PORTCOMMODORE.COM / LARRYMADE.COM BLOG
Is this thing on?
Testing,, testing, if everything is right this will be on my Facebook news.
Maker Faire down next up in a couple months is CommVex - the Commdore Vegas Expo, in its 7th year of Commodore fan getting together.
Blog Order and Updates
Looks like the BLOG order got scrambled a bit with the recent site updates, you can access the previous blog entries from the Index above.
Welcome to the new look for Port Commodore and CommVEx pages!
There has been some shuffling of content make things more sensible as the site contents grow, the Flash Attack, Commodore and classic computing stuff is now combined into a computing section. So if you have links to content on your site, verify that they still work.
Maker Faire 2010
This photo is from the Bay Area Maker Faire Held at the San Mateo Expo Center (a few miles south of San Francisco, CA for those unfamiliar). What a great place it is, over 600 displays of interesting people and stuff they make or things they do.
This was our third year attending, one of my Geek Recharge destinations (theres a topic for later).
A Couple Really Cool PHP Libraries
Create your own PDF documents programmatically with FPDF
Want to integrate existing PDFs into the PDFs you create? Then you also want to get the FPDI Libraries that extend FPDF so it can import in PDF pages.
…and a bonus for those who want to do barcodes with FPDF (this one is for code 3 of 9 but there are also other symbologies available.
Using these libraries are really easy and do an excellent job.
A Point on Using PostgreSQL
Starting my web development I chose a very wise combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (aka the LAMP stack), and has served me well… One consideration early on was to use PostgreSQL, which is a free SQL implementation. At the time I was having too much frustration with the lack of documentation for it. Now things are different, event ISP support has greatly improved.
One of the things that was really compelling about Postgres is better support for GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data and queries. Here is a link to a slide set, does a good job of introducing spacial data and GIS concepts http://www.slideshare.net/dersteppenwolf/building-a-spatial-database-in-postgresql
Eventually I plan to transition to Postgres. The main issues besides time to do it are are initial configuration (which is the case with everything different) and then secondly is MySQL is a tad more lenient on adhering to the SQL standard then Postgres, so there would need to be some updates to Queries.
Discussion
Hi Larry;
I was blowing through my links page and found your SILICON PET page from the old site seems to have disappeared. Do you still have it live? I would like to keep my link to it.
wow discussion! Heh.
it's kinda deep in the menu structure - computing classic commodore pet or seach for PET (search will find you most places quicker) http://portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=larry:comp:commodore:pet:start
The PET Files are stil on-line too but not linked - http://portcommodore.com/files/petfiles.htm
I need to revisit the PET stuff, there is soo much that is going on with the PET there's now people working on flash drives for PET/IEE-488 PET demos, and ROM/RAM replacement boards.
I'm the props manager, and I need gears and things for a steampunk play. Any ideas?
Hmm, tear apart old printers and use some silver/brass paint? Some inkjets and lasers have some good sized gears in it. Most of the steampunk crafters use watch gears for jewelry.
hi larry, i am on a hunt to find the sound that the commodore pet computer made when you turned it on. a little beeping sound. i know its a random question, but do you know where i might find it? perhaps a place where i could download it? thanks.
The “PET jingle” will play in the VICE PET emulator when you start it up (or when running by entering PRINT CHR$(7) or control-g (IIRC PRINT CHR$(135) sounds a longer jingle sound) when you set it to emulate a 4000/8000 series PET/CBM.