amiga-news.de - Advent Calendar: Door 18

18.Dec.2022 Advent Calendar: Door 18 - Marcus Sackrow
For the fourth Advent, Marcus 'ALB42' Sackrow is our storyteller.

Marcus is a Free Pascal programmer and has managed a lot of projects over the years, which he regularly informs about in his blog.
In 2014, he started porting Free Pascal first to AROS and later also to AmigaOS 3.1. Most recently, he released Free Pascal 3.2.2 for all Amiga systems in May 2021.
Likewise, in 2015 he started working on his text editor EdiSyn with syntax highlighting for AROS (latest version 0.54.
In mid-2016, he began working on his OpenStreetMap viewer Mapparium, which he further developed to version 0.8 and also made available again for all Amiga systems. His extensive creative output also includes his free Pascal programme Leu for loading and limited editing of Excel (xlsx), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ods), TurboCalc (tcd) and ASCII (csv) files.

The list could go on, but of course his current project AmiTube must be mentioned: a YouTube client for all Amiga systems that makes it possible to watch YouTube videos on an Amiga. To do this, they are converted into Commodore's CDXL format and downloaded.

To shorten the time until Christmas a little, he has kindly put another game behind his 18th door: his "Amigale" is a conversion of the well-known "Mastermind" (or logic trainer) with words for Amigas from Kickstart 1.3, which is currently popping up everywhere as "Wordle". The task is to guess a word, whereby the programme tells you whether a letter is included or even in the right place. "Amigale" (download at the end of the story) contains both a German and an English dictionary:

(I should definitely have some more lessons in English...: what is "Spahi"??)

Thank you very much, Marcus, and keep up the good work on your projects! And with his anecdote, we wish him and all our readers a happy fourth Advent:

Amiga, Chemistry and Internet

In 1997 I started studying chemistry at the University of Siegen. My professor in the General Chemistry lecture (Prof. Meixner) was quite new at this university and had a lot of interest in computers and the internet.
He had a nice new idea for a new website and a student for it. But since he was new at the university, he only knew us first-year students and someone from my fellow students probably gave him my name when asked. So I introduced myself for the job.
The general chemistry lecture I had with him is a very basic lecture on chemistry, a bit of repetition from chemistry classes (so that everyone is on the same level) but also new things quickly so that it doesn't get too boring. One feature in contrast to later lectures was that it contained a lot of chemical experiments as a presentation on the professor's desk. And there were really many, sometimes 5-6 per lecture hour. Especially popular, of course, were all the experiments that had something to do with fire or explosions. (The phophore explosion left a deep memory, after the whole lecture hall had a whistling in their ears for 20 minutes, not healthy).
Professor Meixner's idea was to give the students a better way to prepare or review the lecture, which works best via the experiments. Of course, films work much better than simple pictures and text, so the idea was to record the experiments and put them on the internet with an explanation. I was to be responsible for the technical implementation, i.e. creating the films, converting them and creating the HTML pages. To show that I can do this well, I should first create the website for his research group.

At that time I only had my Amiga 1200, at that time still with modem as connection to the university's network. So I created and tested the whole page on my Amiga and then uploaded it via FTP to the university's server. The HTML texts themselves were all created with a plain text editor (GoldED), I tried some of the HTML editors but wasn't that satisfied. Especially since I tested the pages against the online HTML validator (HTML 3.2 was still quite new back then). Professor Meixner had such a key phrase for his research, "Espionage in the world of molecules", for which I had designed a logo: a water molecule with a magnifying glass in front of it. And since I had just read some 3D course in an Amiga magazine, I implemented the logo as a 3D animation (Lightwave for the 3D, ADPro for converting/shrinking images, MainActor for the GIF animation). I was satisfied and the professor was thrilled.
Later versions of the page are still available on archive.org (a little warning: 90s wepage-overload ;))

For the actual project, money was now requested, a computer with frame grabber card and a very cheap (PAL) camera were bought - cheap USB cameras did not exist yet, hence this combination. The camera was chosen because some of the experiments were very dangerous and we had to expect that the camera would be destroyed or at least damaged. However, this did not happen, as we were always quite careful and protected the camera extra, partly with its own, additionally protective housing.

There were three people involved in total, a technical assistant who prepared and carried out the experiments (she had a lot of experience there as she also did this for the lecture). An advanced student (I think he was about to graduate) for the technical support and texts on the website and me as the person responsible for the technology and the actual website "programming".

The basic idea was to record the experiments, then put pictures of them and descriptions on the web, and if possible even the videos themselves. But we quickly ran into the problem that almost all students only had access to the internet via modem (like me with my 33,600 modem). This meant that the films could not be too big.
On the other hand, there were hardly any video formats that could be played universally. So we decided on MPEG, because you can almost always find a player there (even on the Amiga) and, as a stopgap, GIF-Anim.
Professor Meixner set the file size limit at 500 Kb. The Amiga was again used to create the web pages and especially the GIF animations (including the background image, which was also created on the Amiga with PPaint).

The recording and processing of the experiments took several months, and later the descriptions of the experiments were translated into Spanish and French and supplemented with small quiz questions.

A funny anecdote at the end: when the site went online, the university was very worried because it described how to make explosives (black powder is one of the experiments, but also phosphorus or termite; they are pretty violent experiments). So they didn't want to see these experiments on the free internet, we had to install an IP filter so that only students of the University of Siegen could see these experiments. A few years later, nobody was interested any more.

The website still exists today, on archive.org, but also as a copy on my own site.

Download: Amigale1c.zip (88 Kb) (dr)

[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 1 - 18. Dec. 2022, 18:43]
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