Warpstock 2001 report (long)
Menno
This year, Warpstock Europe was organized in the Belgian university
town of Diepenbeek, close to Hasselt. Since this is only a three-hour
drive from my front door, I decided to go and seek out the "Katholieke
Hogeschool Limburg". The trip went rather smoothly and I was able to
find the site with little trouble. Just follow the signs to Diepenbeek
and no doubt you will run into a sign to the University Campus. At one
of the university buildings, I found a notice saying "Warpstock
Thattaway". Since I had reserved in advance, I quickly got in. Almost
immediately, I ran into Bob St. John, who apparently wasn't
vacationing in the Bahamas with his ill-gotten gains after all. Even
though Bob didn't give any lectures as far as I can tell, it was nice
to put a face to the name I only got from this and other groups. (The
photo got erased in a SmartMedia event but more about that later).
*** Friday the 2nd ***
I had decided to roam the compound for a while first. There were
several exhibitors. Innotek was there showing their new Virtual
Machine for OS/2. I personally saw a pre-release version of the thing
run Windows XP. The Virtual PC is just that. It emulates a PC with a
given chipset, video card and network interface whatever hardware you
have. You can make it use certain OS/2 directories as shared drives so
you can exchange information between OS/2 and the guest operating
system. In a later lecture, Achim Hasenmüller said that the Virtual PC
will run anything except BeOS because of some bug. Windows 98 was
recommended against. It does work, but due to the fact that '98
disables the cooling cycle of the CPU to make it run faster, your CPU
will be at 100% activity constantly. One nice side effect of running
XP under OS/2 is that no matter how many devices you swap, the virtual
PC will still look the same to XP so no re-licensing is necessary.
Let's hope MS doesn't take steps to make XP *not* work under
VirtualPC. (But let's face it, do we really care?) Innotek was selling
preview versions for fifty euros, but I didn't go for it because a) my
PC is not fast enough to run Windows even without emulation, and b) it
only works till newyear after which the full version will be
available.
My first lecture was one by Christian Langanke about HyperText/2,
which is a preprocessor for producing INF and HLP files. He is
offering it for free in the hope that more people will produce decent
helpfiles with their applications. I think this program fulfills a
need. The IPF file (sources for INF/HLP files) is not very
complicated. It is a flat ASCII file where you specify things like
Bold, Underline and Italics with tags, much like HTML. However, to
produce a good helpfile is a lot of work. The input file for
HyperText/2 looks much cleaner and it will produce a nice info-file
with indexes on the left and pages on the right. If you program at
all, give it a try.
Next was, of course, lunch. This was provided by the University's
catering. It was nice, but they gave you all the food at once. This
means by the time you've finished your starter, your main course will
be cold. Experienced cafeteria feeders eat the warm stuff *first*.
My next lecture was about the Golden Code trace suite. This is a set
of tools that can really help solve problems. They compared working
without them to gunfighting in the dark. Basically, the tools are a
network tracer, a kernel tracer (so you can see what Netscape is
actually trying to do in its more meditative states) and the Trace
Analyzer. The network sniffer is a nicely low-profile piece of
software that hooks into the NDIS driver and dumps everything the
network card sees into a buffer, which can then be saved to a file.
The kernel tracer does the same for kernel activity. These files can
then be analyzed with the Trace Analyzer, which is written in Java.
Most network protocols can be displayed. As an example, Greg showed us
a log of a web browsing session. This is the sort of tool that I
really want on my portable for those hard to find problems. I wonder
if I put it nicely to my boss...
I didn't stay for the Kernel trace part of the session, because I
wanted to go to another lecture given by Starfire on Titan. Titan is
an administration tool that, when used properly, can take a lot of
load off the shoulders of your system administrators. Central to the
product is a database containing system administrative procedures for
a variety of platforms including Windows, AIX and of course OS/2.
(Otherwise what would they be doing at Warpstock?) All the operations
are browser-based and SSL encrypted for security. Starfire also keeps
track of all the modifications to the system. A very nice feature is
that if the target machine happens to be down at the time the command
is issued, the modification will be remembered and once the machine
has recovered from its Blue Screen of Death, it will be performed at
that time. One weakness is that once Starfire is in place, you have to
stop using the original procedures for management or the machine will
go out of sync with the database, which can lead to unforeseen
problems. At the end of the lecture, T-shirts were given to all
comers!
The lecture on Virtual PC concluded the Friday event and I was off in
search of my hotel. I was told that Hasselt has the highest bar
density in the whole of Europe, and I believe it. It is impossible to
go for a walk in Hasselt and not have at least one bar in sight. And
of course, Belgium is famous for its beers. It was a good evening.
