About This Site

The free downloads will be kept up to date as I revise the source in my own environment. Check back at least every 6 months or so to get the latest enhancements.

I will use a NEW flag to indicate areas which have been revised or added. Files will usually be in ZIP file format, so just get the latest WINZIP code from www.winzip.com and enjoy the examples.

About My Hardware

Previous to this I have been using a succession of home built PC's including my current latest (now 2 years old) which is a Cacheless Celeron 266MHz (with 66MHx FSB) Overclocked to 100MHz FSB and 4 times multiplier. Effectively it's been running at 400MHz since I built it. With dual fans, core temperature is around 40 degrees C.

About Me

This web site is one of three, the other two are work related. You will also often find chunks of a University web site mirrored on this site for the other part time students on my course. Although fairly late on in years, I decided it was about time I got educated last year when I signed up for a day release degree with the University of Hertfordshire.

Results to date:

Year 1 Programming (in Eiffel) Level 1 [A1] Formal Language & Deduction Level 1 [A1]

Year 2 Program Design (in Java) Level 2 [A2] Systems & Networks 1 Level 1 [A1] Information Systems Techniques Level 1 [APEL] Artificial Intelligence Level 2 [C1]

Year 3 Systems Design & Development Level 2 [A1] Systems & Networks 2 Level 2 [A1]

Year 4 Database Systems Level 2 [A1] Computer Nets and Apps Level 3 [A1]

Year 5 Advanced Databases Level 3 [A2] Issues in Design and Development of Interactive Systems Level 3 [C2] Final Year Project (Self Synchronising Database With Secure DDL) Level 3 [A3]

Points 390 - Award: 1st Class Honours Degree - Comp Sci

The r2.org.uk Equipment

Over the years there have been several changes to the level of equipment and the decor of the study. Back in 1987 the first home PC was a 25 MHz 386SX with 2 Mb of RAM and a 65 Mb Fujitsu hard disk. It had both a 3.5 inch floppy and a 5.25 inch floppy. This machine was purchased from Multiplex (now out of the PC market) for the princely sum of £1899 excl. VAT. Within the year I had purchased another 2 Mb RAM in the form of 18 DRAM chips and plugged them into the motherboard myself. Memory was £60 per megabyte back then - don't let anyone tell you they were the good old days. I won't bore you with all the stages in between but after about 3 more upgrades to the machine it had come to the end of it's upgradable life and was passed on to my niece (and now my nephew). I have built 2 other PC's for myself and the most recent (now two years old) is getting ready for a change again.
My current PC is called R2P2 because it's mine and it is basically a PII design. I found a really useful midi tower case with side panels that lift and slide out after moving a small catch near the top. It means I don't need to get any tools if I just want to check on a dip switch or swap a hard disk temporarily. This PC is what Q would call "fully loaded" as there are no more spare bays left for anything. From the top, a 40xCDROM, a 3.5 Floppy, a 100 Mb ZIP disk (required for University of Hertfordshire Degree Course). Then internally I have 13 GB and 5.2 Gb Western Digital UDMA66 hard drives. The motherboard is an ASUS P2B running at 100 MHz FSB with 128 Mb of PC100 RAM. The processor is a genuine Intel Celeron 233 (cache less Deschutes) which is currently running at 400 MHz and has done so for the past two years. I did try it at 450 but it was slightly unstable. You may ask why I am pushing this poor little chip that hard? Well, when I purchased it for £75, the equivalent real PII 400 MHz was over £500 and having just spent a few days reading Toms Hardware web site , I just couldn't resist the temptation. The guide pages I used were at Tom's  Intel's Slot 1 CPUs Uncovered which details the speeds and internal CPU formats which are available for over clocking. The P2B motherboard allows 66/100 MHz FSB speeds while keeping the PCI and AGP slots within spec., so I have no problems with my Matrox Millennium G200 16 Mb AGP graphics card. To finish, there is genuine Sound Blaster AWE64 Value sound card and a Diamond 56i Pro internal modem.
This machine has served me very well over the past two years, seeing me through Windows95(OSR2), 98, 98SE and all the intermediate service packs from the Microsoft web site. Things change however and time marches on, so in July 2000 I purchased Mandrake 7.0 Linux and installed it on a partition on my slave drive. I expected some trouble ( not the master drive, only a logical partition in an extended partition, etc.) but just by following the instructions, all seems to work fine. I now have a dual boot PC using BootMagic (version 5 of PartitionMagic and BootMagic, by PowerQuest,  is part of the Mandrake Package) and I'm able to use either OS with a simple key press during the boot sequence. The reasons for setting this up were two-fold. Firstly I have used UNIX (SUNOS 4.3 on SPARC 2, Ultrix 4.2 on DEC 3000, 5000, 9000 and Solaris 2.6 in a SUN SS20 to be precise) over the past several years and trying to support the shell scripting pages on my web site does require access to a UNIX system occasionally. Secondly, I want to get a broad band connection (ADSL) for home use and I just didn't like the idea of connecting a Windows PC to this portal with all it's inherent security failings.
Two other things have happened this year which have given me some other ideas of a more connected future. Firstly, the company I work for has announced that they want every employee to be connected and to that end are providing the opportunity (later this year) to buy/lease a machine of quite a high spec. for home use (19 inch monitor, CDwriter, etc.). Secondly, the company has just disposed of a few SUN SPARC SS20's, two of which I picked up for a song. I have now transferred all the memory into one of my SUN boxes and upgraded the internal 1 GB disk by installing an 18 GB disk along side. Plextor do a nice Solaris compatible 40xSCSI CDROM which I purchased from DABS as well. I also contacted the SUN web site and found that they offer a free binary licence for Solaris 8 as long as you have no more that 8 CPU's in your box (no problem here). The SUN Solaris 8 media pack does actually cost $99 from Palo Alto, CA., because it has 17 CD's and several install guides and release notes all packed in the box. This was all loaded up August 20th 2000 along with StarOffice 5.1 and Oracle 8.1.5i (all free as part of the media pack).
The next things on my list are already on order and I will keep you posted as they come on-line. First is a small LAN to connect this lot up together. I have found a nice 4 port hub (EN104TP) from Netgear which has RJ45 sockets for TP connections. As the SUN box has RJ45 in the motherboard, this was the most appropriate choice. I also need a [3C900B-TPO-SPLI] 3Com Ethernet card for the PC (not sure what we get with the company PC, I'll have to check the latest spec) and some wires. Next is a "real" modem. I know I have a Diamond 56i Pro in the PC, but this is a "winmodem" or a "softmodem" or some other internal hack that is cheap to make (it was only £35) and useless when you're not running Windows. So Mandrake Linux can't see it and neither will any other flavour of Linux. What I need here is a real external modem which any OS can talk to. Enter the USRobotics Courier V-Everything. Note the small UNIX mention under flexibility. These are actually made by 3Com who have had many years of networking experience and are generally regarded as one of the most stable and universally accepted modems around. After that I intend to get a small UPS unit to save my disks from the embarrassment of power failure. We get two or three blackouts a year in this region and it causes quite enough problems for a Windows PC, I do not want to be doing fsck's just because Eastern Electricity dropped a line.

The Kit

The LAN