Category Archives: Computer

The Good Old Trash 80

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I ran into a web site today showing the 1980’s Radio Shack catalog of the TRS 80. (Go to page 170.)

It made me feel sentimental as my very first computer had been a Trash-80 and I remember having a lot of fun with it. One of the most difficult tasks for me to understand, at that time, had been the idea of an interpreted language, like that TRS-80 Basic.

Before that computer, I had been mostly exposed to assembler and some high-level language like Fortran and PL3 on an IBM mainframe. The idea of typing in human-readable code and directly running it – without compiling and linking – was a strange concept for me to grasp.

The TRS-80 I had was far less sophisticated than the one shown in the above catalog, so I looked around and found a picture that matched better what I remembered:

I believe that I had the 16kB model but certainly no floppy disks – I saved my programs and data on cassette tape. With my difficulty to grasp the concept of interpreted languages the first program I bought was an assembler. I was quite some work to get anything done with this setup:

  • Insert the cassette with the assembler and load the program
  • Edit and assemble the code, keeping source and assembled program in memory
  • Insert a new cassette into the recorder and save the source file
  • Insert a different cassette into the recorder and save the assembled program
  • Load the assembled program (overwriting the assembler in memory)
  • Running, testing the assembled program and writing down errors
  • Rinse and repeat

This lengthy procedure trained you to really think ahead and consider all possible errors – it took too long to ‘just try’ something. In this regards those interpreted languages are much easier and train programmers to be much sloppier.

The bigger part of the internet now is based on such sloppy work – whenever you have a PHP file it is more or less interpreted like the old Basic in my Trash 80. I once read – and it made a lot of sense – that we would do a lot to avoid global warming if we would compile all those billions of lines of PHP code into machine code once and then execute that on the server. All data centers around the world could be scaled down considerably if each line of PHP code would not have to be compiled over and over and over again, thus saving energy for the processors of the webserver and the energy for cooling them.

Maybe, then the web could run on a couple of TRS-80s.

Triumph of the Nerds

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Now that all those nerds that created the computer revolution are getting to an age where we might lose them – see Steve Jobs – documentaries like Robert X. Cringley’s Triumph of the Nerds become more of a history text book (book understood more figuratively).

In the old InfoWorld magazine/newspaper Cringley’s column “Notes from the Field” was always my favorite – your’s too, Max, right?

So, I just had to stop and listen (and watch) when I ran into his documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” on Youtube.

And here the playlist with the rest of the series.

What to Do to Be on Money and Coins

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When playing with my scanner and photo editing software to find out how to get around the built-in law prohibiting scanning money, I looked at the dude on that one bill and could not help thinking about what he did to become so admired that he is now on one of those pieces of paper that is usually called money.

Honest Abe managed to trample liberty with all his feet by forcing the South to remain in the Union. They did not like being in that union anymore, but Abe did not want to lose what they had contributed, so he waged a war to keep them in. As he was the victor, he packaged his motives as “freeing the slaves” – but politicians, especially when victorious, have always been very good at this kind of re-purposing.

Another dude that I just recently learned to see in a different light does not have his own paper bill, but at least he has a coin, and, as I remember, at least one stamp with his picture…

Wernher von Braun – the man who took us to the moon.

But he was also a war criminal because he built – or helped build – all the V2s that were used to bomb England. He did not have to stand trial in Nuremberg because his services were needed in the US of A.

So, what could I do to get my picture on some money or at least a coin?

No good idea yet, but maybe some of you might come up with something.

And, so that you did not come here for nothing – here is how I got the picture of Abe from the 5 Dollar bill. My scanner – an HP – did scan the bill without a problem into a png file. I could not open that in Photoshop or Corel Paint – but Gimp was not so picky about the law. So I opened it there, cropped and straightened it, then selected all and hit the Crtl C.

In Photoshop I could open a new doc and just paste the data from Gimp. Once saved as a Photoshop native format – psd – there was no problem re-opening that file – and cutting out honest Abe.

G-Male – that’s how it’s spelled correctly

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If you are a gamer you know Donkey Kong. It was actually the first game my son ever had. I just learned that when I asked him how it’s spelled.

Spelling! This brings us close to the crux of this little article. The name is a translation error, a spelling error between languages, so to speak. Have you ever wondered why a game about a monkey is called DONKEY Kong? Rumor has it that it’s simply a translation error – the Japanese translator just mistook the D for an M and now we are stuck with a Monkey called Donkey. Other data suggests that the Japanese character creator used Donkey as a representation for stubbornness and Kong to indicate the monkey-ness (King Kong is a apparently a term for the generic big ape.)

Whatever is right – I like the first explanation better and stick with it, especially as it allows for a much better transition to the following video that shows that Gmail has been spelled incorrectly from the very beginning.

Here is the correct version – G-Male – and what it really means…

Work that turns into Work

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Today – and last week – I had two days where I really understood why outsourcing could be a good thing.

Gigi and I sell real tangible goods – tie-dye 2.0, also called mudmee tie-dye. Gigi is the part of our enterprise who creates the products and also takes them to art and craft shows. I just sit in the house and stretch out my feelers to potential customers through the internet.

For me, building the site and programming the entire inventory and order-handling were part of a self-assigned internship to learn how to work with the web. I also learned a lot about marketing, which I did not have to do much of when I was only dealing with very few clients in the high-tech and scientific programming, something I had done before venturing out into the new realm of the web.

These last two weekends, we added two new types of shirts that had already created good responses at shows, and now our mailing list responded very well. So, after the waves calmed down a bit, I was working till late into the night to process all those orders.

Initially each and every order was met (by me) with big excitement and a quick trip to the paypal backed to print the shipping label and get those items out. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when there are so many orders that it takes me all night to get them ready for shipping – but I also understand why outsourcing can be a real good thing.

Yet before  I can even consider outsourcing I would probably have to ‘blackbox’ my system some more. As it was all handcrafted, there are still some elements in my system that are only obvious to me – because I built them – but not black-boxy enough, so that I  could just hire somebody and let him or her do the order processing.

In case you are a bit curious what this is all about – I am speaking about Mudmee Tie-dye at  JustZen.

To ‘Really’ clear a USB stick

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Sometimes it is necessary to go to the command prompt (!) to accomplish things, even in Windows.

If there is any invisible junk, like old partitions, on the stick, the GUI utilities in windows will not be able to remove all that.

In this case go to the command prompt (as an admin user), and do the following:

diskpart
list disk
select disk #
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format quick fs=fat32
assign
exit

make sure that you get the right drive with the select disk command, otherwise there might be a long night of re-installing windows.

Google Search Operators

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Just a quick summary of Google search operators for myself. If it helps somebody else that is OK for me as well  😉

“xxx” Exact words and phrases
– excluding word
site:domain domain to search
~ related words
* wildcard in exact phrase
2000..2012 time range
filetype:xxx only match files of type xxx
OR one word or another
define:xxx find the definition of xxx
/ * + – calculator
X [units] in [units] unit conversion

 

This, Jen, is the Internet – the IT Crowd

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The first time I heard about the IT Crowd was from Cory Doctorow in one of his BoingBoing posts. Thanks to pirates I was able to watch the show despite not being in the UK, and I was instantly hooked on the show.

After a few seasons, I re-visited the IT Crowd in one of my posts from 2009, but now, finally, there are some clips of it on the interweb, so that, for all of you who don’t know these masterpieces of television yet, I can share one of the highlights.

Here is one of the best scenes – EVER!