๐ฃ๏ธ - 2023-07-25

I managed to read Red Team
Blues during summer
vacation. As the author is Cory Doctorow
the tech parts in the book never leaves you itching.
It's interesting to have a 67-year old world weary main character, but
I could have done without the (however brief) "romance" parts of the
book. I liked the book; the pages turned quickly.
It is labeled both "a science fiction crime thriller" and a
"technothriller about finance crime" in the author's bio - I'd go with
the latter, it didn't read science fictiony to me - and I won't
complain about that.
๐๏ธ - 2023-07-23
I am watching another episode of
Columbo and
the phone number the lieutenant is investigating has a very familiar
ring to it, look:

๐ฃ๏ธ - 2023-07-23

Following up on the nostalgia from the 38th
anniversary of the first
Amiga, I happened upon an article on
lobste.rs
about hacking Little Computer People on the
Amiga - it has a link to a disk image, so I thought I'd try it.

A quick sudo apt install fs-uae
and some searching for an old
Kickstart ROM later, suddenly my laptop started sounding like an old
Amiga 500 - click, click, click, screetch, screeetch.
Fun!

My Little Computer Person is called Orville and is happily nattering
away in the background now, accompanied by a grey dog.
And the nostalgic sound of the floppy drive torturing the floppy comes
on once in a while, when the game saves its state. Oh dear.
๐ ๏ธ - 2023-07-23
The other day I was watching a documentary about 80's hair metal, and
this band portrait flickered past on the screen:

It reminded me of something ... something ... close to this:

Is that Seb' Bach or Jesp' Binz'?
It definitely was a look!
๐๏ธ - 2023-07-23

It is 38 years since the Commodore
Amiga was launched today.
My Amiga 500 was the second
computer I owned, the first being a Commodore
64. The Amiga however was
the first one that I could use for communication - I bought a 2400
baud modem first year of high school and got a 40 GB "Tiny
Tiger"
harddisk (connected to the parallel port(!)), got connected to
FidoNet (2:230/149) and I was hooked.
It was on my Amigas I learned scripting, mixing the power of a mouse
driven multi tasking graphical user interface with a useful command
line interface (oh, how we laughed at the sysops running BBS's on
"monotasking" DOS PC's!), started programming in C, realized why
Shareware was an annoying waste of time, and learned about the idea of
Free/Open Source software.
After high school I switched the 500 out with an Amiga
4000 which I ran my BBS on
and eventually, through Fidonet technology, I even got email and
usenet access on.
At some point the writing on the wall regarding the Amiga's future was
pretty clear, and I managed to sell my Amiga 4000 without losing too
much money on it, fortunately.
After not having a computer for a while, I assembled a PC of
reasonably low priced parts and installed Yggdrasil
Linux (Fall
1994) - even ran X on a Hercules monochrome display! Shortly after I
tried Slackware, before finally settling
on Debian (around 1.2 (rex)-1.3 (bo)).
Still here!
๐ฆ๏ธ - 2023-07-23
Last night, with a bunch of help, I switched the web part of my little blog engine Lantern from using the Spock Haskell web framework to Twain.
This in an attempt to get to the bottom of the memory leak I have been unable to get rid of previously. (So far it's not looking that promising, so maybe it's something else.)
While I was working on converting my code to use Twain, I was watching an episode of Columbo from 1991 called "Caution! Murder can be Hazardous to Your Health", and in the credits this came up:

Serendipity!
๐๏ธ - 2023-07-02
A conservative extension of ISO 8601 to support fractional
days
is a fun blog post about extending the ISO format for timestamps to
support fractional days in addition to fractional seconds, minutes,
and hours.
Aesthetically I dislike the "T" in ISO 8601 format, but what can you
do.
Fractional days allows for easier handling of the French Republican
Calendar and Swatch Internet Time!
Alas:
ISO 8601 does not allow for specifying offsets from UTC in seconds
(another obvious oversight).
Interesting fact:
in contrast to common scientific usage, the decimal part is
recommended to be separated by a comma and not a full stop, although
the latter is permitted too.
I had no idea!
Anyway, what's next - fractional months and fractional years? Why not?
Tomorrow
First sms sent (31).
Friday
Bornholms befrielse 1658 (365).
2023-12-10
Ada Lovelace (208).
2023-12-11
Laust Sonne (49).
2023-12-17
Wright brothers took off (120).
Stine Sjรธrslev Kelsรฅ (48).
2023-12-20
Apple buys NeXT (27).
2023-12-23
Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear (135).
2023-12-25
Isaac Newton (381).
2023-12-26
Mary Somerville (243).
Charles Babbage (232).
Sonja Rindom (119).