- Jim Strickland found a site with some of the guldurndest CP/M-80 programming tools from the 80s and maybe earlier. Most of them aren’t familiar to me, and I don’t have a machine to run them on anymore. However, if you want any of the four releases of JRT Pascal, or Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M, well, dinner is served.
- And for dessert, here’s the x86 DOS collection, including Turbo Pascal 3.02, Turbo C 2.01, and all of the original IBM PC slipcase compilers that I’ve ever seen.
- Very nice if not especially new intro to Flash and SSDs, from AnandTech.
- Another, more recent piece on Flash over there. Remember that it’s a multiparter; read ’em all.
- Pete Albrecht sends word of a Death Star ball camera trending on IndieGogo right now. It’s a little like kite aerial photography without the kite.
- Amtrak has some new muscle: 8600 horses’ worth. I used to take Amtrak between Baltimore and NYC regularly when I worked for Ziff-Davis, and it was a wonderful thing. Now if I could only get a damned train between here and Denver… (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Wonderful volcano photo over at Wired, which again leads me to wonder what the trends are in volcanic activity over the past century or two. Are there really more eruptions, or are we just hearing more about the ones that happen? If you’ve ever seen a chart somewhere, please share.
- Ouch.
- Pertinent to my last Odd Lots: The correct term is “assortative,” according to linguist Michael Covington. “Preventive” and “assortative” are derived from the 4th principal parts of the Latin verbs “preventus” and “assortatus.” That’s actually more interesting, in a way, than assortative mating itself.
- The Great Lakes are now 88% covered in ice. We may not top the 1994 level (94%) nor 1979 (95%) this year, but unless things get a helluva lot warmer out east in the next month or so, we’re going to give them a very good run.
- Great perky guitar piece by Eric Johnson in the $1.29 MP3 pile over at Amazon.
- Also, my fourth favorite pop song evah, for only a buck.
- If you &*!## love science enough to believe the &*!## data, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that sugar will &*!## kill you. (Thanks to my very brilliant wife for the link.)
- The core of loving science, by the way, is questioning authority–and demanding that scientific authority be sane, calm, utterly honest, and absolutely without anger. (And so–need I say?–should the questioners.)
- Either red wine, aspirin, or both could help us beat certain types of cancer. The key may be not too much wine, and not too much aspirin.
- If this Onion piece makes you twitch even a little, well, good.
programming
Odd Lots
Yearwander
Wow. Somehow it got to be a whole new year when I wasn’t quite looking. I’m not unhappy to be shut of 2013, and as usual, I have high hopes for this year to be better. The last of our parents has been released from her suffering, and while I miss them all (especially my father, who died 36 years ago) my idiosyncratic understanding of Catholic theology suggests that they’re all in better shape than I am right now.
Which isn’t to say I’m in bad shape. I had a couple of health problems this year, but nothing horrible. I’ve been able to get my abdominal fat down to almost nothing, and weigh just eight pounds more than I did when I was 24. It still puzzles me just a bit, but I lost that weight by eating more fat. I’ll tell you with confidence that butter makes almost everything taste better except corn flakes.
I scored an interesting if slightly peculiar writing gig this year. It’s been an immense amount of work, not so much in the writing as in the learning. I’ve never done a book–or part of one–with this broad a scope. I’ve touched on a lot of technologies in my career, but touching isn’t understanding, and understanding is the critical path to explaining. I’ve written code in Python and C and ARMv6 assembly. I practically buried myself in ARM doc for most of two months. That felt good in the way you feel good after walking fifteen miles…once you’ve allowed three or four days for the smoke to clear. I now know a great deal more about virtual memory, cache, and memory management units than I might have just touching on things in my usual fashion. Curiosity is an itch. Autodidaction is a systematic itch. And to be systematic, you need deadlines. Trust me on that.
No, I still can’t tell you about the book. It’s going to be late for reasons that aren’t clear even to me. When the embargo breaks, you’ll hear it whereverthehell you are, whether you have an Internet connection or not.
