Parking in ‘Chippy’

Ξ March 31st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Mumble |

Recently I bought Common Lisp [a heavy book off eBay] for a steal – brand new, and just £2!  The extra ‘bonus’ was that the seller was in Chipping Norton; a nice little town, and home to one JC [*not* John Cleese, or 'the other JC']. Anyway, rather than pay the postage, we had a nice little vroom to ‘Chippy’ instead.

JC’s on holiday apparently – pity, as I know he’d have loved to have seen the centre of town ‘amusement’ I was privy to – watching a Chipping Norton lady park a car – or at least attempt to. You can probably guess the type of vehicle? Yup – a bloody great 4×4.

I think she had around nine goes in total; finally leaving the thing so stuck out into the road that I could have parked my car between it and the kerb [I was so tempted!]

 

Spring Forward – but not with your phone!

Ξ March 30th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Motoring, Rant, Technology |

Less fun today for a Sunday: according to The Times, Clarkson is on holiday.

What with that, and the bloody clocks, my Sunday has only been slighted elevated by the rather nice weather [I hope it holds on into the evening so we can watch the ISS and its 5 ton robotic-shadow pass overhead from Cleeve Hill around 22.30. Hey, maybe a ‘roll’ down hill could be on the cards too!]

I love this time of year, especially this, the first day of Spring, when you just can’t but remark, out-loud, “how pleasantly light it is for seven o’clock!” But of course, only to be observed and then remarked upon if you’ve altered your clocks.

And that’s the bit I hate about today.

I’m especially displeased with my new Nokia 6500 Classic [bought very recently as a ‘Blue Tooth Buddy’ for my TomTom]. Why oh why is it that such a modern device can’t update its own fugging clock automatically!?

Ah, it can!

… it has an ‘Auto Update Time’ feature – that was switched off by default [why!]

… a while later…

Ah, it can’t!

03, Tele-O or T-For-Two, or whatever the name of the network is that I’m on, doesn’t appear to broadcast the time of day [or even the day]!

Now I just cannot bring myself to believe this; I mean you would surely think that knowing the time would be something a mobile-phone would, um, enjoy knowing – but T42 obviously think differently. Although, that said, mine would just continue to remind me to ‘Water the Plants’, one second past the stroke of midnight on a Friday evening – and always, always, when I’m having a rather erotic dream :- that I know I ‘had’, but then can’t quite recapture: thirty seconds past midnight! Bloody, sodding phone!

Thinking about how my mobile phone has failed me today – with a simple clock – I’m reminded of a rant I once had, all to myself, a while back when driving from Stow-on-the-Wold, back to Cheltenham. Now, a gorgeous road it might be – beautiful countryside, sweeping bends, decent cambers; even the odd straight! But, and this is normal for the Cotswolds, it’s a road that’s also prone to the odd ‘up and down’ – the “woldness”-‘downs’ of which killed my phone every sodding time!

However, losing the signal and ‘dropping out’ didn’t stress me: nope, it was the fact that I knew, just knew that T42 didn’t have a damn clue that, A) it had happened, and worse, B) *where* it DID happen, and I found myself once again going ‘hello, hello – are you still there …, HELLO?, … BOLLOCKS’. Actually, I don’t know this for a fact [not the BOLLOCKS bit - that happened], but given the technical-ineptitude that our mobile-phone network and operators display daily, I’d give anyone odds of 20:1 that I’m right!

How much better that they knew I hadn’t hung up [and could refund me for the call perhaps] – and, even better still – knew just *where* I happened to find that I was talking to myself [again]! Perhaps they’d see quite a few of their customers ‘drop-off’ the airwaves in the self-same location? And maybe, just perhaps, they’d consider improving reception in the many black-holes that are scattered about this green and pleasant land wold? Here’s an idea for all the phone operators – monitor this shit, and do the ‘right thing’!

Anyway, for now, back to the ‘time’ to finish.

