Recent Posts

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

It’s easy enough to build your own :)

Topic: Bugs / Static Analysis

Apologies for digging up this old thread, but I’m having difficult to using cppcheck on RISC OS. I’ve downloaded the packaged version using packman, but every time I try and use it, it comes up with stack backtrace error/illegal instruction.

is anyone else having luck running it on a modern version of RISC OS?

I’m using RISC OS 5.25.

update1:
Scratch that – I think I’ve fixed that problem.

gcc cppcheck win.c

Now I need to figure out how to reference the OSLib library header files. Grrrr.
Yes, I’m a beginner.

Update 2:
gcc cppcheck main.c -IOSLib:
should work I think, but the error says that the file format not recognized? hmmmm

Topic: General / AMCOG Games : Request for beta testing

Thank you for offering to test Stunt Racers.

I have sent out beta 1 of Stunt Racers. It now includes 4 computer controlled cars and some added sound effects and graphics.

The game should be compatible with the Raspberry Pi 0,1,2,3, ARMX6, Titanium, RPCEmu (host computer speed permitting), VirtualAcorn, Pandaboard and Beagleboard.

Instructions are included in the game.

Known bugs:
3) If you explode and have lost the race, the game does not end – Sev 1
4) Vertical alignments for the player are slightly out in the X plan when headed upward – Sev 2
5) Player car collision with robot cars imperfect – Sev 3
6) Dead code in steering control and in car control speed code – Sev 3

Planned features for RC 1
1) Add car-selector (you are currently always a black T-top)
2) Skill level control that select robot car maximum speed
3) More tracks and possibly track selector
4) More obstacles to jump
5) Possibly more sound effects

Please let me know if you find the game playable or find any more bugs.

Thanks for taking the time to test it. I greatly appreciate it. Once the game is finished, I will send you a finished copy of the game.

Thanks and Regards,

Tony
www.amcog-games.co.uk

Topic: General / AMCOG Games : Request for beta testing

Hi Simon, please would you send me your contact details to the contact e-mail at

www.amcog-games.co.uk/about.htm

Thamks,
Tony

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

so we have until the year 2176 (approximately)

More accurately:

   10REM >TimeTest
   20:
   30REM Unix &7FFFFFFFFF
   40DIM tem% 40
   50!tem%=&FFFFFFFF
   60tem%!4=&7F
   70SYS "Territory_SetTime",tem%
   80*TIME
   90!tem%=&FFFFFFFF
  100tem%!4=&FE
  110SYS "Territory_SetTime",tem%
  120*TIME
  130END
>RUN
Sun,18 Mar 2074.03:28:58
Sat,23 Jan 2247.04:30:04

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

This is where I hoped you were going, Andrew!

From what I have read elsewhere, it is possible to ‘root’ a Chromebook and use it google-less. Booting into RISC OS or Linux would be dandy!

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

Makes you wonder what it might take to make a hardware manufacturer take notice of RISC OS, doesn’t it?

Edit: Andrew is down with 5th cold/flu in three months.
Colds/flu are not as much fun as RISC OS.
You heard it here first.
Or RISC OS laptops.

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a lightweight, slim, ARM-based laptop that was really nippy, could run RISC OS 5 natively, and could run firefox with a few clicks if you needed it. Wouldn’t it be cool if the manufacturers were aware of RISC OS and supported development?

I think the only item that really matches that requirement to decent degree is the various models of ARM based Chromebook.
However the main aim of a Chromebook is to ensure no one can hack the OS and leave it in a state where it isn’t running Googles favoured setup which puts you in the position of needing their services for the software on it.
Hacking a Chromebook to run RO natively sounds like an interesting project.

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

The Acorn A4 ….. did it have a floppy drive?

Yes. How else could you shift files around? I seem to remember we had a frisbynet in those days.

Topic: Bounties / TCP/IP bounty beta release

In case others have not noticed, there is a subtle facility of the ‘Unverified certificate chain’ dialogue. When there are higher-level certificates in the chain, the ‘issued by’ icon at the top has a raised instead of sunken border, and when the raised icon is clicked another dislogue box opens with the next certificate up in the chain. Only the highest level displayed has Input Focus and the Accept button enabled.

