shoei_mike

Posted here because xenogram won't see it in my twitter feed.

Clicky on the image takes you to the artist's blog, the link below is the start of the story.
sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-and-babbage-vs-the-economy/

From The Daily WTF: "I've heard of Gisborne, Ashburton, Darfield, and Kaikoura", writes Steve Chadbourne, "but that last town is a new one to me."

We got this on DVD a few days ago. After two episodes, I'm sold. I shall be savouring the next twenty and then plotting a path to obtaining the next season. Maybe one day I'll find a couple of mint seventies-to-eighties police specials* and a riding partner.

*not totally unlikely - kai_loi had a Yamaha one for a while.

You're watching C4's 80s weekend and think "Hey, I've just been rickroll'd", even though you weren't really.

Five of us just had our second session of MegaTraveller. Yes! I found an RPG running in Greymouth. The GM and one player were in a game that ground to a halt (after 100+ sessions) about ten years ago. They want to get it going again, so the plan is to link this new game into the old once the characters are up to that level. That's expected to take some time. Sessions are 4 hours or so every fortnight.
( RPG detail... sealed for your protection )

Opps, just got caught out by this, which reminded me of the above xkcd comic. Luckily this happended in testing, thanks to a Mr O'Connor in my data set. He will now be known as Mr O\'Connor. Anyone else with similarly dangerous characters lurking in their name will be mangled in the same manner.

The old DOS/PDS BASIC app I've been working on for the past 20 years or so (with some breaks to do other stuff) was purely Microsoft PDS BASIC (and a little MS-DOS batch language) until recently. Now parts of it are in Delphi, some of which contain SQL queries, since it's now also a front-end for a PostgreSQL database running on a Linux server, with python scripts doing some processing on that data. That makes 5 languages I had to code for, not including the HTML generated by python cgi-scripts on the server. It's rapidly becoming a Tower of Babel.

Delphi (+ZeosLib) is nice for making a pretty Windows UI for your SQL database and as command-line middleware between BASIC and the SQL server. PostgreSQL is like playing Zork with databases. Python is effectively concise..
The server side of the same project has involved Debian with bind, dhcpd, lighttpd, iptables and ulogd - in addition to the aforementioned PostgreSQL and Python.

Busy. Very busy, but having fun too.

Found via Geek Parenting.

Next week's fun interfacing project is talking to a voicemail system. Like the PBX with the MCP last week, it's talking TCP/IP and I'll probably hit it with Delphi/Indy. Unlike the PBX, I don't have the actual device in my secret programming lair*. For the testing, I might have to hook up remote access to a PC on-site. Anyway, the vendor did manage to provide some DLLs and example code... in VBSCRIPT!

Thinking it'd be fun to have a play with this VBScript code in a debugger, I asked the friendly search at MSDN. All the results mentioned there was a VBScript debugger but said to search MSDN for it. When you search MSDN, all the results mention a VBScript debugger but say to search MSDN for it. After extracting myself from the timeloop with my trusty sonic screwdriver (vodka, orange and loud rock music), I tried a Google and found ScriptOMatic 2.0.

It isn't a VBScript debugger but I still like it because it's evidence that within Microsoft there are a bunch of people messing about without much managerial supervision. Exhibit (A) these great release notes...

Actually, our original plan was to emulate the Coca-Cola company, which a few years back released New Coke, a product that met with almost universal disdain. Needless to say, things looked grim, but then some unsung genius at Coca Cola had a brainstorm: they suggested that the company do nothing more than bring back the old Coke, now christened Classic Coke. And guess what? It was a huge success! We figured, OK, we’ll do the same thing. We’ll write a piece of software that nobody likes and release it as New Scriptomatic. We’ll let people grumble and complain for awhile, and then we’ll bring back the old Scriptomatic (or Classic Scriptomatic) and everyone will love it! We’ll be heroes, and – best of all – we won’t have to do any work.

In the end, though, we decided to create a brand new version of the Scripotmatic, one that actually worked: Scriptomatic 2.0. And to celebrate the release of this new utility, we decided to hold a make-believe press conference. Here’s the transcript from that press conference:

There's more but you'll have to try ScriptOMatic 2.0 yourself. Windows Genuine Advantage(R)(TM) or a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a recent toenail clipping required.

---

*guarded by a cheeky weka, a bossy elderly white duck** and kamikaze wood pigeons.
**the duck is currently on summer leave but be warned, she lives nearby, and I have photographic evidence that she and her minions are working on a clone army.

I've been writing Delphi code to log data from an ethernet-TCP/IP connected PBX. People make calls, the PBX sends out a line of text with the details. We used to log this on the serial port, but serial ports aren't cool anymore. An Indy client component seemed to be the best way to do this, so I coded and drew forms for an app. Since the PBX had not been delivered yet, for testing, I made an Indy server app which needed some kind of greeting message to send to the client. Obviously this should be "Greetings, program." Little things like that help to keep you sane. Later, the PBX arrives. It's about the size of a large old-style desktop PC, with six modules. What should be the name of the module that controls everything?





There is no way I'm going to hook that thing up to a laser. I'm not even going to turn my back on it.


End of line.

