Galen's VMS Hobbyist Spot

DS10 booted again, after a LONG break...

2009-08-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

This evening I finally found a chance to boot my DS10 for a brief spell while my son Tyen is napping.

It was nice to be using VMS again after so many months of withdrawal. :-)

I downloaded gawk V3.1.7 from ftp.gnu.org and hope I have a chance soon to start looking at getting it going on VMS.

Free Mac software!

2009-05-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

No, this has nothing detectable to do with VMS, but it does have something to do with a chance to win some free software for your Mac. (You don't have a Mac yet? Well, run right out and buy one! You'll be glad you made the switch from Weendoze. But hang on to your VMS system if you have one.) And I'm all in favor of free software.

AppStorm is giving away two free copies of Tweetie and one of DevonThink Pro at the end of this one week long contest, which began on April 29 (2009).

For your chance to win, just click here, or go to http://mac.appstorm.net/general/competitions/the-big-giveaway-tweetie-devonthink-pro/

Resolution for 2009--

2009-01-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

Find more time for VMS at home!
Now that I'm not using it at work, it's all gradually fading into the background of my long term memory. It's difficult to make time, though, with a busy family life and two hours commuting every day (round trip).

I'm still very interested in looking at gawk and xmlgawk on VMS. On the gawk page at savannah.gnu.org I noticed recently that the vms subtree has had some changes for gawk v3.1.6, obsoleting some of the work I'd done on my own over the last several years. I haven't looked yet to see if xmlgawk has taken up any of these.

Update: Jan 12, 2009

Got VMS83A_UPDATE08 installed; downloaded a few ECOs that weren't included in 08, as well as TCP/IP ECO, hope to install the remainder soon.

A small plug for VMS as a network operating system

2008-11-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

A user of Yahoo!^® Answers asked the question,

What are the 4 types of network operating systems that available [sic] in the market?

Seeing the opportunity to put in a small plug for Our Favorite Operating System™, yours truly posted a description of VMS as a network OS and was rewarded with 10 points for having my answer chosen as the best. [It's true there wasn't much competition…]

Click here to go to Yahoo!^® Answers and see the question and both of the answers that were submitted.

I wasn't sure initially that I was answering the question that was intended, as the wording was a little vague. How is one supposed to take the word type? As in, What type of food do you like best? Or perhaps more colloquially, as indicating the actual name of something. In which case the question could have been worded more clearly as, What are the names of the four network operating systems that are available in the market? But I guess the 10 points proves I was aiming in the right direction, even though I only supplied the name of one O.S.

(Come to think of it, the last few times I've visited the two local markets there weren't any operating system on sale at all. And neither Giant nor Safeway would give me a rain check!)

A sad day...

2008-10-31T14:30:00.000-07:00

It's a sad day when Alcatel Lucent pulls pioneering Bell Labs out of fundamental physics research. This after a stellar history including six Nobel Prizes, inventions like the laser and transistor, and much more.

I don't know if this means that Bell Labs is totally or even mostly kaput, however.

OpenVMS Saves the World!

2008-10-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Well, not really--I chose the title to catch some attention. But the story does involve OpenVMS and a kind of object that could destroy the world, and it did seem like a nice follow on title to my earlier post, The end of the world as we know it, coming soon to an LHC near you.

Courtesy of an article on openvms.org here is a story about the Minor Planet Center, where an Alpha VMScluster running OpenVMS V8.3. The Tamkin Foundation Computing Network is used to track Near-Earth Objects (NEOs ). A large enough NEO on a collision course with Mother Earth would certainly wreck things up pretty well. So it's conceivable that OpenVMS could help save the world, if we could only find a way to deflect whatever world-smashing object this system was tracking.

According to openvms.org's article this cluster has an uptime of almost three years, which but for lengthy power outages in 2005 would be even longer.

A small contribution to Wikipedia

2008-10-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

Today I edited the Wikipedia article about the HP Superdome. I added good old OpenVMS to the list of supported operating systems, with citations from a relevant HP press release and from the OpenVMS V8.2-1 Release Notes.

(Lest the above links should break after this is published, the press release is archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5bGrC0lBy and the Release Notes at http://www.webcitation.org/5bGqrvpsD, courtesy of WebCite^®.)

