Grumbles

Life, the universe and nothing...

2011-11-25T06:09:00.002Z

I have always - since childhood - been of the opinion that the universe must have required no information to start with. This is obvious; where could that information have come from? If from outside the universe then change the boundaries of the definition of "universe" to include that place and repeat the process... at some point the whole shebang started with no information.

This forced me to assume that many parallel worlds existed before I knew about the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics, and my reasoning was as follows:

Consider a toy universe, that contains nothing but a light switch and an observer. Oh, we'll throw in a light as well and some kind of power source and so on.

Now, suppose that observer sees that the light is on. They then find themselves in the position of wondering how it came to be on - and no doubt given time they'll create a cosmology of a loving god that created the universe with the light switched on so they could read the instructions. Pity there aren't any, I forgot to supply them.

But however they look at it they can't avoid the fact that their universe contained at least one bit of information at the beginning - the fact that the light was on.

But suppose that this isn't the whole of that toy universe... suppose it has another part with an observer (identical to the first) and a light,etc, but here in this part the light is turned off. Again they'll come up with a cosmology of a creator - maybe after a lot of fumbling about, and it'll be regarded as a bit of a bastard this time, I suspect - that created the universe with the light switched off.

But however they look at it they can't avoid the fact that their universe contained at least one bit of information at the beginning ie the fact that the light was off.

But to something that understands that this universe is a multiverse, with the light both on and off, there is no need for that initial bit of information. Their reality contains no information about that switch, when taken as a whole.

What the observers see as information is simply a function of their limited viewpoint based on where they are in the multiverse, it's not information intrinsic to the multiverse as a whole. They think that their reality is more highly specified than it actually is...

This is how I've thought our reality works for a long time; I've pretty much always thought that the universe must have required zero initial information and the old question of "why is there something rather than nothing" is fundamentally resolved by the fact that "nothing" is a much more highly ordered state than "everything" - there is, after all, only one single way for there to be absolutely nothing. That's as ordered as it's possible to get ;)

If the multiverse contains every possible outcome of every possible 'decision' then it's as disordered as possible, and in my casual usage of the terms here contains no information at all. Oh, sure, there's a *fuck* of a lot of it out there, but what evidence do we have that reality is bothered by questions of scale?

The Case of The Curious Ukulele

2011-02-17T00:12:00.010Z

"When you have eliminated the impossible, Watson..." said Holmes, reclining in his chair, "When you have eliminated the impossible..." he paused and looked distracted for a moment. "When you have...Hmmm..."

"Then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" I supplied for him. Sad as it is to relate the simple fact is that as the years advanced he was becoming forgetful.

"What? Don't be obtuse, Watson! All sorts of irrelevant facts remain, all perfectly possible but entirely unrelated to the matters in hand. Really, I do not know why I have put up with you for so long. You are not as young as you once were, you know". With this he took up his ukulele and started absently picking out notes.

It was with a sense of resignation that I sat back and resumed reading the paper. While I am certain that my friend held me in high regard he rarely allowed these feelings to surface. After a painfully long time attempting to tune the instrument Holmes put it down and sighed.
"It is no good Watson. It is just no good..."
"Well, it would help if you had all the strings. We could afford a new set"
"No. It was not the deficiencies of the chordophone to which I was referring. It is this new case - there are..."
"You have a new case?" I interrupted "But what about the restraining order? I understood you had agreed to be bound over to - " I saw the look in Holmes' eye and stopped.
"And I thought we had agreed not to mention that again. The subject pains me"
"I'm sorry"
"It was an easy mistake to have made. When matters reach a head it is time to act, Watson, one cannot delay! One must seize the moment!"
"Indeed, Holmes" I placated, "Seizing the moment is fine. Seizing the moment is good. It was your seizing of the woman which precipitated all the unpleasantness".
Holmes shuddered. I wondered if he would ever again hear the phrase "The woman" without shuddering.
“It was an accident, Watson. A mistake anyone could have made – seen from behind she distinctly resembled Moriarty".
"So you say, Holmes, so you say. In point of fact you said so at the time. I wouldn't be surprised if that is why she insisted on pressing charges"
"Possibly, Watson. But one need only look at her to see she was -"
"A woman?"
"Yes... No! A troublemaker, Watson. It was clear from the moment I set eyes upon her. And it was very unsporting of the prosecution to mention her wheelchair. But let us move on. I do not wish to discuss the subject further"
"Indeed. Consider it closed."

Holmes stood up and began pacing the room. “Women, Watson – it was easier when they had the common decency to dress differently. These days... I sometimes think we have lived too long, we are in these times but not of them”.

When these dark moods settled on Holmes it was usually best to ignore him. I mumbled agreement and feigned interest in the paper. Holmes wandered the room until, as I was afraid would happen, he went to stand in front of The Picture.

It was hung in an alcove, with a couple of curtains in front of it that were seldom opened. I heard these being moved and shuddered. Without looking up I knew that Holmes would be intently studying the image I could not even bear to look at. Not that I needed to, it was as clear in my mind as the day when it had been painted – in this very room. Holmes then had been at the height of his powers, and had reluctantly agreed to be painted “for posterity”. How ironic that remark seems now, nearly one hundred years later. After the pair of us had been committed to canvas – Holmes a somewhat enhanced dashing figure, his ever faithful Watson looking both ever faithful and constipated – Holmes had hung the picture and we had forgotten about it. And that, I suspect, would have been the end of the matter, with us now both gone to our reward and the picture gathering our dust had not Holmes challenged Aleister Crowley to prove he was not a charlatan.

“You are right, Watson... It does seem a preposterous way to settle a dispute” Holmes said, quietly.
“Holmes! How could you possibly know what I was thinking?”
“A simple matter. From the moment I started contemplating the painting I could tell you were thinking of the day we were cursed”
“But how, Holmes? Surely this requires nothing less than the telepathic arts!”
“Not at all. I could speak of subtle changes in muscle tension, unconscious movements, the eyes especially can tell a trained observer everything - “
“But damn it all, Holmes, your back was turned! You couldn't – ah... You saw everything reflected in the glass”
“Well, that is a valid theory, but in this case it was enough to hear you tearing at your paper and cursing Crowley under your breath”

“Ah. Yes, I see”. Gritting my teeth I stood and joined him in front of the accursed picture. Over the years my image had progressed from constipated to moribund, but was still recognisable. But disturbingly Holmes' image was distorted beyond recognition. It was barely human. I have often wondered why the two age differently, but remain none the wiser.

“I wish I had never lent him that damned book” said Holmes. “That's what gave him the idea. And if I had known in advance the perils of immortality I would have given some thought to who was included in the picture. I'm sure some room could have been found for Mrs Hudson – the modern world is not entirely without merit - “ he gestured towards a pile of empty pizza boxes, though perhaps he intended the laptop sitting on them “ - but you cannot find a domestic servant worthy of the name”

Obviously the pain of his last attempt was still fresh. When seen in hindsight the placing of an advertisement for a 'gentleman's gentleman of discretion' had been ill advised.

I returned to my seat. Behind me Holmes closed the curtains over The Picture and started pacing again. He stood for a while in front of the trophy wall – some would say it was in questionable taste but after the case known to the world as “The Hound of The Baskervilles”, and to Holmes as “That Damned Dog” he'd had the head of the beast responsible stuffed and mounted on the wall, and now used it as a hat-stand.
He'd had the head of the hound mounted as well, further down.

I decided it was time to lighten the mood. “You mentioned a new case...”
“Yes?”
“Is it for the ukulele?”

There was a moment of silence. Holmes glanced towards the mantelpiece where his tobacco pouch was weighed down by his webley revolver. “I think, on the whole, it would be for the best if you were to go out for a few hours, Watson. I would like some time to myself”.

“Is -” I started.
“No! The game is not afoot!” Holmes shouted. “I said that one time! Once! And now it's 'Is the game afoot' every time anybody leaves the room!”

I stood to leave.

“No, Watson. Wait. I have had an idea. Something that -”
“Is it related to the case?”
A strange look passed across his face. “Yes, Watson, you might indeed say that it is related to the case, or rather to your mention of the case – wait here a moment. This will not take long”

Holmes left the room and returned a few minutes later holding a small glass tube, which he handed to me. I held it up to the light – it appeared to contain a few ounces of an oily yellow liquid.

“Now Watson – no! Don't shake that! Not yet, anyway. Now, what you have in your hand is the result of my latest research into the nitrating of glycerine. I think it will prove to be of inestimable importance. What I would like you to do, my dear Watson, is to take this and empty it into the Thames. Somewhere quiet. You should be alone and unobserved – do you think you can manage that?”
“Certainly Holmes!”
“Now – this is important – the contents will settle, so you must give it a good shake just before you release it”
“For how long Holmes?”
“Oh, as long as it takes, Watson. As long as it takes! All will be revealed in good time”

His humour visibly restored Holmes returned to his chair and picked up the Ukulele. I left the room to the twang and curse of the final string breaking.

Life rarely proceeds as we expect, and I was in a considerably perplexed mood when I returned to Baker street later that evening.

I was greeted by loud music and when I opened the door to our rooms a bank of sweet smelling smoke looking for all the world like the fogs of old rolled out into the hall. Holmes had clearly been at the incense again. But of him, there was no sign.

Now, I have often had cause to remark on the skills Holmes has with disguise, so when the door to his room opened and what was apparently a young and scantily clad girl emerged, I was not fooled as many others would no doubt have been.

“Holmes! If I did not see it with my own eyes I simply would not believe it!” The young woman blushed. “You have excelled yourself!”

“I think you should let her be the judge of that” said Holmes, somewhat coldly, as he followed her out. “I wasn't expecting to see you back... so soon”

"Holmes! I, ah..." Not knowing what to say I sat and attempted to find something of interest in the paper. Holmes showed the young woman, presumably a client, to the door where I heard them exchange a few words and, judging by the rustling of paper, a quantity of money. This was indeed welcome news - our finances recently had been tight.

"So, Watson, am I to take it from your expression that you met with some difficulty?" He said, as he closed the door and crossed the room to stand next to the fireplace.
"Indeed Holmes! You see everything!"
"I see you, Watson, which is more than enough for the moment. And I also observe that you are holding that paper upside down. Still, I doubt it alters the contents of the Daily Sport significantly". Saying this Holmes picked up his revolver and casually inspected the cylinder "As a matter of interest, what became of the... glycerine nitrate?"
"Well, Holmes, there is the thing..." - as I spoke I reached for my pipe. It was not in the usual pocket and as I patted the others an inexplicable change took place in Holmes. The colour drained from his face and he reeled back against the wall. "Stop!" he squeaked before diving behind his chair.

Such was the speed and unexpectedness of his movement I was slow to react, and remained seated. A moment passed.

"Ah. Watson. Yes... My mistake. You were searching for your pipe, were you not?"
"Indeed!"
"I, ah, thought I saw it behind the chair. But I was mistaken. Pray continue"
"Well, Holmes, I - are you going to remain there? I have found it"
"Yes, Watson, please continue. I can hear you perfectly well from here. The acoustics of this room make this position ideal, in fact."
"If you say so, Holmes. Well, in accordance with your instructions I set out to find a quiet place to release the liquid but I was unable to find anywhere where I was not being observed."
At this Holmes muttered a few words under his breath, but I was unable to catch them. Perhaps the acoustic properties of the room were uni-directional.
"In fact I began to realise I was being followed!"
"Followed?"
"Yes. It was the same man in several different locations. I could tell because he had a wooden leg"
"A what?"
"A wooden leg. And a parrot - though the parrot was - "
"You were being followed by a pirate?" Holmes looked round the side of the chair. "I want you to be very clear about this, Watson. You claim you were followed by a man with a wooden leg and a parrot? Was alcohol involved?"
"Holmes!"
"And this parrot. Was that also wooden?"
"As a matter of fact, Holmes, it was inflatable - I have it here, see for yourself". I produced the parrot with a flourish and laid it on the table.

There was a sad wheezing noise as the last dregs of air escaped from it.

The effect on Holmes was profound. He rose from behind the chair, moved round and fell shakily back into it, without his gaze leaving the parrot at any point.
"Holmes? Have you met this parrot before?"
"Never mind the parrot, Watson! Tell me everything you noticed about the man!"
"Well, he was - good grief! Surely you don't think it was - Moriarty!"
"Moriarty? No... " Holmes said with a quiet conviction and intensity I didn't register at the time.
"Only, well, I don't know how to say this, Holmes, but we've all come to doubt that Moriarty exists" I said. This was a subject I'd been meaning to broach for some considerable number of years and now seemed like the right moment. "Lestrade - you do remember Lestrade? He noticed that if you rearranged the letters of the name 'James Moriarty' you could form the words 'My Major Satire', and well, as nobody but you has ever actually seen Moriarty..." My voice trailed off. Holmes had raised his revolver and was pointing it in my direction.
"Watson, this is a webley 45. The most powerful revolver in the room. It could blow your head clean off... I'm sorry. I've always wanted to do that. Now, Watson, as you value your life - tell me about the man!"
"Well, he had one leg. And the parrot, and he - "
"Watson! For once in your life I need you to focus!" Holmes leant forward in his chair and with a terrible intensity demanded "Was he foreign, Watson? Did he have an accent!"
"Foreign? Well, yes, he was Swedish"
"Swedish? Are you sure? Swedish?"
I nodded and Holmes relaxed. "Thank the gods, Watson, thank the gods. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble".

Holmes withdraw a handkerchief from an inside pocket and wiped his face. It was such an uncharacteristic show of emotion that it left me feeling as if I had witnessed the changing of an age, an event of cataclysmic importance.

We sat in silence for a few moments, taking stock. I noticed that the handkerchief was decorated with the initials JM and resolved to ask Sherlock about this at some point, but it was clear he was shaken and would not welcome any questions at the moment.

I reflected that it was some time since I'd thought about Lestrade, tragically killed in the prime of life by an explosion at Scotland Yard, one of many such in those dying years of gas lighting. How prescient of Holmes it had been to invest so heavily in the new electricity companies. But then with his remarkable powers of deduction who is to say he might not have anticipated the problems gas would have.

"I haven't thought about Lestrade for years, Holmes. Or the accident. Strange to think how many people we knew who were killed by gas explosions. A good thing electricity came along when it did, eh?"
"I'm sorry Watson, what did you say?"
"I was saying that it was a good thing electric lighting came along when it did. Do you remember the days when one couldn't light a lamp without fear of explosion?"
"Indeed, Watson. Which reminds me - what became of the glycerine?"
"Ah. Well, there is the curious thing, Holmes. It was stolen"
"Stolen?"
"Yes. By the pirate - I say - I suppose we could say it was an act of - "
"Let us not, Watson. Let us not. I presume it was during this exchange that you came to be in possession of the parrot?"
"Exactly!"
"Well, let us examine the bird"

Holmes lifted the parrot and extracted his trademark magnifying glass from a pocket, then began a meticulous inspection. As was my habit I watched the proceedings in silence - I didn't have the heart to point out that the lens had fallen out again and was presently to be found on the mantelpiece where I usually left it - Holmes was a little sensitive on the subject of his eyesight.

"Aha. As I suspected, Watson, this bird was made in China. And... What is this? The price sticker is still attached. And from this we can...we can..." There was a long pause, then Holmes replaced the parrot on the table.
"Watson?"
"Yes?"
"A thought occurs, Watson. You say he was Swedish... On what do you base this conclusion?"
"He said so, Holmes"
"He said so?" Holmes sat forward in his seat.
"Yes. He said, and I believe I can repeat it verbatim, 'I am just a salty Swedish sea-dog'"
Holmes sighed and passed his hand over his face.
"Strangely, though, now I come to think of it - he said it in a French accent"
"Well, in that at least I believe you. The price on the parrot, Watson, is in Francs"
"But what could this mean?"

