We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • or maybe even a miror-image blue Gumby …

    The Expo 2010 Shanghai mascot looks like a blissed-out version of the angry Wrigley’s gum character, don’t you think?

  • actually, the internet is really made of mantids

  • Amiga chiptune

    It’s the demo that came with MED 3.1 in 1991: Teijo_Kinnunen MED SynthSong2.

  • The lost art of the ramdisk

    You don’t hear anything about ramdisks these days. What with intelligent OS file cacheing, we don’t really need them. Back in Amiga days, though, the RAM: drive was blisteringly fast. You’d put your small files there, and you could move them around really quickly.

    Third-party ram disk drivers added features like the ability to survive a reset, and be more dynamic than C-A’s offering. The ASDG Dynamic Ram Disk was written by Perry Kivolowitz, who went on to win an Oscar for digital rendering techniques.

  • elizabeth cotten in 1985

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm5-WdB_aVE

    (not embeddable, sorry)

  • as featured on the back of the 1645 yellow pages

  • Here is a nice picture of an owl

    an owl

    I got it from a government report somewhere, so it’s copyright someone else, but you needed to see it.

  • diary of a geonumpty

    I have a GIS problem:

    There are two layers in the map above:

    • the green areas represent land lots, with owners Arnold, Beal, Carr, …
    • the red points represent wind turbines, or really anything that needs to be identified inside a lot.

    While I used to be quite decent with plain ol’ SQL, the spatial extensions (such as are in SpatiaLite) are nipping my heid. What I need to query:

    1. How many turbines does each land owner get?
    2. Are there any turbines that aren’t in a lot?

    Here’s the data, and I’ll show you a solution once I work it out.

    Update: dang, the SpatiaLite tutorial is useful. Here’s how to get the count for each owner:

    select Properties.owner, count(*) from Points, Properties where within(Points.geometry, Properties.geometry) group by Properties.owner;

    which gives:

    Owner count(*)
    Arnold 1
    Beal 2
    Dockrill 2

    Nifty, what!? Now to work out the other one, which I suspect will use a ‘not within()’.

    Update #2: Nope, the SpatiaLite mailing list came through:

    SELECT id,
       unitid
FROM   points
WHERE  id NOT IN (SELECT points.id
                  FROM   points,
                         properties
                  WHERE  Within(points.geometry,properties.geometry));

    I have to admit that I still don’t really think of nested SELECTs – my SQL formative years were spent on a DB that didn’t support them.

  • harshing on the TTC at Osgoode

  • amiga emulator for iPhone – sorta whee

    Emulated Commodore Amiga Games sounds like a good idea, but each game has to be sold as a separate app so the dreaded FEATURES of the computer aren’t allowed out.

  • beacoup fish

    I just downloaded the first 1000 Fish Disks from Aminet. Back in the day, that would have cost me £3000, and would have involved serious floppy storage. As is, it took just a couple of hours.

    I used to write for short-lived PD Shopper magazine. There was one flaw in the business plan; trying to sell a magazine to people who were naturally inclined to be cheap. As soon as shovelware CD-ROMs became available, PD Shopper vanished.

  • empty threat

    This is the clickwrap login usage licence at work. The threat of ” is particularly chilling.

  • something went wrong

    Something went very wrong when my Thinkpad booted up:

    Pretty, though.

  • actually quite happy to see this

    Dammit, E-UAE is fiddly to set up. I finally got hard disk images working, by doing something like this:

    1. For an 160MB image, create the blank file: dd if=/dev/zero of=blank160.hdf bs=1M count=160
    2. Add the file specification to your .uaerc, something like: hardfile2=rw,DH2:$(FILE_PATH)/Amiga/blank160.hdf,32,1,2,512,-12,
      (Yeah, linux e-uae doesn’t allow you to add in HDF images. Annoying.)
    3. I found I had to put the amiga system executable FastFileSystem in with my ROM path. Your path may vary – look at the UAE log output for something like ‘RDB: fakefilesys, trying to load ...‘, and see where you want it to go.
    4. Pop into UAE, start a CLI or Shell, and issue this command: format DRIVE DH2: NAME hd160 FFS QUICK

    I’ve updated the drive images from yesterday, so you probably won’t need to format them.

  • amiga: blank hdf images

    I’m trying to get running an Amiga again, to see if I can remember what was rocking my computer world twenty years ago. I want to run that code, swim with the Fish disks, and generally muck about with what was my life back then.

