🚀 go-pugleaf

rooijen@rulcvx.LeidenUniv.nl (A.J. van Rooijen) in <1057@rulcvx.LeidenUniv.nl>
asks:

>In article <36302@cup.portal.com> thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) writes:
>>	CLI6> lastboot
>>	System last booted Sun 8-Jul-1990 14:32:15
>
>What kind of software are you running capable of avoiding guru's since 8 july?
?
>I should like to know that. I have a guru at least one time a day on my A500.
>And I don't even have a 68020 board.
>
>Erwin van Breemen

Fair question, deserving an answer: essentially either software I trust or
software I've written myself.  And I use the Amiga system(s) VERY heavily.
I have one at home and two in my office (yeah, actually in MY office on MY
desk)

Editing:
	mg2a (micro-Emacs, Mike Meyers' version)

Telecomm:
	handshake 2.12a for talking to my DEC-20s, VAXes, UNIX boxes, etc., in
	fact, for everything except when I need to do "online" file transfers
	using zmodem at which time I switch to AZCOMM 1.00 only for the time
	required to do the zmodem'ing, then back to Handshake.  Takes but a few
	seconds to switch back-'n-forth.  Actually, I usually "batch up" file
	transfer requests until I'm just about ready to go to sleep for the
	day, then switch to AZCOMM and enter "sz -b * ; exit" on the UNIX
	box(es) then click-on zmodem receive; the next morning I change back
	to Handshake.  Been doing this for a l-o-n-g time and it works fine.

Compiling:
	Manx (mostly) and Lattice.  Also Absoft Fortran.

	Also several cross-assemblers I've written for use on some of my
	outside consulting jobs.  I burn EPROMs directly off the Amiga using
	Handshake talking to an International Microsystems EPROM-1 box; in fact,
	I have 8 devices connected to a serial port switcher: several modems,
	a StarLAN NAU, HP plotter, C.Itoh ProWriter, and lines to serial ports
	on several UNIX boxes.

Text processing:
	AmigaTeX by Tom Rokicki (and source files prepared either using mg2a
	on the Amiga or "imported" from elsewhere).  I use this heavily for
	nearly all documentation, newsletters, flyers, users' group agendas,
	etc.

	Also WordPerfect for compatibility with docs I either receive from
	elsewhere or must send elsewhere.

PC Layout and CAD:
	Pro-Net and Pro-Board.
	Aegis Draw+
	PLOT: device
	and some misc. other

Misc Utilities:
	Conman, PopColours, POPCLI (aka Mackie from Tom Rokicki, though I've
	changed its name), cp (Jeff Lydiatt's), ls (from the net), many "net"
	replacements for various AmigaDOS "commands" (all for which I have the
	source), my "info" and "avail", sweep, tar, compress, uuencode and
	uudecode, unshar, cal, appt, etc etc etc  for about several 1000's of
	programs in my c:, util:, and other directories.  Many of these go
	back to 1985 and 1986 (yep, they STILL work under the latest OS).

	Note that I've source for nearly ALL of them, many from "Fish Disks",
	since I often add customizations.

	I could do an "ls -lR" of the directories in my PATH, but that would
	be wasteful.

Games:
	shanghai, Test Drive II (which, by the way, is "real time" and DOES
	return back to the CLI upon completion, leaving everything intact,
	showing that it IS possible to have fun, interactive games which are
	hard disk installable and do things "right" (even though their other
	games don't)), asteriods (sic), and some 50+ other programs in my
	"games:" directory

Misc:
	DPaint II, DigiView (for doing photos documenting other things, as
	people who saw my Hard Drive lecture at FAUG may remember), various
	"show" and "anim" displays, etc etc

For your reference, a listing of the ASSIGNS, PATH, environmental vars, and
stack size is appended; I didn't want to clutter up this part of my post.

The point being: if one abides the "rules" as printed ever since the first
DevCon back in May 1985 in Monterey, there is NO reason for one to be seeing
gurus on one's machine unless there's an actual HARDWARE failure.