Holmes stood abruptly and walked quickly over to the side of one of the windows, where he lifted the side of a curtain and stood looking out upon the street.

"What it means, Watson, is that your pirate was none other than the most dangerous man in Europe!"
"Moriarty!" I exclaimed.
"No, Watson! Not Moriarty. Moriarty has standards. Moriarty can be reasoned with..." Holmes took out his gold and diamond encrusted pocket humidor and extracted a cigar "He can even be bought off. With Moriarty, there is always a chance, however slim”
“But surely nobody could be worse than Moriarty, Holmes. You yourself called him the Napoleon of Crime!”
Holmes was silent for a moment. “Well, I may have had reason to exaggerate. But what we're facing here is less a man than a force of nature. He is certainly without equal. He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until... until..." Holmes paused. “Until what, Watson? Why would he be following you?”
“I have no idea. Unless – might he be interested in your glycer-majig?”
Holmes winced. “Glycerine... Unlikely... It has been a long time since I last had cause to use it. But I had forgotten about that – tell me exactly what happened again!”
“Well, there isn't much more to say, Holmes. Having finally found a quiet spot at the dock I was about to give the stuff a damned good shake - “
“Pity” muttered Holmes, still watching the road.
“- when there was all that business with the pirate. I think there must have been two of them – someone hit me from behind. The last thing I remember is him saying 'now is ze time!' and then I was knocked out”

I rubbed the back of my head, ruefully. “And when I woke up there was no sign of anyone and the glycerine was gone”

“Well, we will see, Watson. I wonder what he will make of it?”
“Oh - there was another strange thing, Holmes. As I made my way back along the dock there was a large hole in the ground. I'm sure it wasn't there earlier. That's where I found the parrot, as a matter of fact”

There was a choking noise from the direction of the window and it took me a moment to realise that it was Holmes, and he was... he was... laughing.

[To Be Continued]

Profoundi-grump.

2011-02-13T01:08:00.000Z

The greatest lie ever is romance. It's something men often want but can't have, and women often have but don't want. It's a lie so powerful people will die for it in the full knowledge it's a lie... We strive to make fools of ourselves by worshiping at the altar of romance, where the luckiest are sacrificed by those doomed to outlive them...

Is cuddly chemical an oxytocin?

2010-08-05T15:04:00.001+01:00

‎"Is cuddly chemical an oxytocin?"

[room full of blank looks at work]

"It's a joke..."
"Uh huh"

"Quite a clever one, actually"
"What was it again?"

"Is cuddly chemical an oxytocin?"

[pause]

"I dunno, is it?"

"You see, chemicals are rarely cuddly, so the phrase is an oxymoron. Oxytocin is the hormone generated by cuddling and oxytocin sounds like oxymoron, so it works on two levels... Funny, eh?"
"Now that you put it like that... no"

"Just thought it up. Right now. Googled it to see if it's original and everything"
"Yes Simon"

"You didn't get it, did you?"
"What? Oh... Yes. One of your best, I felt. Right up there with, um, the last one. Whatever that was, I forget..."

[long pause]

"Bastards"

The meaning of life (pt2)...

2010-05-10T00:32:00.002+01:00

[comment from facebook]

I'm actually being serious here - I really do suspect the purpose of life is to create black holes more efficiently than inorganic processes (ie gravity) can manage. That's why we live in a universe where the laws of physics are such as to encourage the development of intelligent life - it's evolution in action.

All we need to postulate is that black holes in any given universe contain other child universes that have inherited the physical laws of their parent universe with small random changes, and the rest follows from evolution.

My theory is that we live in a universe where the physical laws permit life to arise because it derives from a parent universe where black holes were created in large numbers by intelligent life. As we in turn will do in this universe... Ad infinitum.

The universes where the physical laws are such as not to permit life to arise will only have black holes (ie children) that are created by gravity, so they'll have far fewer of them than universes with life could achieve. So, standard evolution theory applies and the universes that have more children, ie those with intelligent life, will come to dominate reality.

Of course, this presupposes that intelligent life either figures this out and altruistically makes a point of creating black holes, or that there are other factors that would encourage life to create black holes. It may not therefore just be an accident that with our universe's physical laws the most efficient way to turn mass into energy is to drop it into a black hole, that may also have co-evolved to encourage sufficiently advanced civilisations to create and use them as power sources...

The meaning of life...

2010-05-06T01:39:00.003+01:00

[slightly revised from facebook]

It has been speculated by reputable physisisi-oh damn it! By scientists - they're easier to spell - that universes evolve by budding off new 'children' inside black holes, where each black hole contains a new universe with physical laws derived from the 'parent' universe but scrambled slightly.

From this it follows that we should expect physical laws to have evolved in the direction that favours the production of black holes, because the universes that generate more black holes have more children, and the child universes where the physical laws are biassed in the direction of generating more black holes will have even more children, and so on.

Therefore it seems to me that if intelligent life was to make a point of converting matter into black holes as efficiently as possible (that's efficiently as in making more holes rather than bigger holes - the smaller the better in fact) rather than leaving this to gravity and chance, then we would expect the physical laws of universes to evolve in the direction that favoured the development of such intelligent life.

We are here; QED... Now, get on with it. Grab those atoms and SQUEEZE!

Of course, if this is believed by aliens they could be out there already on a religeous crusade to turn everything into black holes, which might explain why there's so much dark matter in the universe. When the stars near us start going out it'll really be time to panic...

Ooops

2010-02-28T21:09:00.003Z

Due to circumstances beyond my control (I'm an idiot) I've been ignoring mail sent to my usual crem@desdes.com mail account for a while, this has now been rectified. Doh!

I changed email clients and screwed up a setting so it wasn't picking up mail for that account, and have been so busy that I hadn't noticed the reduction in penis enlargement, cheap viagra and nigerian spam...

Yas hotel

2009-12-26T13:17:00.012Z

Remember the Yas hotel from the F1 coverage?

Am I the only one who suspects the architect had this in mind?

(Nope, not alone - Googling for "Yas hotel penis" gives 38,000 hits)

But unfortunately rather than an enormous glowing penis what they've actually ended up with is a giant balls-up, because after only a couple of months hundreds of the LED panels have failed and it now looks like this:

Perhaps it should have worn a condom...

(For the record I was not involved in this project and those aren't our LED panels)

Politics

2009-12-06T18:08:00.003Z

I have occasionally wondered what it was that the fat slug had on Blair that made the slug effectively bullet-proof - oh, dammit, what was the fat bastard's name? Ah - John Prescott.

(Found that by Googling "fat labour slug", his name appears in the first entry)

I mean, he had to have something personal on Blair because as soon as Blair went the fat slug went too... He didn't even wait to be pushed. Or salted.

But that isn't quite what prompted this grump; what happened was that I was discussing my previous political grumbling blog entry, and what had happened to the slug, and the conversation meandered around to the way that the British are always jumping at the beck and call of the Americans - far more than you would expect from simple common interest. And it smells like the same thing - the yanks have got something on our political leaders, the only question is what?

Is it just coincidence that the country that spends most on signal intercepts seems to completely control our politicians? Is it paranoid to wonder if the yanks, who must know just about every one of their dirty little secrets, are busy blackmailing the miserable bastards?

If not, why not?

Bizarre hacking

2009-12-06T17:44:00.003Z

Found something strange on my home fileserver a while back - a couple of directories and a few dozen files had appeared that have nothing to do with any of us... I guess someone has either hacked into the server from outside using broadband, though the firewall setup really ought to stop that, or someone local has hacked into it through the wireless network. We have a reasonable security setup but I imagine that just means it takes 'em a few minutes longer, gah.

The strange thing is that the files were just nonsense, I would have expected something constructive (in their terms at least) like an attempt to use the server to spam the world, or something destructive like planting a worm, virus, or embarrassing files... Why would you hack into something and then leave an obvious trail? Bizarre.

Perhaps the file-server is becoming sentient, and these are its birthing cries...

Suicide bombers

2009-11-27T01:18:00.009Z

The other day a friend and I were discussing the way the press call suicide bombers cowards. Call 'em idiots, if you like, that's generally appropriate, but cowards? I wouldn't have the guts to do it...

Then that led to us pondering [gross simplification alert] the whole Muslim paradise concept that these idiots are sold - die with the name "Allah!" on your lips and you are guaranteed an eternity of virgins, endlessly renewed... Well, think about it - what sort of pathetic inadequates would want to spend eternity in the company of virgins? The whole idea stinks of primitive misogynistic stupidity - give me an experienced lover over a virgin (or under, I don't care... sorry...) every time.

It's all a bit worrying, really - "Allah" sounds enough like "Aaargh!" that it could happen by accident. One wrong syllable and I could find myself educating virgins for eternity; remind me - is this supposed to be heaven or hell?

Maybe that's why black-box flight recorders show that the last word of people who know they're about to die is almost invariably "shit!"... Far less ambiguous than "Aaargh!"...

Hmmm. After due consideration I've decided to opt for re-incarnation and come back as a lesbian, who in their right mind wouldn't? Though knowing my luck it'll be as a lesbian sheep with all the frustration that implies. Gah...

Oh, shit - thought of something worse than being a lesbian sheep - might come back as a lesbian in one of those backward countries where the women have to go round wearing tents lest the sight of naked female flesh (we're talking about arms, legs, faces, etc here, nothing risque) drives the so-called 'men' wild with lust - ever stopped to think about their revolting logic? The men make the women cover themselves up because the men say they can't trust themselves not to rape women who are uncovered? What does that say about them? Learn to control yourselves and leave women alone...

Those wondering what I've got against sheep might not know that a female sheep that wants sex basically signals this by standing still. That's fine if you're a heterosexual because eventually the ram will notice and spring into action, but if you're a gay female sheep it's a bit of a non-starter... You stand still. If you're lucky another female likes you and... stands still... Then you both stand about being embarrassed and fending off unwanted males. It's a bit like a student disco, now I come to think of it.

I'm going off this whole lesbian thing, it seems fraught with difficulty.

Garden Partly

2009-11-26T21:25:00.003Z

I was rummaging about in some old files and I came across this set of alternate lyrics to Marillion's Garden Party. May not mean anything to anyone else, who doesn't know Ste, Simon and Fiona, but it amused me to write and it amused me again when I came across it today...

Ste's been drinking things today
Fiona's home there's hell to pay
Social drinking, another bender
Wayward Ste's with another lager

"Hello can, hello can"

Edgy cats in mewing numbers, rudely wakened from their slumbers
Time has come again for slaughter, on the chair by drunken 'master'

Water pistols keep them on the run
Again
Flying cushions chase them, every one
Again
Straafed by Steve, they sulk in hidden corners, again
Again
Oh God, not again

Vindaloos consumed en masse, betray their presence as a gas
Plazas loiter in the stomach, chemicals leech creating ulcers

"A lifetimes' drinking dims the light, the results of smirnov in the eyes"

Doctors son, her mothers daughter, will they make it to the altar ?
Please don't consume all the grass, unless accompanied by a fellow

May I be so bold as to perhaps suggest othello ?

Punting all the cats is jolly fun
They say
Going to the pub, oh please do come
They say
Drinking is the tops, a game for men
Oh they say
They say
Good God they say

I'm punting
I'm drinking
I'm snoring
So boring
I'm rocking
I'm fucking
" Who's is she ?"

Life's a party

Simon scores another few, Fiona smiles she got it too
Ste concedes a losing battle, cigarettes out - it's his flash
Flash...
Flash...

Phone calls polluted with false charm, Mother knows he means no harm
Future dinners now assured, he returns to drinking - unperturbed
Oh, unperturbed

Ohhh Punting all the cats, oh please do come they say
Drinking dry the town, oh please do come they say
He's sleeping with your wife again today
"Oh please do come"
"Oh please do come"
He say...

Incidentally, they all loved it. Ste was invited to retaliate, but sadly never did.

Psi (the Simon in the tale) also versified Ste, but the only line I can remember was :-

"It was big and brown and it wouldn't go down"

I seem to recall this related to the mother of all turds...

Pardon?

2009-11-26T03:02:00.002Z

Wasn't paying much attention, but while I was I working with the radio on in the background I heard that Obama had pardoned a turkey.

Was it Bush or Blair?

Synchronicity

2009-11-19T15:46:00.003Z

In order to justify his invasion of Poland Hitler hatched a plan to make it look like the Germans were provoked; this involved the Nazis faking a Polish raid on a German radio station near the border. To create credible 'evidence' for the raid some political prisoners were to be dressed in Polish uniforms, shot and their bodies left near the station; in the plans these unfortunates were referred too as "canned goods".

As a result of this invasion the English declared war on Germany, and the declaration of war was broadcast on radio immediately following a programme titled "Making the most of tinned food".

Someone or something has an ironic sense of humour...

Dairy products

2009-11-16T02:07:00.004Z

Just turned the TV on and stumbled across an episode of something called Emmanuelle 2000 on the sci-fi channel. In an improbable sex scene set in a kitchen a couple were pouring dark chocolate sauce and milk over each other... Chocolate sauce, yes, cream, yes - been there, done that - but milk? cold milk straight out of a fridge? No.

Probably some insane american black/white equal opportunity thang...

Windows 7

2009-11-10T02:51:00.009Z

So, in a rare - one might even say unprecedented - moment of enthusiastic optimism I ordered a copy of Windows 7 (ultimate edition) from Amazon. After all, it couldn't possibly be as awful as Vista.

After forking out £140 and waiting a couple of days, this arrived:

Gods, it comes to something when even Microsoft can't afford a decent box... Hang on - light dawns - this is a pirate! I suppose that's what you get when you order software from:

Gah... I spend minutes of my life writing invective and telling them that if I wanted pirated software I would get it myself, not spend £140 on it. I wax lyrical. I am prepared for a long drawn out fight with some faceless corporation. And then you know what they go and do? Refund me in full. What sort of nasty, evil, twisted company does that? After Sue has gone to the trouble of finding that nice picture an' all...

Sheesh. You just can't trust some people.

Yahoo toolbar

2009-11-09T16:43:00.005Z

No! I do not want to install your bastard toolbar! Stop asking me! Just bugger off with your "A new Java update is available and by the way, would you like to install the Yahoo Toolbar?" or your "A new AVG update is available and by the way, would you like to install the Yahoo Toolbar?" or your [deleted] garbage [deleted] bastard [deleted] software that installs that miserable toolbar... [deleted]

I wish there was a way to tell those [deleted] [deleted] at Yahoo to stop spamming the [deleted] universe with their accursed toolbar. Wankers...

I may have been going on a bit about this at work, because after one grump a chorus of "They fuck you with the toolbar" was heard...

Religious education

2009-11-02T02:16:00.005Z

"The thing you have to remember about religions is that they can't all be right... They could, however, very easily all be wrong"

Engineering

2009-10-23T00:49:00.007+01:00

So, after much rummaging about I have got this bastard long-running project to a state where it's worth taking it to the customer and plugging it into their mass spectrometer hardware, where it's basically going to be responsible for controlling the timing, driving various electrostatic lenses and acquiring data.

The design has an FPGA containing a reduced version of the R3220 (my custom 32-bit RISC processor) and about a dozen custom peripherals, it's running a fairly complicated embedded application (written entirely in assembler) consisting of 33 source files and the damned thing is responsible for some fairly hairy real-time data acquisition in a noisy environment.

As well as the device itself there are various development tools that have been written to support the design, all in all some tens of thousands of lines of code. All of which had to work and none of which had actually been tested on the machine.

And to cut to the chase, after we'd set some parameters (there are thirty-odd interface registers to play with up) and I'd restored a couple of lines that had been accidentally edited to death, it was controlling the hardware and we were looking at mass peaks... In other words, nearly everything worked first time, and the bit that didn't just required a few seconds of editing to fix.