Every year has some bummers. The ACA did us out of a health insurance plan that we liked, but at least in our case it wasn’t cancelled on the spot. We have some time to figure out where we can get a comparable plan, if one exists. (One may not.) It could end up costing us a quarter of our income or more, and we may lose relationships with physicians we’ve known for ten years. I’ll just be called evil for complaining, so I won’t. Anger is the sign of a weak mind, after all. I think one of my correspondents whose insurance was cancelled without warning summed it up in an interesting way: “I’m not going to get angry. I’m going to get even.”
It’s snowing like hell as I write. I would have posted a photo, but as most of you are staring out the window at snow this week (in some places a great deal of it) I doubt it would have been especially interesting. Besides, a couple of hours ago, I could have just said: Imagine yourself inside a ping-pong ball. Open your eyes. In truth, the weather hasn’t been all that bad. The global climate, in fact, has been remarkably benign considering all the dire predictions of the past ten or twelve years, at least once you look at actual stats and not anecdotes or GIGO models. Science works. Back in 2007, Al Gore himself told us that we would have an ice-free arctic by 2013. (Then again, he also said that a couple of kilometers under our feet it was millions of degrees…talk about global warming!) I love the scientific method. You predict, you test, and then you learn something. Sure, I believe in global warming. I’m still unconvinced that it’s entirely a bad thing. (I remember the ’70s. I also remember Arizona.)
I’ve also been doing some experimental research on the psychology of people who jump up and start frothing at the mouth like maniacs the instant they read something somewhere (anywhere!) that conflicts with their tribe’s narrative. That research is ongoing.
I’ve discovered a lot of good things, albeit small ones: Stilton cheese pairs with Middle Sister Rebel Red. Who knew? Python is much better than I remember it, TCL, alas, much worse. And Tkinter, wow. You’re not going to spin a GUI that fast or that easily in C. Green Mountain Coffee Island Coconut beats all, at least all you can get in a K-cup. Carol and I are dunking good bread in good olive oil again, now that Venice Olive Oil Company has a retail shop in Colorado Springs.
Time to go up and start cooking supper. We’re out of egg nog but my Lionel trains are still running. I don’t care if it looks like a ping-pong ball outside. I have my wife, my dogs, my junkbox, and a head that still works more or less as intended. Happy new year to all. Life is good, and getting better. Trust me on that too.
Daywander (Again)
I guess for symmetry’s sake I have to hand you two Daywanders in a row. Blame symmetry if you want; here you go:
It’s (almost) all good news. Carol is improving daily, though still using crutches for long hauls. Her foot hurts when she uses it too much. She’s about to begin physical therapy, which should help. And in three weeks she goes in to get the other one done. We knew this winter was going to be spent mostly at home, though neither of us fully appreciated just how at home we were going to be. Then again, dancing with that girl is as close to heaven as I’ll get on this old Earth. It’s not even three years until our 40th wedding anniversity celebration. Dancing you want? Dancing we’ll give you!
Our Lionel trains are up! It’s been several years, but with a little unexpected help from Jim Strickland, the Camel and the GG-1 are tearing around a longish loop that now surrounds both of our livingroom couches, powered by my formidable Lionel ZW. We put some liver treats in Carol’s 1959 hopper car, and of all the Pack, only Dash was willing to chase the train around and scoop the treats up out of the hopper. He was also the only one willing to grab Louie the Giggling Squirrel from the same hopper.
I find myself renewing an old friendship while writing a chapter on programming. (The book itself is largely about hardware.) Back in the early 1990s I spent a certain amount of time with Tcl/Tk and much enjoyed it. Visual Basic was brand new, and creating GUI apps was still mortal drudgery facilitated by the king of mortally drudgerous languages, C. In 1993, all you got with Tk was Motif. Funny to think of Motif as a bottom-feeder GUI now, when back then it was nothing short of breathtaking. Today Tk gives you native look-and-feel, and there are bindings for just about any language you’d ever want, and there are more computer languages these days than mosquitoes in Minnesota. I’m using a binding for Python called TKinter that basically gives you Tcl/Tk without Tcl. That’s good, since Tcl is a bit of a dud as languages go and the main reason I dropped Tcl/Tk like a hot rock when the Delphi beta wandered in the door at PC Techniques. Python isn’t Pascal but it’s way better than all the toothless C wannabees that represent the sum total of recent language research, especially JavaScript, the Woodrow Wilson of programming languages. If you just can’t bring yourself to use The Kiddie Language without falling into fits on the floor and drowning in the dog’s water bowl, well, Python and TKinter represent the easiest way to lash up a GUI that I’ve ever seen.
