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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for February 27th, 2017

Interesting historic read of notes on end 1970s Apple SSAFE project – how it started and ended

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/27

This appeared a few days back: [WayBack] http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/apple/ssafe/Apple_SSAFE_Project.pdf

It’s about “Software and Security from Apple Friends and Enemies” an early exchange of ideas and possibilities for DRM in the Apple ][ and Apple III era.

I got it via my bitsavers.org RSS subscription, but it has been over the net in quite a few other places as well:

I think the most important quote is from the one on reddit, submitted 20170223 by vadermeer  for which I added some WayBack/Archive.is links:

[WayBack] Found Internal Apple Memos about copy protection for Apple II, SARA, LISA(self.VintageApple)

Yesterday at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet, where everything is sold by the pound, I noticed the Apple logo on letterhead sticking out from a bin of books, so I started digging. What I found were the 1979-1980 files of Jack MacDonald, manager of system software for the Apple II and /// at the time

They tell the story of project “SSAFE” or “Software Security from Apples Friends and Enemies.” This was a proposal to bring disk copy protection in-house to sell as a service to outside developers. Inter-office memos, meeting notes and progress reports all give a good idea of what a project lifecycle was like. Different schemes and levels of protection are considered, as well as implementation primarily on the Apple II+ and the upcoming SARA (The Apple ///) and Lisa computers. [WayBack] Randy Wigginton is featured prominently throughout, along with mentions of Woz and many other familiar names.

The documents were all a jumble so I’ve put them in chronological order and scanned the collection, please enjoy. [Archive.is]

The reddit thread is very nice reading as it explains how close we are now to this Level 1:

Level 1. Totally secure. Absolutely no method of stealing the software. 100% effective. Note that the ideal, level 1, is achievable only through disallowing any access of any kind to the software and the computer. Not very practical in our circumstances.

and this one from boingboing:

It’s so neatly packaged and well-documented it could be a Harvard Business Review case-study.

–jeroen

Posted in 6502, Apple, Apple ][, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Maybe Probably Dance wrote the fastest hashtable implementation ever

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/27

Long read: well worth it. [WayBack] I Wrote The Fastest Hashtable | Probably Dance

github repository: skarupke/flat_hash_map: A very fast hashtable

source download: https://github.com/skarupke/flat_hash_map/blob/master/flat_hash_map.hpp

–jeroen

Posted in C++, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

The woods and trees of OpenSuSE on single-board computers – image abbreviations – and getting it installed using OS X

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/27

Finding the right image

There are many single-board computers on the OpenSuSE hardware-compatibility list (HCL), including:

A lot of them have ready to go images, often for Tumbleweed, however none of the pages explain the below image differences hence the one-line for each:

Since I wanted a headless system, JeOS was what I needed.

As it wasn’t available for my ODroid C1+ but was for my Raspberry Pi 2 and as my main machine is a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro Late 2013 [WayBack] below are the steps I used to get the image working.

Installing the Raspberry Pi 2 image using OS X

The below Raspberry Pi2 link will redirect to the correct image in the generic download directory http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/Factory:/Contrib:/RaspberryPi2/images/

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/Factory:/Contrib:/RaspberryPi2/images/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi2.armv7l.raw.xz

For other Raspberry Pi versions, you can find them here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/Factory:/Contrib:/RaspberryPi3/images/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi3.aarch64.raw.xz

http://download.opensuse.org/ports/armv6hl/tumbleweed/images/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi.armv6l-Current.raw.xz

I installed on a 8 gigabyte SD card that revealed itself as /dev/disk1 using this diskutil command (via osx – List all devices connected, lsblk for Mac OS X – Ask Different [WayBack])

diskutil list

So this wrote the image to SD card in a sudo su - prompt:

targetDevice="disk2"
unxz --keep openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi2.armv7l-2016.08.20-Build2.1.raw.xz; \
diskutil umount "/dev/${targetDevice}s1"; \
dd bs=1m of="/dev/r${targetDevice}" if=openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi2.armv7l-2016.08.20-Build2.1.raw; \
sync; \
diskutil list; \
diskutil eject "/dev/${targetDevice}"

or if you want to select which image to “burn”:

targetDevice="disk2"
imageName="openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi2.armv7l-2016.08.20-Build2.1.raw"
imageName="openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi.armv6l-2016.11.23-Build2.22.raw"
imageName="openSUSE-Tumbleweed-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi3.aarch64-2017.01.12-Build3.2.raw"
unxz --keep ${imageName}.xz; \
diskutil umount "/dev/${targetDevice}s1"; \
dd bs=1m of="/dev/r${targetDevice}" if=${imageName}; \
sync; \
diskutil list; \
diskutil eject "/dev/${targetDevice}"

A few notes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Development, Hardware, Hardware Development, Linux, Odroid, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, Single-Board Computers, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed | 1 Comment »

iMovie on a 2010 iMac was starting and running slow: 2 simple steps solved that

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/27

iMovie on a 2010 iMac was starting and running slow. During startup, it wasn’t using much memory, but during editing it did: less than 2 gigabyte out of 8 gigabyte free memory left.

The hard-disk was like 30% full, there wasn’t much in the cache, few processes were auto-starting and the recycle bin was almost empty.

So my first thought was adding more RAM (which is easy): duplicating it to 16 megabyte was easy and not expensive when you look at the Amazon prices for it.

After that it was faster, but not really fast: especially the loading was still slow (less slow than before, but still taking minutes).

Then I scanned for permission issues and there were quite a few as the machine had been getting updates since 2010. So I repaired the permissions using disk utility.

Now iMovie loaded much faster as well: in under a minute.

So out of 17 Ways to Speed Up Mac OS X Lion – ChrisWrites.com, only 2 steps were really needed so far.

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User | Leave a Comment »

 
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