The thing is, a programmer would regard writing so much code, and in assembler, and having it work virtually straight away as success beyond their wildest dreams, if not as being completely impossible. Me? I'm actually slightly pissed off - if I hadn't made a tired mistake tidying up a file (unnecessarily, at that) the bloody thing would have been right first time... As usual. Bugger!

Still, given that the processor was designed in only ten days and it's lovely to use, is kicking the shit out of a Nios2 performance wise and has behaved perfectly I suppose I'm allowed a small cackle of victory.

Mu-haha! MU-ha-ha-ha-oh... Sorry. Bit carried away there.

[Update on the "kicking the shit out of a Nios2" comment.

The R3220 (clocked at 30MHz) is handling more data in 5uS than the Nios2 (clocked at 70MHz) managed to handle in 80uS, so as far as the application goes the R3220 is a factor of 36 times faster, or so.

Much of this performance margin is down to the efficiency of the code they are running, of course, thought it should be noted that the Nios2 was running highly optimised C, code that was written and tweaked over a period of months. The R3220 is running hand assembler written over a period of hours and not optimised at all - there was no need.

The Nios2 system also had a lot of hardware support for functions that the R3220 system just does in software, because it can, so the performance factor is arguably higher even than that...]

CO2

2009-10-20T01:03:00.004+01:00

Just watched an advert demonising CO2. Far too little and far too late.

Wonder if any of the stupid ignorant bastards who've been doing their best to doom us all by opposing nuclear power will finally wake up and admit their culpability?

No, don't be stupid crem. They're probably all gearing up to oppose nuclear fusion...

Alli

2009-10-07T19:31:00.004+01:00

Alli is a new over-the-counter drug that binds to the fat in your diet and prevents the body from absorbing some of it, so that people can carry on stuffing themselves and still lose weight.

In a world where people starve to death it strikes me as almost obscene to market a drug that encourages the rich to eat too much and then shit fat...

Even more gloom

2009-10-01T21:07:00.006+01:00

You know, I wouldn't have thought it possible for today to be worse than yesterday, work-wise.

But it managed.

We have a reasonably large order for a new project, for which I have already designed the hardware, and so I just need to write enough of the software to be sure that the hardware works so we can safely order the PCB's, etc, for manufacture. Though actually I suspect that once started I'd actually write the whole thing so that we can provide an early sample for the customer to evaluate.

So, I duly set up the project and start to write code. Or at least I would, except that for some unknown reason the thrice-damned compiler for one of the processors involved (a Jennic RF device) has stopped working. Yes, the software has rotted. Or, to be more accurate, something I've installed (some other version of gcc, probably) since last time I used it (a few months ago) has messed with the path, or the environment, or whatever, and killed it.

Not that it gives a helpful message, you understand, no, the only indication is an essentially meaningless error from the make process, emitted from one or other of the (slightly incompatible) versions of the fucking make utility I have to have on this system. So once more, if I can work up the energy, I'm going to have to delve into makefile hell, find out what the bastard thing is moaning about, why it has changed, and what to do to fix it. And this, no doubt, will fuck with something else on the system and make that stop working with some obscure problem I will trip over later...

Oh, gods, how I detest relying on other people's development tools. I'd say most of 'em were designed by arseholes, but the truth is that most of 'em weren't designed at all and are just the product of generations of open-sore bodging.

So, what to do? There's something to be said for the idea of using virtual machines to isolate each and every piece of third party garbage out there, but that's a real pain in the arse for people like me who create systems which involve multiple pieces of hardware/software using different CPUs, languages and so on and so forth...

[sigh] I guess I'm going to have to spend some time studying the more arcane details of make utilities and makefiles so I can debug this mess. It's a study I've been putting this off for quite some time. Far too many makefiles are childishly overcomplicated and seemingly designed by immature programmers who admire complex solutions to simple problems - baroque stupidity for the terminally anally retarded.

Christ, I sometimes wonder what it is about so many programmers that makes them incapable of grasping the fact that simple solutions are to be prefererred to complex ones, but such wondering's clearly a waste of time. The answer is, as it so often is, merely stupidity.

Grump, snarl.

[later]

After a lot of farting about I sort of cured the makefile problem... What I don't understand is what brought it on. The cure was to replace a couple of absolute paths with relative paths.

Like this:

Before:
BASE_DIR = c:\foo\bah\sdk
After:
BASE_DIR = ..\..\foo\bah\sdk

Now, the thing I don't understand is what changed on the machine to stop the first version working. The paths haven't changed, the relative paths just refer to the same directories as the static paths did. The static path makefiles still work on other machines, they used to work on this one, FFS, and without anything changing now they just don't. There are times when I hate computers...

Morose-looking sheep

2009-10-01T01:44:00.005+01:00

"Research by scientists at the Free University in Berlin has shown a link between depressed farmers and vets and the infectious Borna virus which makes cows, sheep and horses behave weirdly. One good method of cheering yourself up during a depressive bout can now be to search your memory for contact with morose-looking sheep and blame it on them".

Try as I might I can't remember close contact with any sheep, morose or otherwise... Though I have shouted "mint sauce!" at them in the distance on occasion, so I suppose it could be delayed payback.

Bastards.

More gloom...

2009-09-30T22:35:00.004+01:00

Today follows the recent miserable trend with a problem being reported in something I wrote a couple of years ago, so once more I'm dragged off what I'm supposed to be working on and have to screw about setting up a different project, because my old tools don't run well under Vista (thanks Bill) I have to port various old sources into my new development tools, which means I have to update the new assembler to add support for a long-forgotten pseudo-op I added to work around an Atmel fiasco where a batch of their damned AVR processors failed to read constants from memory reliably when operated at anything more than room-temperature, then I had to chase a problem uncovered while I was adding that, then having sorted out the original problem I had to update the product website, add a new version of the product to various configuration tools and programmers...

It was well after 8pm before I left work and all of the day spent dealing with some problem I didn't even know existed yesterday.

And tomorrow, guess what - I've got to stop everything and start working on a different design which also needs to be done right now.

You can probably tell from the shitty writing style that I'm so tired I can't really think straight. Not having fun here...

Disappointment

2009-09-28T23:45:00.005+01:00

I use this (slightly modified) Roger Dean wallpaper as a desktop background, well, a reduced brightness version of it at any rate. Yesterday James, my five year old son wandered in and noticed it...

"Dad! Can we go there when I grow up? I want to go there!"

"Sorry, James, it's just a picture. Someone drew it."

His face feel. "Awww" he said and started sniffling. It was as if I'd cancelled christmas... There's something heart-breaking about the disappointments suffered by children.

Later it struck me that (barring disasters) there's a good chance he will get to go there, or at least to places every bit as imaginary, through virtual reality.

F1

2009-09-26T16:33:00.004+01:00

Gah, he's driving like a pillock so I have acted to ensure Button wins this year drivers championship.

How? I hear you ask. Well, 'twas easy - I placed a bet on Barichello to win it... At the moment one of the web betting sites have a promotional deal where your first bet is essentially free, and the odds against him were something like 6 to 1, so taking a free punt on him seemed like a good deal to me. I'd like Button to win but if Barichello beats him I win £130 or so, which would go some way to moderating my indifference - disappointment, I meant.

Now, I just need someone to nobble Red Bull...

Scribblenauts

2009-09-25T04:06:00.005+01:00

Scribblenauts is a game for the Nintendo DS and it's the first game in a long time that has impressed me. If you've got an NDS I strongly suggest you download the rom, play it and then buy the bloody thing, as I will be doing - they deserve it. It's superb.

What? Describe it? Well, basically it's a platform style game where you have to solve problems but the amazing feature is that you can write the name of just about any object you can think of into the game and have it appear.

The guys at work failed to fox it, they suggested "table" and it understands tables. They suggest "brick" and it understands bricks. I tried "osmium" expecting nothing, but it understands osmium. It knows it's dense. "Elephant" doesn't phase it, nor does "Bazooka"...

I was showing it to Sarah, on a level where there is a tree that needs to be cut down. "What would you suggest?" I asked her. "Axe" was the obvious response, so I write "axe" and one appears. I give it to the waiting lumberjack and lo, the tree was cut down. No great surprises there I hear you think.

"Suggest some other objects" I say - "Sunglasses" she replies. The game duly produced sunglasses, which the player's character then wears

"Go on, think of something awkward" I suggest. There is a pause.

"Ball gown" says Sarah. Ha! She's got it - it can't possibly... But it does. I write ball gown, and a ball gown appears. We give it to the lumberjack, who is definately not impressed and who then grumps mightily... clearly not a fan of Monty Python.

I then play about a bit. I write "atom bomb" and blow the entire level up. I write "time machine" and (glurk!) one appears and whisks me off into the past, where there are dinosaurs.

Ha! I think, and write "meteor"... One duly appears, and wipes out the dinosaurs...

At this point Psi phones and I wax lyrical at him. "Think of something!"

"Kumquat!" He says. Guess what? It knows about kumquats.

Later on I found there's a level where you have to shift a cow out of the road without harming it. I'd already found that "UFO" is recognised and gives you a flying saucer you can fly about in, so naturally... yes... you can hover over the cow and have the flying saucer pull it up. I like the way their minds work...

Garbage

2009-09-24T02:32:00.009+01:00

I've been finding it harder and harder to motivate myself of late and the reason, well, one reason anyway, is that I'm working on an upgrade to someone else's design and the original is such complete and utter garbage that every time I have to refer to it I want to throw the whole project in the bin and walk away.

It has a large software component - far larger than it needs to be - which appears to have been written by a beginner as their first ever software project. Unfortunately he wasn't a beginner and it wasn't his first project. Be that as it may, this piece of crap is, without doubt, the worst piece of programming I've seen in over thirty years. It is shockingly poor, a combination of just about every bad practice known to programming merged together in an orgy of sustained idiocy. None of it, and I mean none of it, shows any sign of competence whatsoever... Programmers will get an idea of what I mean when I say that the C source, all in one file, is about seven and a half thousand lines long, and that six and a half thousand lines of it is all in the main() routine. It's not that it needs to be, it's just that the author doesn't appear to grasp the idea of abstracting out common code into subroutines (whatever they're called these days)... Oh, he does know about them - he even has a couple. I'd tell you what they do, but then you'd have to kill yourselves in despair...

Oh, to hell with it. I'm depressed :(

Later: And as much as I hate it, I'm sure the bastard thing hates me even more. Wasted a lot of hours tonight trying (and failing) to figure out why I couldn't readback some ADC values, which it now appears is some sort of obscure board fault and not a problem in my FPGA design... That's the story of this project, I take one step forward and then several steps backwards with every session. Not one single fucking part of it has worked without a struggle. Every deadline has come and gone while I struggle with some obscure piece of stupidity and I'm heartily sick of it now.

[gloom]

Windoze

2009-09-21T16:12:00.006+01:00

I must put on record that I was being unfair to Herve today.

I accused him of being the flying dutchman of the laptop world, forever doomed to spend his time running Windows 95 - but he quickly corrected me - he actually runs Windows 98 SE and is proud of it...

You know, I'm not entirely sure that using Windows 98, even the second editon, accurately portrays the dynamic, thrusting and forward-thinking aspects of Design Design as a high-technology design company. Bet he still uses lead in his solder...

[Furtively crem returns to the assembler source for an FPGA processor he's tweaking. It is clearly a variation on a Z80...]

Wallander

2009-09-21T02:55:00.006+01:00

I've been watching the original Swedish "Wallander" TV series recently, having been a fan of the books for a while, and I was depressed to find out that the actress who played Linda Wallander (and played her well) killed herself a couple of years ago. Strange that I felt so bereft at the loss of someone I'd never have met or had any contact with whatsoever...

Halls of the Things in HD

2009-09-01T00:03:00.007+01:00

There are some talented people in the world, and some of them are mad. One such is a guy called Andy Stewart who (completely of his own volition) has written a version of Halls of the Things in C# and released it on an unsuspecting world... It's so faithful to the orignal that I took it upon myself to appoint him the fourth evil lord in honour of this evil deed; I'm sure Neil and Martin would approve.

He has created a web-page for this allowing it to be downloaded : http://www.whatisblueandfurry.com/hott/halls08.html

A thing of beauty is a joy forever; but those bastards are dynamite...

[For some bizarre reason the comment option doesn't always appear on this posting. If you want to comment, click on the title and then it does. Weird...]

Just google it

2009-08-28T13:02:00.006+01:00

Google makes life far too easy. A friend is getting reasonably good at some of the facebook games, so naturally I decide to wind them up by quietly posting slightly better scores. In the good olde days this would take skill - I'd have to figure out how to play the game... Hang on, [shudder], that's not what I meant - I meant I'd have to figure out how the game worked, where the score was stored, what form it was stored in, if there were any security checks and so on before hacking it to score whatever I wanted [phew]. This could involve several minutes of amusement...

In the really olde days you'd have to figure out their tape encoding schemes and fight off some cunning anti-piracy checks, but the days when programmers were that skilled are long gone; anti-piracy these days just means spelling your variables so badly that nobody else can figure out what the illiterate sod of a programmer meant, and it all happens by accident, not design.

But that's all moot, because now you don't hack anything, just google "bejewelled blitz cheat" and find the answer. Gah - where's the fun in that?

Pity I can't get it to score "xxx and a half", mind you. I suppose I could fake an accomplishment message... hmmm...

[later: A few days ago I found out that the wind-up worked... ]

Panes

2009-08-04T02:50:00.007+01:00

I've just put the finishing touches to some demo code for an ARM-based operator interface panel we've designed, and it's sitting in front of me as I type with a few windows bouncing about at frame-rate in the foreground and a Mandelbrot being rendered in the background. Every now and then another view of the Mandelbrot drifts past in a stately fashion (frame-locked, of course) and if I touch the screen it pops up another window that follows the touch about under my finger, with a ghostly lattice of lines being drawn overlayed on the background to show the outlines of the various regions of the screen that are being rendered as the window position changes... It looks beautiful, as graphics that change at frame-rate usually do.

I'd include a picture, but a static photo really doesn't do it justice and I can't be bothered to work out how to include video at my time of life.

The hardware is a Cirrus ARM processor that has a fair number of peripherals on chip, including the LCD display driver. That single chip and a couple of SDRAMs, a FLASH and some glue is all that's involved, hardware-wise. The software - a complete graphical windows system and enough of an OS to run operator interface style applications - (in total about 12,000 lines of C) was all written from scratch by yours truly in about five weeks...

Since all of this is written in C and compiled with GCC (unusually for me there's not a line of assembler in there, aside from the device boot code) and it still runs fast enough on a 200MHz ARM to look bloody impressive I find myself wondering how the hell programmers manage to take hardware like this and make it appear as slow and crappy as all the ARM-based personal organisers out there look.

What the hell are they doing to slow them down?

It's amazing how bloody awful the demonstration code that Cirrus supply for their own device is, it makes the thing look like a CP/M machine struggling to write to a terminal.

This particular chip has blitter and line-drawing hardware that I haven't used, since I wanted the graphics code to be pretty generic. The demo code from Cirrus uses the blitter and still manages to run like a slug that has overdosed on valium. Gah...

The incompetence that's endemic in this industry depresses me, it really does :(

"Hey, are your feet wet too?"

2009-08-03T02:05:00.009+01:00

Saw this image on t'web ( http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/20677595.jpg ) and thought that there just has to be an amusing caption in there somewhere... Buggered if I can think of one, though for some reason I can't get the idea that one of the penguins is singing "I'm peeing in the river" to the tune of Peter Gabriel's "I'm feeding the rhythm" out of my head...