Can/should SetSessionHost be used for all connections in case SNI is used?

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

We had an Acorn A4 at the Physiological Society’s publishing office. It used to go to Physiology conferences. I don’t remember – did it have a floppy drive? I think it must have done, or did we have an external one? The lass who produced The Proceeding of the Physiological Society accepted floppies from all the presenters of papers at the conferences*, loaded them into the A4 and had half done the copy-editing and make-up of the journal by the time the conference was finished. (She’d generally finished the job ready for printing a day after returning to the office – on her RISC PC.)

*Originated on all sorts of software on all sorts of computers.

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a lightweight, slim, ARM-based laptop …

In 1996 Bruce Goatly lent me his Acorn A4 to take to Bangladesh. The power blackouts in Dhaka were no inconvenience to it. My host’s brother, who had just furnished a palace for the prime minister of Nepal with tiles from his own factory, was very impressed. He wanted one to show off designs to his clients. All it lacked was colour. I was more interested in its uses in the classroom.

Topic: Bounties / TCP/IP bounty beta release

Thanks Rick – adding AcornSSL_SetSessionHost does seem to have fixed it. The dialog box only showed "back-unknown-subdomain-or-no-sn" – I only could see the full message when I ran from a command line to copy for posting, and did not realise the significance. Another knowledge gap filled!

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

Oh, nuclear waste is usually regarded as including radioactive hospital waste – a substantial bulk, but in terms of radioactivity not in the same league as used fuel or the fission products separated from used fuel during reprocessing. And in particular, relatively short lived compared with a significant proportion of the fission products.

Some of the radioactive material in hospital waste is isotopes that are present in significant quantities in fission products, but separating them is too difficult and dangerous, and that’s not where they get them. Some of them are produced in reactors, by neutron activation of non-radioactive materials inserted into the neutron flux in the reactor, but of course kept out of contact with the fuel with all the associated fission products; and some are produced in accelerators by bombardment of targets with ions, or possibly with neutrons produced by the bombardment of a primary target.

Topic: Bounties / TCP/IP bounty beta release

I think the error may be telling you… badssl-fallback-unknown-subdomain-or-no-sni

There’s a newish SWI to tell AcornSSL the name of the remote host. Has the client example program been updated to use it? Does it even send valid requests yet? ;-)

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

An apology. I have equated nuclear waste with radioactive waste, which is quite common; all radioactivity comes from the nucleus. However this muddies the water when discussing nuclear power. ;-(

Even hospital nuclear waste sometimes comes from inside reactors, although it may have been created in accelerators instead.

Even you have made the same equation here. ;-)

Topic: General / pi-top 2 with RO

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a lightweight, slim, ARM-based laptop that was really nippy, could run RISC OS 5 natively, and could run firefox with a few clicks if you needed it. Wouldn’t it be cool if the manufacturers were aware of RISC OS and supported development? Maybe I’m daydreaming, or is it hallucinations brought on by excessive cold/flu medication?

Topic: Bounties / TCP/IP bounty beta release

I found a site https://badssl.com which seemed to have a collection of bad certificates. The ones I have tried work or fail as expected on Netsurf and other browsers.

However, when I changed the example HTTP_Client host$ and path$ to use the site, I noticed that even the base badssl.com certificate was queried, and all certificate details given were identical regardless of the variation. Which confused me!

Two example logs from HTTP_Client are:

Got session handle 554593652
DNS record for badssl.com is 104.154.89.105
Connected to host on port 443
Requesting page ...
An attempt to make a secure connection has been stopped because the security check was unsuccessful:
 ⇓
 Subject: C=US, ST=California, L=San Francisco, O=BadSSL Fallback. Unknown subdomain or no SNI., CN=badssl-fallback-unknown-subdomain-or-no-sni
 Issuer: C=US, ST=California, L=San Francisco, O=BadSSL, CN=BadSSL Intermediate Certificate Authority
 Version: 3
 Serial number: CD:BC:5A:4A:EC:97:67:B1
 Signature: RSA with SHA-256
 Valid from: Fri Jul  8 21:17:05 2016
 Valid to: Sun Jul  8 21:17:05 2018
It is inadvisable to continue. Reject or accept the connection (R/A) ? ......Rejected

