Joe's Jottings

Category: Personal Stuff

  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-06-24

    • #natwest problem is a glitch in the same way that Fukushima experienced a minor leak…. #
    • #eurozone #blair stating European integration will go ahead no matter what…'Springtime for Tony'? #
    • #natwest how much are you betting that the cost of sorting this Mongolian Clusterfuck out will eventually turn up as customer bank charges.. #
    • #natwest couldn't happen to a nicer bank. Typical they still manage to apply charges to accounts. I will enjoy every second of their misery. #
    • England dodged a bullet there….. #
    • Rooney's hair transplant may have been mortally wounded…more news as it becomes available….. #
    • Ahhh….I feel more comfortable tonight with England. Poor performance, moments of terror, disappointment from big names…the old England! #
    • Well…that was…average. Perhaps Roy can go the whole way and put Princess Fiona and donkey on to join Shrek… #
    • Hmmm…..felt after 10 minutes that presence of Rooney has distorted team – now convinced after Rooney miss – Carroll would have got it. #
    • Throughout the land, children are watching, pointing to the England number 10 and shouting 'look! It's Shrek!' #
    • Hmmmm…stock markets approve of Greek election result. Looks like the Greek people (and us) are going to get f**ked over… #fb #

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  • The Last of the Magicians

    “He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

    So wrote John Maynard Keynes about Sir Isaac Newton in a lecture he wrote, but never delivered, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth on Christmas Day, 1642.

    I was reminded of this observation the other evening when I was contemplating my ‘life and times’ as a developer come writer come ‘hacker’ (in the original, MIT, sense of the word) in late 1970s and early 1980s.  My life and times with computers started as a spin off from my interest in electronics as a boy – I built a simple computer in my teens, and then took the path of ZX81, Spectrum, BBC Model B, Amstrad 6128.  I was particularly interested in interfacing and robotics – and because of my prior interest in electronics I could handle both the hardware and software side of things.

    I had an interest and an aptitude for electronics, analogue and digital, and could understand my computers from the printed circuit board up, so to say – on occasion doing the odd modification to circuit boards to fix things or improve matters.  Looking back, it was possible to trace those 8 bit home computers back through history to the special purpose computers created during and after World War 2 to help with code breaking and other similar applications.

    And this was where I started from the other evening – in IT terms, hobbyists and hackers of the 70s/80s were able to trace their activities back in to the ‘Sumerian Period’ of their interest; the world view was similar, just using chips rather than relays. Sometime in the 1980s it all changed; PCs, Macs, etc. came along with (eventually) the sort of day to day access to the Web, Apps and the Internet that we regard as normal. That ability to get involved with all aspects of the machine, from wires to Windows, disappeared.

    It seems to me that there is a line back from where we are now, through the 2000s, in to the 1990s and back to those original Macs and PCs – then a hiatus – then back from the home micros via mainframes to the days of Turning Machines, Colossus and ENIAC.  And those of us who remember hacking code and hardware on computers big enough to get your fingers inside are maybe not the first scientists of the modern IT age, but perhaps we are truly the last of the magicians.

     

  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-06-17

    • Argyll and Bute council stop a kid blogging about school dinners. And people wonder why I regard most local authorities as wastes of space. #
    • If there was a Cameron drinking game based around the words 'I don't remember' we'd all now be pissed…#leveson #
    • Lib Dem MPs seem to have shown a lack of intestinal fortitude today…… #Hunt #
    • .@belfastcc #lennox – beyond the final No there is still the possibility of Yes, and on that all hope rests. Say Yes to saving Lennox. #
    • via @justamomtob: desperately need RTs. Where is #lennox being held in Belfast..we may be able to save him”. #SaveLennox #
    • Hmmmmm…..maybe a 'Trainspotting' themed opening ceremony for the Olympics would have been a better bet….. #
    • The power of the yellow label is strong in hillsborough morrisons this morning! #

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  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-06-10

    • We passengers have now been told by a loud man a dozen times that some buses are to be rebodied. Restraing myself… #sheffield #
    • Bugger. Ray Bradbury dies. Was reading some of his short stories over the weekend. Very sad. http://t.co/PtF76x3l #fb #
    • Now that would be silly, @britmic. The Czechs did ok with Havel – surely we could find our equivalent? #republic in reply to britmic #
    • To those who ask abt who would be UK president- doesn't have to be politician. There are thousands of other possibilities in uk. #Republic #
    • To those who ask abt who would be UK president- doesn't have to be politician. There are thousands of other possibilities in uk. #Repulican #
    • Jubilee exploitation – makes you puke. http://t.co/nfgLO4eg How's that 'proud to be British' thing working for you today? #
    • Repeats of Inspector Morse and Have I Got News For You seem a better bet than this concert dooberry…… #
    • Spent a quiet afternoon and evening watching old whodunnits and good-bad tv on Alibi. Anything happening in the world? #fb #

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  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-06-03

