8. September 2010 by admin.

* Alan Spicers Note: A line from that movie “21″ has Kevin Spacey saying “Welcome to Vegas!”. And someone could just as easily say, about the Hurricane Season, Welcome to Florida! or Welcome to the Caribbean. And some members wrote that on this thread in Dockwalk’s forums.

http://www.dockwalk.com/Essentials/DockTalk.aspx?g=posts&t=34058

Janine:

Forecasters have been building up this hurricane season as one for the books. On Sunday, August 29, the Caribbean got its first taste of fury. Hurricane Earl, which churned into a Category 4 (currently a Cat 2), hit the islands of St. Maarten and Antigua with ferocity. Cbsnews.com reports that Earl gained enough strength to become a hurricane on Sunday morning by drawing in the warm Caribbean water – at 86 degrees F. According to News.yahoo.com, Earl uprooted trees and left power outages in his wake. Antigua was left flood laden. Cbsnews.com states that Antigua’s airport was closed and flights suspended. Cruise ships headed for the island were diverted. This is when hurricane-force winds began to radiate outward – up to 50 miles from Earl’s eye.  Go-Jamaica.com reports Antigua was without power when trees toppled onto electrical lines due to the strength of the then Category 3 winds. St. Maarten saw much of the same. News.yahoo.com maintains that no casualties were reported from officials on either island. As Earl tracks north, just off the coast of the U.S., Tropical Storm Fiona seems to be following suit but the area of activity that was Tropical Storm Gaston has dissipated with only a 40 percent chance of re-developing. Are there any crew in Antigua or St. Maarten who rode out the storm? If so, please send photos and share your experiences here.

As we move deeper into the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, we will keep our weather eye open as yachts prepare to head back across the pond for boat shows and an upcoming winter season in the Caribbean.

Pascal: (like the programming language? hell no?, really Pascal?) also writes…

there is way too much sensationalism in hurricane “coverage” as evidenced by some of the above quotes!

yes, some trees will fall, there will be a few power outages and a few unprepared structures or vessels will loose awnings and canvas.  sure, airports will close for a day and cruise ships will be diverted…   big deal…

having delt with hurricanes for almost 30 years, either on st Barths  and now Miami,  i’ve learned that while hurricanes need to be taken seriously there is way too much hype out there.  but hey, storm coverage is good for ratings which is why it’s become “cool” to have “reporters” lean into the wind holding a microphone in one hand while the others push their hood on their head.

or better, watching news report of long lines at FEMA centers in miami after wilma  in 05 when most stores had reopened…

that said, you can’t take chances.  i flew back to Nantucket on thursday and got the boat i run out of there once i saw that the NHC forecast had the track very close to the island. right now i’m in Mystic CT as the track has shifted a little more to the west and further from the island.

here is the view from my HelmCam… not too exciting i’m afraid! just rain and average breeze on the Mystic river!

http://www.sandbarhopper.com/webcam.html

and Henning writes:

No doubts about the hype. After my foray around Lake Worth and docking up at the PB Yacht Club in the middle of Frances, I was surprised that CNN wanted to interview me, turns out I had been on live for the last 20 minutes. After that was all done, I was watching as the reporter was standing there on the walkway in full foul weather gear leaning into the wind giving his report and just then this dude just wearing a pair of shorts strolls on behind him walking his little dog just “la te da” style. It was comedy.

* Alan says: That would have been quite a comedy to see, indeed!

* I also posted on Dockwalk …

I always thought it was a little strange, the warnings that everyone *else* should stay inside … while the news crews go out, supposedly in the midst of hurricane weather. How are they any more qualified to be out in dangerous weather than anyone else? And why do we need to see their raincoats and hat hoodies flapping to believe there is bad weather in an area? I made a blog post about this. Welcome to Vegas! a pun on a quote from the movie “21″ but instead someone could say “Welcome to Florida” or “Welcome to the Caribbean”. I feel for anyone in any area affected by Tropical Storm and Hurricane weather, but in yachting a lot of “boats” go north … It’s worth pointing out that the storms seem to be heading that way this year. Is that just a current trend? Or has that happened before?

—

Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

communications @ marinetelecom.net

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8. September 2010 by admin.

http://www.dockwalk.com/Essentials/DockTalk.aspx?g=posts&t=34068

Do engineers make good Captains? Captains need to have a solid grasp of engineering and this is precisely why Engineers are able to make the switch Captain on smaller yachts.