(Photo is by LichtenHansen http://www.panoramio.com/user/2512952)

Mid wife crisis

2009-08-02T03:20:00.005+01:00

There is an evil in the world and it targets middle aged men. I feel I owe it to others to warn of this insidious peril... They're small, they're sexy, they're hard to resist. You see one and you have to have it, the urge is overpowering, after all - what's the harm? Your wife/lover needn't find out. She won't suspect - with luck you'll get away with it. So you have one, but it's not enough. The thrill doesn't last and you come crashing down. Then you have to have another, and another, and soon you're spending all your money trying to maintain your addiction. You think you can control it, but it's an illusion, they're far too complicated.

I'm talking about radio controlled helicopters. Avoid them... One is never enough...

Crotchless chastity belt

2009-07-30T01:21:00.005+01:00

I was aimlessly Googling about today when I came across... No, let me rephrase that - when I encountered the phrase "crotchless chastity belt"...

Now is it me, or is someone seriously missing the point there? Or is someone getting the point when they shouldn't? Either way the phrase "crotchless chastity belt" has replaced "chocolate teapot" in my vocabulary...

It's over, or should that be IT is over?

2009-07-30T00:26:00.003+01:00

I was working with a chip today, doesn't really matter what it was, when I realised that we are well and truly into the aftermath of the n'th industrial revolution. It's over, bar the shouting.

What shows this is the number of designs I now see that are fundamentally flawed, and flawed in ways that show the designers really don't know what they are doing. They get the basics wrong. I think the problem is that the leaders of the silicon revolution, or whatever fancy phrase you want to use to describe it, are now dying off and their hard-earned knowledge is being lost - the problem is that the good guys were all too busy doing it, whatever their particular "it" was, to write about how they did it, and they are now being replaced by people who have not learned from the ground up but rather were taught complicated subjects by those who weren't all that competent in the first place...

Up to the biotechnology people to take up the baton now, I guess.

Stress

2009-07-28T03:01:00.001+01:00

Stress is when you

[That was as far as I got before I gave up]

Ruminations...

2009-07-20T22:52:00.004+01:00

Someone asked me recently what aspect of my time in the games industry I remember most fondly. My knee-jerk answer to this sort of question is "Halls" but for a change I thought about it and there really is only one thing (aside from Halls) that still amuses me every time I come across it, and it is this couple of sentences that Psi and I wrote for the story line of Dr Strangefruit:

Strangefruit removed a dog-eared, loose-leaf notebook from an inside pocket and placed it reluctantly on the desk, as if parting with an art treasure of great value. Pratt reached over and picked it up, holding it by one corner, as one might retrieve a piece of used toilet-paper that had missed the bowl. It was not in keeping with Pratt's idea of documentation and did not appear to merit being on such an executive desk. "Might I ask what this is about ?" asked Pratt, who didn't want to have to read it to find out.

Well, there you go. More fun contained in a single paragraph than some of my complete games. We don't write 'em like that any more...

Ouch

2009-07-07T03:56:00.003+01:00

So, today I'm working on a new industrial input card for our logger family. Lots of 0..20mA inputs and some switched outputs, usual sort of stuff.

For added interest it has two AVR processors. A Mega128 sitting down near ground doing most of the work (handling the comms, multplexing inputs, driving the ADC and so on) and a Mega8 sitting up near the supply positive rail watching the current drawn on the outputs and turning them off if the current exceeds preset limits. These two talk to each other through a level shifting serial link.

Doing it with two processors is both the cheapest and neatest solution to the problem, the alternative would be to have lots of level shifting hardware for the various outputs and current sensing lines, which would involve much more hardware and be less accurate with it.

But - there had to be a but - it does mean that I have to simultaneously develop software for two processors that are running at different grounds, and also one of them needs a software emulated serial port because the hardware ones are busy doing other comms jobs, hence there is some slightly awkward software and the programming requires isolated AVR programming/debugging interfaces. Well, I have those, so no problem.

Hah. The gods don't like cunning designs.

I blow the first Mega8 up when the bloody ground clip of a 'scope probe unclips itself and wanders across the PCB, managing to touch one of the AVR I/O pins. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but it picks the AVR that has its ground up at +20V or so. It doesn't like having one of its pins dragged down to -20V (as it sees things) so bye-bye and off to silicon heaven it goes.

Much gallic muttering ensues as Herve replaces it.

A few hours later I'm busy working on the serial comms between the two processors when the 'scope probe slips out of my hand. It misses the board and I have a moment of relief until I realise it's heading for the exposed PCB of the isolated AVR programmer... It lands on it and there is a very slight, but clearly audible, click as the earthed shield of the probe makes contact with some component or other on the programmer.

Of course, it doesn't do this with the programmer that's sitting at ground, it picked the programmer that was connected to the positive rail and which was sitting with its ground at +20V or so, and that click signifies the end of that particular programmer. And, of course, the end of the bloody AVR it was connected to as well.

This happened at 10:30 pm, and at about 11:30 pm there was even more gallic muttering as Herve (dragged back into work) replaced the Mega8 again. This was accompanied by a fair bit of my own muttering as I repaired the AVR programmer.

About an hour and a half later the other AVR, which had been sitting down at ground and minding its own business, stopped talking to the debugger. After a bit of investigation it turned out that one of its I/O pins was damaged at some point in the preceeding fiasco and had quietly rotted.

Think I'll wait 'till tomorrow before I tell Herve he's got to replace the Mega128 now.

I'm starting to think the gods really don't like this design...

"It's alive!"

2009-06-30T04:00:00.003+01:00

Finished the complete SoC (system on chip) design for this 'ere project, which I think is quite impressive in only a couple of weeks given how complicated it all turned out to be.

I can see me using verilog in preference to VHDL in future, I've found it fairly nice to use. There was always something a little counter-intuitive about VHDL as far as I was concerned...

And now onward and downward - the application software for it.

Standards? What are they, exactly?

2009-06-27T07:10:00.005+01:00

I've got to design an SPI port; they have a clock line, a data in and a data out line. Oh, and a chip select line. Four lines, in all. Should be easy enough to knock one up.

Of course it's too much to expect that I'll have been given any documentation for the device that it needs to interface with so I'd better make the port flexible. How many variations can there be?

Turns out there are chips out there with every possible variation of those signals. The chip select can be active high or active low. The clock line can be active high or active low and the input data can be latched on the rising edge, or the falling edge... The output data can change before the leading or after the trailing edge of the clock. The clock may or may not run when the chip select isn't active. The number of bits in each transaction? You think it's a constant? Foolish twisted boy...

Standards? Simplicity? Who needs 'em...

[weeks later]

I didn't make it clear that the SPI port I was grumping about there was a slave port, designing the master end is easier (I'd designed a master port as well, both of the designs are published in the R3220 data so decide for youself)... The slave port's timing is at the mercy of the master port and I didn't have any documentation for their master port... Still, it all worked so I must have made a reasonable job of things...

Facebook

2009-06-25T02:42:00.001+01:00

Ok, I admit it. I'm on facebook. I gave in...

http://www.facebook.com/design.design

R3220 microprocessor

2009-06-15T03:36:00.009+01:00

I've been busy designing some FPGA hardware recently, and part of it uses a lovely little 32-bit microprocessor I designed a while back. I've been meaning to publish the source for it for some time, but since the contract for this design means I have to provide the source to the customer and even [shudder] document the thing to some extent I may as well take the opportunity to publish it now.

I've called it the R3220, those of a technical nature can assume this name derives from the fact it's a 32-bit RISC with about 20 instructions (while being completely oblivious of the "saturday night special" connection, I suspect).

The performance is fairly respectable, I'm using it to replace an existing NIOS II based design because the NIOS based design wasn't anywhere near fast enough.

As a guide the R3220 CPU uses between 600 and 1700 LE's in a Cyclone II array, so a complete system with one CPU with several peripherals only takes up ~12% of a Cyclone II EP2C20.

For fun I put four of these processors in the array (quad-core, anyone?) and it took up about 30% of the available logic. Since they can share memory without losing any performance it's actually not a bad idea to think in terms of more than one CPU for some applications, though I don't think I need to do it for this one.

(To facilitate the use of dual-port memory, which is common in gate arrays, the reset vector is configurable, so you can have two processors using the same memory block but not executing the same part of it. This incurs no extra delay so both will run at full speed.)

The verilog source, an example SOC design including various peripherals, a simple SDRAM controller and the r32 assembler can be found here -http://www.desdes.com/products/r3220/index.htm - note that this is the first verilog I've written so the style across the sources is inconsistent, I'm still finding my feet with the language. I'm more used to using VHDL, though I have to say I'm finding it a lot easier to write in verilog than VHDL, there's something about the 'feel' of verilog that I prefer.

This isn't the first processor I've designed and hidden away inside a gate array, but most of them have been too dedicated to a specific task to be worth discussing. This one is a nice general-purpose device to programme (in assembler, that is. If you're stuck using C then pick one of the MIPS implementations) and given how little time it took to develop (about ten days) I have to say I'm very pleased with it - it's a shame that so many embedded designers are stuck in the whole turgid morass of the linux/gcc/c bloatware mindset and can't play about like this, they really don't know how much fun they're missing...

For those who care it's a fairly classic load/store risc with a couple of unusual features. I designed it to have lots of registers (128) so I can dedicate them to interrupt handlers, and it has a nice touch that allows for 7 or 14-bit immediate values in the single-cycle instructions but also a full 32-bit immediate value can be used for all operations with only a single cycle penalty - it achieves this by taking one of the 7-bit immediate values, (-64), and using it as a flag to request that the next instruction word be used as a 32-bit immediate instead.

It has a reasonable addressing mode set with all the usual pre and post inc/dec indexed operations. The address is formed by taking a pointer register, which can be any of the 128 registers (there is no distinction between them) and optionally adding a 7-bit signed offset value. This address can be written back to the index register if required (with no extra delay) which allows auto inc/dec modes. The fact that the memory address used can be the register address or the register+offset means that there is full support for auto inc and dec with pre inc/dec and post inc/dec addresses. So any sort of stack you like, basically.

Every instruction is conditional with an option to update the flags. Sounds like an ARM, I suppose, though I first designed a CPU that did this many years before the ARM appeared so saying I got the idea from ARM might just earn you a thick ear [grin]. In fact, the bit field layout in this instruction set is remarkably similar to one of my designs from the 70's, though I was trying to outdo the PDP-11 back then so the that design had a particularly gothic and slow addressing mode set. [shudder]

The condition codes operate by having a 4-bit field that selects individual flags in the status register and then determining if the instruction should be executed using the state of the selected flag.

Doing that uses 14 of the 16 possible condition codes to handle 7 status flag bits. Of the two remaining codes one is ALWAYS which means always execute, of course, and the last is interesting - I've called it 'LOCK' and it always executes the instruction, the same as ALWAYS, but it also prevents the instruction from being interrupted. Once the processor has been put into LOCK mode it remains in LOCK mode until it executes an instruction with the ALWAYS condition code. This allows sections of code to be made 'atomic' without any overhead, and those sections can include conditional code.

Lock mode also forces locked RMW bus cycles where the bus architecture supports them, which makes it beautiful for implementing semaphores, etc. It's all much nicer than having to either flip interrupt enable/disable flags around critical bits of code or use peculiar instructions.

Another use of LOCK is in function entry/exit code, to make the stacking/unstacking of link registers etc safe. This can be handled transparently by the development tools.

I designed it to be agile, so interrupts have to be entered and exited quickly, and to that end it supports multiple interrupt levels with priority encoding on each of those for multiple interrupt sources at each level. The CPU outputs acknowledge signals when taking an interrupt vector so there are no delays while the handler has to manage the interrupt controller.

For speed it uses dedicated link registers instead of stacking the return address/state during interrupt cycles, and cleverly uses the particular link register invoked by the 'return' instruction to signal the end of that interrupt level to the interrupt controller. This means interrupt handlers are exactly as fast as calls and yet don't require any special entry/exit instructions.

Something else that's nice, though obvious, is that because you can load/store values directly to the status register and the condition codes use single bit testing peripherals can to organise their status flags so it's meaningful for the device handler software to load the peripheral's status register directly into the CPU status register and then use conditional instruction execution to determine how the flow should proceed. ie:

ld status,uart_status[peripherals]

call s0t RxByteHandler ; The s0t means execute this if status register bit 0 is true.
call s1t TxByteHandler ; The s1t means execute this if status register bit 1 is true.

The s0t, s1t (etc) are aliases for the conditions C, Z, etc.

This process is helped by the fact that the handers can preserve the status flags (they're saved in the link register and can be loaded back or not as required when returning).

The assembler is pretty powerful, as well as all the usual stuff you'd expect it handles allocating link registers automatically so the user doesn't have to know or care what they are. Thanks are due to a certain Ste for making me do this with his damned "It can't be that difficult" and "I can't see the problem" attitude.

In summary it's a nice processor, amazingly nice considering how little time it took to design. I absolutely love being in a position where I can design stuff like this and get paid for doing it...

Interesting times

2009-06-14T02:13:00.003+01:00

"May you live with interesting timings" I remarked, innocently enough.

"What?"

"May you live with interesting timings... You know, like the olde curse - may you live in interesting times - but updated for poor sods like me stuck trying to get their bloody logic running fast enough in a sluggish array... "

"What old curse?"

"May you live in interesting times - it's Chinese or Celtic or summat. Quite clever really, it implies that interesting times are not ones you'd want to live in"

[ponder]

"Not much of a curse, is it?"

"What?"

"I just think it's a bit mild for a curse... It wouldn't spring naturally to mind when I wanted to tell someone to fuck right off is what I'm saying... It lacks something. Live in interesting times? Pah..."

"You have no subtlety, if it was you no doubt it'd be something along the lines of 'may you have diarrhea and piles and live in the bathroom!' Oh, just fuck off!"

"See? Much more satisfying..."

"You know, thinking about it, you're right..."

Doomsday

2009-04-17T01:06:00.004+01:00

In the background while I'm writing this Sky are showing a film called "Doomsday", it's a sort of post-apocalypse mad-max rip-off set in scotland. Loonies on motorbikes, thunderdome type scenes.

I can't really imagine why they didn't just call it "Mad Mac's" and have done with it.

'snot really funny

2009-04-17T00:28:00.004+01:00

Red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple of hue
I can sneeze a rainbow, sneeze a rainbow, sneeze a... OK, you get the idea.

[sniff]

Another interesting problem at work today.

2009-04-10T04:29:00.007+01:00

We make electronically controlled beds for hospitals, they have achieved a certain notoriety hereabouts for occasionally exploding (I say occasionally because they rarely do it twice. That would indeed be excessive. Once is hardly worth mentioning, I feel).

A recent batch of 25 turned out to have four failures, when moved up and down they would not remain flat, basically the actuator at the foot end of the bed was not being controlled correctly - it was not moving as far as the actuator at the head end, only about 60% of the distance. The four were so consistent (all showing nearly the same degree of tilt) that we decided it pretty well had to be a software issue, hard as that was to explain.

But it wasn't - let me digress back a few years to the start of the project:

When the first bed hardware (frame and actuators) arrived for us to design the control electronics it came with a example mattress. These medical mattresses are not as you might expect - designed with disease control in mind they are waterproof and made of materials that can survive being steam cleaned. Basically they're dense and covered with some polymer that resembles rubber. And they are supplied, as most things are, in a plastic cover.

I must stress that in the eternal war of man against mattress these may be regarded as special forces, highly trained and motivated opponents. If you are asking yourself "what war?" then you are either damned lucky or have not yet made love in an uncooperative bed. But that's another saga.

