HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: Sprite dragging/New Filer/Replacement ToolSprites
Date: 12 Nov 1992 11:17:40 -0000
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
NNTP-Posting-Host: oak44.doc.ic.ac.uk

In article <1992Nov12.095100.18123@aston.ac.uk> davism@uhura.aston.ac.uk (Mik Davis) writes:
>  If we must have a 'special character' to mark a directory which has an icon
>then can we have somethin unobtrusive like '-' NOT '*' or '?' etc. "~' might
>be quite usefull...
>

If you have to have a special character, there's nothing to say that
the filer *has* to display it. The only problem with *not* displaying
it would be that people might not realise it's there, and forget it
when using the command line, etc. but in that case you could have an
option to not display the character (for those who are linkely to
remember), and what's more you could even extent that to including not
displaying the '!' for application dirs as well.

Failing that, for extra confusion, you could make the special
character a hard space - err... perhapse not! :-)

Ian

-- 
                            E-mail : ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk
 ___           __       Snail mail : Department of Computing, Huxley Building,
  /  _   _    /_/ _   / _ _   _  _   Imperial College, 180 Queens Gate,
_/_ (_|_| )  /   (_|_(_| ) )_|/_)    London. SW7 2BZ. England.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: Sprite dragging/New Filer/Replacement ToolSprites
Date: 12 Nov 1992 10:04:41 -0000
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
NNTP-Posting-Host: oak44.doc.ic.ac.uk

In article <1992Nov11.175231.9297@dcs.warwick.ac.uk> ahersee@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Andrew Hersee) writes:
>
>We need your views to implement a Filer (etc) with features you wish Acorn
>had included.
>
>Andrew Hersee
>

One thing that I would find useful would be if the filer could
remember your current 'faster' setting for copying, etc.

It's a mega-pain to have to keep setting 'faster' every single time
you copy something when you want it in a hurry (but don't really want
to resort to RO2 type copies). 

Ian

-- 
                            E-mail : ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk
 ___           __       Snail mail : Department of Computing, Huxley Building,
  /  _   _    /_/ _   / _ _   _  _   Imperial College, 180 Queens Gate,
_/_ (_|_| )  /   (_|_(_| ) )_|/_)    London. SW7 2BZ. England.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: jkh@esel.lotus.com (Jordan K Hubbard)
Subject: Re: Exception handling in C.
Organization: Lotus Ireland
Date: 11 Nov 92 20:29:38

	Exception handling should not be a part of any language -- it is
	part of the Operating System.

What utter rubbish.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: Some Questions... (Very Long)
From: jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA)
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 02:54:31 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

jjjbokma@cs.ruu.nl (John Bokma) writes:

> 2. When using Wimp_GetWindowInfo to read some information on a window you 
>    also get 32 bytes for every icon in the window. How can you determine 
>    the number of icons in a window 

Oh, that's easy... you just call Wimp_GetWindowInfo, and read the number
of icons... A nice feature of the Wimp, that... ;-)
(But seriously, the only thing to do is use a default buffer size that's
definitely big enough for *any* of your windows...)

> 3. How do I get the input focus in a window like the main window of !Draw?

Plonk it in, as in your example, but...
I use x and y offsets that ensure the caret is outside the visible workspace
of the window, so there is no way that a caret can 'accidentally' appear
in the window...

-- 
_________________  "I'd like to answer this question in two ways:
  /____ _ _/_ __       First in my normal voice, and then
 // / //_//_ /_/       in a silly, high-pitched whine." (Monty Python)
From: adamd@rhi.hi.is (Adam David)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: Removable mass storage (Syquest,Flopticals...)
Date: 10 Nov 92 20:49:57 GMT

ee91mds2@brunel.ac.uk (Mark D Smith) writes:

>I am looking to buy a removable mass storage system to replace my ever
>growing collection of floppies and to backup my two 40MByte hard disks. I
>have been looking at various options, including flopticals and syquest
>drives and, at the moment, a 44MByte syquest drive looks to be the best
>solution.

The nice thing about flopticals is that they handle all the useful 3.5"
magnetic floppies too. The only thing that gets in the way of replacing the
standard floppy drive with a floptical is that some software is locked
by accessing the floppy drive directly. Of course, an internal SCSI
interface is also necessary. I am wondering if a module that redefines
SWI ADFS_DiscOP would be enough to solve the software lock problem.
Floptical drive mechanisms are available for $275 and the 21MB disks cost
reasonable so it looks like a viable option.

