BBS: Inland Empire Archive
Date: 02-06-93 (13:37) Number: 308
From: CORIDON HENSHAW Refer#: NONE
To: RICH GELDREICH Recvd: NO
Subj: Ra user Conf: (2) Quik_Bas
Hello Rich!
Tuesday February 02 1993, Rich Geldreich writes to Coridon Henshaw:
>> I've got some interestion projects on my mind now, like a nodelist
>> converter. A good estimate is that my converter would shrink the
>> nodelist from 1.7 megs to 1.1 megs.
RG> How hard is that exactly? (I've never got my hands on the nodelist.)
Not that hard, the nodelist is in a real messy format. It's all comma-
delimited fields, with very many limitations, like a BPS
rate field that can't go over 9600, so the flags have to be
used for anyone who has a modem that does 2400 or faster
(So you know what "standard" the modem uses).
To make things worse, there are non-standard flags in use,
and valid flags after a comment escape code. It's a real
headache to handle all those things.
If you'd like to see one of the worse formatted listings
around, ask your sysop for a copy of the Fido nodelist, and
be ready to recieve 1.7 megs uncompressed, or 800K ARJed.
All I needed to do is replace each valid flag with one bit
in a four-byte flag block. 2 bytes of the flag block are
modem flags, and the other 2 are system flags.
RG> My latest project (which I've been doing on and off since '87) is
RG> the generation of PI.
RG> My first program, all-assembly on the 6809E
RG> microprocessor, could generate
RG> RG> about 2,000 digits in about 6 days or so...
I guess the 6809E ran at 1Mhz <grin>
RG> My latest program in 80286 assembly can do it in under 7 seconds!
RG> Now that's optimization!
Pritty good.
RG> (Of course the 80286's DIV instruction didn't hurt - the 6809 didn't have
RG> RG> one...)
I read that DIV is slower than downloading 100K at 300bps
;) Couldn't you make it faster by using a replacement for
DIV?
Coridon Henshaw
--- GEcho 1.00
* Origin: TCS Concordia - Mail Only - Toronto, Ontario (1:250/820)
