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March 2000
editor@os2voice.org

March 13

For those ISP800 customers who are having trouble with the toll-free line, I recently discovered that the old Innoval site is currently a local dialup line search engine for ISP800. I don't know if this will help ISP800 customers or not, I just stumbled on this the other day at:

http://www.innoval.com

March 13

The Philadelphia Area Computer Society OS/2 SIG web site at http://www.phillyos2.org has just been updated. Stop in for these new features:

MARCH MEETING PREVIEW

Front page updated with March meeting information: Jim Nuytens will conduct a presentation and demo of Partition Magic 5.0, demonstrating how to use it with OS/2 to copy, move and resize partitions and clone whole drives.

FEBRUARY MEETING REVIEW

Meetings page updated with report from the February meeting featuring Junk Spy from Sundial Systems.

WARPSTOCK 2000 SUPPORT

The Warpstock 2000 logo is now displayed on our site with a link to the Warpstock site.

March 13

March 13

Magnus Olsson the developer of WarpCalc and Astrology has developed Numerology 1.0 for OS/2:

http://www.visdom.nu/home/numerolog/

Numerology for OS/2 is a very simple implementation of basic Chaldean numerology.

March 13

APRIL 2000 "OS/2 CONNECT" NEWSLETTER RELEASED

PALM HARBOR, FLORIDA (March 13, 2000) - M. Bryce ~Associates (MBA) today announced the release of the April issue of OS/2 CONNECT, a freeware newsletter distributed through the various computer networks and bulletin boards. OS/2 CONNECT is THE authoritative source for contact information in the universe of IBM's OS/2 32-bit operating system.

The newsletter is implemented as a web page at:

http://www.os2ss.com/connect/

Its HTML files are also available for downloading and viewing locally. The file is named CON0400.ZIP and can also be obtained at:
Hobbes - ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/
ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/info/newsltr/connect/con0400.zip or
ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/incoming/con0400.zip
Walnut Creek - ftp://ftp-os2.cdrom.com/
ftp://ftp-os2.cdrom.com/pub/os2/newsltr/con0400.zip
or
ftp://ftp-os2.cdrom.com/pub/os2/incoming/con0400.zip

America Online and various Bulletin Boards.
Tim Bryce
Editor, OS/2 CONNECT
M. Bryce ~Associates (MBA)
a division of M&JB Investment Company
3310 U.S. Alt. 19
P.O. Box 1637
Palm Harbor, FL 34682-1637
United States
Tel: 727/786-4567
Fax: 727/786-4765
E-Mail: timb001@attglobal.net
WWW: http://www.os2ss.com/connect/
MBA: Developers of the "PRIDE" Information Factory ~Batch Manager
Since 1971: "Software for the finest computer - the Mind"

March 13

The March/April 2000 edition of "Ask Timmy" is now available on 32BitsOnline at:

http://www.32bitsonline.com/article.php3?file=issues/200003/timmy-mar-00&page=1

Ask Timmy is a column written by Tim Sipples that answers tough questions on OS/2 networking.

March 13

Because some people are having problems getting to the MIDI Station Sequencer web site I've mirrored the site so that everyone will be able to see it.

The URL is:

http://www.geocities.com/Hodges_C

This site will be active until I resolve what is happening with my ISP.

MIDI Station Sequencer is the most advanced MIDI/Audio sequencer for OS/2.

March 12

In the following you will read about a project which aims to help people in porting and writing portable software on OS/2.

Current Situation:

While most commercial software development for OS/2 has stopped (except important server-only and large-scale solutions) the "open source" movement currently gains momentum. For most remaining individual OS/2 users and developers it is essential to profit from this momentum in the best possible way.

For many years EMX has been the work horse here: Not only because of its gcc port. Essentially because of its highly portable, largely open standards conformant C Library. This one has proved reliability and excellence. Let us try to extend it slowly, implementing those interfaces _we_ have always been missing without reducing stability, slickness and performance. Like EMX itself it should well serve as an example of good software engineering. In the following we outline an approach which follows a well known theorem from physics: the "least action principle": in our opinion the rather low resource demands makes this project likely to succeed!

The idea:

Our idea focusses on three independent steps:

1. Collect already existing ported APIs and subsets and make a quite usable and well documented extension library of it, that can be improved upon and heavily tested, independently from emx.

2. Create a Posix-conformant file-system wrapper using a _posixRedirRoot()-function very similar to the existing __XOS2RedirRoot() interface of XFree86 as well as a BSD-Unix-style () mechanism for remapping hardcoded path-names. Other ideas (not necessarily from the authors here) include an "emx.dll" internal database to simulate symlinks and perhaps one should have a look at TVFS here.

3. Merge all those efforts into a single distribution that is upwards-compatible to already existing emx-software and that would (eventually) pass all tests for official Posix-conformance. We would not limit the scope to POSIX.1 but include a selection of system calls from The Single Un*x Specifications (Unix 95/98) as well as traditional SYSV and BSD interfaces.