Years ago I wrote to the Prime Minister [his Tony-ness I think it was] detailing how ridiculous all this jiggling about with clocks twice a year was. I mean, what’s it all for anyway – just so as some kilted, beardy-farmer in ‘Scawwtlund’ can find his sheep without a torch! I think they should all stay in bed myself – I do; and I bet the sheep don’t give a shit either way!

 

Sunday Bloody [Easter] Sunday

Ξ March 24th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Motoring, Mumble |


I’ve discovered why Sunday drivers are such pains in the arse – they’re all in neutral!

Today, Easter Sunday, *I* was in neutral; and judging by all the people who were sat right on my ahole [rear bumper], I assume that, as this is a ‘typical Sunday driver scenario’, all Sunday drivers must be in neutral too? However, my excuse for doing no more than 10 mph at times was that I was attempting a rather cool, gravity assisted experiment. Hmmm, maybe Sunday drivers are all trying something similar then [nah]?

What was I doing you ask? Well, it was a ‘super feat’ … endeavouring to coast the entire length of the Cleeve Hill, from the top, down into Prestbury High Street!

Cleeve Hill is fabulous; great views, superb walking on the common [an added bonus here is that as the public have the right-of-way you get to annoy all those ‘ruining a good walk’ golfing types]. It even has a groovy pub in the shape of the Rising Sun. But undoubtedly nice as it is, for me there’s always been one thing missing – in the hundreds of times I must have driven down this hill, I’ve always wondered if I could simply roll down it instead! You would ride the crest at the legal speed limit, and then, feathering the brakes as and when necessary [not much!], make it to the bottom, and Prestbury High Street. And I’d love to tell you whether or not this is all possible, but as I always trip over some ‘waste of a licence’ type doing 25 mph, I’ve never managed it. And needless to say, I didn’t manage to test my theory today either.

What goes through these people’s minds? “Oh f**k, it’s a hill!!! Throw out the anchor, floor the ‘go slower’ peddle” … you know I’m sure they must jump out their skins as the mountain bikers, tractors, 2CVs, ramblers and little old ladies with Zimmer frames all simply whiz past them!

In the end, and having normalised my speed in a second attempt, i.e., to try the last little bit from the 30 mph sign, we pretended to be looking for something – like trying to find a house that’s only got a name instead of a number. Well, I mean you have to pretend you’re doing something acceptable – when you’re doing 5 mph through the shops and waiting for the last little bit of a slope down to the white blobs that pass for roundabouts at ‘the finish’! Once you hit those, you yell ‘Rally!’ and, with a little bit of right foot, the world returns to normal – as does your blood pressure!

 

Focal and the PDP-8

Ξ March 18th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Books, Coding, Geeky, Oxford, Software, Technical, University |

One of the cool things about being at a university [still] is that people discard rubbish that’s someone else’s ‘treat’.

Recently I found a ‘Programming Languages’ Volume 2 manual for the PDP-8 – and it’s become my essential bedtime reading for now.

The book’s full of great stuff about how you should ensure that you’ve a teletype attached, and that you’ve got the steam-pressure just right before turning the thing on in the first place!

PDP-8 Programming

It takes me back to a time when programmers were, um, ‘novel’, men were ‘chaps’ and girls wore petticoats [actually, I got a bit carried away there!]

On languages, the book talks mostly about Focal; which I’d forgotten about altogether [a blessing really], here’s the Focal code for the Towers of Hanoi …

The Towers of Hanoi in Focal

I loved the PDP-8 though – keying in the bootstrap and forgetting to load the punched-tape was a great way to spend a half hour or so [oh, how I WOULD LAUGH at times like those!]

PDP-8

If you fancy playing with a real PDP-8[E] albeit remotely, then have a look here [you can even watch the machine operate via a webcam]: http://www.pdp8online.com/run.shtml

 

TomTom GO 920 Review

Ξ March 17th, 2008 | → 6 Comments | ∇ Geeky, Science, Software |

I have a new GPS – well it’s about a month old now – so I thought I’d share some thoughts about my Go 920, and its shortcomings.