Then again, Delphi and Lazarus are just better.
Carol and I got the Christmas cards out today. It didn’t get done last year because Carol’s mom was failing and we knew we had only one more Christmas with her. Between Carol’s foot and my book project it almost didn’t get done this year either, but we’re trying to get back real life as life should be lived. Christmas cards are part of that. No complaints.
Bad news? Not much. I was pulling a pizza out of the oven a couple of nights ago, and fumbled the pan with my gloved right hand. Fearing that dinner was about to go jelly-side-down on the kitchen floor, my reflexes put my un-gloved left hand in the line of fire, and whereas I saved the pizza, it came at the cost of second-degree burns on two fingers and the thumb of my left hand. It’s not bothering me as much today as yesterday, and my typing speed is slowly getting back to my accustomed Thunderin’ Duntemann (Thanks, Fiona!) 100 WPM. But I promise you, the next pizza that gets wonky on me is gonna go jelly-side down, while I stand there and laugh. I may be 61, but I learn.
New featured pairing: Stilton cheese and Middle Sister Rebel Red wine. Very good news.
As most people have already discovered just sticking their noses out the back door, 2013 looks to become one of the ten coldest years in US history. It may not be global, but damn, it’s cooling.
And that, my friends, makes me look to my now-empty snifter of brandy and egg nog beside the monitor. Time for a refill. Long past time, in fact.
Daywander
As the temperature slides back down below zero (F) here, the supper dishes are done, and I lean back to savor the memory of home-made stuffed peppers, and for dessert a good sharp Stilton cheese chased with Middle Sister Rebel Red wine. It was very close to a carb-free meal, consisting of some 85% ground beef with a little rice to thin it out, mixed with salsa and scooped generously into some very Christmas-y red and green pepper halves. Oh, I’ll maybe have a little egg nog later on, the season being what it is.
What the season actually is, is early. I’m not used to below-zero temps two weeks before winter begins. It certainly hasn’t happened in the ten years we’ve lived here. I get screamed at every time I suggest that we may be entering a cooling spell on the Third Rock, but from all I’ve seen in the stats it sure looks that way. At some point my strongly suspected Neanderthal genetics may come in handy.
Carol’s still scooting around the house on her knee walker. She’s improving day by day but there’s still some pain that her surgeon will have to consider when we go back next week. I hung a little canvas pack on the knee walker so she can carry things around. My father brought the pack home from WWII, and it sat in a box in my mother’s attic until we sold her house in 1996. It then sat in a box in my sister’s garage for another ten years, until we unpacked it and I took it home. I have no idea what sort of pack it is, and if you recognize it (see above) give a shout. Now, the other mystery: How could something that old and neglected not smell? It doesn’t. It’s clean and looks almost unused. Whatever my father did with it back in the day, it’s become useful again. He would be pleased if he knew. Someday I hope to tell him.
I turned in a ginormous chaper today for The Book I Still Can’t Tell You About. I’m well over half finished with the gig, and certainly hope the next chapter won’t cast off to 55 book pages all by its lonesome. It’s certainly something to do while waiting for a quick trip outdoors to cease being a near-death experience.
Michael Covington mentioned to me that Lowes is now selling Meccano parts in those marvelous little bins of odd bits in the hardware aisle. I got up there a few days ago to take a look, and it’s true: A company called The Hillman Group provides little bags of zinc-plated steel girders, plates, and brackets, all with the Meccano standard 1/2″ hole spacing, the holes sized to clear an 8-32 bolt. They’re expensive compared to haunting eBay for beat-to-hell and incomplete modern Erector sets, but the parts can be damned handy. Here’s an Arduino-powered cat teaser built from some servos and Hillman parts.
Tomorrow I dive into Chapter 5. Should be easier, as it’s about programming, not hardware. Now, can we ditch this absurd obsession with curly brackets? What part of BEGIN and END don’t you all understand?
