There’s not really a non-boring way of talking about this, so uh: you can still buy a 6502 processor. That’s a 37-year-old design. That’s, from like, medieval IT times. I guess you could still use it for some things. The patent has expired, and in some tasks, you only need a teeny bit of CPU power.

The average webpage is now almost a megabyte in size. Back in what I hate to refer to as “the day”, downloading a megabyte of data was a serious time investment. It still surprises me that every page click is now the equivalent of 20 minutes of 1998 online time. Which was 20p when it was 1p per minute. Also, I had a shit modem. It was more software than hardware. Like a car with an engine made of feathers.

Also, I can’t miss an opportunity to snark. The article linked above says:

“Ryan Kim at news site Gigaom speculated that the growth in the amount of Javascript on webpage was down to the growing use of HTML5”

Actually, Ryan, the growth in the amount of Javascript on webpages is, in fact, down to the growing use of Javascript on webpages. Javascript-heavy pages have been on the increase a long time before HTML5 showed up.

Interesting and scary all at the same time.

You know what’s very quick and simple to install? Not this:

I can have MySQL running in about 10 minutes from a standing start. SQL Server 2008 Express Edition, on the other hand, can’t even open it’s manager without having a “this might take a few minutes” box pop up. And I’ve been bumping heads with the installer for two hours now (how can I just install the manager without installing everything? Joke’s on you, it’s impossible). It’s all installed, finally, but the components aren’t talking to each other.

GRUMPY.

A friend just bought an iPad. I’m trying to describe to him from memory how to get PDFs into iBooks using iTunes. My stuttering, confused explanation told him everything he needed to know about iTunes’ ease of use. In the end, I suggested he just email the PDFs to his iPad.

Because fuck iTunes.

…the US gets three new models of Kindle, and we (and presumably the world) just get one? The cheapest, least innovative one?

And we have to pay £40 extra over the US price?

I know, I’m sure everyone else will get the new Kindles in a few months too. They can’t launch everywhere all at once. But somehow I don’t think that price is going to be brought into line any time soon.

There’s something pretty interesting in the exclusion zone there.

“Starting in 1976 a new and powerful radio signal was detected worldwide, and quickly dubbed the Woodpecker by amateur radio operators.”

It’s one of three Over The Horizon radar systems used by the Soviet Union. More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Woodpecker

More photos: http://carbonangel.co.uk/site/chernobyl-series-2010/chernobyl-series-moscow-eye

Over the long weekend, I decided to have a stab at programming an Xbox 360. Don’t judge me, this is what I do with spare time.

I’ve never thought I’m particularly great at programming. However much I know, there’s always more to learn. A few years ago, I passed a tipping point where the new stuff began to get easier to take in, and I began to feel like there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t eventually figure out.

I’ve been doing web development during those last few years, and it has pushed out all the other things I used to play with. I used to make 3d games - well, 3d games engines that did nice stuff, but weren’t actually games. If I knew how to make compelling games, I’d probably have turned them into games. But since it was kind of a dead-end hobby, I spent less time on it.

Enter the Xbox 360, with it’s XNA development environment. It’s a huge step up from the environment I used for 3d stuff before, which was the humble but versatile Blitz3D. I’m getting that feeling of being a beginner all over again.

I forgot how bad I was at maths, and forgot how much of it was needed for 3d programming. In the past four days, I’ve shovelled all sorts of knowledge into my brain. I knew what Matrices were, but not how they pertained to 3d graphics. Well, now I do. Quaternions. Ever heard of those? Me neither. Until now. Changing the colour of something now takes about 10 lines, where it used to take just one in Blitz3D. I don’t position objects in 3d space anymore, I apply translation and rotation matrices to them.

It’s scary stuff, so why persevere? A few reasons:

1) If I want to keep programming in 3D, the already aged Blitz3D simple won’t be around forever. XNA is, for now, current, and regularly updated.

2) I don’t want it to beat me. If I can figure this out, then I’ll have a foot in the door.