The first thing I should say is that overall, I’m more than happy[ish] with it; so I should start with the …

PROs

  • It talks blue!

The first great thing is that, as it talks to my Nokia 6500 via Blue Tooth, this single unit does away with any need for a hands-free kit. Additionally, the supplied software [TomTom Home] allows you to sync between your phone and your 920. According to everyone I’ve called, and asked ‘can you hear me ok’, the quality’s good too.

  • It plays music.

The second thing is that I’ve also been able to do away with my iPod, as the GO 920 also allows me to store gazillions of music tracks, audio-books and even pictures [but see a 'con' below on this]. One really great feature here is that if the unit wants to talk to you ['Turn right in 100 yards' etc] while you’re listening to ‘The Boss’, it first fades the music, and pauses it. Once it’s done chatting the process is reversed, so you don’t lose anything [nor have a nasty transition from music to speech and back again]. Of course, it’ll also pause whatever it is you’re listening to if you’re on the phone.

Lastly, I’ve also been able to do away with my expensive iPod FM-transmitter add-on thingmy. Yup you’ve guessed it, the 920 can broadcast on FM too [or even via Blue Tooth if you have a really fancy car-radio].

  • It listens too!

Another of the 920′s great features is the voice-recognition – although this didn’t work right out of the box for me [I had to download a file from TomTom's website first]. With this you can talk to the 920 and tell it things like city, street and number.

A downside though is that you can’t activate the 920′s voice by voice, i.e., ‘tell it’ to navigate you to an address without first having to touch it [three touches are required to turn on voice recognition]. That’s a pity as you may as well stop and touch it [or else you might find yourself up the nearest lamppost!] See also a ‘con’ on the ‘Quick’ menu here.

  • It speaks in strange tongues.

Of course, you’d expect to be able to change the voice the 920 uses, and you can. You can even download extra voices using the TomTom Home software. I have several free ones [created by the TomTom community], and one paid for [John Cleese]. But, fun as having Stephen Hawking, NASA or ‘the lord’ JC direct you, the best voices are the computerized ones – as these can say so much more; like street names. They’re not too bad either, in fact, apart from the American one, that says ‘Rod‘ for ‘Road‘, they’re truly excellent.

A slight software annoyance here is that to find new computer voices you don’t select ‘Voices’ from TomTom Home, but navigate ahead two further screens and select ‘Computer Voices’ – something that I found confusing at first [goodness knows what the folks at TomTom were smoking when they thought this was a good idea].

On the ‘Rod‘ thing, my theory about this is that street names, or should that be ‘road’ names are stored internally in an abbreviated form, e.g., instead of being in the form ‘Old Kent Road’, they’re stored as ‘Old Kent Rd’ … now, how would you pronounce ‘Rd’, ‘Rod’ right!? As I write this I’ve just downloaded a UK versions of the computerized voice, but haven’t yet tested it. Fingers crossed then.

  • It has software!

The TomTom Home software is pretty damn good [if not entirely intuitive], and the connection to your computer is through USB and a nice desktop cradle. You can even operate the 920 right there on your desk from it – so pre-configuring routes etc is a doddle. See another ‘con’ below though.

There are tons of other great features available via the TomTom Home software too: Map Overlays [only seven listed at the time of writing though], Points of Interest [POIs], Routes, Icons, Colour Schemes, … lots! The software is also your point-of-contact for updating the 920′s ‘Safety Camera’ database! Um, to you and me that’s the ‘Speed Camera’ database of course [vital stuff!]

Before the ‘cons’, I must repeat that I’m happy[ish] overall with the 920, e.g., the built-in antenna is fantastic … even when you consider that mine’s not only transmitting on FM and Blue Tooth, but listening to satellites too.