*** Saturday the 3rd ***
Day dawned. Quick shower, breakfast and off to Diepenbeek. The first
lecture that day was on all the new stuff that goes into MCP2 and ACP.
It seems that most of the work is going on under the hood. New
drivers, new ways of tweaking the kernel and such. It also showed a
time line that shows that by 2006, IBM will have achieved full
platform independence, whatever that means. It didn't sound altogether
hopeful, but then again, IBM is not known for its glowing enthusiasm
for OS/2. Not since David Barnes was last seen. (I wonder what he is
doing now).
The next session was done by Rainer Feuerstein and Alain Rykaert.
Rainer got rather technical and showed us lots of REXX code. Learn
this, guys! Audiences are NOT interested in bloody source code unless
it's a programming session! Alain took over and showed us the stuff he
used to install 60.000 seats at France Telecom (single-handedly?
wow!). This involved a central database with configuration information
somewhere on the net and a carefully prepared bootable CD. I'm afraid
it completely bypassed all IBM's installation routines. It partitioned
(with LVM) and formatted the hard drive, then unzipped pre-configured
images on them. TCP/IP was configured by careful hacking of the source
files using a REXX script called cube that lets you edit files from
the command line. Even while explaining about it, it took him only
fifteen minutes to install a fully functional Aurora server, which is
pretty fast! What I remember most, however, is Alain's enthusiasm
about the product he was working with.
After lunch, I went to Kim Cheung's lecture on how to call REXX
scripts from a C program. This is very useful if you have an
application that benefits from scripting. For instance, you could
write an email client that automatically sends the latest news to all
your friends... Naaah, been done before. Kim showed how you can fire
off REXX scripts from C programs, how to pass parameters to the REXX
script and how to share variables between C and REXX. It seems that
even though REXX is an interpreted language, that doesn't mean it's
slow. Kim showed us an example with about 3000 threads running at
once. Pretty impressive for a notebook.
The last session of the day was about XWorkplace, a free Workplace
Shell enhancer, hot off the compiler. The lecture was given by Ulrich
"DJ Mutex" Möller. I'm pretty impressed with both Mr. Möller and
XWorkplace. Even now, when he says the project is under "heavy
development", it looks very polished. It comes in several languages,
it uses the WarpIn installer, and it is extremely well documented on
the website (www.xworkplace.org) as in the program itself. Ulrich is
one of the people who knows the Workplace Shell inside out and still
resists the hackerish trend to produce undocumented oracle utterings.
Today, I also took the opportunity to visit Mensys and Team OS/2 from
different parts of Germany. I scored some software for e-Biz (Apache,
MySQL, PHP, Perl) and some Palm utilities. (Gotta back up that thing
one of these days).
Finally, Saturday was the night for the beer bash or Social Event.
There was one band consisting mainly of Mensys and HCC-attached people
and one blues-band. Roderick Klein could be observed installing eCS on
his portable even during these proceedings! Roderick, for Chrissake!
it's *party time*! (Mary Sparlock, if you're reading this, I've got a
nice photo of you. Mail me if you want it). I didn't stay too long.
Since I had to drive to the hotel, I was on non-alcoholics for most of
the evening. Finished off with a nice Palm at the hotel. Bed.
*** Sunday the 4th ***
This morning I had declared "USB Morning". The guy to look for if you
want to know anything about USB is Markus Montkowski. He started out
with a short description of what USB was and how it was supported in
OS/2, which turned out to be pretty well. Markus was a little late for
his first lecture (What's USB anyway) due to lack of computer. A fresh
one was installed or borrowed and the presentation started. It seems
that USB was designed from the start to be easy to use both for users
and for manufacturers. The main trick in installing the old ISA cards
was to find out whether the buggers were in fact really installed in
your computer. USB devices send a "Hello" message to your computer
when they are first connected to the system. From this message you can
determine what device it is and if any of your device drivers is up to
the task. USB devices can talk to your computer in several ways:
Interrupt-driven (when the user presses a key or moves the mouse one
mickey), Bulk (which will use all the bandwidth it can get but will
politely move out of the way if more pressing business arrives) and
Isochronous, which uses a specified portion of available bandwith and
can be used for audio or stamp-sized videos.
The next session covered how USB devices could be used from normal
applications. Markus explained how to set up connections to USB
devices and used a USB radio as an example.
The last session went into the development of USB drivers for all
kinds of devices. I'm afraid Markus lost me pretty quickly there. I'd
like to know this kind of thing, if only to implement a Netdrive
plugin for USB Mass Storage devices that adhere to the other half of
the standard than IBM does.