If you ARE seeing gurus, then the software you're running is GARBAGE and
should be tossed out and your money-back demanded.

Getting on a "small" soapbox here, my biggest gripe with most so-called
"commercial" software available for the Amiga is that most of it is, in
general, well conceived but poorly designed and implemented.

People simply do NOT design and/or code properly nor do they perform even
rudimentary QA.  When I see some mfrs ship "updates" nearly weekly, I wonder
why they cannot get it right the first time.

If the methods used to teach and practice CS were applied to, say, civil
engineering or EE or to the medical profession, there probably wouldn't be
anyone alive in the world today.

In fact, this is a big problem I see with most CS courses as taught today:
people are NOT being taught how to DESIGN software.   CS classes "should"
be structured along the lines of the EE, CS, etc. disciplines.

Note lack of smileys above.

I've been in the computer software/hardware business for about 25 years;
prior to that I was doing architectural design, and also microwave receiver
design for gov't applications, and I also designed and operated a microwave
IC fab plant (sheesh, I was "doing" GaAs ICs, YAG and YIG, on diamond and
sapphire substrates a l-o-n-g time ago), so I have much experience with QA
and design "up-front."

Some of that paid off for a contract I had with JPL about 20 years ago to
"prove" the tenets of structured software design.  It DOES work!

I immediately applied the results of that JPL contract to another system I
designed start-finish for real-time monitoring of light water nuclear
reactors.  Several hundred of those were built and are STILL being sold with
my original software unchanged ... if it ain't broke, DON'T fix it; and a
minor mod to that software is (was?) being used to monitor stress in the
cables on the Golden Gate bridge.  Then the AMPS system (Automated MicroProbe
System; a computerized scanning electron microscope).  Then the POINT (POlice
INTelligence) system; for this I had to first design/implement a new language
which, in retrospect, resembles "C" (for "C" wasn't readily available back
then).  These systems are 100% reliable and failsafe.

Also, my company and I pioneered "structured QA" of software projects way
back when no-one even considered this possible; this includes both regression
and comprehensive testing.  And all these techniques WORK and assure reliable
(and non-GURU :-) functioning software systems.

It's MY belief, and borne out by JPL and many, many others for whom I've done
software, that a software project should be:

	90% design up front
	 5% coding time
	 5% QA and checkout

With a structured design (either flowcharts or using my DLT processor (i.e. a
flowchart compiler)), the design can then be coded in whatever language one
chooses.  Most of my earlier programs were 100% assembler (due to machine
memory constraints), but they could just as easily have been coded in, say,
Fortran, BASIC, COBOL, whatever, from the same structured design and would
have operated the same (albeit more slowly in some cases).  And many of these
were NOT trivial programs; one of the largest comprised some 750,000 lines of
assembly code, which I then converted to C about 5-6 years ago, enhanced
further during the past 5 years, and am now porting to UNIX.  And the nature
of that code includes complete 4GL DBMS processing and my parsers, code gen
(yep, for speed, I generate 100% machine code for all users' queries and
programs), runside libraries, etc etc etc.

I apply the same techniques to all software I write, and THAT's why I'm able
to keep my Amigas (and other systems) up so long.  I will NOT tolerate "crap"
software whose every execution paths were not tested or verified ... which is
also why I oftimes have to write my own stuff since I don't trust most of the
commercial software out there.

Software should be DESIGNED along the same techniques which are used for
other engineering disciplines ... sadly, that's seldom the case in the real
world.  And that's why you see your GURUs and the like.  :-(

{end of soapbox}

Hope some of this provides some insights and food for thought.  I didn't mean
to be so long-winded on what "could" have been a short answer to Erwin's
question as to why my Amiga(s) stay up so long between reboots.  I felt some
of my thoughts and the issues mentioned in these regards ARE pertinent to this
technical newsgroup.

Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]

-------------------- begin included material --------------------

Perhaps the following may give you more insight to my systems' configs; most
my Amigas are similar in these regards.  And I *DO* have separately-purchased
and licensed copies of the commercial software, so don't waste time even
suggesting that I am running "illegal" multiple copies; many who frequented
the Amiga BBS systems on which I was the SYSOP know my position on software
piracy.

CLI6> assign
Volumes:
RamDisk [Mounted]
SYS6B [Mounted]
SYS6A [Mounted]
SYS5 [Mounted]
SYS4 [Mounted]
SYS2E [Mounted]
SYS2D [Mounted]
SYS2C [Mounted]
SYS2B [Mounted]
SYS2A [Mounted]
SupraBoot [Mounted]

Directories:
C              RamDisk:C
GAMES          SYS4:GAMES
FontPath       SYS2A:AmigaTeX/TeX/pk
LaTeX          SYS2A:AmigaTeX/TeX
TeXfiles       SYS2A:AmigaTeX/TeX
TeX            SYS2A:AmigaTeX/TeX
WP             SYS6A:WP
VS3D           SYS6A:VideoScape-3D
UTIL           SYS6A:UTILITIES
UDICT          SYS6A:Dictionaries
TBasic         SYS6A:True_Basic
SRC            SYS6A:Sources
SCRIBBLE       SYS6A:Scribble
ProW           SYS6A:ProWrite
Print          SYS6A:WP
PCLO           SYS6A:PCLO
PAGE           SYS6A:PageSetter
OLD            SYS6A:OLD
NEW            SYS6A:NEW
MVP            SYS6A:MVP-Forth
MODULA2        SYS6A:Modula2
MISC           SYS6A:MISC
META           SYS6A:Debuggers/MetaScope
LINT           SYS6A:LINT
LIBR           SYS6A:LIBRARIES
Learn          SYS6A:WP/learn
LANG           SYS6A:LANGUAGES
JForth         SYS6A:JForth
IFF            SYS6A:IFF_Tools
INCL           SYS6A:Include
HELP           SYS6A:HELP
EXPL           SYS6A:Debuggers/EXPLORER
DV             SYS6A:DigiView
DRAW           SYS6A:DrawPlus
DOCS           SYS6A:Documentation
DICT           SYS6A:Dictionaries
DEBUG          SYS6A:Debuggers
DCad           SYS6A:DynamiCad
DBMS           SYS6A:DBMS
COPIERS        SYS6A:COPIERS
CONT           SYS6A:CONTENTS
COMM           SYS6A:TELECOMM
CC             SYS6A:AZTEC
BBS            SYS6A:BBS
AUTO           SYS6A:AutoDOCS
w3             RamDisk:w3
w2             RamDisk:w2
w1             RamDisk:w1
ul             RamDisk:ul
dl             RamDisk:dl
ww             RamDisk:ww
t              RamDisk:T
l              SYS6A:l
s              SYS6A:s
SYSTEM         SYS6A:System
DEVS           SYS6A:devs
FONTS          SYS6A:fonts
LIBS           SYS6A:libs
TBA            SYS2C:PORTAL-MAIL-TO-BE-ANSWERED
PDL            SYS2C:portal
JC             SYS2C:BBS-JC
Files.db       SYS2C:Files.db
DL3            SYS2E:DL3
DL2            SYS2E:DL2
DL1            SYS2E:DL1
ANIMS          SYS4:ANIMS
SYS            SYS6A:

Devices:
DH61 DH60 DH50 DH40 DH24 
DH23 DH22 DH21 DH20 DF2 
DF1 PRT PAR SER RAW 
CON RAM DF0 
CLI6> path show
Current directory
RamDisk:C
SYS6A:LANGUAGES
SYS6A:UTILITIES
SYS6A:TELECOMM
SYS6A:
SYS6A:System
SYS6A:AZTEC
C:
CLI6 set
CLIB=CC:LIB/
INCLUDE=CC:INCLUDE!CC:ASM
CCTEMP=RAM:
TZ=PST8PDT
CLI6> stack
current stack size is 70000 bytes
CLI6> 

-------------------- end of included material --------------------