However, good as it is, now for the …

CONs

  • You can’t ‘automagically’ turn on voice recognition [see above].

Why it can’t ‘be listening’ for a special phrase I just don’t know, ‘Oy, listen to me, I’m talking to you!’

The voice stuff just stops short in other ways too – for example, you can’t read out a number when you want to telephone someone – so you’re back to touching the thing, and risking a visit to the nearest tree when you do so. Having to pull-over or risk life and limb is not my idea of true ‘hands-free’.

  • Too much detail!

I wish that I could tell my 920 that one announcement is enough. For example, it’s not uncommon to get four or five announcements when one would do … ‘Exit ahead’ … ‘In two miles take the exit’ … ‘in two hundred yards, take the exit’ … ‘take the exit’ … ‘take the exit’ – enough already! This is something you just have to endure – very frustrating when you’re singing along to The Verve’s ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ and the music keeps on pausing! To be fair, there is an option to ‘disable early warning instructions’ but this only turns off the very initial ‘exit ahead’ warning – still far too chatty for me.

  • Not enough memory.

My 920 came with maximum memory installed [I think they all do] – which isn’t enough if you want to load up a good collection of mp3s etc. However, there’s an SD slot, so off I went to eBay and back I came with an 8Gb SD card!

Downer – the card needs formatting as FAT32 [think Windows 95] and therefore only supports upto 4Gb! Result, I have 4Gb of unused SD card. If anyone knows a workaround for that, I’d be most grateful to know what it is!

  • My radio’s crap. And most likely so is yours’!

The built-in FM transmitter just isn’t powerful enough. There you are listening to Billy Bryson’s searing wit when you suddenly get ‘break through’, sometimes to the point where Billy disappears completely and is replaced with some local DJ [git] who likes the sound of his own voice too much!

Now I know the 920’s transmitter has to be weak[ish] – else as you drive by people on the motorway you’ll possibly treat them to a blast of whatever it is that you’re listening to; which will come as a shock to them no doubt [that'd be fun though]. But it needs improving if you’re not to be constantly re-tuning the 920’s output frequency [touch, touch, touch again – watch that tree!]. I’ve found that setting mine to use 107.9 is best, or failing that, I just unscrew my car aerial. No interruptions now, but a bit of a bugger if you’d like RDS traffic reports. And that’s another thing – even with the antenna still attached to the roof, my 920 seems incapable of getting any traffic reports – the built-in FM transmitter’s too powerful perhaps? Argh! Well, it’s either that or TomTom want you to use their own traffic stuff; available now – for your credit card number. Who knows!

  • It’s a bit of a numpty!

If I leave home in Cheltenham, heading for some remote destination, I’d really rather the 920 keep its trap shut until I need it – when I’m out of my own home town! Like, I know my way around here better than you do – so shut the f**k up!

A small example here. Last week was Gold Cup week in Cheltenham – so the place was full of ladies that lunch [well, fuller than normal], and tweeds topped with flat caps – and the Irish! So, to escape all this I went to Alylesbury [if the local punters are all stoned, go look at stones I say]! Now, do you know where the 920 wanted to take me? Right past the racecourse, that’s where! No thanks, I know all the ‘wiggles’ around Cheltenham – and I sure as hell know how to avoid the racecourse. But, would it listen! Nope, all I got for about ten minutes was ‘Turn around when possible’. Why can’t I tell it that I live here – and to only start directing me when I’m outside of the town I’ve lived in for twelve years?!

  • It doesn’t like my ‘other’ books.

The only audio books the 920 ‘likes’ are those from Audible. Now I have a few of those, and it’s great that 920 knows where I got up to the last time I listened to any of them. But, how about all the other books I have – in mp3 format? Well, in a nutshell, it tells you they’re as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit would be, i.e., to go stuff ‘em where the sun doesn’t shine, i.e., they have to go with all your other mp3s. Result, when ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ finishes you *could* go straight into some random chapter in ‘Truckers’ [a Terry Pratchett 'must read/listen' I hasten to add]. And ‘no’, you can’t simply rename a .mp3 to .aa and get it to work [I've tried it]!

