My BBS has been very sluggish on the old PII450. I find some people give up waiting for the BBS to start after connecting. Tonight I moved the BBS onto my old desktop computer (P4 1.5 GHz), the one that couldn't run Vista because none of its hardware is supported. I formatted the computer and put XP Home on it, then simply copied the BBS over. The bbs is running much faster now. The problem I have is the old Runtime Error 200 for door games written in Turbo Pascal is back. There is some timing feature built into TP7 that loops x times for something? On faster computers (such as PII233) this did not work and caused a divide by zero error (RTE 200). I've been running a TSR program that fixes the bug on the fly while TP7 programs are executing. It works great on my old PII450 but I guess my 1.5 GHz machine is again too fast, so the error is back. I don't know what to do now. Some of my favorite doors on the BBS such as EZ-ROM, Planets TEOS and Super Liners no longer work. I've posted a message on the BBS_DOORS and MUFFIN (maximus bbs) echos on FidoNet. Hopefully someone knows what to do. All I can find on google are patches and the TSR which only work on older PII computers.

One day I hope to use a Solaris workstation for my work and that would mean I'd probably be using OpenOffice for my word documents. The documents from work that I've opened in the past looked almost right but some things would end up on the next page because the fonts weren't the same. Today I learned how to copy true type fonts from Windows (such as Arial and Times New Roman) to Linux. After installing the fonts I opened my document and it was nearly perfect! The only problems were missing Windings font (for some special characters I used), and I noticed some missing lines around "note boxes" I created. Someone told me that it is illegal to copy Windows fonts onto Linux. I found out that StarOffice, the commercial version of OpenOffice ($35 or $69?), comes with a bunch of standard Windows fonts, plus some extra features. Solaris comes with StarOffice so that's perfect. Their website says they are currently working on supporting Word 2007 documents. That's good because we just upgraded to it at work recently.

Another neat program I was reading about is Cross Over Server. This is a commercial version of Wine, the program that simulates Windows and lets you run programs like MS Office 2003 on Linux, Solaris and Mac. The server edition supports thin clients such as Sun Ray. It would be so neat to have a network of Sun Ray clients logging into a Solaris server running Star Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and some Windows apps through Cross Over. Cross Over is quite affordable ($69 per user for the professional edition).

The other day I found an absolutely perfect terminal program for calling telnet BBS's (SyncTERM), which also runs on Solaris. A bunch of my other favorite programs run on both Linux and Solaris such as NetBeans IDE, Sun JDK 6, Sun Application Server 9, PostgreSQL, tsclient/rdesktop, OpenOffice/Star Office, Wine/Cross Over, etc... Even the BBS software I run has been ported to Linux, though it does not support running DOS door games under dosemu. However, I am considering switching to Synchronet and tweaking it to look and feel just like my Maximus board. I think the time is here, I am fully capable of switching to a Linux or Solaris environment for work and home, workstation and servers.

I'm nearing completion of my Solaris 10 book. It will soon be time to put it all into practice. My revised plan for my two servers:

Server #1 - BIND, Sun Directory Server, Collab.Net Enterprise Edition, NFS server, print server, Bacula server, Sun Ray server and Cross Over server.

Server #2 - Scalix, Centric CRM, JRoller, Synchronet BBS software & door games (switching from Maximus so it can run in a Linux container with support for DOS doors).

My present desktop computer might become a BBS computer if I decide not to switch to Synchronet. Otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do with it since I don't have a use for multiple workstations.

My laptop has two hard drives. I will upgrade Ubuntu on the first drive to the latest version (7.04) and install my copy of Windows Vista on the second drive. Hopefully I will be able to find Vista drivers for everything. The laptop will be my "desktop replacement", as it has been for the last year or so.

Later in the year I will buy a real Sun workstation with Solaris 10. I plan to live in Toronto this time next year and I want this to be my workstation for work. I'll keep my IBM laptop from work with Windows XP on it just in case I ever need Windows for something (like MS Office, IE or VB), and when I travel for work.

