OS/2 eZine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

16 December 2001

Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. and a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day.

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From The Editor

Season's Greetings

I wish you and yours the best of the holidays. I hope you like the festive little snowman and pine tree on the eZine logo this month.

Into Java - The End

Thanks to Simon Gronlund for his long-running Into Java series which comes to an end this month. I hope everyone will send a quick thank-you to Simon. I've really enjoyed his series over the years, and learned quite a bit about Java programming to boot.

Take the GCC 3.0 Survey

If you are a developer, you should take the GCC survey at the top of the GCC article in this issue. The developers are very interested in your feedback.

Convenience Pack 2

If you are interested in what will be in Convenience Pack 2 (Warp 4.52), there's an IBM slide presentation at Serenity Systems website. Quite interesting reading.

Windows XP and OS/2

I've spent a bit of time with Windows XP this last month getting new XP clients to work with OS/2 servers. I'm not going to talk about XP here, but there is one tidbit I wanted to pass along. If you use Netbios networking, you're going to need to switch to Netbios over TCP/IP as XP no longer includes straight Netbios in the standard installation. The nice thing, is that once you switch your OS/2 server over to Netbios over TCP/IP, XP picks up the OS/2 server right away.

When I switched the OS/2 server to Netbios over TCP/IP using Network Adaptors and Protocol Services, there was one little hitch. In the \IBMLAN\IBMLAN.INI file, for whatever reason it didn't update the

net1 = NETBEUI$,0,LM10,34,100,14

line which caused an impressive collection of error messages at startup. It should read TCPBEUI$ rather than NETBEUI$. Apparently straight Netbios is available on the Windows XP CD as an add-on, but we didn't bother looking into that option.

eComStation Coverage

There is another favourable eComStation review at OSNews.com. Don't forget to read the reader comments, they are as entertaining as the article itself.

Open Source OS/2

John Dvorak of PC Magazine devoted his column in current issue of PC Magazine to the possibility of open-sourcing OS/2. Although everything I have heard says that this isn't a possibility, it is a good idea. If you like the idea, there is an online petition you can sign.

Interesting Website of the Month

While not at all OS/2 related, The Wayback Machine is the most amazing feat of internet development I have seen yet. Go there, type in your favourite URL, then pick a date from the past. I was shocked to see my company's old websites dating back to 1996 there, complete with pictures and binaries. Just make sure you have JavaScript turned on or the links won't work. How does it work? They have a web robot that constantly scours the web looking for updated sites, and then it stores copies of them like a massive library for future generations to see. They've stored over 100 terabytes of data so far.

Damn Evil Spammers

A pox on whoever added my email address to a Chinese language spam list. Like I don't get enough spam that I need to get spam I can't even read!

This Issue

This issue, as thoughts turn to the holiday season, Robert Basler has a suggestion for your new year's resolution, Pete Grubbs looks at the press' effect on the OS/2 community and talks to Joachim Benjamins of Mensys, Platon Fomichev & Andrew Zabolotny talk about GCC 3.0.2, Isaac Leung explains the ins and outs of bugfixing at big corporations, Douglas Clark is back with a bonus two big installments of his series on ODBC and Simon Gronlund anchors the issue with his final Into Java column.

Please Support the OS/2 eZine

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