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Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow (2023) ★★★★☆ #books

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

I am watching another episode of Columbo and the phone number the lieutenant is investigating has a very familiar ring to it, look:

Amiga nostalgia/emulation #amiga

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.

80's rock look #music #fashion

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!

Amiga turns 38 #commodore #amiga #computers

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

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!