The collected works of hamei - Page 22

Here's a trick you will like : when you get a winterm like that, put your mouse cursor at the end of what you want. Depress the left mouse button and swipe to the left up to the beginning of what you want. This will highlight all the test you "selected". (Works the other way also but I am right-handed.) Release the l eft m ouse b utton (aka lmb). Now drive the mouse cursor over the desktop or an open directory display-window (or even a closed one's icon). Press the m iddle m ouse b utton and it will drop a text file onto your desktop. It will be named "Pasted Text" and you can then rename it.

Now you can paste that into any application you want, such as the message window on your web browser.

Beware : after you get used to this you will become addicted to it. Windows does not have this feature.

Running an international drug smuggling ring from your basement ?

The quick fix is to close Fireflop and reopen it. That solves the problem for a while ....

Did you update from /current or is that a new libpng from /beta ? If you'd give the neko_libpng-1.2.47.tardist in /beta a try and make a post about it in Development, that would be a help to the Nekoware Updating Program.

Thanks for reporting back, anyhow There are a few users here who could take a lesson from your good manners. And I mean the word "users" literally

I agree. But Fireflop has so many serious problems that spending a l0t of effort on this small thing when you can fix it by closing and reopening is not very productive. You're welcome to do things the hard ways if you like, though, Pentium

With my setup, at least, when it starts doing that "such and such a jpeg cannot be displayed due to errors" trick, it is going to crash bigtime very very soon. That error seems to be indicative of a three-legs-broken, just-hasn't-fallen-down-yet situation. So I close it and repen at that point and it's usually okay for a while. With javascript turned off it manages to go longer between episodes of

I've also got a huge list of blocked */*ads* domains in my fail.cnf file, which helps somewhat ....

Not sure about vrml but there was a series of converters floating around for 3ds, Softimage, Wavefront, dxf, iges and some other formats to Inventor. They worked pretty well. Your Turbocad should be able to export in iges or dxf.

Okay ... looked through 400 pages in the Intertubes, never did find anything so had to put every CD in the drive and make a list which I can now search. If it helps anyone else, welcome to this :

(solaris 10 update 7 for sparc, last one available on CD)

Boy is Solaris fun !

Sun Studio 12.3 appears to be working. I grabbed a bit of code off the Innertubes for a test and ...

MIPSPro also gives a ton of errors on the same file. Interesting that they aren't exactly the same. Nice tutorial.

Anyhow, the compiler appears to be working. But all the apps I want complain about (config.log)

This isn't what I want but gmake should be a short simple test case to get the dumb thing running. It appears to want libdwarf. No problem, dload the source to libdwarf and configure ... oh-oh. Libdwarf also wants libdwarf to compile libdwarf. This could be a problem. I can't find stinking libdwarf anywhere on the Solaris CD's and no clue on the useless godforsaken Intertubes.

Where the hell is it ?

And here I thought MIPSPro was kind of a pain ....

(But I did discover that Sun likes to rename and reorganize every single part of their operating system for every release. Cool ! no wonder they went broke.)

Thank you. I finally found them in the SunStudio stuff. A fresh download (500 megs) and a reinstall and I now have them. They should have installed the first time but stuff happens ...

Good idea. If I had to install Solaris on a regular basis I'd have myself pre-emptively committed. Nice software, TERRIBLE organization. And WHY do they have to change the names of everything every three weeks ? It's about as stupid as Firefox flipping the "cancel" and "save" pushbuttons or moving the settings from edit -> preferences to tools -> options. Serves no purpose except to annoy people and make everything that's already documented meaningless.Worse than meaningless, confusing. I'd love to go to their parking lot one lunchtime and move the gas pedal to the left, put the brake pedal on the passenger side and make the steering go left when you turn right and vice versa. Would be fun to watch when it was time to go home. Ha ha, would serve those jerks right.

If Oracle had spent as much time straightening things out as they did changing "Sun" to "Oracle" everywhere, Solaris could be pretty nice.


V100 is tiny. No room.

It's actually a surprisingly great little server. No nothing - no graphics, no scsi, no usb, no way to attach anything externally, no pci slot, slow cpu. Specs-wise it's a pitiful little thing. But it works good !

I think they effed up on that computer ... doing a Core (basic) Solaris install on a V100 installs Infiniband, Gigabyte ethernet, Fiber Channel, all kinds of things that are junk, as far as a V100 is concerned. And the V100 has a small disk. They sold the hardware, they should have made a special V100 Solaris Install Package that would go zoom-zoom onto the disk and given small businesses a running web / file server in three easy steps. The thing works nice but it's a nightmare to get into a usable running condition. And who thought up that horse's ass disk partitioning scheme, then made it the default ? What a mess.

Is this a clue to why Sun went broke ? An MBA can manage any business, eh Sky ?

Give it to your mom. They are perfect for that.

Moms are people too, my friend !

You're trying to bait me .... this dork must be a member of the famous McMuffin family, a Ziff-Davis shill to the last. What an imbecile.

