The Mad Ramblings of a psBASIC User
NOTE: screen colors are my choice. The default is your terminal's.
We love Pi Shack BASIC (psBASIC) and are constantly finding new and fun ways to put it to use in our daily computing. It makes many tasks quick and simple. Like the shell it provides glue to combine Linux tools into larger solutions. Stay tuned for many simple recipes demonstrating its various powerful features.
Automating Tasks with psBASIC and Databases
While psBASIC has no built-in support for accessing database servers (like MySQL) its abilities to communicate and control other programs and easily parse text table data makes it quite easy to launch tasks based on data in a database. ...
Thomas Kurtz, Co-inventor of BASIC has passed away
The last of the co-inventors of the BASIC programming language passed away on the 12th of November at the age of 96 (CHM article). Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny pioneered the language that made the personal computer era possible. Their contribution can not be under estimated. From the earliest significant kit PCs to those made in the 1980s they all shipped with a BASIC interpreter built-in. It was necessary to learn the language to do anything useful with a PC since software did not yet exist. 
But the language was made for learning and it is easy to learn.
Their influence does not stop there. Many languages over the years have been formed by BASIC in one way or another. Many companies have made parts of their fortunes on various versions of BASIC. Many computer professionals started with their BASIC interpreters on their PCs. Kurtz and Kemeny's contribution to PCs was HUGE! ...
Hunt the Null Byte (\0). Goose Eggs?
A client of mine bought a Python module and asked me to install it in his Odoo installation. I grabbed the files off of the shared file server and proceeded to install it. In the process of running "py3compile" I received several complaints of "null bytes" in the sources. But "py3compile" was not kind enough to tell me which files! What was I to do?...
Pi Shack BASIC Helps with the Too Many Files Problem
If you've been a Linux administrator for a significant amount of time you have probably run into the "too many files" problem. That time when you try to do something with a large list of files and the shell squawks about "too many arguments". This is caused by the fact that the kernel has limits on how many arguments it can pass to a program. If there is large set of filenames to be passed you can easily exceed that limit. psBASIC can be a significant help in this situation. ...
Watching Apache Website Logs in Real Time with psBASIC
A *NIX server administrator has a lot of tools available for processing text based log files. But often times they don't work quite as well as we'd like in real-time. Its easy enough to grab slice and grep for specific bits of data. And there are some tools like "goaccess" that can provide phenomenal real-time output of specific sets of stats. All of these tools have their place and are very helpful. But there are times where you just simply need to see something other than what comes pre-canned. ...
Toggle Switches Make a Macro Keyboard with psBASIC
In the past two episodes we were able to grab system statistics and reflect them on to a set of 8 LEDs. The last part of this particular project is to use the 8 toggle switches for something. In essence they will make a macro keyboard where each switch will run some piece of software based on its new state. This gives us 16 possible actions. ...
psBASIC Displays System Stats with LEDs
Building on the previous episode I will periodically put the gathered system statistic on 8 LEDs to simulate the blinken light displays of yesteryear's computing big iron. Those lights would blink like crazy as the various components of their CPUs processed instructions. Since our SBCs don't have physical access to such information I will update my LEDs with the bit-pattern of a busyness counter. ...
psBASIC Gathers System Stats
For some reason unknown to me a DDP-24 found its way into our backyard when I was growing up. It was funny to see that giant behemoth next to my TRS-80 model I. But all those blinken lights and shiny toggle switches were way cool! The Altair and IMSAI had plenty of toggles and blinken lights too! Recently I wanted to build a steampunk like computer and wanted plenty of toggles and blinken lights like those oldies had! ...
psBASIC does NEO Pixels
Pi Shack BASIC is here!! It's a quick, fun and simple way to program the GPIO features of modern SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. It provides a classic BASIC experience with live access to hardware features, very similar to what was common with the microcomputers that became available in the 1970s and '80s. Plus it unlocks a lot of the potential of Linux I/O and interprocess communication. ...
Pi Shack BASIC - Now Available!
Version 1.0 has just been released. It is the easiest and most interactive way to learn and experiment with hardware on and attached to SBCs. Type a command and watch your hardware do something. Type another to read its state. Manually fire off subroutines while developing and testing hardware. It also has many UNIX related features like reading from some other program or writing to one. It can open SPI, I2C and UART devices, optionally passing additional hardware parameters, like clock rates. It even includes features for handling text data files (CSV, TSV, ...) as is commonly exported from various software packages and found in the the /proc, /sys and /etc directories. I routinely use it for data-mining Apache logs. And it comes with a full on-line reference manual! ...
Pi Shack BASIC is coming...
Pi Shack BASIC is coming. It's a quick, fun and simple way to program the GPIO features of modern SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. It provides a classic BASIC experience with live access to hardware features, very similar to what was common with the microcomputers that became available in the 1970s and '80s. ...