Odd Lots
- Blasting away on a book project that I’ll tell you about when the publisher announces it. One thing fersure, it’s certainly reminding me what I’d forgotten.
- Your brain takes out the toxic trash while you sleep. Short your brain on sleep, and the trash piles up. Let it pile up enough (particularly beta amyloids) and you could put yourself on the fast track for Alzheimer’s. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
- I described a coffee-station sized version of this, controlled by a hipster AI, in Ten Gentle Opportunities.
- Oh…and a blood-powered computer. Reminds me of another book I wrote once. Ok. It’s not blood. It’s “blood.” But still… (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- Apple’s iCloud system has been cracked. It’s true that anything can be cracked. But I’m still convinced that it’s harder to crack stuff located down here than it is for stuff up there.
- Intel now has a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, the Galileo. It’s compatible with most Arduino shields and the Arduino software development environment. The board is based on the Quark microarchitecture, which is somewhere south of Atom and aimed squarely at the mobile device market. The board will be generally available to hobbyists by the end of November, for about $60. More on Ars. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for poking me about this; I knew but have been too busy to mention it here.)
- Very nice site on Earth’s cryosphere, which shows sea ice extent and much else. Antarctic ice is in good shape and growing. Arctic ice is a tougher call. It’s down from the 70s but looks to be coming back.
- There is a hoarder house so full of vinyl records that the collector ended up sleeping in his car. Hey, is there an undiscovered hoarder house full of variable capacitors somewhere?
- There are a number of reasons I don’t read Time Magazine. This may be most of them.
- Manshunyogger!
- Maybe it’s a triple-humped solar max. Or maybe Old Sol is just having some fun with us.
- Here’s why the Russians didn’t beat us to the Moon.
- Turbo Pascal as a Javascript browser window. Not complete (and it doesn’t understand Readln!) but still. Egad. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- If you f&$!*!ing love science, you should f&$!*!ing hate how we do it in this country.
Odd Lots
- Feeling a little better, but still lousy. Thanks for all your kind words and wishes.
- We may not lose the Nook after all. Or we may. At this point, I’ll refrain from taking sides.
- Calibre 1.0 has been released. Quite apart from its role as an ebook manager, there’s absolutely nothing like it for doing ebook format conversions. If you don’t have it yet (it’s free) you’re nuts.
- I’m boning up on my grade-school French, and this Lazarus component directory (as close as I’ve seen to Torry’s for Lazarus) is the reason. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the link.)
- Samsung is starting mass production of their 3D V-NAND flash memory devices. It’s unclear when we’ll see SSDs containing the technology (much less SD cards) except to guess that it may be sooner than we think. (Maybe it’s time to write my funny pirate novel, which depends on cheap terabyte SD cards.)
- New Zealand has outlawed software patents. Watch for innovation to explode from The Other Down Under.
- I’ve often wondered why phage therapy has not been much in the news, given the rise of multiply antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Maybe it’s because all the phage action is in Georgia. The other Georgia.
- You may have to send away to Tbilisi for real bacteriophages, but you can get stuffed ones from Amazon.
- Oh–unless you hadn’t heard, I’m a phage phan. The leaded glass design in my front door is a stylized bacteriophage. As is the design in the ironwork on our front porch. Friends who have been here either know this already or should look the next time they visit.
- Bill Meyer sent a link to a brilliant little prototyping enclosure that folds up into a cube for testing or deployment, or folds flat for tweaking. Very cool that it’s from Bud, whom I connect mostly with aluminum chassis.
- It can’t just be the Un-Pentium. (ARM has that franchise, I guess.) It’s gotta be the Un-Un-Pentium. And it’s evidently coming to a periodic table near you.
- Shameful thing to admit by a man who’s been in publishing for thirty years and was an altar boy in the Tridentine era to boot, but I always thought the canonical “lorem ipsum” greeking text was nonsense Latin. It’s not.
- Having flown a lot of Hi-Flier kites with flying wings printed on them as a kid, I was always a fan of the unlikely aircraft. Here’s a very good multipart history of the flying wing, which is not as modern a concept as most of us like to think.
- H. P. Lovecraft’s back-of-the-envelope notes for his novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” Really.
