Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Pinnacle DVC 100 Capture Device and FC15

This works on my FC15 system with the VHS player plugged into a Pinnacle Dazzle DVC 100 USB capture device to copy VHS tapes to AVI files with syncronised video and sound; uses under 15% cpu on a dual core … Continue reading

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Managing WTORs in MVS38J

While everybody is comfortable issuing a WTOR and waiting for a reply I had a need to issue a WTOR that would cancel itself if no respose was recieved within a certain time. The timer stuff was easy, but it … Continue reading

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Learnt some new Fedora packaging commands

So posting, for if nothing else my later reference. I will probably need them again. The issue was that in the last ‘yum update’ I did (it included a kernel update) it worked perfectly on three machines. On my fourth, … Continue reading

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C64 playtime

Playing with C64 emulators again. Still haven’t decided which one to use. FRODO compiles under Fc14, Vice does not. However VICE is available as a binary from RPMFUSION repositories for FC14 anyway which does work. Under Linux, my preferred OS, … Continue reading

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Trying to find a usable disk erasure tool.

My Ex wants something to overwrite securely all space left by those deleted files; as we all know deleting a file doesn’t delete the actual data off the disk. The reason being she wants to be able to pass on … Continue reading

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Replacing a hard disk with a larger one in Linux

Well I finally got around to relaying out my new disk. The history of the requirement is that basically my 80GB disk died in a screaming heap (reboot number one had disk errors, reboot number two no disk found, yup … Continue reading

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Playing with VMs – clonezilla under QEMU

First off, let me make it clear I am running QEMU non-accelerated here, I don’t have a CPU that supports VT-X so qemu-kvm won’t work for me. And before anybody says VirtualBox is a lot faster than QEMU in a … Continue reading

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Triple boot from OSX now working, but life is a bitch

Finally got that working. Now my new desktop can boot into OSX, Vista and Fedora. The Vista image is pre-SP1, as I just can’t get SP1 to install on there at all, but that will be in another post. Where … Continue reading

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Snow Leopard on x86

Where have I been wasting my time lately (apart from loooong hours at work that is). Was interested to see what Snow Leopard was like. And had an effectively spare server/desktop that had three disks, Vista on the main, Fedora … Continue reading

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VTL – Virtual tape library

For some reason I thought this would be a good idea, something fun to play with anyway. But of course I wanted to make it complicated and make the drives network acessable. Anyway, the virtual tape library itself was a … Continue reading

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