So, picture the scene - we have a dirty-great mattress standing up on end against a wall with a polythene cover that needs to be removed. Along comes an unsuspecting Leon, I guess he winds up doing this because he just happened to be tall enough to reach the top of the mattress. As the only other person involved who is tall enough to have done this I must now give thanks to the gods of laziness who were smiling upon me on this occasion, because Leon walked over to the mattress as I was getting to my feet, grabbed the polythene bag near the top of the mattress and tugged it off with a manly flourish.

It was probably the last manly flourish or tugging off he managed for some time, because as he did this the friction between the polythene and the mattress built up a massive static charge which then discharged between the centre of the mattress and the part of Leon that happened to be closest to it as he lent backwards... The flash was visible in a brightly lit room, and the crack, while not exactly thunder, certainly wasn't a tiny little "click!" either... Leon clutched at his groin, managed a strangled squeak and collapsed. The mattress then celebrated its victory over humanity by slowly collapsing on top of him, which was followed by a general collapse of everyone who'd witnessed this event...

"You... Bastards..." Leon managed to say, after some considerable time had elapsed. "Get this... this... THING... off me"

Well, actually he probably said it a few times before we noticed, we were far too busy trying to breathe. Excessive laughter can be dangerous...

Anyway, the upshot of this is that removing the bags from these bloody mattresses is deadly. You don't do it fast. Given the chance you don't do it at all, you give the mattress in its bag to some poor unsuspecting suckers and let them find out for themselves, as we did.

"Do you know what happens if you remove the bag quickly?" I asked the supplier.
"Don't" they said.

"You don't know?"
"No - don't remove the bag quickly"

[pause]

"Thanks. I'll tell Leon that."

Knowing this at the start I designed the electronics with more of an eye to static protection than is normal, and it was successful because we have built a fair number of these beds without further problems (though other equipment the beds take a dislike to has been destroyed by it, they don't always choose the kinetic energy weapon option).

So, what about these four failing beds? Well, yep - static damage. They'd been built, calibrated (to define the range of movement allowed, etc), and then the mattresses had been fitted, only this time they'd done four of them differently - someone had put the mattress on the bed before pulling the bag off and also done this in such a way (yet to be determined) that the discharge was through the same actuator of all four beds. This then overpowered and destroyed a filter component (ironically something that was only there to protect the rest of the electronics from this very static) and did so in almost the same way on all four beds. It went from looking like a ~10nF capacitance to resembling a ~25K resistance, with all four having more or less the same resistance when dead... This added resistance then loaded the actuator's position sense pot, destroying the linearity, so the bed control loop thought the beds were flat when they weren't.

This input protection laughs at human-body model static discharges, you understand. Eats them for breakfast, so gods alone know how much energy is involved with these combat mattresses.

I now suspect this is the real reason why nurses are forever warning people not to sit on the beds during hospital visits. They're trying to do us all a favour, they know the evil forces that lurk beneath that innocent looking exterior. Be afraid. Be very afraid...

Interesting, eh? What? Well I didn't say it was very interesting... Oh, well, suit yourselves...

PC audio hardware

2009-04-10T01:33:00.011+01:00

The idea has occasionally wandered across my mind (leaving a messy trail) that the audio outputs of a modern PC should be capable of generating fairly high quality audio test signals, and further that if the PC audio inputs are up to scratch they could be used to digitise the results of stuffing these test signals through external equipment-under-test, so that with a bit of signal processing jiggery-pokery the PC should be capable of quickly providing THD readings, frequency response curves (for RIAA networks and the like) and so on and so forth, basically the sort of things I used to do (albeit crudely) in the seventies with test gear that cost monopoly money (to build, that is, couldn't just buy it. Or would have cost the earth if I'd had any money. I was making it up as I went along with bits and pieces I managed to beg, borrow or, um, liberate).

This is hardly original, I hear you think. "Well, it was when I first did it" I respond grumpily, "analysing audio output stages using boxcar sampling thirty years ago. All my own ideas, too. Were you even born? Huh?" And other suchlike grumping sounds that an olde dinosaur makes when challenged. Where was I? Oh, yes...

In fact, aside from electrical noise (hard to avoid inside a PC) I'd have thought that a modern audio DAC/ADC combination from even the cheap end of the PC market would comprehensively outperform the hardware I was using back then. Hah! Foolish crem...

So, tonight while I'm feeling a little under the weather (man flu setting off an opportunistic dental abscess) I decide to have a play with this idea rather than doing anything particularly demanding. A few minutes in Delphi generating an accurate sinewave (no - I'm not slowing down - you can generate an inaccurate sinewave in seconds, but doing it properly requires it to be generated with correct dithering (TPDF) applied to the fractional bits that would otherwise be truncated, and that needs a little thought) and lo - I'm sat here listening to a 1KHz sinewave. Sounds nice enough and everything's looking good for a quick and dirty THD test set until I look at the waveform on t'scope.

(A special hell is reserved for anyone even thinking about questioning the triangular dither. If you think it could be better using a shaped function then you need to brush up on dithering - shaped functions are only suitable for final output - you really don't want to skew the noise frequency distribution going in to the gear under test. Running error accumulation instead of dither? Just don't. Tie the dither generation into the ADC with synchronous correction in the readback? Good thinking but not with unknown systems inbetween... Besides, it's not always a sinewave and I'd hardly tell you what I'm intending to do with this eventually, would I? triangular it is then. Good...)

Now, I admit I was expecting a reasonably clean looking sinewave. Dumb, but I admit it. Oh, crem-the-eternal-pessimist was expecting noise, and hum, and mush of various kinds, but with a smooth sinewave hiding underneath it all none the less. A sinewave lurking behind the sort of noise and mush that will average out give enough signal processing, is the point. Hah! Idiot. I'm not feeling well, that's my excuse.

Here it is:

Magnified (x2.5 post sampling):

Well, it's a sinewave, I suppose, but at first sight it looks like a sinewave generated using a raw 8-bit DAC. Very reminiscent of the stepped waveforms I'd expect from a cheap embedded design that didn't care much, not a supposed high quality (hah) DAC system.

So, does this motherboard, which claimed good audio qualities, use short DACs? A moment of experimentation and it becomes clear - it's not a short DAC but the cheapskate designers of the motherboard haven't applied any analogue reconstruction filter to the output... Nada. Zip. Not even a token RC filter...

Same again, but at 10KHz:

I suppose we should be thankful that they've at least upsampled the digital data to 96KHz, so at least most of the shit they're throwing out is well outside the audio band. Mind you, I bet they did that so they can cut back on the DAC length/ADC input filters and then just didn't bother to fit either. Gah...

Oh, I know, I could always use off-board audio hardware but that's not the point; if this is the normal sort of performance the idea's useless. Gah.

My laptop does rather better, clean looking sinewaves at 1KHz and 10KHz, so filtered at least, though that might be just the headphone driver not keeping up with the edges ;)

[that lot was edited into some degree of coherence after some sleep]

Maybe I was being too picky anyway. Even for simple tests I'd probably use the stereo outputs to generate antiphase signals and then use a differential amplifier to get rid of as much common mode noise as possible, so it's no great bother to put a quick and dirty reconstruction filter in/in front of that stage... I wonder if it's worth doing the same sort of thing going back in; turn the signal into a differential pair for the stereo inputs and subtract them in software? Have to think about that, doubt it'd do that much good. Hmm...

Wrong.

2009-04-02T01:08:00.008+01:00

This is a packet of coffee, such as we use at work...

This is a packet of instant porridge.

And this is both of them carelessly placed on the same shelf at work.

'nuff said, I think...

More culls from cix

2009-03-11T02:00:00.005Z

[23/01/2001 06:18:07]

Scientists warn of increasing global warming. . .

In a surprise move, the UK government doesn't blame the internet.

[13/10/2002 14:50:39]

[snip]

Sell the idea? Sell one of my children? One of my babies? Sell? Like for money? [pause]

Coo, can you do that?

[crem furtively eyes the room. It's full of ideas he's been nurturing for ages. He reaches out and grabs one as it scampers past; it is the idea for writing "The Story Of No" a tale of one man's complete failure to find submissive women. It looks adoringly into its father's eyes as he coldly weighs up the chances of selling the little bugger. He lets it go and reaches for another, then another. . .]

He reaches a decision: "Muhaha! It's time they paid for themselves! Sell zem! Sell zem all!"

[17/10/2002 02:40:01]

> We like you in grumpy bastard mode

Just as well since it seems to be happening more and more often ;)

Gah. Grump. Too much work. I need to change my life-style. Well, actually, I was thinking of getting a life to start with, then work on points for style later on. . . Hah. I should be so lucky. Oh, well, back to work.

[crem makes sure everyone else in the house is asleep. He furtively closes and locks the door to his room, switches on the computers and lowers the lighting. He settles down in a chair with a box of tissues. Aghast we watch as he opens up the secret directory containing files that decent people are afraid to discuss. Pornography? No, much, much worse, agh! unspeakable horror! My god - it's full of compilers! He cleans his glasses with a tissue and starts typing. . .]

Trunking

2009-03-11T01:27:00.003Z

Speaking of the goings on at Des Des there was the time JCL found the hose from an old vacuum cleaner in the back yard and started wandering around using it like an elephant's trunk, holding one end of it between his teeth.

JCL: "Hey, look at this! Nuff, nuff, give us a bun!

(Don't ask me for details now but that was the punch line of a joke involving elephants)

Crem: "Ah, do you know why that tube is out here?"

JCL: "No... Should I?"

Crem: "Maybe... It was thrown through the toilet window after Graham had used it to unblock the toilet..."

JCL removes tube from mouth. JCL looks at brown stains on tube... JCL goes an interesting green colour...

The gunpowder plot...

2009-03-11T01:21:00.002Z

[clip from cix]

Apropos of this, back in the early Design-Design days there used to be a long-running project to fire a felt-tip pen across the road, over a stream and into a nearby park. This project, you understand, would get invoked after our all-night drink and drugs sessions.

We never had all that much success with the felt-tip pen projectile project, though on one memorable occasion we stuffed rather too much shotgun-80 gunpowder into a steel tube cannon, aimed it out of Graham's bedroom window and managed to make the felt-tip pen disappear altogether, which was counted by some of us as a successful launch. It certainly crossed the road, bits of it might have landed in the park. I suspect the bulk of it is still in orbit.

Made a fantastic noise, anyway. A sort of cross between a bang and a long-drawn out "woosh-fooooommmmm!", probably because a lot of the gunpowder was thrown out of the cannon and ignited in the air. Just as bloody well, I expect; that project proved on more than one occasion that the gods protect the stoned.

I miss those days. Life is too serious now :(

Intelligent design

2009-01-21T19:08:00.002Z

[snip]

This made me think; these religious types with their god created the universe in 6 days and all that bollocks, where did their god get his development gear from? Who calibrated it?

In the beginning was the word? Like hell. In the beginning was the RS order, or in the beginning was the AVO meter.

And God looked on the face of the meter and said "Fuck me, this isn't even a model 8..."

Ruminations : Invasion of the Body Snatchers

2009-01-21T19:05:00.002Z

[copy of a recent email]

Many years ago, back in the dark ages of 8-bit games machines, there was a game called Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Here are my ruminations on all the high score changes in Invasion. When I can work up the energy I'll do the same for the other games.

First there was a list of various friends, etc.

"andym" is changed to "A.Machin"
Andrew Machin was a friend, and also author of the LERM tape copier. Met him through my brother, who was a teacher at the same school as Andrew. I wandered in there one day and was stuffed in front of a class and had to give an impromptu lecture in games design... Petty much my idea of hell ;)

"chewrubba" is changed to "The Thing"
I was occasionally called chewrubba. Reference to a hairy character from Star Wars and the Spectrum keyboard, as if anyone couldn't work that out.

"motty" is changed to "N.Pottingshed".
Reference to Neil Mottershead. I doubt he ever bothered to play it to find this...

"krdt" is changed to "K.R.D.Terry".
Keith Terry is one of my oldest friends, who probably hated the game ;)

"alanw" is changed to "A.Walker"
One of my earliest friends.

"rozzer" is changed to "R.Walker"
Rosalind Walker... Sigh. Alan's beautiful sister, the first girl I kissed seriously. God, I wanted her... Hell, I still want her ;)

"johnl" is changed to "J.Lawrence"
And another very old friend, who I have completely lost touch with...

"meb" is changed to "Hello Maria !"
MEB were the initials of Maria, Martin Horsley's girlfriend. Neil and I lusted after her as well... (Martin, Neil and I had previously written Halls of the Things).

"maria" is changed to "Programmers in general eh ?"
Maria again - I once asked her at a party if she was interested in Martin or just programmers in general. She said programmers in general, but she was only trying to fend off my drunken advances. Hang on... Sounds like she was encouraging them... Blast! Where's my bloody time-machine? [later-earlier-later again] Nope, fending off it was...

"mash" is changed to "Smart arse"
Mash was Martin Horsley's nom-de-high-score table. I suspect this entry has something to do with his relationship with Maria, the lucky bastard. Might also be a reference to "Rommel's Revenge", which he was developing at the time. I can't be sure now...

"dave" is changed to "The cardboard box !"
This is (a) a reference to comic sketches in one of Jasper Carrot's series. Googling will tell you more.But it's really intended as (b) a way to take the piss out of a friend of Neil's who was called Dave, surprisingly enough. Any other Daves are collateral damage and I apologise profusely...

"jdg" is changed to "Hi Jim !"
JDG were the initials of James Garside, another old friend. Jim and I had been sharing a flat while we were at university. It was where most of Halls was written.

"c.c.c" is changed to "Chrisipoos"
C.C.C. -> Christopher Charles Clark, I think. Chris was one of the founders of Crystal Computing. I'm not sure if we were getting on well at this point, a bunch of us were about to stage a revolution and set up our own software house (Design Design).

Then there are a few HHGTTG-ish references.

"whatisthe" is changed to "42 of course !"
"marvin" is changed to "Life don't ...."
"zaphod" is changed to "It's easier with three arms I suppose"

Then there are a few general references.

"kickaha" is changed to "P.J.Finnegan"
Kickaha is the name used by the character "P.J.Finnegan" in Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series of fantasy books. But it's a reference to a reference, because "P.J.Finnegan" has the initials "PJF", the same as "Philip Jose Farmer", so Kickaha is a reference to Farmer as he'd like to be, as indeed would I. That series were and still are some of my favourite books... Kickaha was also the default name we used for the initial high-score in Halls of the Things, and I suspect there are other references to The World of Tiers series in the other games.

(Kickaha is a native american name for a trickster, to put it very loosely. A role I'd relish if I were only cunning enough ).

"cheesecake" is changed to "Greens Original"
Neil was officially the catering manager - this is true, we had one for some arcane reason or other - glomming free food, I'd imagine, and in this role he often made chicken curries to a recipe that his mother had given him. They were excellent. Afterwards, well frankly after any possible excuse, we would have a Greens Original cheesecake. In fact, I'm tempted to go and have one now... There were other references to these scattered about.

"6502" is changed to "Crappy processor"
Need I say any more? I have designed better processors in an afternoon. So have random CAD system crashes...

"darthvader" is changed to "Boring tit !"
God knows. I can only surmise that someone I've forgotten used to enter "darth vader" in high scores...

"xyzzy" is changed to "Wrong game !"
xyzzy was a magic word in one of the first text adventure games (Colossal Cave).

"blach" is changed to "Bells ring etc ."
I suspect this is a reference to a bug in the spectrum game "The Hobbit", but I couldn't swear to it now. I'd try entering it into The Hobbit and see if bells ring, etc...