- From the Word-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Twerk . If you don’t know what it is, well, that may be a plus.
Odd Lots
- I confess to some surprise at reading that we really don’t know yet whether antimatter falls up or down. Falling up might explain why we don’t see a lot of antimatter in these parts.
- By now I’d guess you’ve all seen the movie. Now see how it was made. (We used to do animation with that few pixels. But the pixels were, well, a lot bigger.)
- There’s been much discussion recently about bitcoin mining using GPUs, including some systems designed specifically to mine bitcoins and not do much of anything else. Such systems basically turn electricity into money, and you have to make sure that the bitcoins you get are worth more than the juice you have to spend to mine them. So…how about using solar panels? I have easier ways to make money (and don’t trust the bitcoin infrastructure to begin with) so it’s not an experiment I’m willing to make, but with enough solar panels and a bitcoin box, how long would it take to break even? Bitcoin math is pathological, but I’m aware that the more people start mining with such rigs, the harder the mining becomes.
- Here’s more cautionary advice on bitcoin.
- Somebody thought that mining bitcoins on user PCs while they play your games could a new business model. Mmmm, no.
- We are already shoveling our way through the second-coldest spring on record. If May doesn’t warm up quite a bit (it’s still going below freezing at night here) we will soon be facing the coldest. The photos of my deck under 4″ of snow on May 1 continue to boggle. I may have one of them framed.
- Suing your customers for criticizing your business is epic dumb, as Chicago’s tort-happy Suburban Express has discovered.
- I don’t use Visual Basic so I’m unlikely to try it, but OsenXPSuite could be useful for creating embedded database apps without a great deal of coding. The screenshots are intriguing. $150 for a single-seat license. They also have a freeware SQLite management app that I will try.
- There’s nothing healthy in most “health foods.” (It’s PR.) I like the bit in Men In Black III. K: “Do you know the most destructive force in the universe?” J: “Sugar?” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- From The-Ghosts-of-Friendships-Past Department: LinkedIn just sent me a message telling me that a friend had just celebrated his fifth anniversary at a local firm–even though he died four years ago. This led me to check my Facebook friends list, and sure enough, there are two dead people there as well. This is a weird business.
Where’s the rest of SQLite?
Wait. Oh. That’s all there is.
Really.
I had this problem once before, with the Atlantis word processor. It’s 5MB installed. 5. The first time I installed it I suspected I had downloaded a corrupt file, but no: However they did it, the wizards over at Atlantis implemented a damned fine Word 2000 clone in 5MB. It doesn’t have the collaboration features, but for solo work it’s a very big win, and exports extremely clean epubs as a side benefit.
For a fair number of years now, my non-Delphi database work has all been in MySQL. (With Delphi I use a VCL product called DBISAM, which is linked into the compiled .exe and doesn’t have to be installed separately.) Because SQLite is available for the Raspbian OS and MySQL isn’t (as best I know; Percona runs on Arch Linux) I’m going to be using SQLite as a database teaching tool. So when I installed it the other day, I stared at the 600K .dll and wondered, Is that all there is?
Yes, that’s all there is, my friend–so let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the tools and have a ball. ‘Cause that’s all there is!
Wow. I verified it by searching for the sqlite3.dll file on my system. The Calibre ebook manager uses an older version (as do a few other things) and the file was not only that same unbelievable size, but smaller. Can you implement a relational database engine in only 372K? I guess you can.
One reason SQLite’s .dll is so small is that it contains no UI at all. There’s a bare-bones command-line management utility available as a separate download. As some of you may know (or suspect) I dislike command lines intensely. So it wasn’t long before I had two free GUI management apps for SQLite databases. One was recommended by Chris Newman’s book on SQLite, SQLite Database Browser, and the other is SQLiteMan. Both are free and installed without drama. So far I prefer SQLiteMan, but it’s really too early to tell. SQLiteMan is supposedly compilable on the RPi. I intend to try that. I’ll let you know how it goes.
One other reason may be that SQLite is “typeless,” which means that the engine does not do type-checking on reads and writes. You can put anything you want in any field (apart from key fields, which are treated specially) and if it makes no sense, it’s your screwup on your conscience. I’m a strongly typed guy and this would rankle, if it didn’t allow a database engine to come in at half a megabyte.
