Grafx 1.0 for MINIX

Isn’t this Internet thing cool! Using Google Group’s Usenet archive, I managed to locate the project I completed in the 3rd year of my Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer and Information Science, way back in 1991/92.

My supervisor (Bob Buckley) offered to post the finished source code to the comp.os.minix newsgroup on my behalf (as students didn’t have permission to post to newsgroups at that time). Strangely, the older posts in this newsgroup don’t appear to be indexed properly by Google (eg. searching for ‘gardiner’ doesn’t return any matches), but for posterity, here are the links to the overview and 4 parts:

• BIOS graphics for MINIX part 0/4
• BIOS graphics for MINIX part 1/4
• BIOS graphics for MINIX part 2/4
• BIOS graphics for MINIX part 3/4
• BIOS graphics for MINIX part 4/4

Quoting from the introduction text:

The Grafx package gives MINIX the ability to display graphical output. It also partially implements the UNIX plot(3X) library. Graphics is driven through the BIOS (with all the associated implications).

Hardware Requirements:         IBM-PC or BIOS compatible         Graphics Adaptor - CGA,EGA,VGA,(Hercules Untested)

        Other platforms eg. 68K should be able to use this package         with a small amount of work.

The documentation is distributed in the following files:

usrdoc.txt      - User documentation - ASCII text sysdoc.txt      - System documentation - ASCII text

These are wordperfect output - so bold and underline may look odd on your screen, but should print OK. Mail a request for the WP files if you want to print with different fonts, etc.

I would welcome your feedback on this package. It was my 3rd year project, as part of the Computer Studies Degree course at the University of South Australia.

- Dave Gardiner, 14/2/92 Internet: [email protected]

Historical notes

• The 4 separate posts are part of a “shar” shell archive – a popular way of sharing scripts and source code in newsgroups.
• It was in August 1991 that Linus posted to comp.os.minix about a new operating system he was working on (later to become Linux).
• I’m pretty sure I got a response back from Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum – I can’t find anything online so it may have been an email which has since been lost. I believe he encouraged further work on the idea – but unfortunately that never happened.

ReportViewer 2010 remote processing requires RS 2008 or later

I had an idea today that using the newly released ReportViewer 2010 controls might help with an unusual rendering issue we’re having with a web page when displaying very large reports.

Turns out that you can use Report Viewer 2010 with Visual Studio 2008, though I did have to copy the files out of the GAC. Make sure you update the assembly references in the project file, web.config and also any .aspx pages so that they refer to Version=10.0.0.0.

Firing up the site to view one of the reports then resulted in the following error message:

“Remote report processing requires Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services or later”

Checking the current MSDN documentation for Configuring ReportViewer for Remote Processing does indeed state that “to use a server report, you must have access to a SQL Server 2008 or later Reporting Services report server”. Contrast that with the Visual Studio 2008 version of the same page which says SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services was the minimum.

Unfortunately in this case Reporting Services are still on 2005, but when that changes, using Report Viewer 2010 will be a viable option.

User-settable properties in Reporting Services

SQL Server Reporting Services reports have a number of properties that can be obtained via the GetProperties web method.

The full list of properties is documented in SQL Books Online in Report Server Item Properties. What it fails to mention is that some of these items are read-only. Try passing them in via CreateReport or SetProperties and you’ll just get an exception for your trouble.

By trial-and-error (mostly error!) against an instance of the SQL 2005 Reporting Service Web Service I discovered that the following properties are user-settable: