The Blog Is Still Up !

Posted on November 8, 2016

I was actually away from home for the last week, and I was thrilled to find that the Rainbow and its nutty network connection were still online, accessible, and functioning perfectly. The Rainbow continues to hum away, occasionally servicing a connection as indicated by disk reads.

I was thinking of improving a few things about the server. For easy modifications, I was considering:

• Adding compression when serving
• Caching in memory

The compression would probably involve linking with zLib and writing the appropriate routines to compress files as they are read from disk. It might actually improve the Rainbow's throughput since the bottleneck is still the serial connection itself. The second idea, and it could be combined with serving, would be to cache files in memory to avoid disk access. I wouldn't actually "write" any sort of caching algorithm. Rather, I would probably use the Rainbow's memory disk driver to create a memory drive and store files there rather than on the floppy. If compression were implemented, the compressed files could be stored on the memory drive rather than raw text.

Ideally, I'd also like to implement PPP for uIP/FOSSIL rather than relying on SLIP. Thankfully, Debian continues to support the SLIP protocol, but I couldn't find another major BSD or Linux distribution that did. Moving to PPP would make uIP/FOSSIL mildly better.

Finally, I do have to get around to documenting GW-Blog. The software is very easy to use, although it is miserable to read, I think. GW-BASIC is not a pleasant language for people other than the original author of a code base to edit or understand. Some documentation on how to at least use GW-Blog might lead to someone actually trying it !