| Date (yyyymmdd) | Comment |
| 20081101 |
Did a lot of webservice coding/ object oriented coding at work. Which is nice but the whole Service-Oriented-Architecture project is going way too slow. Got some other things to do as of late also.. Anyway better then being bored. Sometimes I am not even tired but I jut don't feel like coding. At work, maybe that comes from the fact that the specifications will change a 100 times. Some of the work is just dull coding. Sometimes if you allready know how to do it you don't feel like actually working it out. Especially if you doubt anyone is waiting for it. At for the hobby, I also have a (code)writers block now and then. Sometimes I am just to tired or busy, sometimes I just want to do something else. Sometime I am just lame..... Lameness is a hobby-coders condition I suppose. Finally late at evening, when everbody else is sleeping we slowly start. Early in the morning were finally up to speed and we work till we drop dead from exhaustion or have to go to work. There is also from of lameness that comes from being bothered unnessesary with small things. Everthing that has to be taken care of in my famliy is taken care of be me typically... Furthermore I am a member of a club called the HCC (Hobby computer Club). They had a deal with a magazine that you automatically got. The deal was changed and we had to pay extra to get the magazine. So I wrote an email that I was not interested in the magazine. It took approximately 14 days and 2 telephone calls from me to get a confirmation of the ending of the subscription. I wanted to stay a member of the HCC but then they send me a notice that I had to pay them more because they gave me a subscription to another magazine. I had to dens a mail If I DID NOT want the magazine instead of the other way around. If they give me extra work one more time I don't want to be a member at all anymore. I fooled around with a laptop with a disfunctional screen ,PcLinuxOs ans Acronis True image backup software. My son damaged the screen of my wifes laptop severly but it still works. This is jut another proof that my concerns are not unfounded. Other damaged stuff include Charging units fo cell-phones, photo-cameras...These kid can't be left unsupervised in the neighbourhood of electronics. At the retro fair I mentioned before I was very inspired by the sinclair stuff. I had never tryed anything ont those machines and never wanted to have one because the keyboards were crap. I did download an emulator (Speccy) and watched some impressives demos But a guy at the fair was working on an 6502-vic20 emulator. There is already such a thing and there even is a c64 emulator. They guy at the fair even had a solution for the crap keyboard problem; a decent and robust replacement. And the demonstrated file transfer from PC. Of course these guys are cross-developing on PC's nowadays..... He told me that he had a cross-assembler in which he could mix 6502 and z80 code and that he could use that feature in developing the emulator. This is interesting in respect to the c128 which has a 6502 and a Z80. Probably someone has made a spectrum emulator for the c64/vic20 also. Not all games and features will work the way you want of course...Still it is cool and you learn a lot developing stuff like that. At the time I was at the fair I was still contemplating to make a 6502 emulator in javascript..... What is the practical use of an 8 bit-emulator under an 8 bit machine. You have access to more software, but is that software worthwhile? Some games/demos/musics/graphics/operating-system-routines might be. Switching in and out of emulation to rip sprites or debug... What is the added value if you could use the z80 and 6502 in sequence like on the c128? Executing routines from the different kernal-roms? Doing specific thing one CPU is better in? What about using z80 and 6502 parallel? There is no retro machine that can do that. Of course you can have 2 retro 8 bit computers operate a model/railway. You can even have them exchange data (very hard though) thru various busses like all the 8 bit to PC connections. But it would be very difficult to have them share the same memory and graphic chips. And again the question remains; what is the added value. With the VHDL ( One Chip MSX, 1541 Ultimate etc) you probably don't have to build the hardware. I also read that someone had constructed a setup to let a spectrum control a MSX VDU. This a way to demonstrate the potential of a particular 8 bit machine if only it had a ...custom chip. Imagine a MSX with a SID chip.. Also at the fair there was an atari 8 bit guy who hacked the atari kernal. He studied the kernal for 5 years to make sense of it. The hack he showed me was relatively small, but of course he is able now to do a lot more. I have a documented c64 kernal listing which I have studied. I know that it is complicated and I guess that if you don't have proper documentation and you have to figure out everything yourself, it can easily take 5 years. |
| 20081103 |
Today it was brought to my attention that your name,address and bankaccount number are enough to steel your identity and commit fraud. For my department it means that we should be carefull printing that stuff on reports and letters that are easily accessable. Due to the credit-crisis the banks demand a forecast of your income fro the next 4 years to come, if you apply for a mortgage. At work we already had a standard letter stating the employees current income, so I am adapting that one. I am doing that in rtf. One of the problem is that the tags that have to be replaced by value's get surrounded by layout information (font, size, etc). Maybe if you use another editor than the Word version I am using you don't have that problem. Anyway, I think its the third time that I have to adjust the mangled tags in the raw rtf. Tables are also cumbersome in rtf because you have to know the amount of rows/columns in advance. Of course this is no big deal but it would be nicer to hae a work around. I found out that inside the paragraph after replacing the tag you can't add CrLf (char(13)||char10) but /line works. The elements or groups that you know that will be there, you can surround with edges. Inside the elements or groups you can easily vary the amount of lines.... I was using a function intended for something else which uses %bind(:1), %bind(:2). But if the XML kind of tags don't get mingled up with display information like the previous kind did I might make the switch. Of course the presentation is only one side of the matter, the calculations are actually a bigger portion. And there will be several meetings wich will costs me hours and hours. Today after work a had to fetch the kids, prepare dinner, bring the kids to bed and shave. After that not a lot of energy left to do some programming. Tomorrow I having an all evening appointment so no opportunity then. |