The end of the world as we know it, coming soon to an LHC near you (well, relatively near on a cosmic scale at least)

2008-09-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

Lacking anything to offer that's pertinent to VMS, instead I provide a pointer to an interesting discussion on comp.os.vms about the Large Hadron collider and the awfully scary, horribly frightening, and downright terrifying possible consequences of the experiments to be performed there.

[Your humble blogger has also posted his comments there, should you be interested. ]

On to other things, at work anyway...

2008-07-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

I moved to my new position (still at Booz Allen) effective Tuesday, July 1st. And as it was easy to predict, it does not involve VMS.

It does involve configuring and testing Windows systems and networks that use some really interesting applications of more recent technologies including virtualization, some recent model HP hardware, and other cool stuff.

At this point I can't say much more than that, though...

Rest assured, though, that VMS is still alive in my office at home--even if my DS10 hasn't been powered up very often of late.

gawk and VMS

2008-05-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

Over the last several years I've worked quite a bit with gawk on various versions of VMS. Currently on my home systems I have V3.1.5 running, with some customizations I've made myself.

My initial work on customizing gawk was to modify [.vms]descrip.mms so that I could try compiling gawk as a single object module with HP C's /PLUS_LIST_OPTIMIZE qualifier, and also to default to tuning compilation for the host system (/OPT=(TUNE=HOST)/ARCH=HOST) which happens to be a DS10. This wasn't very much work, but it also didn't make much difference in performance on any of the test scripts that come with gawk. I suspect that I/O is probably the limiting factor for most or all of these scripts but didn't make any attempt to verify that this is the case.

After that I took a look at [.vms]vms-conf.h, the VMS-specific config file that ships with gawk. As shipped, there were several compile-time options disabled due to older versions of the DEC C RTL (run-time library) lacking working, compliant support for a few “common” C RTL routines. Most of these actually have little to no impact. I'll list and briefly discuss these in a future update or response to this post. Meanwhile I'll just mention that wrote a new include file vms_versions.h and modified vms-conf.h to automatically enable or disable these based on the version of the C RTL and/or VMS. I also enabled support by default for the switch() statement, which I've found really handy to have.

At the same time I put together an MMS build file in [.test] that followed as closely as possible the original non-VMS makefile for running the tests. It makes heavy use of DCL pipes and a DCL script that puts together and executes a gawk command based on the arguments to be passed to gawk. It's not a pretty sight but it produces output that looks a lot like what you get from the makefile on a Unix system.

Perhaps the most important option that I enabled is dynamic loading. This was actually easier to do than I had thought it might be.

The C RTL since V7.2 (at least) has provided the dlfcn.h include file and the related functions dlopen(), dlclose(), dlsym(), and dlerror(). The gawk (v3.1.5) source module ext.c uses these, excluding dlclose(), to implement user-written extensions to gawk. No changes were required to ext.c.

The only time consuming part was to set up everything to build gawk as a shareable image. Most of the work here went into finding gawk's internal variables and functions that might typically be needed by user written extensions and specify them using the symbol_vector statement in a linker options file. So far I've found 37 such symbols; I wouldn't be surprised if a few more turn up as more and more extensions are written. I added all the mechanics into the MMS descriptor file to create the linker options file and then use it to link gawk as a shareable image.

Since then I've implemented a few extension functions, following the guidelines from the gawk v3.1.5 manual, Appendix C, Implementation Notes. I was able to get all the extensions in Appendix C to work, exclusive of those that depend on Un*x or Windoze. I've also got working a gawk interface to the $getsyi system service and am planning something similar for $getjpi, $getuai,and perhaps $getqui. That last one looks like a little tougher nut to crack.

Someone on comp.lang.awk asked last year if anyone had implemented the sfmt (SIMD-oriented Fast Mersenne Twister) random number generator in awk. I built a gawk extension function to do so, utilizing some source code in C from Mutsuo Saito and Makoto Matsumoto of Hiroshima University.(I'm sorry to confess that after all this time I still have yet to post it to comp.lang.awk; but I've never seen anything more from the requester. )

I will be posting more on these topics in weeks to come, time providing—I'm getting ready to move to a new position within Booz Allen Hamilton, where I currently am employed.