Tektronix 4010, 4051, and 4114 and Apollo DN10000 Join The Collection

I met a fellow computer collector in Boulder over the past weekend. He brought me four items of interest to my collection of vintage computer graphics gear: three Tektronix terminals (models 4010, 4051 and 4114) and an Apollo DN10000 workstation. All of these machines are “project” machines, which is just a nice way of saying there’s some sort of problem with all of them. That made them a little cheaper than they would otherwise be, but all of these machines are in the “hard to find” category for vintage computer graphics gear.

Playing With Themes

I’m playing around with WordPress themes for this blog because I discovered that the default theme here, Tarski, doesn’t provide a link to older blog posts or direct links to the categories. So the visual appearance of this blog might be variable for the next few days….

Direct3D Graphics Pipeline Sample Code Installer Bug Found

OK, I was finally able to reproduce this problem with the installer and the issue comes down to something downright weird. If I’m running dbmon or DebugView while the installer is running, then the code installs fine. If I’m not running a debug monitor, then the installation fails with no useful information in the log message (other than the custom action return code is 3, which indicates an error).

So now that I’ve found the bug, I’ll investigate getting an updated installer uploaded that corrects the problem.

How Do I Unit Test Something That Writes To A File?

This is a question that comes up periodically. Remember that a good unit test is one that is fast (< 100ms/test). A test that accesses files, databases or the network is not going to be this fast. But, we still have code that writes data to files or reads data from files and we want to unit test that code. So how can we do that?