There are wrappers for most common languages, including Lua and Lazarus/FreePascal, both of which I have here and have been fooling with in recent months. I’ve been very spoiled by DBISAM, and I’m interested to see how well SQLite works in non-server applications. More as it happens.
Odd Lots
- 32 years ago today, Darkel’s Lucky Guess–known to more than a few of you as Mr. Byte–came into our world, and eight weeks later Carol and I took home our very first bichon puppy. Although not show quality, Mr. Byte was a spectacular dog, and even seventeen years after his passing we miss him terribly.
- A study at Michigan State shows a strong correlation between use of multiple forms of media at once–e.g, watching TV while surfing the Web–and depression. We don’t know if multitasking causes depression, or if depressed people multitask to distract themselves, but simply establishing the correlation is a good first step.
- Now this is nothing less than brilliant: an app that examines a design destined for 3D printing and lets you know whether it will print well, or at all. 3D typos cost money, and it’s not always obvious looking at a design where a typo lies, or how serious it might be.
- Oh, and there’s a browser-based CAD system that was created with 3D printing in mind: TinkerCAD. Have not used it and generally don’t like browser-based software (what if I develop skills with it and then it goes away?) but it’s a niche that had to be filled.
- Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has just signed the state constitutional amendment legalizing marijuana. As long as you’re not in a public place, using it is now legal under state law–which is, pardon the expression, mind-blowing.
- Only slightly less mind-blowing was the savaging that Rolling Stone gave Obama for not jerking the leash on the DEA. Wow.
- If the elderly–who have nothing if not life experience–are peculiarly vulnerable to scammers, it may be due to the failing of a region of the brain that acts as a “crook detector.” I agree: smug, smirky mouths are not the signs of integrity. Nor is the desire to run for office.
- Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a search site for locally grown food and farmers’ markets. We buy local when it’s possible (though we don’t make a fetish of it) and things like this can only make it more possible.
- Line up the cover spines on Wired‘s 20th year, and read the secret code.
- Lazarus 1.0.4 is out. It’s a bug-fix release, but bug fixes are good to have. I’ve already been messing with it, and I’m starting to think the product has really quite sincerely arrived. Get it here. Many components and demos available here.
Odd Lots
- Juggling, thing-throwing robots are a major theme of my newly completed novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities. It’s a good bet they’ll be deployed in Disney theme parks eventually. I’m not sure why, but I find this very depressing.
- I read this when it first appeared ten years ago and I still think it’s true: DRM does not and cannot do what it’s supposed to do. This from Microsoft, heh. I sure wish they’d quit trying.
- Here’s a good quick survey of Linux window managers, starting out by explaining the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment. (We don’t have this problem in the Windows world.)
- Smilodons and bear dogs somehow managed to coexist. What I don’t understand is how I lived sixty years without ever hearing the term “bear dog.”
- I dunno. This reminds me a little of Cold Fusion: We all want it desperately, but it just seems so damned unlikely. (Thanks nonetheless to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Facebook enforces a sort of least-common-denominator social behavior on people, and is thus stressful. In other words, everybody’s got a hot button, and if you have enough friends people will get pissed at you no matter what you say. The people who don’t care are probably the only ones who should be on Facebook.
- Not space-efficient, but very cool in its way: the Moebius clothes hanger. (Big question: If you buy two will they breed in the closet?)
- This is the heaviest thing that Amazon will ship for free. It weighs a ton. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- If you still have a Commodore 64 (or something like it) try this one-line BASIC program. Amazing.
- Yes, except that if I drink as much as I want, I wouldn’t sleep. (I barely sleep without drinking it at all.)
- Everything you didn’t really want to know about Gangnam Style and didn’t feel like asking. The funniest thing about the video is that it doesn’t go anywhere near the ritzy Gangnam area that it’s named for, though I would expect only Koreans to get that part.
- Oh–and the name of the dance that PSY and his gang are doing is (as best I can tell) “the invisible horse dance.” It’s a natural at weddings. Watch out, chicken dance–your days are numbered.