What to do:

As a first step we'd like to know from each other if people want to contribute here and if so what they have to 'offer'. Let us set up a mutual coordination of past individual efforts to merge them to a quite usable single library. Many complicated work has alread been done, namely to support the forthcoming XFree86 4.0. You might already have implemented other complicated and missing api's. Contribute them, please! And feel free to criticise and to stress test what we already can offer.

Then we might have to discuss the license issue: A license more liberal than (L)GPL would be nice, since we don't want to limit usage more than necessary. This does not exclude a non-liability-disclaimer and individual copyright notices. If possible we might agree on a having an unique license for the whole package. At least the small collection we are offering in a package called 'libextensions' (working title) is Public Domain, except some (L?)GPL stuff. This will be removed eventually.

Finally we have to address the topic what to do with our work: as explained it may not simply be added to the public EMX distribution ...

What we have:

We have already collected a few implementations for "frequently missing APIs" upon porting: including math and random number functions, g/sitimer(), dlopen(), etc. To be prepared for possible future enhancements we meanwhile also provide stubs for functions which have no real counterpart on OS/2 yet. This clearly superceeds the approach of #whatunixhas (0) /* and we on OS/2 don't have at all:-( */

An important statement:

Since we marked our code as Public Domain it should be clear that 'we' do not intend to make advertisement with your hard work claiming it would be 'our' effort (only ;-). The goal is only to get EMX or any similar project ready for porting more software out of the box!

Organizational stuff:

We're primarily looking for people which actually will contribute code. Especially since this little project shouldn't go 'fully public' (i.e. upload to a site like Hobbes) unless a certain level of quality and quantity is reached. No, not the full Unix98 API list has to be done before ;-)

Since we've learned from many projects that users (like on xfreeos2@) get upset when too much technical stuff is discussed we have set up a new mailinglist: posix2@borneo.gmd.de is available for discussing this project. Send subscribe requests to majordomo@borneo.gmd.de (they will be forwarded to the list owner for approval)

Thanks and Bye,
--
Arnd Hanses,
Alexander Mai,
Holger Veit

March 12

Just a couple of notes:

BgMetrics has been updated again as of March 11, 2000 with several small fixes. BgMetrics is a native OS/2 solution to track Blood Glucose readings and dietary info for diabetics and may be found at:

http://www.pillarsoft.net/bgmetrics.html

BgMetrics came together very quickly but because of the heavy amount of time invested over the last few weeks, the update to WarpZip is running behind schedule. We will try to get the planned increase in functionality for WarpZip working as soon as possible and hope our users will understand. WarpZip is an award winning archive management tool for OS/2. Downloads and more information may be found at:

http://www.pillarsoft.net/warpzip.html

The PillarSoft Suite "introductory special" pricing will be ending on April 10th. The PillarSoft Suite is a collection of 13 native OS/2 tools and utilities from PillarSoft. Further information on the PillarSoft Suite and what it includes is available on our web site at:

http://www.pillarsoft.net/suite.html

If it all comes together (and it appears it will) we are planning to be in Phoenix for Warptech and would like to find someone that knows our software to help out behind the booth. The qualifications? Here they are, in order of importance.
1) A smile (for everyone, even if BG walks in!)
2) An upbeat attitude (easy when you're having fun)
3) Gregarious (you have to be able to talk to folks!)
4) Knowledge of Pillarsoft software (don't we all?)
5) Demonstrating applications
6) Unspoken qually: If you have a spare computer to take with it would really help out too. It's hard to get equipment to a show in one piece and more than one is next to impossible. :-)

Not too difficult in the qualifications department. Please contact me at swanee@pillarsoft.net if you think you would like to help out.

More information about PillarSoft and its products are available at our website under the "Products" category. PillarSoft on the web is located at:

http://www.pillarsoft.net

March 12

The Weekly WarpTech 2000 Report

We've been just a little bit busy since our WarpTech announcement a week and a half ago. Vendors, speakers and attendees have all been signing up and, quite frankly, it's been a humbling experience to have so many OS/2 folks planning to show up for WarpTech.

Esther Schindler is taking care of the session planning and Marilyn Pizzo is busily getting in contact with vendors. We want to have more technical content than you've seen at any other OS/2 show and that means Esther and Marilyn have to work, well, "overtime" to bring you some great presentations and some great OS/2 exhibitors.

IBM has agreed to send a large team of OS/2 specialists to speak at WarpTech. Look at our Sessions page and you'll see what I mean -- there's technology in OS/2 that people have asked questions about for years, and now the "inside" guys will be on the outside where you can hear them speak and ask them questions. Some of these specialists have never before spoken at an "outside" OS/2 conference.

We have four people working on the WarpTech web site to keep it up-to-date; make sure you visit it often. WarpTech is three full days, not two or one, and that means you'll have many more sessions to choose from. Take a look right now -- we already have about 30 sessions listed -- and pick out the ones you want to attend.

http://www.warptech.org/

And take a quick peek at our Registration form so you'll know how little it costs for three big days of OS/2.

See you Friday to Sunday, May 26-28, at WarpTech 2000!

- Captain Craig captain@warptech.org

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