Absolutely right! Only 10% of a Captain’s job is driving the ‘boat’, the rest is management which a good Engineer will have already accomplished! I’m also a fan of the person that drive sthe boat and breaks it should fix it!!!!! LOL

Engineers do not make good captains on larger boats. They are too logical and lack the emotional compassion to run an effective crew. Besides, Engineers hate Deck crew by nature, never met one who didn’t. So you see the issue there. Now, we need to define Engineer. A person with mechanical aptitude who runs a 60-80 footer is not an engineer, and does make a great captain. This question is relative to vessel size. It takes ten years to be a good Chief Engineer and about Seven years to get all the tickets to be captain on a yacht over 500tons, so you just don’t see it….

(More at the link, above.)

—

Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

communications @ marinetelecom.net

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8. September 2010 by admin.

Previously I blogged about:

http://blog.marinetelecom.net/2010/08/24/the-personal-computer-revolution-historical-and-imsai-8080-emulator-running-the-led-demo-alanspicer/

The retro computer simulators (important not only for historical signifigance but also an excellent way to prepare for the Hexadecimal codes used in the new Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) that will start replacing IPv4 “IP Addressing” as soon as some time next year), one of which was Imsai 8080 in Z80pack by Udo Munk that runs in Linux, can be used to program and run 8080 and Z80 Machine Language “code” assembled (compiled) from 8080 or Z80 valid source code programs.

Lawrence Woodman, on http://techtinkering.com/articles/?id=11 created a bouncing light program for the Z80pack Imsai Simulator … titled: Writing My First Program To Toggle In To The IMSAI 8080. I also manually toggled that program into the simulator more than twice. At least once in binary and maybe a time or two more in Hexadecimal because I like the way the FrontPanel representation on the Imsai 8080 makes Hexadecimal and Octal (and Binary) notation more easily visually understandable. Does that make any sense? Looking at a bunch of A through F and 0 through 9 “numbers” is not very intuitive usually. But when you look at the front of an Imsai 8080 and realise that there are Octal and Hex “helpers” marked right on the panel it gets kind of exciting. Well to me anyway????

The Imsai 8080, on the front panel, has the Address and Data bus all laid out in LED lights with Hexadecimal and Octal “rulers” showing “8-4-2-1″ for Hex, and “4-2-1″ notation for Octal. So all a person has to do to program in Hex, for example, is to have a memory location to start in … and the Hexadecimal patterns to enter in.  Let’s assume that the program starts at address “0″ (Zero) for simplicity. You just leave all of the switches down (this is the default at power on of the simulator) and hit “Examine” one time. The let’s say you have a pattern of “0EFF” to enter in. That’s a nice 16-bit number. You break it up into two sets of two hexadecimal digits “0E” and “FF”. Then you set about entering that into the panel on the right most 8 switches. Up is 1, down is 0. On and off. This will start at the 2nd set of BLUE switches on the panel. Under “Address Bus” and “Data Bus”. You can see the ruler right there with both “7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0″ and “8-4-2-1, 8-4-2-1″ as well as “2-1, 4-2-1, 4-2-1″. The 8-4-2-1 sequence is an aid in entering Hexidecimal into this computer. Starting at the first blue switch you want to figure out how “0E” will go in there? Well each hex digit is a “nibble” of 4 bits. So the zero “0″ goes in the first four switches and the 14 or “E” goes into the second four switches. What did I just say? “14″? Well yes, E in hexadecimal is 14 in decimal. So in the first four switches … none of them get turned ON. In the second 4 we want to reproduce the number 14 - so we add up from left to right the correct switches to add up to 14. That would be “8″ ON, “4″ ON, “2″ ON, and 1 stays OFF. And there you have it … you just toggled in an 8-bit piece of data representing “0E” into the computer. You would then hit the “DEPOSIT” switch and deposit that data (or program instruction code?) into memory - in which case your pattern would show up on the top DATA BUS LED lights. Then you can clear or turn OFF all 8 of those switches, and now you would want to enter in “FF”. Thats just “15″ and “15″ since F is 15 in Decimal. So 8+4+2+1 = 15, so all 4 switches would get flipped ON on both the Blue and the Red switches. And then you would hit DEPOST NEXT. Cool huh? It makes you appreciate life, right???? With our easy Apple Mac OS/X and Windows 7 or similar computers … all of this stuff is a thing of the past, right? Well for most people yes. Anyway that was basically the first line of instructions, that you would have just entered in above, for the Night Rider LED lights program. You would have a lot more of that switch flipping to do to enter in the rest of the program.