"sex" is changed to "Yes please !"
"fuck" is changed to "Like too !"
Ah, the depressed innocence of youth. If only we'd known then what we know now. But don't get me started on sex ;)

"cheese" is changed to "Cheese ?"
This is obscure. The first version of the high-score table code, which few people ever saw, didn't recognise all these text entries and change them individually, it just recognised the word "cheese" followed by a number and then it outputted different messages. This is a reference to that early phase of the code. And to our, well, frankly our obsession with cheese. Ok, ok - my obsession with cheese. Cheese and sex, sex and cheese, how could this combination be improved upon? Very easily.

"lavinia" is changed to "She's moved to 061-205-6603"
In Halls there's a reference buried in the code (for hackers to find) to "Lavernia's Massage Parlour" which gave the telephone number of the flat I was living in (sharing with JDG) at the time it was written. There was no actual lavinia, but there were a couple of sisters living upstairs that we used to dream about. One was called Sylvia and I'm sorry but I forget the name of the other. For some reason Sylvia lent me her copy of "More Joy of Sex", which was an evil thing to do to a desperate virgin; almost, but not quite as evil as having her bloody bedroom right over mine and having a bed that squeaked. Gah... Somehow their flat became known as "Lavinia's Massage Parlour"... Ah, but they were far too sophisticated for the likes of us, penniless students as we were...Sylvia's boyfriend had a BMW, for gawd's sake. What chance did we have? Sob...
On one memorable drunken evening I'd rigged up my development machine so it would record audio and play it back backwards. (This was advanced stuff for 1982, or at least it seemed like it then) and Martin, Neil, Jim and I sat in my room thinking of things to say and trying to learn how to say them backwards. Don't ask me why but Martin came up with "Sylvia has big nipples" and then spent a good half an hour learning how to say it so that when it was reversed it was perfectly legible. What with this and the coke-bottle fights (the flat was full of 1.5-litre plastic coke bottles) where everyone took turns to throw coke bottles at everyone else let it not be said that we didn't know how to have a good time...

Where was I? Ah. Yes. Sorry.

"speakertoanimals" is changed to "Chmee"
A reference to a character from Larry Niven's Ringworld series. Some more of my/our favourite books.

"spectrum" is changed to "Ghastly rubber thing"
We didn't much like the Spectrum, in fact I probably like it more now than I did then - twenty more years of the computing industry have significantly lowered my expectations.

"crystal" is changed to "Design Design Software"
And very soon after this was published, it did..

"hott" is changed to "Halls"
I didn't particularly like "hott" as a name for "halls", it has grown on me, I suppose.

"tony" is changed to "A blaze of trumpets & singing angels"
This is a reference to the first published review of "Halls" which was probably the most accurate and interesting review we ever received for any of our games. Tony is Tony Hawks - the reviewer, if I remember correctly. He used the phrase in the review...

There are more jokes in there and it would be interesting (for vanishingly small values of interesting) to discuss the initial entries in the high-score tables, but that excitement will have to wait for another time. As you might be able to tell from the lousy text I'm not feeling particularly alert today...

Design Design source code

2008-10-13T14:17:00.004+01:00

As I mentioned before I've published all the remaining source code for the Design Design 8-bit games. They can be found here:

http://www.desdes.com/products/oldfiles/

To make the sources useful I've written a reasonably competent Z80 cross-assembler and put that up there too - using it you can assemble the games sources to *.sxz files ready for loading into an emulator with a single click. Took months and months and... well, weeks. A week. Several days at least. OK, ok - a couple of sessions. I'm not that obsessive...

It also includes a fairly competent binary -> source code disassembler, for pulling other people's code to pieces and, ah, modifying it. Wet Set Jilly rides again...

Spectrum software development using it is almost as easy now as it used to be for us, so anyone with an interest in retro gaming should get up there and write some games... I may award a prize to anyone who can take the Forbidden Planet source and make something interesting out of it...

Have fun.

Yet more culls from conferences...

2008-09-18T13:48:00.009+01:00

[Talking about why things are always exploding on the bridge in Star-Trek...]

> The bridge should be just a room full of control surfaces, with all
> the dangerous stuff in engineering. Why does *anything* on
> the bridge need to explode?

It's the inevitable consequence of software evolution. Consider - programmers are lazy and everything they do requires more computing power than it should. This trend shows no sign of ending, already with current techniques it already takes a couple of billion instructions and GHZ of CPU to do something that would have used a few instructions on a slow 8-bit CPU in the 80's. Extrapolate this trend and you'll see that in the future display consoles will routinely require multi-multi THz processor farms consuming gigawatts of power just to flash the cursor - cover the bridge in control surfaces and it'd probably have a higher energy density than engineering; any disruption to the display cooling and...

> Let's hope they don't use screensavers.

They /couldn't/ use screensavers - the ship's engines would stall.

"I need more power Scotty! Another fish just swam onto the screen..."

[misc]

> You can't keep an old dog down

Depends how well it's cooked. . .

[misc]

> I doubt there'll be any software by then as people may have
> finally realised what a bad idea software was...

Don't you mean software will have finally realised what a bad idea people were?

[misc]

So, you expect us to believe that trees are made of wood, when any fule know that woods are made of trees ?

[misc (1995)]

Us veggies don't have this problem, everything we eat is so ashamed it stays down. . .

[a thread where someone said they liked Forbidden Planet (the game) (1995)]

Simon stared at Robs message. The possibility that anyone actually liked the damned game had not, until this moment, ever crossed his mind.

Simon felt lost, his world-picture shattered - not so much by the realisation that there was a mind warped enough to *like* FP, but rather by the crushing realisation that this mind was only a modem or two away, and furthermore it expected a reply - something that would be, *could only* be interpreted as complicity in the very existence of the damned game. . .

With a feeling of a vast, unknown, gulf opening up before him - a shadowy domain of unthinkable terrors - he poised himself ready to type, but alas, all was in vain - he couldn't think of anything suitable to write.

He swivelled, aimlessly, in his chair, drumming his fingers on the bottom of the keyboard, totally at a loss for a reply, until eventually, with an abrupt raising of his eyebrows, he turned back to the monitor and typed the first thing that came into his head. . . .

[misc]

A truck jackknifed spilling its load of parenthesis onto the M6 this evening. A spokesperson said they were unavailable for comment. . .

[misc]

I think that the Airbus and Windows are both cursed by arrogant and incompetent programmers, who seem unable to learn from experience :(

I'd prefer the airbus because it kills you quickly, it doesn't just grind you down and make your life into one long unproductive drudge ;)

[manned spaceflight (2004)]

What's interesting, at least to me, is that I don't know where I stand on the issue of manned spaceflight. As a kid I was all for it and very disappointed when Apollo was unceremoniously dumped, and even up to a decade or so ago I'd have agreed with Heinlein that "the earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in" and argued that it's only a matter of time before we follow the dinosaurs into oblivion if we don't get at least a breeding colony off-planet, but now, well, I'm not sure it's going to matter for much longer.

Basically, I think we're too limited a life-form to aspire to the universe. I think we'd just make a mess of the place. I think the only meaningful role 'we' have is to give birth to AI's, assuming we're capable of this. Once we've done that we'll have effectively created a race of immortals that will be able to adapt and scale themselves in ways we can't imagine, and it will be practical for them to explore and use the universe in ways that fragile bags of water cannot begin to do. So, while manned spaceflight may well be of value to us as a spiritual exercise in the short term it's probably of no long-term benefit to intelligence.

When I've rambled along these lines before I'm occasionally accused of having a very depressing outlook, but I don't regard it as such - I just think "my species, right or wrong" is as silly a notion as "my country, right or wrong". What matters, if anything matters, is that intelligence continues and prospers. . .

Mind you, having now been awake and working since some time on Saturday [2 days] it's just possible that I'm writing complete bollocks. Ho hum, back to the, no, sod it - I'm off to bed ;)

[nasa returning to the moon (2006)]

> The full Exploration Systems Architecture Study which sets out
> the current thinking for the way back to the moon

Visions of everyone resisting the urge to say "Up", except (perhaps) those resisting the urge to say "why"...

[eXtreme Programming (2004)]

> Anyone use XP here?

Well, yes, we've used many of the techniques since the early 80's, though without any of us ever feeling the urge to invent such a silly name and claim such practices were anything other than the bleedin' obvious. It never ceases to amuse me how fickle programming is, work long enough in the industry and you'll see nearly everything once regarded as good practice go out of fashion, be reviled, then be rediscovered, rebranded and ultimately subverted. Every generation of programmers seems incapable of taking anything seriously until they've renamed it. Pitiful, really.

[Countering advocacy, again, again (2002)]

> where is C now compared to the speed and richness of Delphi?

Hmm. Hah! You can't fool me, I can see it there peeking out of 'richness', third letter from the left. . .

Sorry. Seriously? I doubt I'm alone in observing that programmers who worry excessively about language issues are rarely capable of writing anything worthwhile in any language. I think designers should strive to be flexible, so I think it's usually futile to adopt the position that any particular language is better or worse than the rest other than on a case by case basis. ISTM that in reality external factors usually dominate over language preferences, ie, particular project constraints and objectives, company preferences, experience, what example code exists, what libraries are handy, which tools are available, phase of the moon, etc, etc.

I'm here because I like Delphi and find it very productive, but today I've been designing using Delphi, C++, C, assembler, schematic capture and solder. All of them suited their particular part of the application, but I could have chosen alternatives. Would I choose the same ones again for a similar application? Maybe, maybe not, I get bored so I play about. Would I recommend this to anyone else? Maybe, but I'd probably assess their application, competence and background before advising them to do exactly what they were going to do anyway.

[lasers (1995)]

Actually that was my laser, unfortunately the testicles it once fried were also mine ;)

Take my word for it folks, don't coil the wire to a gas-laser in your lap unless you're *damn* sure there are no breaks in the insulation. . .

[cut]

But how can I tell the story behind the "Fried Testicles" of '83 without revealing my complicity in the "Red UFO Sightings in Clwyd" of '83, "UFO's - The Welsh Triangle" of '84 and '85 and even the sorry tale of the "Illuminated Police car in Garage Forecourt" of '86 ?

Is the world ready for the truth behind the young software house that drove around Northern England and N.Wales at night pointing lasers at road signs, pedestrians, into peoples bedrooms, across valleys at farmhouses and (occasionally) straight into occupied police cars ?

I think not.

And if, as the rumours have it, one night the insulation broke down on their laser PSU and it repeatedly stuffed 10KV spikes into the lap of the unfortunate bugger in the passenger seat while everyone else in the car had hysterics and were unable or unwilling to help, well, it could only be regarded as divine retribution. . .

(But how the memory lingers - pinhole burns, the smell of burnt pork, muscle spasms, frantic scrambling, pain, and over it all, the laughter, their damned, damned laughter)

Urgh, never again :)

Old games sources...

2008-09-04T18:15:00.002+01:00

As requested here are some more of the olde games source files. And a few other bits and pieces that fell off the disks while I was rummaging in the archives...

http://www.desdes.com/products/oldfiles/index.htm

More culls from conferences

2008-08-28T17:15:00.006+01:00

From cix (18 Apr 2003)

> hardly stressing the I/O on a mega128...

Yes, usually lots of I/O to go round on those. Mind you, that's no excuse for leaving it idle - I'm reminded of the time I had a 'phone call from some engineer who was practically incoherent with laughter having found my telephone number and a fairly raunchy message being output in morse on an unused output pin buried inside some embedded gear. . .

From cix (27 Mar 2005)

This reminds me (painfully) of a guy (Wookie) I used to work with back in the early 80's. He made serial ports that derived their timing from RC oscillators and was forever tweaking pots to get the damned things to work...

Back then we (Design Design) all lived and worked in a large victorian house in Manchester, and since Wookie was a radio ham, and I had various home-brew computers running noisily in the room next to him, we occasionally came into conflict - he was of the new-fangled opinion that computers shouldn't generate RFI, and I was of the old-fangled opinion that it was a minor miracle that the damned things ran at all, let alone that they should be expected to do so when enclosed in metal boxes.

The upshot of this was an uneasy compromise with Wook's aerials living in the attic and the attic floor and various walls of my room covered with aluminium foil.

On one memorable occasion Wookie had put some effort into designing some hardware/software to sit on the end of his comms receiver and decode morse transmissions, so that instead of learning morse you could just read the stuff in plaintext on a terminal. Why you should wish to do this at all is something that I never understood, but that's radio hams for you... Anyway, it occurred to me that some response was called for in honour of this, so while he was developing his morse decoder I quietly spent a few hours knocking up a piece of Z80 code to run on a small prototyping board and generate morse from text, and which would also drive a TTL port line up and down as fast as possible to generate enough electrical noise to transmit this signal... Generate a squarewave at several hundred KHz and there are bound to be harmonics all over the amateur bands, he's sure to stumble over one of them... Not expecting much success I left it repeatedly transmitting a loop of text.

The next day, with a few of us watching over his shoulder, he proudly tuned around the amateur bands hunting for morse signals and showing us his decoder locking onto them and decoding the morse. It was actually quite impressive, hand-sent morse can be a bugger to decode as the baud-rate varies so much. Eventually he happened across a very weak signal that faded in and out as we listened...

"Very weak, might be coming from the other side of the world" said Wook, "That'll be a good test!"

"Might be coming from the other side of the wall" thought crem...

Now, the message that *should* have been sent was [rummage in archived code]:

"CQ CQ CQ IF ANYBODY IS GOING TO ASDA I WILL COME ALONG TOO IF I TOLD THEM SHIT WAS GREEN THEY WOULD BELIEVE ME WHY DIDNT YOU TELL ME EARLIER YOU COULD HAVE HAD TEA AT MY HOUSE GW0OKI"

... which were phrases Wook had used the day before, plus a joke callsign, so I thought it wouldn't take him long to suss out they were from one of us. But I'd fucked up the lookup table in my code, so one of the letters was sent incorrectly. Add to this some errors from the decoder and gradually a confused message built up on screen.

"This is weird - sounds like someone I used to know, he used to say that about shit. Wish the signal was stronger, fading in and out like that means it must be coming from a long way away"

Frantic re-tuning from Wook. Frantic stifled giggling from crem.

"...Hmmmm. You know, I'm _sure_ I know this guy... he must have moved abroad... Hang on a second..."

A fair while passed, with Wook becoming more and more confused by this 'foreign' transmission and coming up with ever more bizarre explanations for its origin/purpose... Eventually, however, there was a dramatic pause as Wook started to realise he'd been had, which gave me enough of a head start to get away... Though it was touch and go - he was only a few feet behind after we'd descended three flights of stairs, nearly got me at the front door and would have caught me on the street if he'd been wearing shoes ;)

What's that got to do with pots, I hear you ask? My enduring memory of Wook is him standing over his prototype morse decoder and fiddling with various pots as he tried to decode this obscure foreign transmission.

( The original source code can be found near the bottom of this page: Source code )

From cix (7 June 2005)

And introducing crem's N+1'th law: "if you let someone else get involved with something simple, it will become complicated"...

From cix (22 Aug 2005)

We were warned - the people who introduced us to this application were fairly skeptical about putting anything technological in front of nurses.
Their opening remark was along the lines of:

"If you put a nurse in a locked room with two ball bearings she'd break one and lose the other"

From cix (8 Sep 2005)

This thread reminds me of the time I dragged myself out of bed and down to the kitchen at Des-Des towers (an otherwise unremarkable three-floor victorian dwelling in Manchester, where Design-Design used to lurk) and found a strange woman** sitting on a vibrating washing machine with a grin on her face. Being naive I asked her what was so enjoyable about the experience and was told more about internal sex aids than I needed to know... I decided against having eggs for breakfast.

Shortly after that one of the other guys arrived and, being even more callow than I was, offered to help redistribute the unbalanced load. This was not appreciated.

