We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • 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.

  • help for the Weston user in your life

    Talk about displacement activity: in the week or so before selling the house and upping and off to Canada, I scanned and converted the Weston Master V Exposure Meter and Invercone Instruction Book to HTML.

  • my juvenalia: 2D Star Dodge / Stardodger

    Oh dear:

    And here’s the Locomotive BASIC version, as published in Amstrad Computer User:

    10 ' ** Initialise **
20 MODE 1
30 INK 0,0
40 BORDER 0
50 INK 1,26
60 INK 3,0
70 q=5
90 LOCATE 16,1
100 PRINT"Stardodger"
110 LOCATE 1,5
120 PRINT"Avoid the killer Asterisqs, and seek the"
130 LOCATE 9,6
140 PRINT"wondrous Nextscreen Gap."
150 LOCATE 12,13
160 PRINT"Use SHIFT to climb"
170 GOSUB 700
190 MODE 1
200 DRAWR 629,0
210 DRAWR 0,170
220 MOVER 0,60
230 DRAWR 0,169
240 DRAWR -629,0
250 DRAWR 0,-399
260 DRAWR 0,2
270 DRAWR 627,0
280 DRAWR 0,168
290 MOVER 0,60
300 DRAWR 0,167
310 DRAWR -625,0
320 DRAWR 0,-399
330 MOVE 636,0
340 DRAW 636,399,3
350 MOVE 638,0
360 DRAW 638,399
370 PLOT -1,-1,1
380 TAG
390 FOR s=1 TO q
400 MOVE 50+RND*561,20+RND*361
410 PRINT"*";
420 NEXT
430 TAGOFF
440 MOVE 0,200
450 dy=4
470 DRAWR 4,dy
480 IF INKEY(21)<>-1 THEN dy=4 ELSE dy=-4
490 t=TESTR(2,dy/2)
500 IF t=1 GOTO 550  
510 IF t=3 GOTO 620
520 MOVER -2,-dy/2
530 GOTO 470
550 MODE 1
560 PRINT TAB(16);"YOU GOOFED"
570 LOCATE 5,13
580 PRINT"Number of Screens completed = "+STR$((q/5)-1)
590 GOSUB 700
600 RUN
620 MODE 1 
630 PRINT TAB(16);"WELL DONE"
640 LOCATE 10,13
650 PRINT"Stand by for Screen "+STR$((q/5)+1)
660 GOSUB 700
670 q=q+5
680 GOTO 190
700 LOCATE 8,25
710 PRINT"Press any key to continue"
720 WHILE INKEY$<>""
730 WEND
740 WHILE INKEY$=""
750 WEND
760 RETURN

    Here’s Asterisk Tracker, the original inspiration from 1984

  • still the coolest thing ever

    Got E-UAE running properly from a hard disk image last night. Tried to get the configuration close to what I had on my old 3MB A500.

    This is what it sounds like.

  • Subnormality: Understanding Nuclear Weapons

  • cold war drives to the pharmacy

  • because everyone needs their own numbers station

    transmission01

  • something went wrong

    At the automatic podcast today, something went very wrong with the announcements. Hear what I mean.

    I was playing with flite‘s new voices, and I think the command line went up the chute.

  • TTC Trip Planner

    The TTC Trip Planner seems to be live, after some digging by the Spacing folks.

    It works with a bunch of small browsers I’ve thrown at it – w3m, mobile Safari, Blackberry – so I know I can use it from a handheld. Yay!

    Only minor annoyance is that for subway journeys, it only shows the direction of travel in the summary (“YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA TOWARDS DOWNSVIEW” – and yes, in all-caps) and you have to click through to the details to find out which station you need to get off at.

    It does seem to get deeply confused at Kennedy Station; I live just south of Kennedy, and it expects me to take the 43 Kennedy north to the junction to Eglinton, then walk south. Everyone here uses Transway Crescent …

    Update: how could I have missed the prettier and much less capslockier MyTTC?

    Update 2: The official TTC site appears to have moved here http://www3.ttc.ca/Trip_planner/index.jsp?useplanner=true. Let’s see if it still works with mobile devices.

  • embedded Old Man Luedecke

    Old Man Luedecke plays The Rear Guard in Toronto a couple of nights ago:

    So if that didn’t work, here’s the YouTube video:

    I took this with my little PowerShot SD790 balanced on a sugar bowl. Cropped and recoded in Avidemux2, it’s not bad. To get the embedded video above, I used ffmpeg2theora (thanks, Daring Fireball!).

    Whatever you do, don’t – on your first try of recording live video – try using a setting you’ve never investigated. For the second set, I used CHDK‘s default video. It looks like an attack of mosaic tiles. Oh well.

  • old computer

    I got my Amiga A500 twenty years ago …

  • Dook of the Beatniks is in the house!!!

    Whee! New album from everyone’s favourite musical genius/loony! More details at the Piety Street Studios Blog.

    Delightful cover letter too:

  • Bill Rickard has a blog!

    Bill has a blog now: Bill Rickard Banjos.

  • implicit markup: easy to read, hard to parse

    I don’t usually ponder about other people’s blog postings, but Jeff Atwood’s Responsible Open Source Code Parenting reminded me of some of the old wars that the used to be when I was a markup head. Jeff writes about his frustration that John Gruber’s Markdown text-to-html filter:

    1. hasn’t been updated for some time
    2. doesn’t quite do exactly what Jeff’s users at Stack Overflow want
    3. appears to have any changes in its behaviour from v1.0.1 strenuously vetoed by Gruber himself.

    Markdown is nice in that you can write screeds of text, and it does almost exactly what you’d expect. The markup doesn’t get in the way, usually. The difficulty arises when implicit markup (indented lines for quoted text, bulleted lists, highlights) has to give way to explicit (cross-references, code samples). Explicit markup is ugly, but sometimes, you’ve got to do it. Complex intent requires complex modes of communication, and sometimes plain text just hasn’t the bandwidth. [As an aside, there was a hilarious lengthy recurring episode on John Mark Ockerbloom‘s late bookpeople mailing list where a user (mercilessly skewered here)  insisted that they could write a general Gutenberg plain-text converter that would re-create typeset quality in an e-book reader with no explicit markup, and that XML was completely unnecessary and ill-conceived. The un-markup language, called zen markup language (said user had an aversion to the shift key) lives on only in a single website: the home of z.m.l. As for XML, its executive assistant had no comment on the matter.] Looking at Markdown, it looks like Gruber’s moved on from it. He made a 1.0.1 which did what he wanted. The code’s there to change if anyone needs it. I understand his frustration at people wanting to make changes and still call it Markdown; I’d be annoyed if I had text which I thought was in one format suddenly not be accepted, or do something unexpected. Seriously, that’s almost as bad as ‘deprecated‘. [At least Gruber didn’t go on a deletion rampage, like (admittedly smaller-time) erstwhile CHDK stalwart Barney Fife did when he was slighted in a forum. Looks like almost everything he contributed to CHDK has been removed, including some very useful control scripts and explanations.] Personally, when I need to make text to web conversions, I still use txt2html and a bunch of shell and Perl glue to feed to tidy. It’s on its third maintainer, doesn’t do much, but does it simply. And I’m pretty simple that way.

    Update: see also On my increasing exasperation with Markdown.