Sigh. The new version of WordPress is doing stupid things with images. I’ll fix them later. Okay, so roughly a month ago, I said that I was interested in rebooting this blog, and then once again I lapsed into silence. It’s tough to make something a new habit, even if it is something that you […]
A few days ago, I was playing around with my Raspberry Pi, trying to get a new, freshly compiled version of the TOPS-10 7.03 monitor running. I was having some difficulty with it, as it appears that a bug had crept into the code that simulates the DZ11 serial ports as telnet connections, and I […]
In my re-reading of Levy’s book Hackers, I was reminded of an interesting bit of programming lore regarding an early display hack that Marvin Minsky did for circle drawing. It’s an interesting hack because the lore was that it was originally coded by mistake, and yet the result proved to be both interesting and even […]
Today’s moment of introspection came this morning. After some time spent updating my twitter feeds and answering emails, followed by my regular commute (where I forgot to pick up my prescriptions, doh!), I realized something: I don’t think I am a hacker. I used to think that I was. Back in the early 1980s, I […]
(Hmmm. I’m sort of on a retrocomputing kick today…) A few years ago, I wandered into Tom’s office one day to find him typing away. I asked “whatcha doing?” and he replied “I’m writing an emulator for the PDP-1 so I can play the original Spacewar!” It tells you a lot about Tom to hear […]
I spent a good chunk of my Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival, which was an opportunity to see some of the old eye-burning blocky graphics, listen to barely filtered square waves, and muse about my humble beginnings as a programmer. We also caught the tour of the Computer History Museum’s Visible Storage, and caught […]
What can I say? I was bored on the way home yesterday, and decided to record a 23 minute podcast, reviewing two of my moderately recent gadget purchases: The Delphi SKYFI2 receiver for XM satellite radio. The Panasonic DMC-TZ1 digital camera, a compact five megapixel camera with 10x optical zoom. I also gave a brief […]
Well, it’s kind of late, and I’m just back from my trip to the Computer History Museum, where they unveiled their restoration of a DEC PDP-1. The PDP-1 is notable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was used to create what might possibly be the first video game: Spacewar!. I […]
Mostly this podcast concerns itself with my latest geeky project: writing programs for the old atari 2600. Why would anyone do this? Have a listen! Hear the sense of childish joy I take in wasting my time! In the podcast I mentioned my implementation of PDP-1 simulator so I could run the original Spacewar! game […]
While chatting with Tom over lunch, I was reminded of a guy who built his own Apollo Guidance Computer Replica. Tom was the guy who got me to write an emulator for the PDP-1 (he wrote one as well) so that we could run the original Spacewar! on a PC, so this was right up […]
A couple of years ago, Tom Duff approached me with the notion that he was going to write a simulator for the ancient PDP-1 so that he could run SpaceWar!, widely regarded as the first real video game. We both wrote simulators for the PDP-1, and enjoyed playing around with such a bizarre machine. Lately […]
Slashdot | Bringing Back the PDP8 relates the efforts of Andrew Grillet and his attempt to make a PDP8 clone using FPGA chips. I’m virtually certain that this is a hideous waste of time, but it is kind of a cool project, and given that I spent a couple of weeks writing a PDP-1 emulator […]
I was trying to decide on the easiest way to make a graphical user interface for the Scarne’s Challenge puzzle game that I’ve been experimenting with. I stumbled upon pygame, a simple game programming library that uses Simple DirectMedia Layer library to provide a fairly attractive environment for making simple games in Python. In just […]
Just like the talking Barbie who drew the ire of feminists everywhere by claiming that "Math is hard", I find myself asking more and more often "Why is programming so hard?"