Anyway as Lawrence Woodman describes in his article:

Entering the program into the IMSAI 8080
The next bit is a little nerve racking and quite laborious.  There are 0×40 bytes of code here, which is 512 bits.  512 ones and zeros that have to be entered exactly.  512 ones and zeros that if not entered correctly mean either re-entering the whole program again‚ or going back through them to check which were entered incorrectly.  As well as this; if the program doesn’t work‚ is it because the program is wrong‚ or because I entered it in wrong?  But now is not the time to worry, I have tested the program on paper, the design is sound, I need to grab the bull by the horns and enter this program.
[end of quote]

* It’s quite laborous to enter that program into the Z80pack Imsai 8080 Simulator, right???? So I got bitten by a bug … a computer problem bug … It bothered me that every time that I wanted to run that “Night Rider” flashing LED demo program I had to go through the whole 512 + switch flipping routine and hope I got it right. If not I was debugging the memory locations every time to see what switch entries I flipped wrong. You can go back a read the memory locations and see what’s in there … and see if it matchins Lawrences listing. Quite often you make a mistake. One little bit switch flipped in the wrong direction and the whole program can be NO GOOD. Now you know how computer programs crash. One little bit, a “1″ or a “0″ in the wrong place or at the wrong time … and it means a completely different thing. Close the window on your desktop no longer means close the window … it means “crash the computer”. :-) Ha! ha! ha!

So instead of typing it again … let me paste in here my Z80 Assembler adaptation of Lawrences Program - which has the why and what of how I made it a loadable program that eliminates most of the toggle switching.
      ;——————————————————————–
      ; Here is your “Writing My First Program to Toggle into the Imsai
      ; 8080 (meaning the Z80Pack Frontpanel Imsai 8080 Emulator)
      ; Written by Lawrence Woodman on 5th November 2008 Techtinkering.com
      ; ——————————————————————-
      ; Your program listing reformatted 7 September 2010 by Alan Spicer -
      ; in an attempt to make the program reloadable by this simulator
      ; without having to toggle the whole thing in every time!
      ; ——————————————————————-
      ; Which brings us to … how can we save it so it can be loaded?
      ; The simulator will take “-xFILENAME” to load a hex or bin file
      ; and thus can load it at program run (Power On) and execute it with
      ; almost no toggle switching at all. But how do we make a hex or bin
      ; file out of this thing? We copy and paste your SOURCE listing …
      ; run it through a BUNCH of Unix/Linux utilties to try and get an
      ; Assembly Language Source File that *something* near to this sim
      ; can compile into bin or hex files. And so I did…
      ; ——————————————————————-
      ; I found out that there is Z80ASM that Udo Munk wrote that comes
      ; with Z80pack, and also Z80ASM for Linux available elsewhere.
      ; Which one will win the prize first and compile without tons of
      ; fatal errors? Udo Munk’s Z80asm won the prize. But not without a
      ; lot more work from me. Neither Z80ASM would take 8080 Assembler
      ; code, which is what Lawrence wrote this in. They wanted Z80
      ; Assembler Mnemonics and ways of doing things. So off to a trans-
      ; lator near you to try and switch it over. Lots more Unix utils
      ; used to switch things over, like the VI Editor.
      ;
      ; It also seemed that the Z80asm didn’t like certain length of
      ; LABELS in the program source code. They were not unique, it said.
      ; So fix that. And I still have 4 errors but it did compile to
      ; binary code. Both bin and hex files could be created. And they
      ; were. But something still seems to be wrong. The machine code
      ; that is generate does load into the sim machine. But it does not
      ; yet run. There still seems to be some bugs in a few spots where
      ; the Z80 machine code did NOT EQUAL the 8080 code? Or the hand
      ; code that you made? Did you really do this with no assembler?
      ; It’s awful strange how you came out with such a listing????
      ;——————————————————————-
      ; After much work re-assembling and trying to fix those errors -
      ; I finally figured out how to kill those 4 errors. 2 each were
      ; the same, The assembler seems to like “FF” in “00ffh” format,
      ; and the IN and OUT data, also “FF”’s had to be in parenthesis.
      ; Imagine all of that???? It loads ok now from a HEX file and
      ; your program works. The bin file? I might be still doing something
      ; wrong with that. But this has been a LONG NIGHT/MORNING.
      ;——————————————————————-
        ORG     0
;
      ;———————————–
      ; Initialise the register variables
      ;———————————–
;
        LD     C,00FFh
        LD     D,1
;
      ;—————————————–
      ; Move the recorded position of the light
      ;—————————————–
;
LOOP:   LD     A,D                   ; Load Position into Accumulator
        CP     128
        JP     Z,SWDIR               ; Position = 128?
        CP     1
        JP     NZ,MOVEPOS            ; Position != 1?
;
      ; Switch the direction of the light
;
SWDIR:  LD     A,C                   ; Load Direction into Accumulator
        CPL                          ; Compliment the accumulator
        LD     C,A                   ; Store result back in the Direction
MOVEPOS:LD     A,C                   ; Load Direction into Accumulator
        CP     0                     ; Direction != left?
        JP     NZ,MOVERT
;
      ; Move position Left
;
        LD     A,D                   ; Load Position into Accumulator
        RLA                          ; Rotate left
        LD     D,A                   ; Store result back in the Position
        JP     OUTPLGHT
;
      ; Move position Right
;
MOVERT: LD      A,D                  ; Load Position into Accumulator
        RRA                          ; Rotate right
        LD     D,A                   ; Store result back in Position
;
      ;———————————————–
      ; Output the light to PROGRAMMED OUTPUT display
      ;———————————————–
;
OUTPLGHT:    LD      A,D             ; Load Position into Accumulator
        CPL                          ; Compliment Accumulator due
                                     ; to way PROGRAMMED OUTPUT works
        OUT     (00FFh),A            ; Output to PROGRAMMED OUTPUT
;
      ;———————–
      ; User controlled Delay
      ;———————–
;
        IN      A,(00FFh)            ; User delay from PROGRAMMED INPUT
                                     ; port 0xFF
        INC     A                    ; Make sure 0 is minimum delay
DLYOUTR:LD      B,02                 ; Set register B loop delay to 2
DLYINR1:LD      E,00FFh              ; Set register E loop delay to 255
DLYINR2:DEC     E                    ; Decrement Register E
        JP     NZ,DLYINR2            ; Loop until Register E = 0
        DEC     B                    ; Decrement Register B
        JP     NZ,DLYINR1            ; Loop until Register B = 0
        DEC     A                    ; Decrement Accumulator
        JP     NZ,DLYOUTR            ; Loop until Register A = 0
;
      ;——————-
      ; Loop indefinitely
      ;——————-
;
        JP     LOOP

