Announce - Open Source CNC website

While it may exist somewhere, it's not ubiquitous enough to be useful any longer.

That's not at all the way I recall. gzip was better than compress on Ultrix, I believe, by a noticeable percentage.

It's all moot, IMHO. Neither compact or compress exist on nearly as many systems as gzip. Game, set, match. Many sites also provide bzip2 compressed files for download alongside gzip files because for large files, bzip2 can be a good bit smaller, which can be important to overall download times. But it's not ubiquitous enough to be the only way you provide something, either.

--Donnie

And in the open source world it's not enough to be able to understand the document forever, it's a requirement to be able to *edit* it forever. That's why the system generating the document needs to be open source as well. It's fine to generate PDF and HTML and whatever formats you want from that, but it needs to be editable for all time, too.

--Donnie

According to Cliff :

Hmm ... pretty old program, if the man page is still concerned about filesystems which limit filenames to 14 characters (the old filesystem which came with v7 unix, and early SysV variants as well.

I'm somewhat frustrated by the HP-UX (or the web page format) eliminating the "Last change: 9 Sep 1999" entry at the bottom of each page, which might make it easier to judge just how old compact(1) happens to be. That one was from Solaris 10. Solaris 2.6 shows: "Last change: 20 Dec 1996" Falling back to SunOs 4.1.4, I get: "Last change: 9 September 1987" and OpenBSD shows it as: "April 18, 1994". Of course, those dates apply to the last change of the man page, not the program, but at least some of the changes of the man page are to reflect changes in the program.

I've seen gzip(1) usually giving a significant improvement over compress(1) on most file types -- at least on SunOs and Solaris (even on the Sun-3 (68020) machines).

DoN.

According to Joseph Gwinn :

One of the entry points for viruses. And *certainly* not supported on other OSs -- thank goodness. :-)

Agreed.

Of course, the current MacOS (OS-X) is layered on top of a unix kernel, so you should be able to pick up the unix utilities which don't happen to have been included and compile them with no serious problems, as long as you don't mind working at the command-line level.

Agreed! And ones which are open source means that you can keep them alive long after they have been abandoned by others, should it become necessary.

Which is why ghostscript's companion shell script ps2pdf(1) was possible. No reverse engineering needed.

And -- there is xpdf(1) (for unix systems running X11), also open source. I tend to use it by preference to Adobe Acrobat reader.

Agreed. Note that programs like xfig(1) (again open source) can generate the input to troff/groff source files to print drawings (using the pic macro sets). And, they can print to PostScript, which can then be translated to pdf by ps2pdf(1) from ghostscript.

Note that the eqn macro set for troff/groff can do a very nice job of typesetting math, which (as above) can be converted to PostSCript, and from there to PDF.

And -- ghostscript(1) is open source (from GNU), so again it is possible to maintain if needed. We are not at the mercy of a single OS continuing to operate.

Enjoy, DoN.

According to Guy Fawkes :

You would be amazed at the number of delivery attempts I block on the basis of originating IP address. (And for the past couple of weeks, there seems to be a new spaming (or is it virus) package out there which doesn't take refusal to allow a connection as meaning that they should stop. one of them tried 3570 times between

"Dec 30 03:37:48" and "Dec 30 06:56:31"

before I set a static route to the loopback address to keep my logfiles from getting too large for their directory. That is 3 hours 19 minutes approximately, or 1078 attempts per hour. And this was only the largest number of attempts that are still in the last maillog.

I wrote some scripts to make it easy to extract every one which tried over 100 times in a short period, and then started adding them to the static routing as well. That kept things under control.

The reason I suspect a virus is that it all went quiet yesterday, though I'm not sure in which time zone it happened. But sudden worldwide switch-off behavior is very virus-like.

The problem is that this is the expectation when you have to register for a site.

As one who knows NANAE and NANAU (usenet newsgroups dedicated to fighting spam in e-mail and usnet), this makes *me* feel a bit better. But I *still* won't be registering at your site until I feel a personal need to post there.

I also ran my own usenet server -- until my ISP dropped all support for usenet -- after which I switched ISPs. The new one is

This makes me feel better. But there is still the problem of what happens if someone is able to breach security on your web site. I'm running my web site on an OpenBSD box (which runs the web server in a chroot jail) and still don't trust it to hold anything truly sensitive.

Enjoy, DoN.

According to Guy Fawkes :

Yep -- that is one which I have already. I find it installed on the OpenBSD systems, but not on Solaris at the moment, for whatever reason.

Hmm ... it has gone to having only a demo version downloadable now, and I don't think that I want to know what they will charge for the Solaris version. :-)

The ones which I would want are still listed as "not yet" for source availability. :-(

Thanks anyway, DoN.

According to Guy Fawkes :

You would be amazed at the number of delivery attempts I block on the basis of originating IP address. (And for the past couple of weeks, there seems to be a new spaming (or is it virus) package out there which doesn't take refusal to allow a connection as meaning that they should stop. one of them tried 3570 times between

"Dec 30 03:37:48" and "Dec 30 06:56:31"

before I set a static route to the loopback address to keep my logfiles from getting too large for their directory. That is 3 hours 19 minutes approximately, or 1078 attempts per hour.

I wrote some scripts to make it easy to extract every one which tried over 100 times in a short period, and then started adding them to the static routing as well. That kept things under control.