It was funny that he'd (supposedly) quote John Akers, tho. Akers never touched a computer in his life, couldn't even type, and ran IBM off a cliff it has never really recovered from. Three biggest quarterly losses in the history of Wall Street, totally missed the peecee revolution, got within an inch of bankrupting the most powerful computer company the world has ever seen, but this drooling retard quotes him as a reputable source. Typical dickwad "technical" writer. No wonder the country is so ignorant.

Just kidding. I was going to answer "In my pants !" but thought someone might take offense

What an ignorant jerk .... but that's what we expect from Ziff-Davis. Computer Currents* ran some intelligent comparisons while we were all waiting for Chicago. That's when i decided to go for OS/2. Their factually-based conclusion was that everything about OS/2 was better except that it had higher hardware requirements.

But since you could see that memory prices would drop considerably in short order, well .... going with Windows 95 would have been a mistake. Win95 was a joke compared to OS/2.


Hey, if you remember riding Dinny through the jungles you'd be old ! 25 years is nothing. It's well within the margin of error for the creation of Earth, in some circles

* Is Gigglebytes stashed anywhere on the innernet ?

"Junk" on the Japanese auction sites just means "untested, sold as-is". It doesn't mean the part is actually junk. But it doesn't mean it isn't, either Pig in a poke ... but generally, anything I have bought from Japan has been well take care of.

APT is not foss but it's public domain, even better Not only that but it's proven ... SR-71, Apollo missions, XB-70, Boeing, Northrop, Douglas, North American Aviation, GE, Pratt & Whitney .... Totally parametric, three d, can handle shapes that the graphical apps can only dream of, nice program / language. No point and click though.

$900 seems pretty high to me for something you can't do anything with. I could see an 8" cube as being useful ....

Are you sure you don't live in China ?

APT stands for Automatically Programmed Tools or any variety on that theme ... It's both a language and a program, came from MIT originally at the same time that CNC was developed / invented / designed, and by many of the same people. Then the aerospace industry took over development ... it was the very first ANSI standard and most of the aircraft built before 1980 would have been designed with APT. It was still common into the 90's ... the wikipedia page is not bad but if you're lazy ...

First step is to define the part using geometry statements. Common entities include circles, lines (in fact it's all 3d so a line is just a specialized form of a plane), cones, spheres, parabolas, hyperbolas, surfaces, mathematically-defined arcs, whatever. If you've played with FORTRAN the conventions will be familiar ...

CIRCLE1 / CIRCLE, POINTA, DIA 6
LINE2 /LINE, 12, 17, 44, TANTO, CIRCLE6

and so on ... gazillions of ways to define each entity.

The next section is tool movement commands - turn on spindle at 3000 rpm clockwise, turn on coolant, start from point A, rapid to point B, go forward to the intersection of plane one with circle three, turn left on circle three at four inches per minute to the intersection with plane five, rapid to the start point, turn off spindle, turn off coolant, rewind, fini.

Rewind refers to tape, of course. Did you know that SR-71 missions were controlled by a computer running paper (mylar) tape ? I think until the very end. Funny.

These days maybe that's too much work for people but compared to an HP-41, it's a dream. Also, as you can imagine, it's quite a bit more powerful than graphics programs if you are more of a programmer than a clicky-the-picture sort. For families of parts, just change the dimensions on your geometry. Run the part definition through the interpreter again. Viola, new part, same program. GE built entire families of turbine engines with a spreadsheet and APT loooong before MySQL was a gleam in Larry's gimpy eye.

The program is in the public domain - hard to find the source code though, it's so old and not sexy for the anti-aliased fonts crowd. Easiest way to try is to get a trial copy of Personal APT (web search) which is a subset of the complete language. Bob Drewry was involved in the original program, he's retired and messes with this in his dotage. He's created a Windows shell for today's users, I much prefer the DOS version. Price for the whole thing - program, manual, postprocessors - is around $300. Or was, last I checked. It's worth it. The manual alone is a full course in machine tool programming.

There were several other versions of APT out there but I believe most have fallen by the wayside. The military still uses it, I'd imagine. They've got all those B-52 parts to keep in inventory.


I've messed with every free cad app I can find, you can bet on that I don't like any of them very much. To tell the truth I am surprised there aren't any nice ones. There have been a few with promise but they seem to have fallen by the wayside. They are all so busy playing with their dicks that they forget the purpose of a CAD program - to draw/design stuff. 80% of the screen is icons. Hey ! Where's the damn part go ? Over here in this postage-stamp-sized mini-window ?


There is also Irit and that BRM CSG thing. Neither of those seemed very exciting from the point of view of machining tho.


Nah, I understand. But APT is going to kick ass over anything from Open Cascade for the next century. Much five-axis work is still done in APT. Just a few years ago it was all done in APT, because the graphics apps couldn't handle the math


Not to be mean but I can't see it being good for that, even. For small delicate work you want a very high-speed spindle and good rigidity and accuracy and repeatability. Little parts have details in the .0001"s. If the best your machine can repeat is .0005" (with luck) then you're going to be disappointed. That kind of accuracy isn't free. That little thing is so flimsy Ahnuld could crush it in one hand like a beer can. I can't see it being useful for anything at all.