 END

[end of that program listing]

night-rider-program-z80.txt
Here is the Z80 Assembler Source Code for this program in a dowloadable file

The hex file that this compiles into looks like the following. If you just want to avoid having to assemble it and just create a text file with the following 3 lines … you can load this into the Z80pack Imsai 8080 Simulator with: ./imsaisim -xFilename (where filename is whatever name you give the file with these 3 lines in it:

:200000000EFF16017AFE80CA0F00FE01C21200792F4F79FE00C21E007A1757C321007A1F65
:1B002000577A2FD3FFDBFF3C06021EFF1DC22C0005C22A003DC22800C30400CE
:00000001FF

* And “loop indefinitely” which is what most programs do. There is a program or routine looping right now over and over waiting for you to move your mouse … waiting for you to click on something … waiting for you to push a key on your keyboard. And it won’t stop looping indefinately until you close/kill the program or shut down your computer - in the case of a big program (system of program(s)) called an Operating System.

* Anyway the bottom line is that I translated his 8080 assembler instructions in hexadecimal into equivalent Z80 assembler instructions with their idiosyncracies … debugged it, aligned it, defined it, and set the color on track. As RCA used to say. And made it into a “compileable” or as they say in this type of program “assembleable” assembly language program. I ran it through the Z80asm - assembler provided by Udo Munk in the Z80pack kit … and loaded it into the Imsai Simulator. And it worked!!!! So now it is easy to reload the program each time you start the Simulator by just adding -xProgramName to the command line of starting the simulator.

Here is new video that I shot about my accomplishment:




Z80Pack Imsai 8080 Simulator Assembler Hacks - By Alan Spicer

—

Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

communications @ marinetelecom.net

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8. September 2010 by admin.

Happy “Incorpaversary” to Google. And have a look at the current “trick” on the Classic Home page of Google.com. You won’t see this if you use iGoogle like I do. You have to click into the “Classic Home” link at the top.

 PC World http://www.pcworld.com/article/204923/whats_up_with_googles_bouncy_ball_logo.html?tk=nl_dnx_h_crawl broke the news to me. I hadn’t noticed it since I land on iGoogle by default with all of my gadgets in place.

—

Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954-683-3426

communications @ marinetelecom.net

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