For more $$$ rewritable optical drives look interesting. Once the drive is
paid for, the media costs $25 per 128 MB (3.5") or somewhat more but cheaper
per MB for 650 MB media. The data on optical disks decays slower than on
magnetic disks, so is good for relatively long-term storage.

When the market catches up with the technology (I mean when we can look back
on the technology that is available today), the best data storage is 3D
optical RAM. After all, we are still in the dark ages.

--
Adam David. (adamd@rhi.hi.is)
From: andy@laguna.santafe.edu (Andy Mell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: Need testers for new template editor
Date: 10 Nov 92 18:04:58 GMT
Organization: Santa Fe Institute

In article <1992Nov5.100048.16083@infodev.cam.ac.uk> ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk (Philip Hazel) writes:
>
>They got confused by addresses like uk.sun.com and uk.tele.nokia.fi. I'm just
>waiting for the day somebody in Chile creates the address uk.ac.cam.cl...
>
>
Well, if youre interested, warwick university changed their domain names
recently. They were once cs.warwick.ac.uk and cu.warwick.ac.uk but had to 
be changed to csd.warwick.ac.uk and something else because mail was
getting routed to czechoslovakia and cuba on the odd occasion..

That probably explains why John Kortink doesnt get mail sometimes, the
mailer thinks cs.utwent.nl is an address is czechoslovakia and your mail
ends up in a postmasters mailbox there.

Andy

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Mell, Applied Physics Department,  |   andy@santafe.edu
University of Hull, Hull, HU7 6RX       |   amell@nyx.cs.du.edu
England.                                |   torq@gnu.ai.mit.edu
From: P.I.Berresford1@lut.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: ADFS maps
Date: 11 Nov 92 11:47:09 GMT
Reply-To: P.I.Berresford1@lut.ac.uk (PI Berresford)
Organization: Loughborough University, UK.


ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) writes:
: Now I have a problem, to which I know of *a* solution to, but I don't
: want it to be the *only* solution.
: 
: Over the weekend I suddenly (well over the period of a few mins) lost
: 3.5Meg of my hard disc free space. I was archiving some files and what
: appeared to happen is that every time a new file was placed in the
: archive (producing a copy of the archive temporarily) the old one at
: the end was NOT being added to the free space map (or is it taken
: away?) on my IDE (A5000) hard disc.
: 
: The consequence is that I went from 3.5meg free to zilcho all for a
: 500k archive. A further consequence is that *checkmap reports that the
: map is inconsistent with the directory tree.
: 
: Now my question is, is there some easy way of getting that 3.5 meg
: back without having to re-initialise my hard disc and reinstal all the
: data?
: 
: What I find hard to understand is that *checkmap obviously creates
: what it consideres to be the actual map of the disc during it's
: directory scan in order to compare it with what is stored as the map
: on the disc. So why then can it not just replace the disc map with
: this correct map?
: 
: I guess there must be a reason, because in the review of the
: disc recovery program in a recent Archive magazine it states that it
: can't do any more than *checkmap does (or words to that effect) on the
: new map discs (ie. it can't recreate the map by scanning the disc),
: but I can't understand why this should be the case.

     Yep.  I've also had the same problem on an A5000 under RO3.0,  but I was
using spark 2.14 at the time. Spark crashed out with a 'Filecore space
corrupt' error or something like that, as it was a few months ago.  I had no
other option than reformatting my hard drive.  The problem seemed to occur
whilst I was doing other filer operations, at the same time as Spark was 
archiving. Since then I've left the filer alone whilst Spark is archiving.

     So maybe theres a bug in filecore, which means two or more applications
can't use it's facilities at the same time. Not what I'd call multi-tasking.

     Hope this helps someone trace the cause.
              Philip
From: dmf@aber.ac.uk (Darren Michael Forbes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Data Sheets
Summary: I'd like data sheets for the ARM chip set.
Keywords: ARM chip set shock horror gasp.
Date: 10 Nov 92 14:43:27 GMT
Organization: University of Wales, Aberystwyth


   Could somebody please send me the address of ARM Ltd. Tecnical services
department (or wherever it is that deals with requests for data sheets)
as supprisingly enough I'd like to ask for some data sheets).
   If there's an email address then so much the better.

