Lloyd's Home Page

Most computer programmer's home pages are just a CV and some photos of their cats. Well, I have finally managed to scan in some photos of my cats . Maybe sometime I will put up a copy of my CV.

All I have up here at the moment is some software that I have written recently. Not all of this software is as tidy as it might be, but I am still working on most of it. Items without links are not on the web just yet.

shape2dat - Converts ESRI shapefiles to ASCII/binary XYZ files. Useful for some mapping applications.
digitise - Drives various digitiser tablets and produces ASCII/binary XYZ files. You must have GMT and be a C programmer to compile this. It is unfinished, but it works well enough for some uses. Bug reports are welcome. Send them to lloyd at must-have-coffee.gen.nz.
dem2grd - Converts old style USGS DEM files to GMT grid files.
xgrid 2.1 - A Motif/Xbae program to display and edit GMT grid data.
xgrid 2.2 - Updated to use libtool.
xgrid 2.2.1 - And then fixed.
pslabel - A Unix program to generate mailing labels. I gave up trying to get recent versions of Word to do the job.
mortgage - My update of someone else's program for calculating mortgage payment information. I don't know who the original author is.
mopscript - This program takes ASCII scripts and converts them into files suitable for downloading via MOP. This program was written to help a nice man at Compaq who was in a bit of a bind.
planet1 - My hack of Torben Mogensen's planet generating program. It writes out GMT grid files (no, not ASCII/binary XYZ files), and I have improved the accuracy of the arithmetic somewhat. Or not.
planet2 - A program stolen from the net that creates planets based on techtonic theories. I have temporarily misplaced this program. Whoops.

I have also written some software that builds under NetBSD/i386, but runs under DOS. This software usually uses the PC as some sort of lab instrument, As you can see, I only have one such program available for download at the moment.

atapi - displays the results of an ATA IDENTIFY command sent to the master device on the secondary IDE controller on a PC followed by the results of an ATAPI IDENTIFY command sent to the same device.

I have also been working on some device drivers. I have a habit of buying cheap peripherals designed for Windows, and then I write NetBSD drivers for them. Here is a list of hardware that I am working with at the moment, and what systems I am writing the driver for (if I have started at all of course). The items are listed in their implementation order.

New Media LiveWire - NetBSD - an AMD 79C940 (MACE) base PCMCIA ethernet card. This driver is ready for (it only has one known bug).
Epson Color(sic) Stylus 300 - GhostScript - This is an ESC/P2 printer that requires the rasters to be constructed to match the special (el-cheapo) print head used. I have written this driver three times now. This time I will put the code in CVS and make backups.
HP5300C - NetBSD - a scanner that speaks raw SCSI over USB. Lennart Augustsson (I even spelled that right without looking) has written a driver that provides SCSI over USB and I am in the process of testing it. This isn't 100% yet, but I can get pretty pictures scanned in.
GSmart 350 - userland - this is a camera that takes photos suitable for the web. When I have the driver written I will start uploading photos to this somewhat bare web page.
Seagate 20GB Travan - NetBSD - an ATAPI tape drive with enough capacity to be useful to me. NetBSD doesn't support ATAPI tape drives, so I have started writing the code myself. I have collected a whole pile of docs. Luckily the NetBSD scsipi layer does all the hard work for me.
Initio 940 - NetBSD - a cheap SCSI card. Someone else has contributed a driver to NetBSD. It all just works.
Acecat III - GMT contrib - a nasty little digitiser that is good for almost nothing. Acecad are also a nasty little company that won't release programming information for their tablets. (Compare this with other companies that publish this information on the web for all to use). I knew this before I bought the digitiser so I didn't spend much money on it.
Densei barcode reader - userland - It seems that this is non-programmable . I am going to have to write some software to look up book barcodes because I am getting tired of typing author and title information into my library catalogue.
Gameboy - fun - I have just bought a second hand Gameboy for $US15. Since one of my other projects is to build an EPROM burner, I think I am going to have fun with this.
Promise IDE Controller - NetBSD - I have a Promise Ultra66 IDE controller in my Ultra 10. This is not a normal configuration, and I had to do some work to get it to go. This configuration is completely incompatible with Solaris.

I am also designing an EPROM programmer. It will be based on a design from the net, but more full featured. This is mostly because I want the device to work with NetBSD, so things like burn timing should not be done on the host. I will post more details when I have them.

I am also a fan of the Z80 chipset. I have collected three hard to find PDF documents describing how to program the Z80 CTC. Sometime I will get around to feeding the PDF files through an OCR system. The PDF files are here.

Lloyd Parkes

Last modified: Fri Jun 15 21:12:34 NZST 2001