Linux Academy…day 2

Spent time, trying to take “Essential Container Concepts” at Linux Academy and on the section “Lecture: Installing and Basic usage of LXC/LXD”. I was told to pause the video and spin up a server…like I should know how to do this. So I spent more time trying to learn their system as I did actually learning! But I guess that’s normal.

Linux Academy…sign up…day 1!

I regretted not taking advantage of last years Linux Academy Black Friday sale ($150 off). So this year I signed up just before 1AM Saturday, my time…I assume, 12AM Friday, their time, with the free 7 day trial. I’m a person that likes tangible stuff but I also have to make good decisions on how to spend my money. I was really tempted by the Pinebook Pro. But I decided instead to invest in something I could put in my head rather than something I could hold in my hand.

First real day with Linux Academy. Got Certificates of Completion concerning Linux Academy itself

Networking

I don’t know why…but I was thinking about my 1st adventure into PC Networking. It was many years ago when I first connected 2 MS-Windows computers together so I could play Duke Nukem with my son. Me on one computer he on another. He was very young and liked playing with me because I could enter scary environments first. It was pretty cool at the time.

C

Looking through an old S/370 Assembly book and found a C program I wrote a long time ago. One of the few I’ve written, I certainly don’t consider myself a C programmer. Don’t know why I didn’t get into it more. It’s certainly a great and important language. There’s no date on the listing but it’s printed on a dot matrix printer on fanfold paper…so pretty old.

NextCloud update…finally!

Finally got option to update NextCloud to 17 (actually 17.0.1)…and did. Version 17 has been out for a while but never offered to me. Was very concerned because of the NextCry Ransomware issue found in the wild. Seem to apply to NGINX web servers…still very annoying for my NextCloud to keep telling me that my software was current at 16…week after many weeks!

IBM COBOL program fix

Fixed sort04.cob amounts and arithmetic on those fields after figuring out how…again, how IBM COBOL works with these fields. It was working but not displaying amount fields and I had left it that way until I understood why. By working I mean producing output and running to completion. So I guess I should really say it wasn’t working properly. Should have created data with proper amounts. Processing would have been easier by not including decimal in data so 01095 instead of 010.95. But it’s been many years since working with IBM COBOL. I think it wasn’t a problem with gnuCOBOL since this was a port of that source!

COBOL numeric fields

I mentioned here something odd and confusing to me. So played with it and certainly can work around it. However I still find it strange that in IBM COBOL, at least this very old version, I can’t move a field defined as 999.99 to another field defined as 999.99. I guess the answer simply is that’s the rule. This is a very old compiler, so as far as I know it may not even work this way any more.

IMSAI 8080

Got the IMSAI 8080 emulator working. The computer came out in 1975 and was a clone of the MITS Altair 8800 that came out prior. My log/blog 1st entry shows the Jan. 1975 Popular Electronics cover with the Altair. They labeled it the 1st minicomputer kit because the term microcomputer hadn’t yet been coined. It predates the Apple & TRS-80. Microsoft was created by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and who sold their Altair Basic to MITS, their first customer.

I think the reason I have a fondness for this computer is that front panel resembles the DEC PDP-11 series of computers I used early in my career, that also had a front panel of switches that you toggled to bootstrap the OS…RSTS/E in my case. The IMSAI 8080 was also Matthew Broderick’s computer in the 1983 movie WarGames in which the question was asked…Do you want to play a game? And he almost set off Thermonuclear War. Very cool how you can toggle the switches and spin the screen replica in 3-D. Booted CP/M 1.3. Basically it looks like the YouTube demo, from the creator Udo Munk. I created a very short video that doesn’t really add anything to what’s already out there but it’s larger than many and the picture becomes very clear after 20 seconds. More info about the emulator here.