   Thanks.

-- 
Darren Forbes  | "Wooden mice know what's nice;    |
dmf@uk.ac.aber |  sawdust cheese and maple spice." | 
dmf@aber.ac.uk |           - The Bones Of The Moon |
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: kjetilho@ifi.uio.no (Kjetil Torgrim Homme)
Subject: Re: Sprite dragging/New Filer/Replacement Toolsprites
Organization: Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 15:21:52 GMT
Originator: kjetilho@driva.ifi.uio.no

In article <1992Nov12.112100.6909@dcs.warwick.ac.uk> ahersee@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Andrew Hersee) writes:
> The character I use is the one that looks like:
>
>
>               \.-./
>                | |
>               /`-'\
>
> Well nearly anyway :-) Nothing uses that at the moment and I have never seen
> a sprite in the icon sprite pool with that character in it. Anyone know what
> that character is called ?

Yes, it's the currency symbol.  I've seen old Swedish computers which
has this instead of the dollar sign.  In popular speak it is called
"sun" or "sofa pillow".


Kjetil T.
From: gst@dcs.ed.ac.uk (George Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: real time and IIC
Date: 5 Nov 92 13:51:43 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh

At the risk of bringing up the subject of IIC_Control again I recently made the
following observation:

Using the call with the previously mentioned parameters (I do not intend to post
these) I managed to get my A5000 real time clock to stop counting when the power is
off. It would power on with the same time it had when powered off. Is there a software
fix for this? I fiddled around with further calls to no effect. At lease this call
didn't kill my machine completely. I did have to desolder the battery to restore
the real time clock to a normal state.

Is there a software fix for this? Where can I obtain the data sheet for the
real time / cmos ram device (who is it made by?). 

I would have thought that the newer machines might not suffer from this problem.
An A3010 in Dixons suffered more severe symtoms though I didn't have the operrtunity
to look at it in detail.

George
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: /G=Owen/S=Smith/O=SJ-Research/ADMD=INTERSPAN/C=GB/@mhs-relay.ac.uk
Subject: DragASprite CMOS byte
Organization: Yale CS Mail/News Gateway
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 21:31:20 GMT

jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA) wrote:

(about using *fx 162,28,3 to set the DragASprite CMOS bit)

>Well, academically, it's not a good way to do it, but seing as how the
>default value is 2 and you want to set bit 1 (thus needing a final value of
>3) this seems perfectly adequate.

...

>I mean, is there *anyone* out there whose byte has a value other than 2 or
>3?

You asked for it :-) - I have a value of 0 in that byte. The bottom bit is
the *Configure Truncate bit, which I always have set to Off. This gives the
RISC OS 2 behaviour of giving an error if I try to save a file with a name
above the length limits. With truncate set to On, the filing system doing 
the file creation just truncates the filename to whatever the limit on that
filing system is.

Owen. (owen.smith%gb.interspan.sj-research@mhs-relay.ac.uk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: /G=Rhodri/S=James/O=SJ-Research/ADMD=INTERSPAN/C=GB/@mhs-relay.ac.uk
Subject: Re: HELP: IDE Harddisk + RISCOS3.1 = error?
Organization: Yale CS Mail/News Gateway
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 17:14:29 GMT

>I just received RISCOS3.1 two days ago. After installing it I started up my
>computer and everything seemed allright. However when clicking on my IDE filer
>icon I got the strange error: Error from IDEFS Filer : Disk not Understood
>- Has it been formatted? I tried to set one IDE drive in !Configure but that
>resulted in another icon and a bad drive error when clicking on it. It seems
>that the two modules IDEFS and IDEFSFiler are loaded from my interface but
>this also results in having two configure options for IDEDiscs. Can someone
>please explain what is happening? I have a A410/1 with an IDEA harddisk 
>interface from Ian Copestake Software and SF & PS. The harddisk is a 120mb
>drive from western digital. Please mail me any comment or thoughts, or if
>you think others will benefit also post!