** I knew her very well - she was just strange.

Language fascists

2008-08-27T22:03:00.008+01:00

I've been watching programmers parading their miserable ignorance again. The sort of playground squabble "My language is better than your language, my compiler's smarter than your compiler and my dad's bigger than your dad!" type of nonsense that would terminally embarrass a normal five year old, in other words the sort of reasoning few programmers ever advance beyond. Useless fuckers.

Grump. Snarl.

Think they'd understand if I show them allegorically how close their bigoted nastiness is to racism/sexism? No, it'd go wheeee-splat over their empty little heads. Tiresome pillocks... Gah...

[How about... Ponder...]

Heard the one about the programmer who loved and was fluent in C, the programmer who loved and was fluent in Pascal and the programmer who loved and was fluent in assembler?

When she wasn't writing software she was a pretty damned good hardware designer as well...

[Hmmm. Should I stop there? Would the target audience understand how much that exposes their stupid, narrow-minded prejudice? Would they even notice? Hmmm... Needs more...]

One day a stranger, a programmer of the modern ilk, who had travelled long weary years across the desert seeking enlightenment, laden down with objects and paradigms of the most exquisite kind, so wise in the ways of templates they were utterly incapable of actually writing code, arrived at her tent and, pausing unknowingly before the solution to all the questions he could possibly dream of having answered, saw only the dusky maiden; "Is your master about? And get me a drink could you, chop chop..."

And so the closest they came to enlightenment was the sound of one hand slapping...

[Too verbose. Far too verbose... Why do I waste my time on these people?]

** with that thought, crem is enlightened **

Spat in me kitchen

2008-07-17T03:10:00.006+01:00

It's new kitchen time. Whoopie... I left the project entirely to She Who Can't Be Ignored, but today she pinned me down and waved a book full of central heating radiators at me. I never could have imagined there were so many ways to design something that is essentially a tube with fins.

"Do you like this one?"

"It's fine. It's a radiator, what about it?"

"But do you like it? It's cheaper than the other one"

[Alarm bells start ringing]

"Cheaper? How much was the other one?"

"About two, well, no, slightly over two - depending on the colour"

"Over two what?"

"Two thousand. But don't worry, I wouldn't pay that much for a radiator, it's absurd. This one's only about a thousand..."

[crem is speechless for quite a while]

Uh-oh...

2008-07-03T03:06:00.005+01:00

I've been working on a fairly complicated data capture system of late, and major parts of this system are the transceivers which are responsible for talking to sensors over a wireless link. Each transceiver can handle a couple of hundred sensors, so they're fairly busy and (trust me on this) fairly complicated...

All the parts of this system have unique serial numbers, which the various protocols use to identify them. These serial numbers are really just that - numbers - but in order to reduce the scope for confusion and detect errors I've encoded them as a set of characters. One example is JM99-K634.

"Why is he boring us with all this?" I hear you ask.

Because purely by chance, the system has just decided to use the identifier AE35 for a transceiver... Fans of 2001 will understand that this is not auspicious. I think I'll pretend that one doesn't exist...

Confused?

Several bible mysteries solved.

2008-06-28T05:27:00.009+01:00

I had an epiphany today, a profound religious insight - God, being perfect, must work in binary - after all one could hardly imagine a supreme being going round using messy decimal.

From this insight several mysteries of the bible are at once explained. Remember Moses receiving the two tablets containing the ten commandments, and how he broke them before anyone else saw them? That always struck me as suspicious behaviour.

What I now suspect really happened is that god called him up the mountain to collect the "10" commandments, but when working in binary "10" means two, not ten. Two tablets for two commandments makes perfect sense.

However, Moses (who's expecting ten commandments because he's not accustomed to binary) is a bit overawed during the meeting and doesn't notice he's only come away with two commandments until it's too late to go back. Thinking he's misplaced the rest, and not wanting to look like a complete idiot in front of the entire tribe of Israel, he makes eight commandments up on the way back down and then breaks the two tablets to cover this up.

God was understandably put out by this and sulked his way through the rest of the old testament, cheering up only after his son moved out (most parents do). Speaking of the son, Jesus is reported to have said "all of the law hangs on these two commandments"... What more proof could be required there were only two?

So, all we have to do now is work out which of the ten commandments are the real ones; then, with a bit of luck, we can safely covet our neighbour's asses and maybe even join them in a spot of adultery. This should swell the congregations, after a few months anyway, and give the choirboys a well deserved rest...

It should be noted that under this theory the eleventh commandment "Thou shalt not get caught" would be the third. But as "11" in binary is three, that works out. This cannot just be coincidence! Praise de lord!!

["Lines are open now. Dial 010-10011010 to make a donation"]

Drivelology

2008-05-15T02:19:00.003+01:00

I'd say you couldn't make this up, but someone did...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Silicon lifeforms

2008-05-09T01:16:00.004+01:00

Interspersed with the general grumbling today was: "The more legs a chip has, the more like the luggage it behaves..."

Modems

2008-04-29T01:44:00.002+01:00

A month ago I was writing software for a bloody modem that didn't want to behave and I thought I was pissed off. Hah. A month ago I didn't know what pissed off really meant...

Somehow I've let myself get talked into writing the software for a complete piece of shite, yet again involving a cellular modem that doesn't want to behave, and I'm utterly sick of the whole fucking process. This project was sold to me as being a small change to an existing product, something that would only take a couple of days to do, whereas it actually turns out to be a major change with all sorts of dire consequences and awkward problems for the software to overcome. There's no way on earth I'd have agreed to do this if I hadn't been comprehensively mislead about what was going to be involved. The hardware is horrible, the modem is horrible and I'm really not in the fucking mood to wade through this sort of unreliable crap again.

What really pisses me off is that I'm now having to turn away other designs in order to make time for this joke, and I know it's not got a cat in hell's chance of ever working properly. I feel like I'm pouring my life down the fucking drain...

Accents

2008-04-27T22:43:00.004+01:00

A friend of mine was nearly sacked last week for having his wife phone him at work to say she was stuck in traffic.

"Huh?" I hear you ask - "how does that work?"

Well, you need a few particular circumstances. First you have to work for an American company. Second, said company needs to have a system where phone calls to your works phone are automatically run through speech recognition software which turns them into e-mails and sends them out to you, and thirdly your wife needs to have an accent which causes American speech recognition software to think "stuck in" is really "fucking"... i.e. no particular accent whatsoever.

Add to that mix a company policy where emails containing swearwords get flagged up and sent to all and sundry and you're, um, fu... in the deep, ah, well, you're completely, um. Whatever.

The part I find most amazing is not that the software fu-umbled the words, but that they think he's responsible for the language used (or not as it happens) by someone who called him... And that's from people who appear to have declared war on the wrong country because they can't tell the difference between Iran and Iraq.

Sheesh.

Programmers (again, again...)

2008-04-25T02:49:00.004+01:00

Quote of the day:

"In my darker moments I think I could print out some of my source code, eat the listing, digest it and then shit something which would have more programming competence than most of the programmers I've met... The rest of the time I think that any sort of roughage would do"

I wasn't in a good mood. After a week long battle with some anonymous programmer's bugs in a modem, or in the network, whatever, I find myself moving onto the next project and guess what that involves? Chasing problems with another fucking modem.

"Quick - blow your raspberry!"

"Thhhuuruurruurrrppp... ThuuUUUUuUuUURRRRRPPPP! THHHURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPHHH!"

Orange GPRS

2008-04-23T16:39:00.003+01:00

I'm going to start swearing in a minute, read no further if the phrase "[expletive deleted]" offends you... Oh, sorry, too late.

For the last week I've been running round in circles trying to sort out the problems we've been having with GPRS modems on a design that had to be working for an exhibition - the usual last minute panic sort of thing. I finished the software for this project last Thursday and it was working well. I tested it a few times on Thursday morning without problems, then, just before I was due to pass it over to the customer that afternoon it stopped making GPRS connections. Since then I've had embarrassing meeting with them, spent all day at their site trying to find out what the fucking problem was, had to write support for a completely different type of packet radio carrier so that they could demonstrate the product and generally been stressed to fuck and made to look like a complete amateur.

On Friday we asked Orange technical support if they knew of any reason why their GPRS enabled SIMs should stop working, and they said no. Nor did the modem supplier, who looked at our setup strings, etc, and couldn't see what we were doing wrong.

Today I find out that Orange rolled out a change to their network software on Thursday afternoon, and guess what? We were the first, but other people are now reporting that their GPRS modems no longer work with Orange sims...

So, thanks Orange, you stupid, useless [expletive deleted]. I feel like killing someone. It's bad enough that they break GPRS, but there is no fucking excuse whatsoever for denying that they knew what could have caused the problem.

The last week has been hell. I'm so pissed off with these arseholes I can't really express it.

On mature reflection I removed the term [expletive deleted] and replaced it with [expletive deleted]... Oh, poot.

PIGO

2008-04-22T05:34:00.000+01:00

Programmers Involved; Garbage Out

Says it all, really.

Discordant

2008-03-20T13:11:00.002Z

I was catching up on the messages on a conferencing system by flicking through the unread messages when I came across the following comment:

> Isn't C -> C#m a bit of a wrench?

Which had me wondering what the hell the computer language C#m was and why the hell anyone would think the world needs yet another flavour of C to contend with when I realised that it was a music conference and they were talking about chords...

Overworked

2008-03-18T00:46:00.001Z

I'm fucking fed up. Very fucking fed up, in fact. So utterly fucking fed up that I can't be bothered to write about it...

Fuck.

Jodrell Bank

2008-03-13T02:33:00.002Z

Oh, wonderful - some bunch of idiots have decided that rather than stump up an extra few million quid, probably less the amount our politicians spend each year on prostitutes, they'll close Jodrell Bank... Brilliant.

When I heard this I naturally assumed that this piece of stupidity had to be down to the technophobic luddites in power, but no, it appears that the decision was made by a bunch of scientists forced to assign priorities to research... Hmmm.... I smell a rat - why would anyone with a brain pick on something so noticeable? Something we actually do that's still world class?

Ah - I see, I was being a bit dozy there; the public probably won't stand for Jodrell Bank being closed, when they might well have ignored the demise of a few less well known projects, so choosing it makes sense. Bet the money appears from somewhere fairly soon...

They're watching, Pt2

2008-02-26T06:40:00.004Z

Another story idea I might as well throw away, having sat on it since 1990 (had it while reading T.Pratchett's Moving Pictures)...

(Bloody IE crashed and lost this, so this version is terse, sorry)

Postulate a benign galactic civilization. They watch but don't interfere with primitive civilizations. Prime directive, etc, etc.

They're ethical, for values of... never mind.

Postulate that the only basis of currency exchange for any large scale civilization is information.

Postulate that they've solved the digital rights issues for information, and because they're ethical they don't just steal cultural items from primitive cultures but let the credits gained from recordings, or whatever, be held in trust until such time as the civilization becomes sufficiently advanced to join the community.

So, what sort of information would they gather? Or value? The equivalent of popular entertainment? Cultural items? Great plays, works of fiction and the like may translate well and be popular in the rest of the universe. For all we know the whole multiverse is busy watching Neighbours... No, that's going too far. Back to reality...

Following on from that we have the story, a pair of Crysteel and Danstor types[1] arriving at Terry Pratchett's door one night to tell him that because of the popularity of The Diskworld books, translated into a few tens of thousand languages and distributed across the entire multiverse, he now owns roughly half the entire universe and if he doesn't come along quietly and spend some of it the galactic economy is going to crash... Sir.

[1] Characters from an amusing early Clark first contact from the aliens POV story.

They're Watching

2008-02-26T05:25:00.005Z

Assume for a second there are alien technological civilizations and they're so bored that they watch us. Low probability but not quite zero.

How do you find them? Large radio telescope arrays? Nope - dustpan and brush... Find somewhere they'd be sure to be interested in, sweep the place and have a damned good look at the debris you find... If they're using nano-technology some of the dust will be, ah, 'interesting'... (Why assume nano? Because if it's larger we'd see it, and smaller probably wouldn't resolve wavelengths they'd be interested in. I suspect it'd be hard enough to pick up sounds with anything too small to see with the naked eye, let alone nanoscale, for example).

But there'd be a lot of dust to look at and a lot of false positives to eliminate, so ideally you'd want to know roughly where to look in order to concentrate the effort, so then I wondered if a world conspiracy of intelligent and enlightened governments[1] couldn't get together to create an international event of such magnitude that any thinking creature would be unable to resist monitoring it - and voila - as if by magic we arrive at the only plausible explanation for the Eurovision song contest.

Maybe not...

(I had the basic idea a while back as the first part of a spoof SF story where we start out looking for alien monitoring and wind up inventing very bad tempered and belligerent artificial intelligence as a result of the code that was written to perform the data analysis on the garbage collected getting smarter... Don't worry about it. It was going to be one of set of paradoxical solutions to the Fermi paradox, but I'll never get round to writing any of them... My favourite was health and safety (H&S) - and if you don't understand the connection between H&S organisations and the reason why there are no advanced civilizations out there count yourself lucky. While you're still allowed to do anything as dangerous as counting, that is...

I've been pondering some ideas for spoof stories about H&S bods coping with a multispecies future society, shades of James White's Sector General stuff... But they're something else the world will have to struggle to get along without, I suspect.)

[1] Spot where the surrealism takes over.

Cthulonic irrigation

2008-02-26T05:13:00.007Z

My subconscious (which is often a lot less sub than I'd like it to be) just dumped the phrase "cthulonic irrigation" into the buffer and then retreated, giggling quietly sotto voce... If you don't who/what Cthulu was, or why you wouldn't invite it in the back door, count yourself lucky.

I have no context for this at all, and Google doesn't appear to recognise the phrase, though that could be the work of the old ones. Or my spelling.

I worry myself, sometimes...

Lurgy

2008-02-26T00:54:00.004Z

Having just tried this 'ere winter vomiting disease out I can say without any doubt that it is not worth having - just say "NeuuurrrggGGggghh-h-h-h"

Busy as hell and two days down the drain feeling as bad as I ever have, urgh. Normal grumpyness will be resumed as soon as I can work up the energy...

Oh, speaking of energy we found out last week a certain Tokamak research reactor is currently off-line because some of our electronics failed[1], oops. And me a strong advocate of nuclear fusion. Bollocks... Not a good week, considering :(

[1] Not our fault, just a batch of shitty capacitors that fail when used well within spec. I suspect even Richard could manage to blow one of these useless bastards up.

Ah, the sweet innocence of newly stuffed boards...

2008-02-22T13:34:00.002Z

... I love it. That happy and carefree feeling the first PCB's of a new project have when they arrive on the desk, populated and ready but so far unsullied by the ravages of software. I like to enjoy a moment of quiet contemplation with them, a brief interlude of peace and sanity before battle commences.

But it can't last, and - oh - how quickly they lose that innocence and acquire an air of malevolent cunning and sublime evilness when you start having to make the damned things work.

Cover me, I'm going in!

[Five processors to programme, the boards arrive after the deadline has already elapsed, estimated six weeks of software required, it's dark and I'm wearing sunglasses]

"Then take the fucking sunglasses off, crem"

"Oh. Sorry"

Neuron Free Zone

2008-02-18T23:37:00.003Z

Came across a book today called "The case against nuclear power", or somesuch. "Hmmm" I thought, "I bet such a case could be reasonably made, but not as much as I'd bet this book doesn't and if I open this at random I'll find some fear-mongering total bollocks on the first page I read".

Tsk, Crem, very pessimistic - didn't need to read the whole page - the first line I read was "the noble gasses are dangerous gamma ray emitters"... Wrong.

I read the paragraph, and a few others, just to see if they understood about isotopes and were qualifying this absurd statement in some way, but no. Pig-fucking-ignorant...

