Brent's World

Did you know that you can easily add holidays to your calendar in Microsoft Outlook? If the answer to that question is NO! I am going to show you show you how.

1) If not already open launch Microsoft Outlook 2013.

2) Select the File tab, then selection Options.

3) In the Outlook Options window, select Calendar.

4) Under Calendar options, Click Add Holidays.

5) In the Add Holidays to Calendar windows, Scroll to find your country, click the check box, then click OK

6) Back on the Outlook Options windows, Click OK.

7) You’re all done! You now have your countries holidays in your Calendar, and if you synch to a portable device such as a phone or tablet. They will show up on the device as well.

Forward: A post that I saw on Facebook caught my interest, because it brought back memories of a very similar conversation that I had with someone on Facebook regarding this very subject. So it got the wheels spinning and the creative juices flowing. The post was reflecting on the niche the Commodore Amiga found in the desktop video market, and was comparing it to Apple’s position in the marketplace with the audio/video capabilities of the Mac. The question was raised if we thought the Mac is the Amiga of today, and if Commodore had marketed the Amiga correctly could the Amiga hold the same position in the market.

This is an interesting question, and one that I had discussed with a user on my BBS at one time. While you can certainly draw comparisons between the Amiga’s video, photo, and audio capabilities. You might even be able to compare the operating systems up to a point. There are a couple of things that Apple did that Commodore was no longer doing, or never did that positioned the Macintosh (The iMac and the Macintosh G3), to gain market acceptance. The final point that may have doomed the Amiga is that the concept of a multimedia computer was plain and simply ahead of its time.

Peripherals / Third Party Hardware – One of the strange things about the Commodore Amiga, is that it’s main selling point (Besides being a kick ass game machine.), was that it could be used as both a consumer, or high end video editing / titling platform. One of things Amiga users always bragged about was the fact that our computers were used by Hollywood in such projects as Terminator 2, and Seaquest DSV. However how many people do you actually know who used their Amiga for this? How easy was it to connect your Camcorder, or Video Cassette Recorders to your computer? While there were products out there for this, they were either expensive enough to place it out of reach of most consumers, or too complex. This is one of the things Apple got right! Not only did Apple produce the software, and gave it away on new Mac purchases. They incorporated 2 industry standards and coordinated with the camera and camcorder manufactures to incorporate these interfaces into their products. So I could latterly go to an electronics or camera store come home and plug it in and start working. With the Amiga we had an extremely capable device but nobody was coming on board with Commodore to make it easy for the average consumer. It’s like having a really fast and hi-tech car, but nobody is making the fuel for it to run on.

Software – Let’s face it, Apple makes some great software, even though one of my pet peeves with Apple, is that they develop these great tools, and then after a while when they decide to focus on something else they let the tools stagnate and then eventually kill them off. Not really caring if you built your workflow around their tools or not. I’ll use Aperture as an example. That aside, Apple has given us some great video and photo editing tools! For both the consumer and professional. iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, the before mentioned Aperture, and Final Cut Pro. These products were all geared towards how Apple was marketing their product! Except for the AmigaOS, Commodore was no longer developing software in house, nor where they driving other companies to develop applications specifically towards Amiga’s strengths. While we all know of the names of the applications geared towards Amiga’s niche. NewTeks Video Toaster, DPaint, or Lightwave. I do not know anyone who went out and specifically bought the Amiga for these applications. If you ask, you are probably going to be told more often than not that the Amiga was bought so one could play Lemmings or Pinball dreams.

Standards – Although Apple is known for developing closed systems, and walled gardens. Apple has embraced, adhered to, and developed industry standards. Which helped it establish itself in the Desktop Publishing world. For instance working closely with Adobe to develop Postscript for its flagship LaserWriter printers. Which saw the birth of Desktop Publishing virtually overnight. The adoption of IEEE1394, (Firewire) to name a few. About the only standard Commodore adhered to was NTSC or PAL for those in Europe. The complete reliance on custom chipsets, for video and sound made developing third party video cards, and audio cards almost impossible. It wasn’t until Amiga OS 3.5/4.0’s release came out that retargetable graphics was even remotely possible. This meant that any video card had to be written specifically to be used with that card or it was basically worthless. Apple had retargetable graphics since the development of the Macintosh II.

