'll have seen my shebang typo, for instance. 
> The 'dense' that's really in use does have the advantage of actually being 
> runable...

Heh. I've done a number of those in my time... although after a certain point, I got into a habit of going back and rewriting them if I found that they kept on being useful. I actually have two projects of that sort on the slow burner right now: my lightweight MTA ('bssmtp'), and the LG mailbag processor. The latter actually has a comment in it that says

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Published in Issue 154 of Linux Gazette, September 2008

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