To be fair, this is partly Audible’s fault – why won’t they let anyone convert an existing mp3 into audible format beggars belief – they could even make you pay for the privilege. I would!

  • Not everything is available via the software.

Whilst the TomTom Home software is pretty good, it’s a pity that ‘Operate my GO’ doesn’t make everything on the 920 available. For example, whilst you can test voices over your PC’s speakers, you cannot select the 920′s Jukebox; so you can’t listen to your current audio book through your PC. I could do that with my iPod, so maybe it’s time I went back to that?

  • Shuffle sucks.

I have ‘shuffle’ turned on, yet whenever I select ‘Song’ all my tracks are presented in alphabetical order. Surely, as I’ve got it on, these should be shuffled? As it is, I have to select a song beginning with ‘A’ [usually A's 'Nothing'] and then hit ‘next’ to get the thing to randomize!

  • The Quick menu sucks.

You can only select from a predetermined list of things to go on this, and you can only select a certain number of things from that [six!] Also, my 920 often seems to forget what I had on the Quick menu, and drops back to some defaults it seems. Haven’t TomTom heard of small[er] icons – coz it’s as though that’s the bit that’s stopping this being really useful?!

  • What’s with the auto power-off!

While it’s docked on my desk, one thing that works very well is the hands-free [albeit not through my PC's speakers] – yup, you can do all the hands-free stuff there too – well, you can for a couple of minutes!

When you put the 920 in its cradle it asks you whether you want it to connect to your machine. Answer ‘yes’, and the hands-free doesn’t work, answer ‘no’ and the hands-free works. But, after it’s connected to your mobile-phone, why oh why does the bloody thing switch itself off after two minutes!? It’s as useful as bollocks on a priest if you ask me!

  • Volume, what volume?

Sometimes my 920′s volume changes for no obvious reason – not while it’s operating, but between operations. It’s like it wants to go back to some sort of default – although I can’t find such a setting, and the volume slider is at 100%. That too seems iffy by the way – like when I first tested it hands-free on my desk two things happened: 1. it nearly blew out its own speaker. 2. our dog shat itself with fright. On rapidly navigating to the volume slider [at 100% as always], and then just touching it, the volume decreased by around a third – to a ‘non-rattling’ ‘non-shit-yourself’ level – what’s with that then?

  • TomTom Support sucks.

Well, perhaps I should wait and see, as my only experience with this was when I found my 920 wouldn’t recognize my voice. TomTom support could only suggest I took it back to my dealer, whereas my dealer said ‘download this file from TomTom, put it in this folder, then …’ – which was all very clear and easy to follow.

Support – are you there? I’ve sent a link to this blog entry to them – and have asked them to comment [and correct me hopefully] – we’ll have to wait and see now.

P.S. I’m sure there were other things – other slight annoyances – but I can’t recall them right now [and recalling the ones I have has left me in a elevated state - as in blood pressure]. However, if I recall any later, I’ll be sure to write them up here. Stay tuned!

P.P.S. I dreamt about this post last night, and my brain reminded me that the 920 comes with a remote control! As my brain did when it first saw it, it/I mused that we have no idea what use this is. So I/we looked this morning. Well it seems as though TomTom don’t really know what use this is either – initially the only reference I could find to it had a picture of the thing, yet didn’t talk about it. So, are you supposed to use this instead of touch, touch, touching the display whilst driving? I doubt that it would put you in a better physical position, spine-wise, for your ‘tree visit’! What to do? Try it! So I did – it’s useless. In the end I thought it might be included so you could have some fun controlling some other person’s unsuspecting TomTom – but alas the 920 asks for permission before it can connect – damn it.

 

Bill Gate’s Last Day at Work

Ξ March 17th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Geeky |

Just found this video. Pretty funny!

Besides Microsoft people, it also includes cameos by George Clooney, Hilary Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bono, Steven Spielberg, Matthew McConaughey [Palmer Joss in the film 'Contact'], and a couple of unknowns [by me]; a black rapper [I think] and a talk-show host.

 

Virgin Galactic Girl

Ξ March 15th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Babes |

Virgin Galactic‘s new logo: too little botty!

 

The Infinitely Profitable Program

Ξ March 11th, 2008 | → 3 Comments | ∇ Coding, Geeky, Software, Technical |

A recent article on Slashdot about assembler games-programming on an Atari [Donkey Kong and Me] got me reminiscing about writing assembler apps in my own early days – and about the machines we had way back when.

Having earlier cut my teeth on a DEC PDP-8, the biggest kick I got was when CP/M came out. CP/M was initially a ‘business operating system’ – but – it was also a system that one could possibly afford to have at home – serious stuff for an up-and-coming nerd!

I was working for Tatung at the time, and as they built computers, I got to play with some pretty ‘expensive kit’ – twin five and a quarter inch floppy drives and everything! I mostly worked on debugging the ERSO BIOS, and also worked on the Tatung Einstein computer; which used a compatible but beefed-up version of CP/M called Xtal DOS.


The Einstein was a great little machine for a while [before MS-DOS machines really came into their own], as well as being able to run CP/M programs [VisiCalc, WordStar, …].


Also, as it had in-built sound and graphics capabilities [colour and sprites!] it could also run games programs. And all for £499 [that’s in 1984 remember]! That’s pricey for the day!


Peet’s Utilities:

I wrote articles for Tatung’s Einstein magazine, which I still have kicking around somewhere, and some commercial programs too. The most successful group of these was a suite of programs called, creatively enough, ‘Peet’s Utilities’ [1986].

Written in Z80 Assembler [I didn’t know about C at the time], the utilities included an undelete, hex-editor, function-key programmer (a TSR!), program auto-boot (like ‘run on start-up’ today), printer-controller, typewriter-emulator [yup I used the 'typewriter' word there] and a whole host of other things. I sometimes wonder, if I’d have ported these to MS-DOS, I might have become Peter Norton [I assume Norton's Utilities made heaps, whereas I didn’t]! I recently found the contract I signed for Peet’s Utilities – I got the princely sum of £1 per copy.

For completeness, I should say how Peet’s Utilities was written – the mechanics of it; as it’s quite interesting, and indicative of the times.

It was written on a CP/M business machine – another Tatung machine as it happens [a TPC-2000 - the rightmost machine in this picture].

Young Peet!

The left most machines in the picture are Tatung Einsteins.

The TPC-2000 was faster and had more memory than the Einstein – and so could run my macro-assembler more efficiently. It was also a ‘pure’ CP/M machine – so, by writing it on that I could be sure to not use some special Einstein-only feature.
After I built the programs on the TPC-2000 I ported it to an Einstein using a program called Kermit – where I’d test/debug it proper! Quite a code/build/test cycle for the times!

GO.COM:

User feedback [on both Tatung’s TPC-2000 and Einstein lines] repeatedly mentioned an irritation: that users often found they had to exit their current application [VisiCalc, WordStar, …] to perform simple disk operations, like finding a file on one of n floppies. It was a real and frustrating problem. For example, say they were running the popular WordStar word-processor and wanted to find an existing file for editing. Let’s also say they’re not sure which of a dozen floppy disks the file is on – they needed to use CP/M’s DIR command to locate it. But, in order to use DIR they’d first have to exit WordStar. Of course, once they’d found their document they’d have to re-run WordStar, i.e., they had to load WordStar off a floppy again – a real pain, esp. as we’re talking very slow floppy speeds here [for those that remember the sound - chunk chunk chunk is fairly onomatopoeic I think]!