    Emulation is interesting. Variants of UAE (which came with an Amiga Forever CD set I bought in 1997 or so) rule the roost. Quality is variable – on Windows, WinUAE is very comprehensive, even making grink-gronk noises as the floppy spins. On Mac, E-UAE is really not worth the bother kinda okay – it doesn’t want to emulate anything above a 68000, and falls over quite often but has decent sound. On Linux, it’s plain and stable, and I happen to have an old Thinkpad going spare I can dedicate to emulation.

    I would have expected all the old disk images to be readily available for download. It seems that the current owners of the Amiga name (this week, at least) still cling on to the old IP as if it has real value. The Amiga games market (which was the market) basically collapsed with Commodore in 1994. I really wonder who is buying the PowerPC based, vastly overpriced new hardware? For now, I’m relying on good old-fashioned torrent sites for my data.

    I want to emulate two machines; the A500 I had for all my cringe-worthy magazine writing running Workbench 1.3, and a fast thing maxed out with all the processors and RAM I never had, probably running 3.1. While I did have Amiga[D]os 2.04 (can’t remember if they’d dropped the D by then), it wasn’t the main focus of my interest by then.

    The biggest problem I have is getting hard disk image, even blank ones. UAE is picky. Here are a couple I formatted under WinUAE, both blank.

    I wonder if they’ll work under 1.3?

    Update: yes, they should. I formatted them FFS under AmigaDos 1.3.

  • well, they did ask

    BizRate had a survey regarding Ticketmaster‘s service. Here’s what I wrote:

    Just whose convenience is your 25% “convenience fee” for? You guys are a scandalous monopoly. I’ve had better customer service from the Mafia – at least they’re family-run.


  • stick it up yer nose

    toothpastefordinner.com: mouth breather
    from toothpastefordinner.com : original image

    If you’d told me even six months ago that I’d be scooting a quarter litre of warm saline up my nose every night, I’d be all like, “yeah, chinny reckon”. But sadly, and this may be heading into TMI territory, it’s true.

    For many years, my nose wasn’t much more than decorative. Too blocked to provide a useful means of breathing or sensing smells, it got only occasional use as a sunglasses bracket. It also had unpleasant nocturnal habits, ones best not described here.

    A month or so ago, I decided I’d had enough. I went to the pharmacy and got one of those squeezy bottle things that comes with the little sachets of salt+bicarb. I can smell again! I can actually use my nose for breathing!!

    Those two benefits are pretty awesome, but the whole process isn’t a bed of roses:

    • yeah, you really need to do the kha-kha-kha thing with your throat, unless you like aspirating saline.
    • every night, it still feels a little like drowning, and hasn’t really got any better.
    • A sinus can still surprise up to an hour later, when an unexpected head tilt can produce a deluge too large for any tissue.
    • if the water’s too cold, it feels like being stabbed in the head. From the inside.
    • I’m much more in touch with my mucus than I want to be, and far, far more than you’d want me to be. I mean seriously, some of the things that I get out … well, let’s just say I’ve measured from nostrils to bronchi, and these luminous sinus puppies would easily stretch that far.
    • The results are nothing like the video. They’re all serene, like they’re getting their Deva Premal on; me, I’m left snotty and spluttering.

    So, it works for me. But we’re all glad that I’m not sharing the details, aren’t we?

  • another hypotrochoid

    Had another one lurking on my desktop:

    and here’s the gnuplot code to generate it:

    set terminal svg size 400,400
 set output "fig-spiro11.svg"
 set size ratio -1
 set nokey
 set noxtics
 set noytics
 set noborder
 set parametric
#
 x(t)=(R-r)*cos(t) + p*cos((R-r)*t/r)
 y(t)=(R-r)*sin(t) - p*sin((R-r)*t/r)
#
 R=100.0; r=-37.0; p=50.0
 set samples 8001
#
 plot [t=0:320*pi] x(t),y(t)

  • some svg hypotrochoids

    Just by messing around with the simple gnuplot script in the article Plotting the spirograph equations with ‘gnuplot’, I made:

  • death from above 1941

    I see that you can now view WWII historical imagery in Google Earth. Yes, there’s Dresden, Hamburg and Warsaw. But what about Clydebank, Coventry, London? Yes, it wouldn’t have been allied imagery, but we were bombed too.