The final session (after lunch) was by Kim Cheung again. He showed a
diskless workstation and the tools he developed (or helped develop) at
Serenity to enable remote booting over Netbeui and also TCP/IP. He
then proceeded to install several applications on the diskless station
simply by dragging them over to the machine using WiseManager. (Who
would want XWorkplace *And* Object Desktop though?) This shows that
the WiseMachine thing you get in eCS is only part of a larger product.
After that session ended I went over to the Mensys stand in search of
some last-minute goodies. I saw that they were selling AOpen Crystal
Labs Soundcards that are well supported in OS/2, so I got one of those
for my next machine. I then saw Daniela Engert and got an original
copy of her DANIS506 driver off her, which would enable my thinkpad to
read the SmartMedia cards I use in my camera using a PCMCIA adapter. I
am happy to say that it worked like a charm, but you have to be
careful when you use the cards and *always* use the "EJECT" command on
them before removing them. This is true even if you only read from the
card. I think I swapped the cards too quickly and corrupted the FAT on
the card with all my WarpStock photos on it. The only thing I can
think of is that OS/2 was writing the latest access dates from one
card onto the other, which corrupted the FAT. Luckily, I was able to
recover most photos by running a chkdsk on the card (most notably the
one I took of Daniela).
After that, I decided to head home. It was a nice conference. I've
been able to meet and pick the brains of some very knowledgable
people. I've been slightly worried by the corporate presentations. I
suppose it's only good business sense to calculate in the possibility
of OS/2's impending demise, but a more constructive attitude would
have pleased me more. On the whole, the best sessions were those done
by OS/2 users. Their enthusiasm for the OS/2 operating system (and its
derivates) are good to see. David Barnes commented on this years ago:
It is the *users* that keep OS/2 alive and happy. The *users* would
not let the product die.
See you all at Warpstock Europe 2002!
Cheers,
Menno.
Andrew Wm. Graham
Thank you for your report on Warpstock Europe. I wanted to write one
about the Toronto Conference but the pressures of work and family
life yadda yadda yadda and it didn't happen.
Can you post the pictures you took? I don't just wanna browse the
hot programmer women of Europe :-) , I also want to see how the
booths at WE compare with the ones at WT.
Thanks again,
Andrew
Fr. Andrew Wm. Graham
Incumbent
St. Columba and All Hallows Anglican Church
2723 St. Clair Avenue East
East York (Toronto), Ontario
CANADA M4B 1M8
NO-SPAM reversed must be removed from the address to e-mail me.
Daniela Engert
> Can you post the pictures you took? I don't just wanna browse the
> hot programmer women of Europe :-) , I also want to see how the
> booths at WE compare with the ones at WT.
Did you ever hear something about copyrights and the rights of
individuals controlling the distribution of pictures taken from them?
Menno's pictures are privately taken and they have to stay private
unless *all* of people on a picture approve publication!
I'm assuming Menno is gentleman enough to take this into account.
Ciao,
Dani
William L. Hartzell
Sorry, but the copyright of the photos belong only to the person who
takes them. As a rule in many countries, a private person may forbid
publication of their photos; But a public figure may not. The question
becomes one of when does a person become a public figure. In your case
that has already happened. Since the photos were taken in Belgium, the
law there would apply. Besides, your photo has been published before,
last year. <g> Any Lawyer types out there have an opinion on this?
--
Bill
<Okay, you win>
Britt Turnbull
personally speaking it is of no consequence what the legal profession would
make of it, it is simply a matter of good manners.....
a person has requested that photos of them not be made public, that
should be sufficient for most civilised people....
just my 0.02c worth....
cheers,
--
Britt
eCs + SMP OS/2 v4.51
eComstation..... the best just gets better...
tos...@aol.com ab...@aol.com ab...@yahoo.com ab...@hotmail.com
ab...@msn.com ab...@sprint.com ab...@earthlink.com u...@ftc.gov
spa...@spamcop.net
William L. Hartzell
Britt Turnbull wrote:
>
> Hi Bill,
>
> personally speaking it is of no consequence what the legal profession would
> make of it, it is simply a matter of good manners.....
>
> a person has requested that photos of them not be made public, that
> should be sufficient for most civilised people....
>
> just my 0.02c worth....
>
> cheers,
>
Oh yes, I would agree with you 100%.
Menno
Sorry, "Something" happened to my previous answer just before I sent
it I think.
"Andrew Wm. Graham" <4mrMAPS-...@home.com> wrote in message news:<zetenunzubzrpbz.gmk7e00.pminews@news>...
> Can you post the pictures you took? I don't just wanna browse the
> hot programmer women of Europe :-)
Well, as a rule I never post pictures showing anyone recognisable
without their permission. People are not usually comfortable with
having their name and photo on-line beyond their control. I would
consider it impolite to do so.
So no, I won't be publishing any pictures. People would object.
Hope this clarifies matters,
Menno.