I think you may be falling foul of the same problem that I did with NexusFS
partition formats.  The version of FileCore in RiscOS 3 does rather more
serious checking of disc format parameters than it used to.  In particular,
it checks that the LinkBits field (what I call IDlen 'cos I'm awkward) is
big enough to cope with the map size.  It does this with a simple
calculation of the number of bits in a map zone times the number of zones in
the map (just ignore the jargon for now).  I (and probably Ian Copestake
Software) took into account the fact that the first zone is rather smaller
than the others.  This means that at certain crucial sizes, which depend on
exactly how you have formatted your disc, I round the size of LinkBits one
way when FileCore rounds it the other, whereupon FileCore produces this
error message.  If you mail me a hex dump of your boot block (disc address
&c00 to &e00), I will try to confirm this; unfortunately since I an *very*
busy at the moment I cannot guarantee to have the time to do this for
several weeks, so you may be better of asking Ian Copestake Software.


The only thing that I can suggest is that you put your RiscOS 2 ROMs back
in, backup everything on your hard disc and then reformat it as if it were
slightly smaller.  Yes, I know this sounds silly, but the real fix needs to
be done to the IDE format program, and I really do not recommend that to
anyone who is not intimately aware of the innards of the disc formats! 
There is just far too much to break.

---
Rhodri James                   *  Disclaimer:  These opinions are shareware,
SJ Research Ltd, Cambridge     *    and may only be used if you send off
Rhodri.James%gb.INTERSPAN.sj   *    $100 registration fee in used fivers.
            @mhs-relay.ac.uk   *    SJ Research is not registered with me.
   or                          *
rmj10@phx.cam.ac.uk            *             Wombats are go!
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: davism@uhura.aston.ac.uk (Mik Davis)
Subject: Re: IFEL ARM3
Organization: Aston University
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 12:00:39 GMT

  Hmm. Assuming that the ARM FPA is affordable, would it be worth ordinary
users (i.e. those who don't do inordinate amounts of raytracing) buying one
or would they not see any speedup in any of the programs they are likely to
be using (Impression for a random example)


-- 
___________________________________________.
 Mik Davis at Aston University, Birmingham |   .  .  __          .
                                           |   |\/|  | \  _,_  _  _
E-Mail: davism@uhura.aston.ac.uk           |   |  |. |_/ |_| \/ |/_'
From: bwc@waikato.ac.nz (Ug!)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Exception handling in C.
Date: 9 Nov 92 13:50:23 +1300
Organization: Vooniersity fo Kaiwato

I'd like to discuss a few things about what I am implementing at the moment,
first among them being the issue of exception handling in C.

Exception handling is always a messy business, and C doesn't cope
particularly well with it, although in fact I've yet to meet a language
which does.

For those of you who don't know what exception handling is, it's what the
language does when things go wrong.  For instance, what happens when you do
a divide by zero?  Much of the exception handling is an academic question:
with facilities built into the language, you are stuck with what you are
given.  However, in your own code, you have some say over how you want to
handle exceptional cases.

Three things I wanted to have with an exception handling facility were:

*  every module which raised an exception should include some facility for
   coping with this exception (usually by displaying an error message to
   the user).  This means that you should not get unhandled exceptions ever.
   However, there should still be some fallback facility for handling
   buggy code.

*  exceptions should be interceptable.  For instance, if I call a routine
   to open a file, and the routine raises an exception if that file doesn't
   exist, then an error message may not always be appropriate for that
   situation.  I should be able to intercept that exception, and in this
   case, decide not to raise an error.

*  exceptions should not alter the normal flow of code.  If you allow
   an exception to land you somewhere else in the program, then you end
   up with a mess that makes spaghetti look friendly.  Instead, exceptions
   should be coped with in a manner resembling interrupt handlers.

Those were my base ideas for handling exceptions.  What I came up with was
essentially each module registering a handler with an 'error' module.  The
most recent registered handler is passed the exception first.  If it doesn't
handle the exception, then the next most recent handler is called, and so on.

How do other people cope with exceptions?  Is there something I'm missing?
I've noticed that my way of doing adds the additional ability to cope well
with internationalisation, which is an added bonus.

								Ug!
From: dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk (Denis Howe)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: ARM VIDC20 Press Release
Date: 9 Nov 92 10:40:22 GMT
Followup-To: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Organization: Computing Department, Imperial College, London, UK
NNTP-Posting-Host: wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk
In-reply-to: segars@armltd.uucp's message of 6 Nov 92 12:58:53 GMT

In article <20021@acorn.co.uk> segars@armltd.uucp wrote (about VIDC20):

>the on-board palette has been segmented so that only one eighth is
>enabled at any one time.

