I’m bringing this up, because below, I talked about the population issue. And this program has become incredibly useful to me, in generating “real looking” test data. In either normal random record length, data terminated with a line feed, on Linux… or fixed length records, common on IBM mainframes. There was a time I would …
Monthly Archives: March 2024
Fake customer generator program Modification
A few months ago or maybe several years ago I generated some fake customer data, using a Python program I wrote. Then I wrote a program (actually a GnuCOBOL control break program) to print totals by state and realized the number of customers between states were about the same. So Wyoming had approx the same …
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The PiDP-10 assembled
Oscar tweeted about the PiDP-10. I asked if he ever considered selling them for more… assembled. And he said they do, assembled and tested… link.
Linux file output to screen
I had to look this up, because I was drawing a blank. I wrote a command line program that was expecting two files… input and output. And I wanted the output to print on the screen instead of a file. So the screen… /dev/stdout, is a file in Linux. Also it was kind of hard …
Build GnuCOBOL 3.2
Among other changes, I saw an EBCDIC conversion compile switch, which piqued my interest.Latest version 3.2, manual build to replace 3.1.2 package install My old install notes helped alot. One error at the beginning was solved simply by removing spaces in a subdirectory. Switching from apt-get to apt solved some problems. It appears that mpir, …
GnuCOBOL other EBCDIC/ASCII considerations
Take a deeper look at this. I used INSPECT for my conversion, should also look into TRANSFORM. According to what I’ve read about TRANSFORM… This statement exists within GnuCOBOL to provide compatibility with COBOL programs written to pre-1985 standards. The TRANSFORM statement was made obsolete in the 1985 standard of COBOL, having been replaced by …
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New project idea… already done
It’s 4AM and I can’t sleep. I was watching a YouTube video about COBOL on the Commodore 128. And it got me thinking about GnuCOBOL. I started looking at some of my old GnuCOBOL programs. And I realized I never wrote one to read EBCDIC data. You know hypothetically, an IBM shop sends me file …
Long Linux startup time
Maybe should be titled sign-on time. I remember a few years ago Linux came up very fast, even before I had an SSD, which I do now. Actually Linux itself doesn’t take too long to get to the sign-on screen. But after, signing on, it seems long probably over 30 seconds… to get to home …
Apple Vision Pro
I am not an Apple fan boy. But I must admit the Apple Vision Pro looks very cool.
PiDP-10
Looks very cool.