Timing – Out of the three items mentioned above, this more than anything else led to the demise of the Amiga, it was just too far ahead of its time! Nobody knew what to do with it. Even if you were able to figure it out you didn’t have anywhere to share your work. Had the Amiga come around after the advent of the internet, I think it would have been an entirely different ball game and I think the Amiga would have been used for what it was best at, multi-media. However back in 85 – 94 we didn’t have twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Using your computer for photography, or video editing is commonplace today, because of the internet. I read a quote once of someone who had sold their Amiga and bought a Windows PC I think it went something like this,”The video editing and titling features of the Amiga are awesome. The next time I need to title a home movie, I’m sure I’ll buy an Amiga again.” Unfortunately I am sure Commodore was dead and buried before that occurred.

In conclusion, while the Amiga did have some of the same qualities that the modern day Mac does, as far as multitasking, photo, and video editing capabilities as the Amiga and it is easy to sit and ponder what if. If Apple was successful with the Mac today, if Commodore could have somehow held on would the Amiga be viable today. I do not believe so. While Commodore was a market innovator with its products, it just did not do all that good a job of marketing it, or driving the standards necessary to keep being a leader. Though I guess that might be a moot point, because that seems to have become Apple’s job, all Commodore would have had to do is follow suit. So as others have pointed out ad museum. It all came down to timing. The Amiga was just too far ahead of its time!

One of the cool features of IMAGE BBS and C-NET was displaying fun and witty sayings during the login process (On older versions of C-Net I believe this was referred to as a Fortune Cookie.

Image BBS Random Saying (Screen Shot From Commodore Image BBS)

In some ways, especially if you login to a UNIX/LINUX box via a terminal, it looks just like a giant BBS. I thought it would be fun to duplicate this feature on my Linux development box. It will also give me the opportunity to introduce to you login scripts or “Profiles”, as well as basic file manipulation.

The last 2 BASH demonstrations were taken from Commodore 64 BASIC programs, and from an IMAGE BBS +. File, so let’s switch gears here, and take our source from a CNET Amiga 3.5c module that was written by Jim Selleck of Beverly James Products. This module was included on the CNET 3.05c Demo and Productions disks, and the comments state it originated with C-Net Amiga 2.0.

Before we begin I would like to throw out a quite plug for C-Net Amiga 3, and the brilliant work done by its author Ken Pletzer. C-Net Amiga 3.05c happened to be one of the most stable, customizable, and feature rich BBS software that I had a pleasure to run. This particular module was written in ARREX, which was an Amiga port of the REXX scripting language developed by IBM and included with Amiga DOS 2.0. There is a version of REXX that will run under Linux. So maybe in the future we could actually explore some native REXX scripts running under Linux itself.

Lets quickly take a look at the original source, as REXX, and it’s features under C-Net Amiga are pretty straight forward and lend itself to very easy porting into BASH.

/******************************************************/
/* Random Quotation Generator 2 for CNet AMIGA v2 */
/* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ */
/* By Jim Selleck © 1992 Beverly James Products */
/* */
/* Installation: */
/* */
/* Stick this Arexx program and the QUOTATIONS file */
/* in your PFILES: directory. */
/* #*/
/******************************************************/

options results
filename = “pfiles:quotations”

if ~exists(filename) then

do
transmit ” ”
transmit ” ”
transmit “The Quotations could not be found! Please inform”
transmit “the Sysop !!!”
transmit ” ”
transmit ” ”
logentry “Quote: `”||filename||”‘ not found!”
exit
end

call open quote,filename,”R”

max = readln(quote) /* Get maximum number of entries */
num = random(0,max-1,time(‘s’))
ctr = 0

if num > 0 then
do until ctr = num*5
line = readln(quote)
ctr = ctr+1
end

transmit ” ”
transmit ” ”
ctr = 0

do until ctr = 5
line = readln(quote)
if length(line) > 1 then transmit center(strip(line),76)
ctr = ctr+1
end

call close quote
exit

The lines in the /* */ are simply comments, similar to BASH pounds #

Filename = is simply setting the path to the quotations filename in this case “PFILES:quotations”
We then have the script saying, if the file does not exist ~exists, then output the text asking the user to inform the SysOp (System Operator).