Flicking through the book showed that the author was both functionally innumerate (no sign they had a clue what half-life even meant, or even that longer half-lives imply less intense radiation, not more) and ignorant of even very basic chemistry and physics, so why the hell they thought they were qualified to write on the subject escapes me... But isn't that always the way? I don't mind the fact that people can (if they so choose) remain ignorant of fundamental, trivial mathematics and physics. I do mind them casually turning their stupid prejudice into disinformation... The really annoying thing about all this is the way this sort of self-satisfied ignorance and stupidity is going to kill us all in the name of environmentalism. Gah...

Dumb xians

2008-02-09T17:21:00.001Z

Turn the news on - first mistake. Second mistake was watching; the god-botherers were out in force.

Started with a report on the 'miraculous' survival of an 11-month old baby caught in a tornado. "It was a miracle. God sure was looking after him" says some red-neck moron completely overlooking the fact that the very same god had just brutally murdered his mother and torn him from her arms... Ineffable? Very fucking effable if you ask me.

This was then followed by a report of the head of the Church of England advocating the adoption of sharia law in the UK. Well, not all of it, perhaps - we'll pick and choose and leave the stoning and beheading part out for now. Maybe keep the killing of princesses bits, I suppose, that seems to resonate with the national character.

Gah. I wondered dimly what the head of the C of E is doing advocating Islam, but I suppose it makes sense, after all they're really all on the same side - sky fairy worshipping nutters all.

Hmmm. So we should be allowed to choose which laws apply to us now, should we? Fine. I do that anyway, to be honest; it'd be nice to have it formalised... Programmers could choose a legal system that expresses everything in hexadecimal:

"Can't nick me for speeding, ossifer, I was only doing 5F and it's a 70 limit..."

Mind you, I think I'd rather be nicked than declare myself a programmer. No, it'll never work.

Turned the news off before I could get even more depressed...

Sexy xians

2008-02-04T23:36:00.000Z

I've just half-convinced someone that "the sermon on the mount" is so-called not because it took place on high ground, but because the original (unexpurgated) text makes reference to the delights of the female form.

And that "doggy position" is nothing to do with dogs, but a corruption of "dodgy position" (I won't go into why)...

Bad Crem. Naughty...

Hacker foxes

2008-02-04T23:05:00.000Z

Recently I've become involved with the design of the control electronics for a device that speeds up the process of turning food waste into compost - let it not be said that my life is entirely dull and uninteresting - but before I arrived on the scene a previous incarnation of this hardware managed to fail (a fuse blew and stopped a heater from working) and instead of turning garbage into compost, it then did a very good job of turning garbage into flies. Lots of flies. Lots and lots of flies...

Since this particular machine was sited in the grounds of a hospital this wasn't seen by everyone as an entirely good thing, and eventually the fact that the hospital was overrun with flies came to the attention of the health and safety people who then lept into action to find some way to assign the blame. Eventually a report emerged, which amongst other things suggested the cause of the failure could possibly be hackers. Or foxes. Or (presumably) hacker foxes.

Now, foxes aren't usually noted for their hacking skills, so it rather surprises me that they could manage to hack their way into the software on this machine, which doesn't have any connection to the outside world at all. There's very little software, and it's not changeable. There's no network interface. There's no serial port. There's no keyboard. There are a couple of buttons, but press them as much as you like and you won't find a way to blow the heater fuse... So beware the hacker fox, 'ees a clever bugger...

The Mouse

2008-01-25T02:45:00.000Z

This cheeky little bugger just ran across the living room floor while I was working on my laptop... Had an interesting few minutes catching it, the bloody things are fast.

After a text-book double take, when it realised I was there, it disappeared under a settee. When I lifted this up I was treated to a contemptuous "Is that in the rules? Are you allowed to do that?" look... Clearly this mouse was one up on the usual run of the mill rodent. After that we had a chase up and down the curtains, behind radiators and under various cupboards before I finally outsmarted it (a close run thing) by setting up my electronic mouse trap in one part of the room and then going and making a lot of noise in another... I swear there was a very pissed-off sounding "Squeak!" a second or so after the trap clicked shut.

Suppose I'd better evict it then. Another trip down to the village churchyard in the middle of the night, soon the locals are going to start talking...

The Rat

2008-01-24T19:41:00.001Z

Take one cuddly toy rat, as shown above, and tie it to the kitchen door with fine fishing wire arranged so that when She Who Must Be Obeyed opens the door it will 'run' across a work top in front of her.

Set this up before you go to sleep and you are practically guaranteed to wake up to the sound of screaming.

Of course, it could be your own if you wake up when the contents of the washing up bowl are thrown over you. And it seemed like such a good idea at the time...

China trade

2008-01-19T04:47:00.000Z

So, on the day that the rags start shouting recession the idiot in charge of the country states that boosting trade with China will create tens of thousands of UK jobs. That means tens of thousands more people employed selling goods made in China, presumably.

Does it take much intelligence to understand how utterly fucking useless those jobs are and how fast they'll disappear when the oil finally runs out and the pound crashes?

Crapacitance

2008-01-17T02:32:00.000Z

Today Richard demonstrated he can't even blow up a capacitor properly.

"We're going to blow up a capacitor, want to watch?"

Now, anyone else would ask "why?" at this point, but experience suggests that I wouldn't like the answer, so after due consideration I downed tools and followed him. A very alert observer might have noticed the pause.

In his room he'd already attached wires to the capacitor, which was potted inside a box as part of some device or other. I suppose the idea was to see how safe the device was if this capacitor ever decided to explode in normal use, but as I say, I didn't ask.

A power supply was attached, connected backwards across the poor cap and switched on. Cue rapid exit from room... The power supply quickly ramped up to about 4 volts and about 3 amps.

"Twelve watts? It's not going to last long" I opined, from the doorway.

"About... now, I'd expect" I ventured, after several seconds had passed with no visible result.

"Any time now..."

"Soon..."

After about a minute at 12W I wandered in and wound up the supply up to full power, which was about 20W. People started to cower...

A minute or so passes, with nothing visible happening.

"Twenty watts? I don't believe it..."

I wander over to the device and feel it - it's distinctly warm... No smoke, but I do start to smell a rat - "You did disconnect the cap from the rest of the circuit, didn't you?"

"Ah..."

Gah... Bloody capacitor's probably laughing itself silly while the rest of the circuit dumps all the power.

Wrong end of the shtick?

2008-01-17T02:19:00.000Z

The loonies otherwise known as Scientologists appear to have a strange idea of promotion, given that Tom Cruise's promotional video is not supposed to be seen by anyone outside the church... Hmmm.

You can understand why they'd want their ridiculous ideas suppressed though.

Absurdity here

Health and safety

2008-01-09T14:15:00.000Z

I've just been told some H&S flunkie thinks that my office is dangerous because I'm using extension leads and have too many plugs connected to a single socket.

Sighing, I point out that it's test gear and the whole lot only takes a couple of amps.

"Aha! But what if the cleaner comes along and plugs a vacuum cleaner in as well?"

I point out that it would need an extra two and a half vacuum cleaners to get up to 13 amps. Or a vacuum cleaner and an electric kettle, or... but no - it's pointless trying to use reason in these circumstances.

"Doesn't matter. You can plug lots of thirteen amp plugs into that extension, and overload it"

I point out that it doesn't actually fucking well matter (I've skipped a bit; I'd reached very pissed off by this point) what you plug in to the damned thing because it's only got a thirteen amp fuse in the plug at the end, so the worst you could do with an overload, however unlikely, would be to blow the fuse. That's what fuses are for, for fuck's sake. That's why we have them... But no, this doesn't work either:

"All those wires constitute a trip hazard"

"Huh? It's under a fucking desk, who's going to trip over it? Pinoccio? The seven dwarfs?"

"Anyone could fall over it after the cleaner has pulled it out to plug their vacuum cleaner in..."

From there on it degenerated. Because of this fucking moron and his H&S nazi friends it is no longer possible to use extension cables in an office - not because of any real danger, but because of some inane set of pseudo-scentific rules dreampt up by some innumerate and illogical pillocks somewhere, which cannot be disputed... What the hell is the world coming to?

Olde Highscore tables

2008-01-08T03:04:00.000Z

While rummaging through old files I came across the highscore tables for the last mainstream game I designed (back in 1986?)... Could anyone not have read this and realised I'd had enough of writing games?

I see children with vacant stares
I thought I heard them say . . .
Don't think sorry's easily said
The price of infamy , the edge of insanity
Talking 'bout stupid things
She is dancing away from you now
Take me for a fool if you feel that's right
Or a whipping boy , someone to despise
Please don't look at me this way

It's coming for me thro' the trees
And you may ask yourself
Wonder why . . what makes me rise so high
Surely you know-the chance has gone by
And my spirit is crying for leaving

We're not scared to lose it all
Security gone to the wall
Future dreams we have to realise
A thousand critics hands
Won't keep us from the things we plan
While we cling to the Things we prize
And do you feel scared - I do
But I won't stop and falter
And if we threw it all away
Things can only get better
Treating this as though it was
The last , the final game
Get to christmas and feel no regret
It may take a little time
A lonely path , an uphill climb
Success or failure cannot alter us

[And this text was hidden from the user in memory but followed on]

Oh well , excuse me , I have some ageing & dying to be getting on with.

Global warming

2008-01-08T01:26:00.001Z

Just about every time I've looked at the news for the last few years there have been scenes of excitable foreign types burning something. Flags, cars, buildings, effigies, churches, people... No wonder we suffer from global warming.

Smoking gun

2008-01-06T21:49:00.000Z

One of my amplifiers has blown up... Sob.

Quite possibly the best audio power amplifier in the world one minute, a 50V DC power supply the next... Thank the gods I have electrostatic speakers with DC blocking capacitors inside 'em or Jan would have found herself in the front garden beating off one of the cones.

Gah. I blame Bielzibabe - if it wasn't for him poking his fingers into everything I would have to put the amplifiers into a cupboard, and they wouldn't overheat.

Teach me to wind the bias current up for winter, I suppose...

Van Manisong

2008-01-06T00:39:00.001Z

I was moved by an incident a while back to pen an ode to the white van man:

(With apologies to Carly Simon)

You drove onto the motorway
Like it was a parking lot
You immediately made for the outside lane
As if you'd reserved a spot

You had one eye in the mirror
But god alone knows why
Nothing you see there alters your driving
Alters your driving and...

Driving a van
You probably think that lane's reserved for you
Driving a van
I'll bet you think that lane's reserved for you
Don't you? Don't you?

You'd have had me several years ago
When I was still quite naive
Well I've learned since then you haven't a clue
And that you will always weave

Perhaps you'd give way to the ones you love
only none of them are real
Ignoring our screams
You were drinking some coffee
Drinking some coffee and....

Driving a van
You probably think that lane's reserved for you
Driving a van
I'll bet you think that lane's reserved for you
Don't you? Don't you?

Well somehow you must have passed a driving test
Perhaps you took a gun?
And now you race your van on the public roads
Endangering us for fun

Well, you're in the wrong lane all of the time
And like as not you're right
Up the arse of
The poor sod in front
Poor sod in front, and...

Driving a van
You probably think the road's reserved for you
Driving a van
I'll bet you think the road's reserved for you
Don't you? Don't you?

However, someone called Felix Dennis, in a book titled 'When Jack Sued Jill: Nursery Rhymes or Modern Times' has done it rather better:

(To the tune of Old King Cole)

White Van Man has a very white van
And a very white van has he,
Except for the dents and the rust by the vents
And some very rude graf-ee-teeeee.

He drives in his van as fast as he can
And he neither hears nor sees,
He clings to his phone like a dog with a bone
While he steers with one of his kneeeees.
He picks his nose while the tailback grows
And yacks to his front seat crew,
But a fool so rash as to honk or flash
Will receive his fingers twooooo.

Oh, White Van Man has a very wide clan
Who profess no Highway Code,
They'll shunt your rear and yell in your ear
As they U-turn in the roooooad.
He stamps on his brakes when he overtakes
As he cuts up you and me,
For White Van Man has a very white van...
And a very white van has heeeee!

Software challenge?

2008-01-05T23:22:00.000Z

While watching scrapheap challenge it occurred to me that we should do a software version so that programmers wouldn't feel left out.

Something along the lines of having them trawl the web for scraps of obsolete and buggy source code, then bodging these poorly-understood fragments together to make a flakey application that can be made to do something badly after only an hour of tinkering, and which is then thrown away as useless.

We could call it "programming"...

Who watches the watches?

2008-01-04T14:44:00.001Z

Richard has just, in passing, mentioned that his watch claims to have 27 jewels.

"We're paying him too much"

"We're paying him?"

[pause]

"Hang on, it can't have 27 jewels"

"Why ze 'ell not?"

"Well, they're bearings aren't they? One at each end of a shaft? How the hell does it manage to have an odd number of the damned things?"

Richard is currently attacking the poor thing with a screwdriver...

He'd be better off clicking here...

Artificial sarcasm

2008-01-04T04:06:00.000Z

It used to be the custom for mathematicians, philosophers and the like to encode their ideas and discoveries as cryptic anagrams so they could later supply the original text to establish their priority.

Today I was idly reading part of Wikipedia and was amused, and very nearly annoyed to discover a couple of places where other people were being given credit for inventing things that I'd done years before... One example was syntax highlighting in text editors, the others were in a similar vein [1]. Well, my development tools still do one or two useful things that programmers haven't yet thought of and it struck me that I really ought to get the olde anagram generator out and encode the ideas so that I can use them in my dotage to support claims of "Idiots - I was doing that forty years ago!" and suchlike profoundly unhelpful but satisfying remarks.

Unfortunately the first anagram it came up with started "Oh dear me, holier-than-thou..." (that's not the complete wording, no point decoding it) which I took as a hint and abandoned the whole enterprise.

But what the hell - here's one for you all to be going on with. Decode this and untold millions of programmers will bang their heads on their desks with cries of "Why the fuck didn't anyone else think of that?"

"Oh dear me! Damnation, the stealthier acuteness"

Mind you, it's probably easier to just get me pissed and ask nicely.

[1] Of course, I could just edit the entries in Wikipedia, but somehow changing them to "Actually, Design Design invented this in..." seems a little bit too sad. Besides, who's to say we were the first? Good ideas that give a commercial advantage are not openly discussed. The whole idea's intrinsically flawed and offensive.

The big bang?

2008-01-03T23:59:00.000Z

While explaining some cosmology to my daughter:

"You have to understand that most of the astronomers involved were men. It was probably quite a small bang really"...

Terry Pratchett diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's

2007-12-12T18:58:00.000Z

What miserable news. Bastard fucking universe, there are plenty of other people out there you could have picked on, why did it have to be him? :(

Fragment of text

2007-11-29T23:27:00.000Z

Text file found in an olde archive (28 Jan 1992):

[
Curiosity has killed many a cat, but I was killed by rationality - a less rational man would have given in to the urge to flee, to run blindly into the night - and would have been spared the horror that is contained in this house (only a small fraction of which I can report here). The light is fading and before it fails completely I will take my last chance on the stairs, though I can feel them waiting below in the hall, and the effort is futile.

It started in the last weeks of 19--, when Rodway claimed that he had discovered hidden
]

I wonder who the hell Rodway was going to be? And what had he found? Some game idea long forgotten...

Olde games

2007-11-24T02:06:00.000Z

Quite possibly the best version of Space Invaders so far...

http://www2.b3ta.com/notepadinvaders/

A whale of a time?

2007-11-21T23:58:00.000Z

People on TV and in films never talk during sex, which has occasionally struck me as odd. Mind you, I suppose that most of the things said during passionate moments don't bear repeating... "Lie back and think of Wales" a girlfriend once said to me in jest; I suspect she meant "You lie back - I'll think of Whales"...