How does this work?
--
Denis Howe <dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk>
So Biggs, you're the idiot who bought all these IBM PCs.  You're fired!
From: mre@ukc.ac.uk (Mike)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: ADFSBuffers
Date: 5 Nov 92 08:16:10 GMT
Reply-To: mre@ukc.ac.uk (Mike)
Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.

In article <1992Nov5.122043.11970@waikato.ac.nz> bwc@waikato.ac.nz (Ug!) writes:
>Owen Smith writes:
>> A fix for the bug is in the pipeline.
>
>Or should that be 'a bug for the fix'? ;-}  Boy, three OS releases (2.0, 3.0,
>3.1) and Acorn *still* haven't got it right...  oh well.

I think you're being a little unfair here - RISC OS is only in it's third
release and even in the first version (2.00) there were remarkably few bugs.
Compare this with the most widely used OS at the moment (unfortunately I
mean MS-DOS )-: ) which is now in at least it's eighth version and still has
some bugs more annoying than the RISC OS3.10 ADFSBuffers bug.

Then cast your mind back three or four years to the days of MS-DOS 4.  That
was at least the seventh version of MS-DOS and it was so buggy that I know
people who actually paid extra when buying new machines just so they could
have MS-DOS 3.30 - just as buggy but at least they were known bugs!

If the exact number of versions quoted for MS-DOS is wrong, I apologies but
I'm proud to say I take no interest in what MS-DOS version is current -
though I do hear rumours from friends that MS-DOS 5 has some pretty big bugs
left in it....

It might also be worth pointing out that RISC OS is now in it's FOURTH
version - not counting Arthur, RISC OS 2.00, 2.01, 3.00 and 3.10 have all
been officially released.  

>Welcome back, Owen!

Seconded.

-- 
Michael Ellis,  Darwin College,  The University of Kent,  Canterbury, England.

    ********* Views expressed are my own and in no way represent *********
    *********     the views of any past or present employers.    *********
From: mybg@doc.ic.ac.uk (M Y Ben Gershon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: Re: Modula 2/3
Date: 13 Nov 1992 12:41:08 -0000
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: swan.doc.ic.ac.uk

In article <1992Nov12.171824.22570@aston.ac.uk> davism@uhura.aston.ac.uk (Mik Davis) writes:
>  oh, yes, do any of the PC M2 compilers work under the emulator?
>
>-- 
>___________________________________________.
> Mik Davis at Aston University, Birmingham |   .  .  __          .
>                                           |   |\/|  | \  _,_  _  _
>E-Mail: davism@uhura.aston.ac.uk           |   |  |. |_/ |_| \/ |/_'

Topspeed Modula-2 works fine under the PCem. So does Topspeed C++. The
Topspeed languages allow projects to be built in a mixture of languages.

By the way, there is a Modula2->C translator available for ftp from somewhere.
I had the sources once but didn't bother working a port to RISC OS.  I am sure
it could be done though.  UnixLib would make things easier.

Michael Ben-Gershon
mybg@doc.ic.ac.uk
From: troeste@Lise.Unit.NO (Trygve R|ste)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
Subject: RiscOSLib for ISO-Pascal
Date: 5 Nov 92 16:35:53 GMT
Organization: Norwegian Institute of Technology

Anyone got some example programs accessing the RiscOS library from ISO pascal
4.01? One problem I encountered was that I couldn't get a pointer to a record
which is defined normally in a procedure. Nearly all of the RiscOS functions
needs a pointer to a record as one of the parameters.

-Trygve
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.tech
From: braindl@uhura.aston.ac.uk (DL BRAIN)
Subject: Re: Modula 2/3
Organization: Aston University
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 08:54:05 GMT

Yes the most common - ie available from Hensa - Mod-2 compiler does work
under enulation, I use it evrery now and again to do my coursework for the
below institution...

-- 
===============================================================================
|David Brain at Aston University (Comp. Sci.)     Braindl@uk.ac.aston.uhura   |
|             Smile. All the time. (It'll really get to them.)                |
============================Beyond the Pale====================================