Some fixes for PowerPC

Dear @mistydemeo,

I have some changes here for some programs.

I got a bit distracted and did not work on the previous pull request and I saw that some of the changes that I had here conflicted with recent changes on your tree.

Therefore, please consider this pull request and ignore the other momentarily. I will see what is still relevant from that pull request and send you a cleaned up version of that.


Thanks.