Putting Pen to Paper
and
Fingers to the Keyboard

Articles
Other
MILSTAR
TPOCC
X-SAR
Code 521
EPOCH

Articles

These are articles that I submitted or had planned to submit to magazines. The text of the articles is as-submitted, not as-published; a couple of them were edited by the magazines, much to my distress!

"Farmer Brown on a 6800", unpublished.

An article I wrote about KIM-1-like subroutines for keyboard input and LED display output on a Motorola MEK6800D2 Evaluation Kit - 512 bytes of memory! I had planned to submit it to one of the early microprocessor magazines: Byte, Kilobaud, who knows ...

Untitled, unpublished.

An article I wrote about a recursive, alphanumeric permutation generator - for a TI-58 programmable calculator with printer! I had planned to submit it to Byte, back when Byte might have published an article like that. Although I don't know what I did with the article, I still have the program itself.

"You've Got a Tin Ear!", unpublished.

Playing the blues on a Commodore VIC 20!

"Faster than Run-Time: An Optimized ASCII-to-Binary Floating Point Conversion Routine", The DEC Professional, March 1985.

A VAX assembly language function that reduced the daily CPU time required by one of our programs from 2 hours to 20 minutes.

"F$USEFUL: A Look at Some Mundane VMS Utilities", VAX Professional, April 1988.

FORTRAN implementations of the VMS lexical functions, F$PARSE() and F$SEARCH().

"Put the Power of DCL into Your Programs", VAX Professional, August 1989.

Spawning a CLI subprocess and feeding it commands.

"Turning a Tree Upside Down: Automatic Structure Chart Generation", unpublished.

Generating cflow(1)-like structure charts from VMS object modules.

"Enhanced Command Line Processing", The C Users Journal, June 1991.

Enhancing the getopt(3) function.

"C Packages", The C Users Journal, June 1992.

Implementing Ada-style packages in C. (Based on a memo I wrote.)

Other

TPOCC and Object-Oriented Programming: A Tutorial/Proposal

This unfinished document started out as a proposal to use Eiffel on our satellite control system, but ended up being an organized memory dump of what I knew (at the time) about object-oriented programming.

MILSTAR

On this project, we built racks of equipment to automatically test MILSTAR satellite components. I wrote the systems firmware that ran on the embedded 80286 single-board computers. This project was FUN!

Universal Firmware Design

Universal Firmware User's Manual

TPOCC

Jumping on the UNIX workstation bandwagon early, we developed a generic, satellite control center for NASA. I wrote numerous how-to memos, as well as the reference manual for TSTOL, the TPOCC version of NASA's Systems Test and Operations Language.

Networking for Netwits! (1989?)

Written when I was much younger than today; read with a grain of salt.

TSTOL Issues and Answers (02/08/90)

Fending off attacks on my ego!

Hashing Out XDR and Miscellaneous Other Topics (04/02/90)

A look at XDR on the network.

Second-Hand RPC Timeout Code Considered Harmful (07/26/91)

The "not-invented-here" syndrome has some advantages!

TPOCC Configuration Monitor Design (1991)

Object-based design in C.

Non-Blocking I/O, One Way or Another (10/28/91)

VMS-like queued I/O under UNIX.

TSTOL Manual

The reference manual for NASA's TPOCC Systems Test and Operations Language (TSTOL).

X-SAR

XSAR and the TPOCC Display Subystem (05/21/92)

A proposal to use Tcl/Tk as the basis for the XSAR GUI.

A Prototype XSAR Menuing System (07/07/92)

Tcl in action: a rapidly prototyped, scripted, Motif menuing system.

An XSAR Forms Library (07/10/92)

A Forms Management System for X Windows?

Static X/Y Plot Hardcopies and PRINT Buttons (09/04/92)

Generating screen dumps from within an X application.

Solving the History Replay Problem

A generic telemetry decommutation library?

Code 521

Extensible I/O (03/14/94)

A proposal for an extensible I/O package that dynamically loads application-specific, user-level device drivers.

Generic Card Debugger

Proposes a script-programmable card debugger designed to exercise and monitor in-house-designed VLSI ASICs mounted on VME cards; see gentle.

C'est Moi!" (02/16/95)

Shows how an early version of gentle was coupled with a Tk-based GUI, moi, for the purpose of monitoring and controlling our VxWorks systems. I subsequently developed a Motif equivalent to moi, called plum, which resulted in a reworking of the display classes so that the same status page definitions could be used by both the Tk and Motif versions of the GUI.

SCTGEN Scripting Language (02/23/95)

The advantages of using Tcl scripts in place of application-specific configuration files.

You're an 8-Track Kind of Guy (03/15/95)

A proposed, Tcl-based design for the ETS Tape Recording Subsystem software.

EPOCH

EPOCH Version 3 - Let's Show a Little Class (Spring 1997)

A critique of the EPOCH Version 3 software.

GLoC's DECnet Interface to EPOCH (09/30/97)

Proposes and evaluates three methods of linking a customer's legacy application (DECnet, VMS) with EPOCH (TCP/IP, UNIX).