3) C# is a really nice language. Blitz3D was great, you could do anything in it, but it’s like programming with boxing gloves on sometimes.

4) If I ever finish something (which I can guarantee I won’t), Microsoft allow developers to upload their game onto an area of the Xbox Dashboard, under “Indie Games” for the entire world to see and downlaod for their Xbox. I’ve always wanted to write something for a games console, so XNA offers quite a nice carrot in this respect. It also offers a giant stick labelled with things I don’t understand, and beats me with it.

Finally, I’m actually making progress. In just a few hours, I had something moving around and controlled by an Xbox360 gamepad. Considering I’d never programmed anything in C# before, or used the XNA framework, that’s kind of a testament to just how good a development environment it is, and that’s seriously encouraging.

I’m fascinated by things that are, to be fair, quite dull. Usually, these things are related to old-school computing or lack of it. I’m intrigued by ingenuity of people who had to solve problems that simply don’t exist today. Here’s an example.

Turn away now if you are in any way cool. You won’t be after you’ve read this.

These days, you can create anything you like on a desktop PC with a 3d graphics package. Back in the indistinct period of time known as “the day”, it wasn’t so easy. Various tricks had to be used, be it miniatures or combining simple computer generated effects to give the illusion of something much more complex than it was.

The BBC, during continuity announcements, used one of these before 1985:

It’s a camera that points at various panels that hold mechanical versions of the BBC world (top left of the picture), the clock, various “techinical difficulties” captions (bottom) and the school’s programmes countdown clock. You may remember that one if you went to school at any point in the 80s.

Here’s another look at the mechanical globe.

It had mirrors and lights around it meaning that after a bit of video colouring it came out looking like this:

In 1985, a computer generated title card was created to replace this. How, in 1985, did they created such a smooth, antialiased bit of CG when my BBC Micro outputted pixels the size of a baby’s fist. Was this really a fully rendered, shaded and textured globe?

Nope.

Here it is:

For anyone too young to remember, the globe spun.

The images is made up of three components. The sea is a single shaded circle, and the land is another shaded circle, both drawn on a Quantel system. Data is then read from a rack of EEPROM chips for each frame, telling the video hardware which bits of the gold globe to render, and which bits of the blue globe to not render. This means that only two full colour frames are stored (the “BBC1” text was part of the blue globe’s frame) and the rest is smaller chunks of data read in for each frame. There was data for 600 frames. Some compression was used, meaning the two full frames were 600KB each, and each frame of land mass data was just 7KB. All this was placed into a single metal box with a switch. The switch triggered the “SUBTITLES 888” text to appear under the “BBC1” text. The BBC also had to produce versions of these boxes for each region, so that on regional programs, the correct regional identifier appeared beneath “BBC1” (ie “Northern Ireland”, “East Midlands”.

In all, 6000 EEPROM chips had to be sourced and filled with data, for which the BBC used a VAX-11.

There’s a few more pictures of the hardware, some test output and links to some further, more technical reading here.

I’m already sick of hearing about Apple’s tablet, and it’s not even been announced yet. It’s not even an official product.

Jesus. This is what it’s come to.

I was looking forward to it at first, because I quite like the iPod Touch. “At first” was about a year ago. Speculation has reached fever pitch, websites have filled page after page with nothing but tedious non-news, even guessing games on what the god damn thing is going to be called are rife. This all basically consists of slavishly pouring over records of Apple’s trademark, patent and domain name registrations. That’s IT journalism for you.

A few months ago, the realisation hit me that this was going to be an expensive product that I wasn’t going to want to wave around in public, and therefore it’s not particularly useful to me. Suddenly, the Kindle looks very attractive. We’ll see, I guess. I think this thing’s being announced sometime today. I should probably know that, it’s been rammed in my face enough, but apathy set in weeks ago. They might have already announced it, I don’t think I’d be able to tell, because the level of frothing would be roughly the same.