‘logentry’ is a specific CNET AREXX function that will write an entry into the systems caller log.

The next line is  opens the quotations file, and then reads the first line, which will specify the number of quotes, Which is 100. Then the result ‘num’ will be a random number between 1 and the number of MAXQUOTES.

The file is then read from line X for 5 more lines, and is center justified for a 79 character line.  So we have a 500 line text file, each 5 lines is a record, containing the quote and the source.

Here is our simple BASH script called ‘rand_quote.sh’. The quotations file was read directly from CNET Amiga using the WinUAE emulator and saved to a capture file.

Let’s now take a look at our BASH script. I would recommend creating this in a dev folder in your home directory, once tested you can move it in to the proper folder.

You must also download the quotations file, from the following link.
https://www.catracing.org/hendrb/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/quotations.txt
1 #! /bin/bash
2
3 # BASH script to display RANDOM QUOTE and center text depending on terminal width.
4 # BASH script and quotations taken from CNET Amiga 2 AREXX PFILE
5 # AMIGA Version Copyright 1992 Jim Selleck and Beverly James Products
6 #
7 # BASH Script (C)24MAY2015 by Brent Hendricks
8 # Script and accompaning BLOG article (C) 2015 Brent Hendricks
9 # Script and quotes are public domain, the accompaning BLOG may only be used with permission
10 # Contact brent.hendricks@catracing.org if you wish to republish the article.
11 # Please visit Brent’s World @ www.catracing.org\hendrb
12
13 ## Get Terminal Width
14 TERMWIDE=”$(tput cols)”
15 ((TERMWIDE = TERMWIDE -3))
16
17 ## Set file path
18 QUOTATIONS=/home/local_hendrb01/dev/bash/randquote/quotations
19 TEMP_QUOTATION=/home/local_hendrb01/dev/bash/randquote/temp_quotation
20
21 ## Get number of quotations
22 QUOTES=”$(cat $QUOTATIONS | wc -l)”
23 ((QUOTES = QUOTES / 5))
24
25 ## Pick a record
26
27 RECORD=$(($RANDOM % $QUOTES * 5))
28
29 ## Read Quote from Quote file
30 sed -n “${RECORD},+5p” $QUOTATIONS > $TEMP_QUOTATION
31 sed -e :a -e “s/^.\{1,${TERMWIDE}\}$/ &/;ta” -e ‘s/\( *\)\1/\1/’ $TEMP_QUOTATION
32
33 ## Remove TEMP_QUOTATION scratch file
34 rm -f “${TEMP_QUOTATION}”

NOTE: Once you download the quotation file, you will need to rename it quotations, or change the quotations path to reflect the .txt extension (WordPress does not allow the uploading of files without extensions.)

We should by now know what line 1 does, and why we put it there, but as a quick reminder, Line 1 tells *NIX which interpreter to use. Just in case the user is in, or defaults to a different shell. Additionally AT&T used to default to the Bourne Shell, while BSD defaulted to the C shell.

While not needed if you never use a different shell, it is good practice, and insures compatibility.

Lines 3 – 11 are my standard comments, comments in shell scripts are preceded by #s

Lines 14 Gets the terminal width, and line 15 subtracts 3 from it. This is for the center justification routines later in the script.