The reason I suspect a virus is that it all went quiet yesterday, though I'm not sure in which time zone it happened. But sudden worldwide switch-off behavior is very virus-like.

The problem is that this is the expectation when you have to register for a site.

As one who knows NANAE and NANAU (usenet newsgroups dedicated to fighting spam in e-mail and usnet), this makes *me* feel a bit better. But I *still* won't be registering at your site until I feel a personal need to post there.

I also ran my own usenet server -- until my ISP dropped all support for usenet -- after which I switched ISPs. The new one is

This makes me feel better. But there is still the problem of what happens if someone is able to breach security on your web site. I'm running my web site on an OpenBSD box (which runs the web server in a chroot jail) and still don't trust it to hold anything truly sensitive.

Enjoy, DoN.

How about the Unix to Dos and Dos to Unix utilities!

UUENCode.exe - Wtar.exe Unix2Dos.exe Dos2unix.exe Hex40bin.exe

I have an archive of them. Martin

Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder

D> According to Cliff :

The problem of this kind of solution is that it can be pretty fiddly, and may require far too much computer knowledge, more than one should expect of the average metalworker.

Yes, but then troff and groff are being replaced by Latex, and all of these have their own learning curves.

At least with latex there is a open version, plus a commercial offering that is reputed to be very good. Don't know if it runs under MacOs without resort to the BSD underpinnings.

Yes. Actually, pdf is the natural display language of MacOS 10 and later.

Joe Gwinn

aye, nothing is 100% immune...

2/ that's why I'm looking for two admins with enough savvy to spot potential problems as well as the ability to do periodic mysql dumps etc

4/ _if_ someone is able to breach security it is a lot of effort, because everything worthwhile is open source anyway and freely available, the people who use open source are likely to be able to make things sticky for any wannabe cracker, and most of all it's a hell of a lot of offort to get a bunch of email addresses from people who are likely to be running their own domains anyway and quite able to create one off throwaway email addresses.

This doesn't matter then for the purposes of what we're talking about distributing since you wouldn't be able to install/build *that*, either.

--Donnie

According to Martin H. Eastburn :

Those are obviously the ones to run on DOS. The unix ones have the same names (all lower case), without the ".exe" -- except for the hex40bin one, which I think is for dealing with older Mac archives. And you left out uudecode(1). (For those who don't know -- the "(1)" at the end of the program names is a clue that they are in section one of the unix man pages -- therefore they are commands. And -- it is not typed when typing the command name to execute it. "(2)" is for system calls in c, "(3)" is library functions in c. Various other meanings for the other digits, which may vary from unix flavor to unix flavor.

All of the named programs come with most flavors of unix, except the "hex40bin" one listed above.

Enjoy, DoN.

Sticking with this thread.

Found an excellent source of CNC hardware, ball screws, linear products, you name it, so done a quick article about them on the site at

There's a moral in there somewhere, if I could only work out what it was.

cheers

"tanks" Don -

IIRC, I got those many moon ago when Schlumberger was funding some development of these and modem utilities. 1980 - 85 ish. I did have that 3 ring binder - but it likely got mildew and dumped. Rats. took a quick scan - and my little IT book is not to be found. Such is life. At the time, IBM email was really different than many of us on other nets - they changed externally - not sure internally due to the software design. Kinda fun days in the early net - customers coming alive in more ways than one!

Martin

Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder

D> According to Martin H. Eastburn :

If it's free, I'll take three?.

The snow is back.

I am about to begin updating a program I wrote several years ago that converted a v.11 AutoCAD ADI plotter file to G/M codes for a EMCO F1 educational machining center, but ==> before I do this I want to find out how much interest there is.

Yes.

Doesn't really matter.

Let's face the facts: Both DOS and Freddy Mercury are dead and it's time to get over it. Windows are the way to go - just ask BD. ;) (besides, XP has an issue with DOS programs, IIRC)

I *could* live with inch output and multiply the input with 25, but why= not make it a user choice in the program? =20

No need here, as our mill has an option for rotary axis swapping.

Text engraving, frames, logos. The (DOS) program I'm using at the = moment has only one font, and is a PITA to work with.

From what I've seen of pen plotters and their seemingly random choice = of path, I'm not sure I would trust their code for pocketing or conturing.=20

--=20 Regards, J. Nielsen

yes, in huge bold text

you said open source, so both really innit...

platform independent like C would be best, failing that something that could easily be recompiled into C, so lots of informative REM statements

see above

if the dll's are available if required linux users can always run it under emulation.

honestly, it shoukd emuate g code and allow metric and imperial in the same output

yes, radius compensation too for rotary table on mill stuff

code library of gcode "objects" waiting to be made >;^)

============= ref item 2 -- cut-n-paste option would have only the actual g0/g1 moves. header of program to turn on spindle CW, set absolute, etc, and footer turning everything off would be written by the user, who then uses an editor to insert the generated code into the complete program. From some emails I have received I think i will do it this way as you can do a zero offset to position the text/artwork just where you want it.

As several people have pointed out it is trivial to allow selection of either inch or m/m output, so will include that.

I will get the "flat" version up and running and then try for the cylinder model.

Uncle George

=============== Item 3/4 I will provide both source and compiled [.exe] files that should run on any late windows box. I am most comfortable working with the older basic dialects in DOS [and I still like cp/m], however as someone pointed out its time to move on as XP has problems with some DOS "box" programs, so I an updating to visual basic for windows.

Uncle George