Oooh ! Oooh ! Uncle Martin and I had to move

Ouch ! And I thought our so-called "service" was overpriced ! We get especially good web filtering, tho

Does your isp snivel about running a low-traffic website on a normal dsl line ? I'd think you could run nekochan on a less expensive service without causing any harm (except to your ISP's pocketbook )

FTTH is pretty common here, too. Residential is $22.50 a month but then, we have certain restrictions Business gets shafted to make up for it, our crappy 512 mbit connection that has been slower than molasses ever since the worst company in the country, China Crapicom, took it over, runs about a hundred $$ a month.

Mr Neko, I notice you do your own DNS. How does that work ? Can you just set up a dns server and the other dns servers will pick you up, or did you have to get integrated into the Greater Internet in some way ? I need to better understand dns, since that's the biggest tool they use to mess us up. I can say with some authority that putting a known-good dns server address in your setup doesn't help, they still manage to poison it. Thanks, Cisco.

If you are interested in early computer developments, I'll try to attach something historical. I found it interesting ....


There's a "project" called Heekscad / Heekscam ... kind of funny. Part of what they are attempting to do is re-create APT in python. Except it appears that they don't even know of APT's existence ? APT was written and tested to the max by every major aerospace company in the US, three guys in their mom's basement are going to do better ? It's free and public domain, but they feel they have to recreate the wheel ?

Sometimes you gotta wonder what people have between their ears. A lot of what they are trying to do looks nice but jeeze. Anyway ...


We have a lot of small sign shops making engraved plastic products with small cnc routers (with very basic z-axis control). They aren't very expensive. I've thought for a while that one of those would make a great base for a backyard cnc mill. They are MUCH more rigid than most of the scary shit I've seen on people's websites. Some of that stuff is awful. I'm sure they are having fun but jeeze ... everything you need to do a nice job is readily available but here they are, gluing popsicle sticks together to make a machine. Maybe I should make kits. Then all we'd need to do is make an O2 act as the controller. We could duplicate Jim Clark's disastrous ocean voyage

That's a beautiful little piece.

And I wouldn't pay ten dollars for it. For actual use, it's shit.

1) Made out of aluminum. Aluminum is one-third as stiff as cast iron. That means that for the exact same force, it will deflect three times as much as a part made of a more suitable material.

2) All bolted construction. Same problem. Bolted joints are nowhere near as rigid as weldments or castings.

3) The ways suck. It's very difficult to impossible to get the preload you want on round ways. If the female portion had seals and hydraulic oil pumped in under pressure they would be hydrodynamic ways, extremely stiff and very cool. But they aren't. If they are just a female bushing then you can't get the fit you need and can't ever adjust them for wear. If they use small balls for rolling elements then they concentrate all the loads on a very small area and wear very quickly plus have almost no damping effect.

4) The table : how the hell are you going to mount anything to that thing ? Every heard of t-slots, guys ?

5) The spindle : a three-jaw chuck ? Are those people nuts ? Any cutter except for a drill will have a sideways component of force. The very first thing they teach a person in shop class is to never I mean never put any kind of end mill or other cutter into a drill chuck. That means NEVER !

We could continue but will refrain

The point is, here's a very nice-looking device built with no consideration for its intended application. None whatsoever. I like hobbyists - I am a damn hobbyist ! but jeeze ... can we learn a little about the basics before we go making stuff ? Or writing web browsers ?


I don't see the price in this little guy but the sign machines are not nearly as pretty except they have the basics correct. I also have a hunch that the sign machines are a lot cheaper and they come with a working control right out of the box. It's in Chinese, of course, but still .... here's a (terrible) shot of a portion of a sign. Words are about 2 cm tall, workpiece was 14" by 22" (roughly 36 x 60 cm). Bigger letters in other areas, this just gives an idea of the accuracy of small cutters even with a small, cheap but properly designed machine.



If CNC-Sable is the competition, maybe I should go into the biz of hobby NC machines ..... their stuff is crap. Beautiful crap to look at but still crap.

Control, this is Qiqihaer 20. Can you give me a ground speed check, please ?


Have to go home, it's getting late here but General ... do you have any foundries available ? Can you run a table saw ? If not, a steel weldment is second-best ... you can make your own and beat the CNC-Sable price and quality.

It's kind of two different requirements .... small parts need a high-speed spindle and fast, accurate table movements. Bridgeport work is more general-purpose, heavier cuts, not as accurate ... just different .....


Yes, this is one of the places that makes the routers that little sign shops use. They also make little laser engravers. They are not pretty like the CNC-Sable but the design is correct and the prices are reasonable. Too bad about your import problem ....


Nothing, except that it's kind of hard to put on top of your desk


If you can't beat City Hall, then play their game Make it in Argentina. There's nothing so special about those little machines that you can't build nice ones. And the competition sucks. So .... we don't all have to be "knowledge workers" toiling in the fields so that Google can know every single thing about our previously-private lives.

PM, general