Got session handle 554593652
DNS record for expired.badssl.com is 104.154.89.105
Connected to host on port 443
Requesting page ...
An attempt to make a secure connection has been stopped because the security check was unsuccessful:
 ⇓
 Subject: C=US, ST=California, L=San Francisco, O=BadSSL Fallback. Unknown subdomain or no SNI., CN=badssl-fallback-unknown-subdomain-or-no-sni
 Issuer: C=US, ST=California, L=San Francisco, O=BadSSL, CN=BadSSL Intermediate Certificate Authority
 Version: 3
 Serial number: CD:BC:5A:4A:EC:97:67:B1
 Signature: RSA with SHA-256
 Valid from: Fri Jul  8 21:17:05 2016
 Valid to: Sun Jul  8 21:17:05 2018
It is inadvisable to continue. Reject or accept the connection (R/A) ? .....Rejected

The dialogue box displays the same data – albeit rather truncated. The View button just displays the encrypted certificate – which does not seem much use.

According to Chrome the validity dates should be
badssl.com 18 Mar 2017 to 25 Mar 2020.
expired.badssl.com 9 Apr 2015 to 13 Apr 2015

Please can anyone either verify my findings, or explain them?

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

Here you go – here’s the fission products yields: http://web.archive.org/web/20150206140041/http://ie.lbl.gov:80/fission.html

(This link is on my “no valid scientific references” website, of course. Always was.)

Thermal neutron induced fission of U235 is the one you’re mostly interested in, but some of the rest are of significance, too – if anyone’s interested I can explain exactly which and how.

And remember, unlike plutonium (and other actinides produced in reactors) fission products cannot be destroyed in fast breeder reactors – in fact they produce more of them.

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

Nearly all of nuclear waste does not come from inside reactors.

Um. Even hospital nuclear waste sometimes comes from inside reactors, although it may have been created in accelerators instead. But the quantity of radioactive isotopes produced in accelerators is a minuscule fraction of the total. There’s a fair amount of radioactivity in tailings from uranium mines, but that’s not usually described as nuclear waste. There’s some produced by neutron activation in the ancilliary equipment around nuclear reactors, but the rest, the vast bulk, comes from inside reactors. It may then pass on to a reprocessing facility, and you could say that’s where the nuclear waste comes from, but it came from the reactor before that.

By the time it leaves the reprocessing facility it’s quite a while since it left the reactor (it will have been in cooling ponds for weeks or months before going for reprocessing) so most of will indeed be non-radioactive by then. But what’s left…

By bulk, that hospital waste is big – but very low activity compared with the reactor waste, and while bulky, much less so than the reactor waste.

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

It depends how long after it’s removed from the reactor

Nearly all of nuclear waste does not come from inside reactors.

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

One of the links on one of my nuclear pages is to this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/

Probably not as easy to understand as my more teacherly exposition, but more academic, much more thorough in its provision of references for its facts. Broadly the same conclusions.

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

Nearly all ‘nuclear waste’ is not radioactive.

Also true, of course. But as you say, not very helpful. Well – I say true. It depends how long after it’s removed from the reactor (or after the chain reaction is shut down), but it becomes true within hours, so close enough. But the witches’ brew that is radioactive in the longer term…

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

Fun fact: The ‘normal’ state of the Earth’s climate

For a (well-informed…) discussion of that, see http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Climate.php?ClimatePatterns

nothing beats the late, lamented David MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”

For a critique of that, see http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Energy.php?SusHotAir

(“There’s a lot of very good stuff in it, but there’s a few big holes, too.”)

Methyl isocyanate. Mistakes such as that degrade your argument.

True. That will teach me to write more carefully on here and not to rely so much on memory. Needless to say, my website is more carefully produced – and subject to corrections when errors are reported. I’ve corrected my post on here, thanks.

Topic: Aldershot / 2038: here we come

For the “waste problem,”

Fun fact: Nearly all ‘nuclear waste’ is not radioactive. True, but not very helpful. ;-)