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Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow (2023) โ˜…โ˜…โ˜…โ˜…โ˜† #books

๐Ÿ•ฃ๏ธŽ - 2023-07-25
Cover of Red Team Blues, a novel by Cory Doctorow

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.

Columbo / PostgreSQL crossover #postgresql #movies

๐Ÿ•š๏ธŽ - 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:

Screen capture of Peter Falk playing Columbo, with the caption '... 5234 blev lukket for 10 dage siden.' in Danish, which translates to '... 5234 was closed 10 days ago.'

Amiga nostalgia/emulation #amiga

๐Ÿ•ฃ๏ธŽ - 2023-07-23
Amiga Kickstart 1.3 insert disk logo

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.

Classic AmigaDOS window on blue background

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!

Screenshot from the Little Computer People game

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.

80's rock look #music #fashion

๐Ÿ• ๏ธŽ - 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:

Skid Row - singer Sebastian Bach looking pouty and chin-sucky.

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

Disneyland After Dark - singer Jesper Binzer looking slightly less pouty and chin-sucky.

Is that Seb' Bach or Jesp' Binz'?

It definitely was a look!

Amiga turns 38 #commodore #amiga #computers

๐Ÿ•‘๏ธŽ - 2023-07-23
Amiga logo

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!

Switching from Spock to Twain #haskell #movies

๐Ÿ•ฆ๏ธŽ - 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:

Opening titles showing the name 'Peter Haskell'

Serendipity!

ISO 8601 extension: fractional days

๐Ÿ•œ๏ธŽ - 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?

Lille langebro

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