    • Journalists being prevented from getting near anti-jubilee protests by police, despite having press credentials. #jubileeprotest #
    • I'm sure that I just heard that the amount of gold leaf on the barge thingies is enough to cover a soccer pitch. Austerity? #
    • This flotilla – about to set out as a revenge raid on Holland fo the Medway raid in the 17th century? #
    • Osborne spending out of recession – clearly doing what he's told by the IMF! #
    • We are bunting. We will assimilate your architectural and decorative uniqueness into our own. Resistance is futile… #buntingkills #
    • Oh the horror – bunting covered blimp explodes in flames landing at Lakenhurst, New Jersey… #buntingkills #
    • #buntingkills bunting causes low flying birds to crash in the streets, exploding on impact and killing party goers…. #
    • Hope we don't find @richarddignall cocooned by that spider that went for me this morning! #

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  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-27

    • David Cameron – proof of the old saying that the problem with political jokes is that they get elected… #
    • Whoops – would appear that spanish bank Bankia has shares suspended. Rumours of #bailout bid. #euro #
    • It's a beautiful morning. Love to all my friends. That is all. #sheffield #sunnyday #
    • My last Joe's Jotting was on #facebook #ipo – http://t.co/JLtnhDjE – more to come later. #

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  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-20

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  • We lost a family member last night…

    My wife and I have always had cats – folks who know me may remember the comment I often make that I love my cats more than I love the vast majority of human beings.  Whilst I  say it with a smile, I sometimes think there’s a large amount of truth in that statement, particularly after watching the news on TV…

    Last October we had a new arrival – Georgie (named by my God-daughter) turned up out of the early evening darkness and took up residence.  We had no idea where she came from, but she was in  bad state – skin and bones, matted and dirty fur, starving, cold and tired.  Within a few days it was obvious she was going nowhere, and our ‘boys’ – our two male cats – found they had a new housemate.

    Georgie in her basket

    The photo on the left was taken a month or so after she joined us – she’s fatter and more ‘together’ there – the grey bits of fur are where we had to cut off some seriously matted areas which quickly grew back.

    We had no idea how long she would last.  We knew she was old and probably had a few health problems, but she kept defying the odds.  We first said ‘She won’t manage it to Christmas’, then it was ‘Won’t manage the winter’.  She did – she also took to wandering around to our next door neighbour and sitting on her lawn, getting fed in two households.  Despite her age she tackled the cat flap with gusto, leapt up and down on to tables, helped to type Tweets on computers, took the phone table as her bed and became one of the family.

    About 10 days ago she became less active and her habits became quieter – this wasn’t too much of a surprise as she did this occasionally.  Over the last few days it became clear she was not herself and so a trip to the vets was arranged yesterday, where it became clear after tests that she was a very poorly lady indeed and that she probably only had a few days left with us.

    We decided to let the vet put her to sleep, and went back to the vets to be with her – it was typical that as soon as she saw us she jumped up and purred. She left us very quickly, very peacefully.

    It’s astonishing how big a tiny cat with us for only 8 months could leave such a big space in our hearts and lives.

  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-13

    • All this 'lots of love' from Cameron. Makes me a bit sick in my mouth. PM acting like a lovestruck schoolboy. #lol #leveson #cameron #
    • All this 'lots of love' from Cameron. Makes me a bit sick in my mouth. PM acting like a lovestruck schoolboy. #
    • My elance profile https://t.co/Vvp9erUj #

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  • Happy (Belated) Birthday Speccy!

    It always takes me a while to catch up with things, but it was recently the 30th Birthday of the Sinclair Spectrum. Like many of a certain age, the Speccy was one of the computers on which I cut my teeth.  I was lucky enough to have been exposed to most of the popular home computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s by virtue of my first job and the fact I wrote articles for the computing magazines of the time.

    I’d already bought a ZX81, and became the Z80 Machine code Guru for my employer – I was also writing books for Melbourne House on the Z80 based MSX machines – and the two worlds overlapped when I was asked by my employer to develop a way of extending the BASIC language of the Sinclair Spectrum to allow new commands to be added to the language.  I managed to deliver the goods – oddly enough around the same time a magazine article was published that detailed a similar approach to my own – and I added writing books on Spectrum Machine Code programming to my repetoire.

    I also wrote a fair number of articles about programming and interfacing the Sinclair machines, designed interface cards for it for my employer, dabbled in a little light robotics, but rarely actually USED the machine for anything!  When I needed to write these articles and books I used my BBC Model B which had a proper keyboard.  How I hated that rubber monstrosity on the Spectrum – the later Spectrum 2 had a better keyboard and made life easier, but one still had to deal with the multi-function behaviour of the keys.  I think that that was the single biggest hitch with the Spectrum; had the ‘dead flesh’ keyboard just had ‘normal’ keyboard functionality, where you typed stuff in letter by letter, I think it would have been easier.

    Still, I can’t grumble.  This was in the days when if you were good enough to write and have your material accepted by a publisher, you got paid for it.  This may seem something of a novelty these days when blogging and other forms of self-publishing seem to have ripped the heart out of traditional (OK, paid!) technical writing, but those magazine cheques of £40 or £50 went a long way!

    I think that the Spectrum was one of two machines I bought (the other being an Amstrad 6128) that actually paid for themselves from my writing.  That immediately makes the Spectrum special to me.  I also learnt a HELL of a lot from it about low level programming, hardware interfacing, robotics and the Zen like patience needed to manage that keyboard and a tape recorder for saving and loading programs…..

    Funnily enough, 30 years later, I spent several hours in my current day job looking at an interfacing problem involving a PIC Microcontroller.  And the solution I eventually suggested was one that I dragged up from my Spectrum interfacing days….

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