Lines 18 and 19 set our file paths.
Line 18 is the path of the actual quotation file.
Line 19 is the path of the temp file created by SED

Lines 22 and 23 gets the number of quotations from the quotations file and puts them in the variable QUOTES. Note that our script is a bit different because we use the wc command to dynamically derive the number of quotes, as long as you remember that each quote uses 5 lines. This is done with the QUOTES=”$(cat $QUOTATIONS | wc -l)” command. Note the use and format here of command substitution. I am going to get nailed here by someone much smarter with BASH scripts than I am. For the wasteful use of the cat command, when technically you could have used just the wc –l and the file name. If done this way, the output was would have been ‘500 quotations’. To save time with a filtering statement, I just had the file cat’d, and piped through wc. The value is held in the variable QUOTES, then divided by 5. Since each 5 lines is a quote.

Line 27 Picks a random quote, in steps of 5. Since it would not do us much good to start reading in the middle of quote now would it?

Lines 30 and 31 are where the real magic occur, and what took me the longest to figure out. I could read various quotes all day until the sun came home, but while BASH has a command to left and right justify, it will not center justify. Again my method and someone else’s methods might vary. I could very well have loaded the quotations file in nano, or word and center justified it and re saved it. However that defeats the purpose of learning, defeats the purpose of making your quotation file dynamic, as each time you added a quote you would have to remember to justify it. It might also look funny if someone had a different sized terminal window then you did when you justified it.

Line 30 reads the 5 lines from the quotations file, and saves it in a file called temp_quotation.
Line 31 uses sed to center justify the text in the temp file and display it to the screen. The use of SED is outside the scope of this blog, and many good descriptions are available elsewhere on the net. If you are interested in the working of stream editor. I would start here. http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

Line 34 simply deletes the temp file, without prompting.

There you have it! A random quote generator for *NIX!

If we want this to be just like a BBS, and display it when a user logs in, we now have several choices to make.

Do we want this script to be run only when we login, or for all users?

If you want it displayed for all users, we must first move it somewhere where they have access to execute it. For this demonstration let’s move it to the /opt volume.

We can use the mv (MOVE) command.

sudo mv ./randqutoe /opt

I have to use sudo here, because root is the owner of the opt directory, and I do not have my local username added to the root group.

Once it is moved, I can verify the entire contests of the randquote directory were copied.

If I cd to /opt/randquote, I should have two files.

-rw-rw-r–. 1 local_hendrb01 local_hendrb01 9893 May 24 07:30 quotations
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 local_hendrb01 local_hendrb01 1169 May 30 13:22 randquote.sh

Make sure the file permissions match.

The next decision is if you want the randquote script to run only when you login to the console, or both the console and the terminal.

If you want it to execute when logging a console only,

Edit the following file in your favorite editor.
/etc/profile

And the following lines.

##Display Random Quote On Login For All Users Console Login ONLY
## Added by Your Name / DATE
echo
/opt/randquote/randquote.sh
echo

Save the file.
We must now edit the following lines in our randquote program, since it is no longer residing in your standalone development directory.

Change line 18 to read:
QUOTATIONS=/opt/randquote/quotations

Change line 19 to read:
TEMP_QUOTATION=/opt/temp_quotation
Save the file, now logoff then back on and you should now the random quote generated.

If you also wish a random quote to be generated when you launch a shell from a terminal window in XWindows or from the console.

NOTE: If you put in both files, you will have 2 quotes generated when logging in from the console!

We must do the following.

Using your favorite editor, add the following lines to /etc/bashrc

##Display Random Quote when opening a shell session via the terminal For All Users
## Added by Your Name / DATE
echo
/opt/randquote/randquote.sh
echo

Save the file.

Open a terminal session.

If you only want specific users to have the random quotes displayed.

edit their respective .profile and .bashrc files in their home directory /home/<shortname>/

For our next tutorial we are going to do three things with this script!

1) Add it to a LINUX login profile, for both terminal and console login
2) Add it to a OS X login profile, for both terminal and SSH login
3) We are going to add something magical for our OS X users!

So be sure to come back for next month’s technical blog, as we do more with *NIX!

Special thanks go to Ken Pletzer and Jim Selleck for the wonderful work you did in the 90s with C-Net Amiga Professional BBS. For the many hours of fun I had with your product!