RNZ news reports that the pillars will be returned to the Grey Main School Reunion Committe. That is, unless the Greymouth Mayor steals them back first. This article at stuff.co.nz has Mr. Maika Mason's statements. Long story short, he says we did it so we didn't get stuck with them permanently. The rest of what he says is _so_ unlikely to help the situation.

Here I am rocking out at a Skunkthorn concert. I filled in my Facebook profile with my favourite music as 'Skunkthorn, Marty and the Fax Machines, and The Titanium Aubergine Pesudo Choir". muerk wanted a picture of me at a Skunkthorn concert, so here it is. I'm hereby declaring that Skunkthorn is the greatest, sharpest, smelly-est band that never existed.

From Linuxdevices.com, Bill Buzbee constructed his own homebrew computer based on his own microcoded ~4MHz CPU. The construction is wire-wrap, and uses about 200 74-series ICs. If that wasn't cool enough, he's retargeted a C cross-compiler to port Minix for it, and demoed the thing. Also, he's put the full schematics on his website too.

Buzbee is my new hero. He scores 0.95 +/- 0.1 Woz.
Make that 950 +/-100 milliWoz. Sounds better.

from Knuth:

THEOREM 2.                                                 
There exist arbitrarily long songs of complexity O(1).     
                                                           
PROOF: (due to Casey and the Sunshine Band). Consider      
                                                           
the songs Sk defined by (15), but with                     
                                                           
           Vk = 'That's the way,' U 'I like it, ' U   (16) 
                                                           
           U = 'uh huh,' 'uh huh'                          
for all k. []
   It remains an open problem to study the complexity
of nondeterministic songs.

excerpt from The Complexity of Songs. A Computer Science student friend told me about this paper back in '94/'95, and I just rediscovered it today.

18V of spinning steel motion. If you told me about this, I'd say "that'll work, but not well". It works far better than I expected. It's really cool the way they mount the complete drill, instead of stripping it down and just using parts.

I'm sure this has been in the pipe a while, but I haven't seen anyone mention it on LJ. The trailer looks brilliant. Napoleon Dynamite-esque +Kiwi. The website (doubleplus flash) perfectly matches the feel of the movie too. I got Team Eagle. Good - 'cause eagles are slightly better than sharks.

My mother, who I thank for introducing me to scifi by taking me to see Logan's Run back in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and seventy something, dropped off a VHS tape of The Last Starfighter. I remember the movie, and the game very fondly. The movie was cool 80s scifi - back then, anything with aliens and a budget was cool. Starfighter was super-mondo-extra-cool because it had computer graphics (rendered on a Cray X-MP, which is cool by itself - let alone when it makes imagery for a movie with aliens), and a videogame.

Right about that time, the affordable VCR and the affordable home computer arrived on the scene too. I could watch the movie without waiting for a re-screening or its appearance on TV. While I don't currently endorse or practice illegal duplication of computer software, I have - in the past - been familiar with the phrase "ARRRR!", thus I could also play the never-released original Atari version of the game over and over. So I thought I'd look up Starfighter on the 'net. To my surprise, other people out there really liked Last Starfighter too. Other people with time and skill. Really really liked Starfigher. So they made it. Wow. Also they made Space Paranoids from TRON.

Just when you may have thought things couldn't get any more 80s video-game-movie crossover esoteric, I find they made The Bishop of Battle from Nightmares(1983). Whoa. I thought I was the only person that remembered that movie, and it had passed unnoticed from this world. Nope. Not only have RogueSynapse recreated the game, and Nightmares(1983) is out there somewhere on DVD, but also, and best of all, iMockery mocks it. If you click only one link on this entry, make it the last one. Maybe I can tempt you by quoting, "Emilio Estevez, powered by the sounds of punk on an ancient Walkman, is a video game master named J.J. Cooney." and "and yes, that is Moon Unit Zappa playing the Starhawk game".
Premium stuff.

1987 : Prozac makes its debut in the United States of America.
1987 : Japan produces this cure for depression...

... and now I have one... In that colour scheme, although it says "HONDA" where the picture shows "Hurricane". Here's more about the CBR600F Hurricane. I particularly like the part where it says "...enough power to make the Hurricane the first 600cc sportbike to cover a quarter-mile in under 11 seconds".

I used to ride motorcycles. For quite some time, I rode motorcycles bigger than this one. Now, it's been about 10 years since I rode, and my attitude to personal velocity has changed. My attitude to personal acceleration is still just the same. Unfortunately I can only experience a couple of seconds of blissfully quick acceleration before I've reached my maximum legal velocity, which I'm now much more careful to observe.

I'm also now much better equipped to survive a mishap at velocity. My new riding gear is some kind of special tear-resistant nylon with pockets that contain foam padding or hard plastic armour. It makes me feel like Batman. Without an Alfred to help me suit up, though, there is quite a delay before I can answer a bat-signal.

These are some of my problems. They are problems I'm very happy to have.
Oh yeah, nearly forgot the best aspect of this concerns muerk. To paraphrase Batman, "It's the bike, chicks dig the bike."

Single or coupled (or multi), pro or anti (or apathetic), I think everyone can benefit from StrongBad's reflection on the meaning of Valentine's Day through the medium of his Teen Girl Squad comic, issue 12. Thank you, muerk for that link, and for being my Valentine.