Tag: GitHub
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BINSIC – Sinclair BASIC emulator – is back
BINSIC was my 2012 project to emulate Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC on a modern computer. It is a series of Groovy classes that provide a mixture of interpretation and ‘domain specific language’ (i.e. executing BASIC as native Groovy). Over the years bitrot seems to have set in and the code in the GitHub repo wouldn’t work…
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Free software to chop up your JPEGs
As a public service announcement – if you need some software (on Linux but may well compile and run on other systems if they support Qt) to chop a big JPEG up into smaller files, I have written this (in my case to support building a test set for a neural network). It’s at https://github.com/mcmenaminadrian/TestSetCreator and…
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How to get a job as a developer
Last night I went to a Birkbeck training session for prospective mentors. I did not realise before I turned up that all, or almost all, the would-be mentors would be MSc Computer Science graduates. In the end that fact alone turned what could have been a pretty dull way to spend a Friday night into…
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More than a game: the Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life has long fascinated me. Thirty years ago I wrote some Z80 machine code to run it on a Sinclair ZX80 and when I wrote BINSIC, my reimplentation of Sinclair ZX81 BASIC, Life was the obvious choice for a demonstration piece of BASIC (and I had to rewrite it from scratch when…
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And now it’s last.fm
Last.fm have had a security breach and advised all their users (such as me) to change their passwords. As with LinkedIn, having passwords hashed may not be enough to keep them secure. I don’t know what has happened here and will refrain from commenting on Last.fm in particular, but one does begin to feel that…
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Using a preprocessor to convert the BASIC
I have, so far at least, solved my capitalisation problem for BINSIC with a preprocessor. Now I can just replace the offending character strings with ones Groovy will handle. It does suggest problems later though – if I want to write something like PRINT “This code uses a PRINT statement” I will get odd results…
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Geeklist spamming people
I had never heard of Geeklist until last week, when I received an email from them and then read the story about their promotion of “brogramming” and abusive response to being called out for it. The email came first – and as I had never head of them this – Hi, my name is Jenny…
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New version of mkfs.vmufat available
I have posted a new version of mkfs.vmufat, a tool to make a VMUFAT filesystem, at my GitHub repo: it will now format a file as VMUFAT volume (if you use the -f switch). Would love to hear your feedback – my posting of the source code for the filesystem itself generated a bit of…
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No (well, not much) kernel hacking on a Sunday
These days it is possible to host the Linux kernel on GitHub and their tools reveal some interesting things about the pattern of kernel hacking (or at least of kernel committing.) The “punchcard” tool shows what times commits are made. And here it is for the Linux kernel: It seems that kernel hacking is pretty…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 