To solve this problem I came up with the idea of GO.COM – the most successful, and infinitely-profitable program ever written?

When a CP/M program loaded into memory, it was always located at the same address, at 0100h – the start of the so called ‘Transient Program Area’ [TPA]. CP/M’s own mini-programs like DIR loaded elsewhere.

Well, it occurred to me that, as WordStar was still in memory [although the user had exited the program, the memory containing it (the TPA) was still intact] it would be rather useful to somehow re-execute the program in the TPA directly; rather than reloading it, i.e., why reload it when it was already in memory? However, to do that you’d have to execute whatever code lay at the 0100h address once you’d finished using DIR etc. But, how to make that happen – you couldn’t write a conventional program to do it, as it would have its ‘jump to 0100h’ instructions loaded into the TPA at 0100h!

That’s where GO.COM came in.

GO.COM contained no program bytes at all – it was entirely empty. However, because GO.COM was empty, but still a valid program file as far as CP/M was concerned, the CP/M loader, the part of the OS whose job it is to pull programs off disk and slap them into the TPA, would still load it!

So, how does this help? Well, using the scenario above:

  • the user exited WordStar
  • the user ran DIR and found his/her document
  • the user ran GO.COM.
  • the loader would load zero bytes of program off disk into the TPA starting at address 0100h and then jump to 0100h – to run the program it just loaded [GO.COM]!
  • result – it re-ran whatever was in the TPA when the user last exited to ‘DOS’- instantly [WordStar in this example]!

So, GO.COM, which consisted of zero bytes of code – and sold for £5 a copy is, I figure, the most profitable program ever written ( as any other program will return fewer £ per byte than GO.COM did)!

Is it really infinitely profitable? Well, in terms of what I made out of it obviously NO – I’m not infinitely wealthy. However, GO.COM could truthfully be a ‘money for nothing’ case. For example, priced per byte, it would look this way

Cost      £5
------- = --- =
Bytes      0

I actually had some ‘funny’ phone-calls and letters over GO.COM [no email back then]: Some purchasers – who were obviously ‘into computers’ – rang up Tatung to speak to me and to ask how – and why – I’d disguised the size of the program (as DIR reported that is was zero bytes). When I told them that it actually WAS zero bytes long, some of them became a little annoyed! “How dare you charge me £5 for nothing!” I told them that I hadn’t, I’d given them something useful!

It’s a pity CP/M’s CCP didn’t have more in-built commands; the existing ones were limited to a small set of useful disk-based commands:

* ERA erases specified files.
* DIR lists filenames in the directory.
* REN renames the specified file.
* SAVE saves memory contents in a file.
* TYPE types the contents of a file on the logged disk.

I later ported GO.COM to early versions of MS-DOS, i.e., before the EXE file format existed – and it worked just as well there too!

 

Fab Children

Ξ March 7th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Research |

Researcher: “What kind of sums do you like to do?” Child: ‘Well, I don’t like hard ones; like “what’s a hundred add seventy”. Seventy-seven add seventy-seven is ok though’

The child actually said “what’s a hundred and seventy” – meaning he’d been asked to add the two numbers in his made up question. ‘and’ is often used in place of ‘plus’ [an additive of some sort in English] of course.

Extra ‘amusing points’ really. As he stated it, the answer is the same as the question [apart from the "what’s"]

 

Duh!

Ξ March 5th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Silly |

On Radio 4 [BBC Radio] today they had a spokesperson from the RNID [The Royal National Institute for Deaf People] – ‘odd’ I thought that one often hears about the RNIB [Royal National Institute of Blind People], but little of the RNID. ‘Ah’ I thought, that’ll be because of Peter White and Radio 4′s ‘In Touch‘ programme!

My brain then said, ‘I wonder why the BBC doesn’t give the RNID a slot too?’

And then my brain called itself a prat!

 

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