Spot Installation and Release Notes

This page provides a guide to installing and updating SPOT on your own web server

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Release Notes

Installation-WinXP/2000

 

 

RELEASE NOTES:

Current Version:  0.93

You can download the current version for Windows-based servers from here.  The UNIX version (in ZIP form) is here.  

Changes to 0.92:

  • Eliminated dependence upon external Python CSV library.
  • Increased maximum execution to 20,000 instructions.

Changes to 0.91:

  • fixed crash on line with an odd number double-quote characters. Now automatically adds an additional " at the end of the line if necessary to close the quotation (e.g. SAY "Hello)
  • fixed: when reading integer-like strings from an input datafile, the values are now converted to integers (instead of strings) so they can act like integers with full arithmetic capabilities.

Changes to 0.90:

  • Added bit operations: AND, OR, XOR, 1-COMPLEMENT, RIGHT-SHIFT, LEFT-SHIFT
  • Added bit-oriented printing: SAYBIN and SAYHEX
  • Added wordsize restrictions everywhere inside the emulator
  • Added wordsize choice on the SpotEmulator screen
  • Added wordsize explanation in the Programmer's Guide

Changes to 0.82:

  • new instruction: SAY _VERSION will print out the current version (note the underscore).
  • Fixed bug: WRITE C2,C3 now works
  • New web page: InstallationAndReleaseNotes.htm.  In case you are wondering about its contents, note that you are reading it now.

INSTALLATION -- Windows XP/2000/Vista/78:

  1. The Spot Emulator is a web page powered by a Python script.  You should know something about Python and its scripts.
  2. You need to have a web server running.  To test whether you have a variant of Microsoft's IIS web server running, try looking at the default web page that Windows typically installs on your system: http://localhost/.  If you either see a web page successfully or get a message that you do not have permission to view this page, then you probably have IIS or a variant of it running.
  3. You need to have the Python package installed on your system, and your web server should know about it.  To test this, create a small file, called testpython.py with the following contents:
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"
print "<html><body>Python works.</body></html>"

 Place the file into your \inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin directory and in your browser, navigate to:  http://localhost/cgi-bin/testpython.py
If you see a web page containing just "Python works." then you are ready for the next step.

  1. If there's still a problem running any Python scripts by your web server -- for instance, you get something like "Internal Server Error" when trying the testpython.py script in step 3 above -- you may need to create a .pth file in your Python directory pointing to the directory that the testpython.py script (and also the Spot .py files).  Let's suppose that your testpython.py file is in the directory c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin.  Create a file called paths.pth in the directory that contains the Python.exe file, and with an ordinary text editor (like Notepad, not Word) put two lines into it:
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin\Spot

Now try navigating your browser to:  http://localhost/cgi-bin/testpython.py

  1. Download the current version of Spot (see Current Version above) and create a subdirectory of  \inetput\wwwroot\cgi-bin called Spot and place all of the files inside the downloaded .ZIP file into it.  Then go to the web page: http://localhost/cgi-bin/Spot/  There is the main Spot page.  Go to the Spot Emulator page, and try entering the instruction:  SAY "Hello World!" in the program area and pressing the Run button.  If you see "Hello World! in the Output area, you are done!  (If not, there is probably a problem with the linkage between your web server and Python.)

INSTALLATION -- Unix/Apache:

0. you will most probably need root access

1. Place the contents of the zip file into /var/www/html

2. If necessary, set the permissions and owners of every file in that directory to apache:

$ chmod +777 *
$ chown apache:apache *

3. Open up the apache config (possibly: httpd2.conf and commonhttpd.conf ) and set the following:

DocumentRoot /var/www/html
...
<Directory />
  Options -All -Multiviews
  AllowOverride None
<IfModule mod_access.c>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</IfModule>
</Directory>
...
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
...
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler cgi-script .py
...
</IfModule>
...
<Directory /var/www/html>
Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
Options ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
<IfModule mod_access.c>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</IfModule>
</Directory>
...

the "..." denote unchanged portions.

4. If the files inside your Spot ZIP file contain carriage-return/linefeed line endings, then the UNIX version of Python may choke on these line endings (which should be just linefeeds under Unix).  Open only these .py files in kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) and click Tools > End of Line > UNIX and hit save.

 

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
All material related to the SPOT processor may be copied freely, however the author must be attributed.