Lately I've been thinking about my BBS again. When I log in, I always do it from my Windows computer because the linux telnet program does a crappy job rendering some ANSI screens, and the character encoding is all wrong.

Today I have found a solution. It's not 100% perfect, but close. My favorite terminal program in DOS was Telix. Minicom is a linux clone of Telix, and like Telix it can only use a modem. Combine minicom with modemu, a modem emulator, and you have an awesome terminal for BBSing. After installing the minicom and modemu packages, run the following command line to start up the emulator and attach it to minicom:

modemu -c "minicom -o -l -c on -p %s"

I put that in a script because I don't expect to remember it. After it is started, change your console window's character encoding to IBM850 so that you get almost perfect IBM extended ASCII. If you do it before you load minicom, it seems to reset to the default character encoding when minicom is started. The only problems I have found are:

• IBM850 isn't quite what I wanted, CP437 is what I want but I can't seem to get a font that works right. Some character's are a bit wrong, and there is a tiny gap between some lines.
• ZModem doesn't seem to work. Maybe I need to install an other package?
• I don't know how to change my default console font and character encoding so when I switch to a full screen 80x25 console it uses the right font. For a true BBS experience, you need to be using 80x25 full screen text mode.

Pretty dam close to perfect though. It even has a phone book so you can program in all your favourite BBS's. I called almost every bbs on one list that uses the Maximus software that I use. I was so shocked, almost all of them use the default screens, default everything. They mostly have no files, very few and inactive message areas, and are just crap in my opinion. After seeing those boards I think my BBS is a real winner :) I think the login sequence flows better, professionally designed menus (an ANSI artist did them for me), file areas with files, hundreds of FidoNet message bases, dozens of door games, and a relatively active user base (1-2 calls a day, amazing for 2007).

Update: I've since learned about a program called SyncTERM. This is an amazing little program that knows all about IBM extended ASCII, ZModem, and does magic to give a 100% authentic BBS experience without having to install fonts, change your console window's character encoding, or anything. It just works! Unless you use Ubuntu. Ubuntu has some missing symlinks to libraries that the program needs to enable the correct rendering of extended ASCII. Install the libsdl-console-dev package and its dependencies and the symlinks will be created for you. I love SyncTERM, I will use it for BBSing instead of minicom. It even does perfect full screen after pressing ALT+ENTER!

In other news, I just got an email about the JavaOne conference. There's a Canadian night where registered Canadian attendees can meet up. Guess who's Canadian? James Gosling, the original Creator of Java. Guess who's going to be at Canadian night meeting and chatting with attendees? James Gosling! I have mixed feelings about this. One part of me is so excited about getting to meet him. The other part of me knows that I have nothing intelligent to say or talk about with him, and that he is on a whole other level of intelligence than most of us. I've only been doing Java for a bit over a year :/

Oh crap!! It's from 6:30 - 9:30 PM, and one of the seminars I was really looking forward starts at 9:00 PM, and there are also a couple more before it that I really wanted. Well, meeting other people at the conference (and especially James Gosling) will probably be good for me since I am travelling alone and don't know anyone. I might be able to build up some good contacts for the future. I think I'll attend Canadian Night, and will leave a bit early so I can catch the 9:00 PM seminar.

I've noticed a few weird things lately on the BBS computer, which is also a "temporary" place for my websites. Last week the database server service stopped running by itself and I had to start it back up manually. Also I noticed bbs users connecting and waiting so long for the bbs to start up that they give up and disconnect.

I suspect the hard drive is starting to fail, or some of the old memory I stuffed in months ago is cheap and going bad. I backed up all the important files and if the computer goes bad it might be a little while before I get things back up and running.

I have put off a re-write of my website for years. A large part of that was because I wanted to do it in Java, had some experience in it but not enough to do the rewrite to the level of sophistication and quality that I wanted. I've been gaining a lot of experience at work and might actually get started on the rewrite soon (as in first quarter of 2007 :)

I've just finished moving all of my websites from my old server to the BBS computer. They will live there temporarily until I get around to doing a re-write. I don't want to put Apache/PHP/MySQL on my new server since I don't plan on using those for my new work.