[Coco] Tonight's total lunar eclipse...

[gene heskett]

On Monday, December 20, 2010 09:00:35 pm Aaron Banerjee did opine:

> Gene,
>     Just from the output you provided, it probably is.  I got it out
> of "Astronomy" magazine back in '86 and got it to work on my coco.  I
> wrote it in "true blue" Extended BASIC.  We didn't have those fancy
> "double precision" numbers, so I used what we had.  If your original
> BASIC program refers to "ET" instead of UT, it's the same one...  It
> would be nice to know that something I actually did for the coco is
> still out there...
>                            - Aaron
> 
ISTR I got it from one of the other computer magazines at the time, and may 
even have that puppy squirreled way in the basement, no doubt included in 
some of the other ton or so worth of magazines I've never thrown but should 
have.  No idea if it was Byte, or Compute!, or any one of about a dozen 
more.  I also have a few Astronomy mags, but I can't seem to convince 
myself I got it from one of those.  Your time frame seems about a year late 
if you did that in '86, but then my memory could well be suffering from wear 
out too.  I'd bought a coco3 in '87 or '88, and I know I had it running on 
an old coco2 before I bought my first coco3.  I do recall I magic markered 
the word Eclipse on the cover of it, so I possibly could find it while 
looking for my also missing round tuit.  I'll post if I do.

The sequence was that I was looking for something to exercise that trig.l 
that Lonnie had published in the RB and I had built, and that eclipse 
program seemed to be the ideal candidate to check some of its 17 digit 
doubles with.  That was likely only a month or 6 weeks after the trig.l was 
published.

Stupid Q:  Did that library of double precision transcendentals ever make 
it to RTSI?  If not, that is another package I could pack up and put on my 
web page.

That is, if I could get to it, I've been trying to figure out a way to make 
lha211b actually compress the data on that seagate, and put the smunched 
file on a 40 meg quantum drive I also -had- cabled up till just now.  But a 
dir -e of the old maxtor/ar.stf I copied to that seagate 9 years back from 
a maxtor 7120s, goes south, and when I fire off ded to look at the file 
structure, I find a floppy image of a 35SSDD diskette has overwritten about 
630 sectors worth of os9 data.  I can probably fix it with ded given enough 
time by just de-allocating that area and nulling the directory names and 
running dcheck to get the bogons in the allocation map, IF its just that 
single directory, but I suspect it isn't.  Grrrrr, darnit I did this with 
the first B&B I ever had too.

Then if I can get that 20 year old maxtor to spin up one more time, I can 
dsave it and at least put that section of it back to 9 years ago status.  
This sucks dead toads through soda straws...

Assuming I can get a clean dcheck report, the next thing I'll be looking 
for is a real backup program, from the viewpoint of being spoiled rotten 
because I'm using amanda here on this linux box.  It absolutely must be 
capable of compressing mostly text source files to not more than 20% of the 
original size, and handle the compression duties through !pipes! into it, 
with the output pipe then feeding the disk file compressed data plus 
filemarks & filenames for recovery purposes.  Suggestions welcomed, even 
including my re-writing bru1.2 again to make it use a compressor, the $64k 
question being which one.

Aha! got it, I just found a tar.c in the c.src tree, and that doesn't look 
to be a contaminated tree.  But, I don't believe I ever compiled it, so it 
looks like I hook the Quantum P40S back up and build me a c compiler 
environment on it since the seagate should be treated as read-only till I 
get that sorted.

According to the help files, this tar can use stdout, so all I need now is a 
good compression utility that can handle stdin and stdout.  What do the 
rest of the oldtimers here remember about ar2?

Is anyone going to stay up and watch the eclipse tonight?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
"Nine years of ballet, asshole."
-- Shelly Long, to the bad guy after making a jump over a gorge that he
   couldn't quite, in "Outrageous Fortune"