Paul Legato

Dell only provides certain PowerEdge BIOS flash upgrades in the form of Windows-only self-extracting archives (despite the facts that they claim to officially support Linux and that the BIOS flash utility itself is a DOS program.) Ordinary unzip won’t open the self-extracting archive. You need to run it on a Windows system, which I don’t have. Here’s how to flash your PowerEdge BIOS without Windows.

Dell provides the biosdisk utility to make a bootable FreeDOS image with the BIOS upgrade executable on it, but it doesn’t work with the Windows-only PowerEdge 4400 BIOS upgrade, since that won’t run on FreeDOS. They claim that biosdisk isn’t intended for PowerEdge systems, since they all have Linux BIOS flashes available; this does not seem to actually be the case for the 4400.

The Windows self-extractor does run under WINE, but it demands an actual floppy drive device to write to, which my computer doesn’t have. WINE also doesn’t seem to support mounting an image file as a floppy device, for some reason. You’ll need to use something like VMWare or a computer with a physical floppy drive to get this to extract itself.

Once you have a floppy image, here’s how to flash without biosdisk or Windows available: Continue Reading »

Popularity: 22% [?]

Now that we have implemented Black-Scholes in Clojure, let’s make a Swing GUI for it. The Swing GUI will have text boxes for all the necessary inputs, and calculate prices and Greeks when the button is pressed. It’s a simple and straightforward way to get started in Swing GUI programming in Clojure. Here’s what it looks like.

The GUI is written entirely in Clojure with the Swing toolkit. Calculation state is stored in a series of atoms. Watches are used to update the output table automatically when an atom changes, an idea from Kotka. I used the excellent MiG Layout for general layout functionality, and generic Swing widgets (JTextFields and a JTable) for the input and output.
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Popularity: 100% [?]

The Black-Scholes option pricing model, implemented in Clojure based on the description at Wikipedia and these code samples.
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Popularity: 63% [?]