It's not just a cesspit, it's a broken cesspit.
Baritone saxophonist, Duke Ellington devotee. Harmony In Harlem jazz orchestra. Liberal Democrat, federalist, poet. Former VLSI engineer at ARM. South Cambs, UK. #NAFO - spend money to free Ukraine.
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It's not just a cesspit, it's a broken cesspit.
Fahrenheit... Blimey. Will you lot ever get with the times?
Only just realised I called it Twitter. Excuse me while I just go and scrub my brain with a wire brush.
Ever so briefly, at 2:28 in the video, a rather splendid thing with lots of lovely flashing green lights appears on the right of the screen. What the blazes was it?
Best use of the word "gentlemen" I've seen on Twitter, ever.
That doesn't look /quite/ like pure Border Collie. Definitely a bit of something else too.
From that angle, the Aussie just looks like a full blue merle Border Collie. Flek has some blue merle in the family, and some of his siblings had one blue eye. Here is his "yes, I've been a bad dog" pose.
2/ You iterate x (in your example) and flag 0/1 bits for each iteration plus an iteration count, and then calculate y afterwards - if there is a condensed way of doing it not in the main iteration loop? Just a thought. Could end up being slower if generally only half a dozen iterations, mind.
1/ Also, you only need the midpoint of x to determine how many iterations are needed to get x/equal to the screen boundary. Each iteration is a half-step in one of two directions. Is there a shortcut for calculating y based on this accumulated info such that...
Hmm. Did you optimise it by having four near-duplicate routines for lines that overflowed left, right, top, bottom?
I'm slightly puzzled. They are doing a load of division, but surely it's more efficient to do the chop that you describe?
My brain isn't functioning and I can't follow the 6502 line clipping algorithm in the Elite deep dive. When it says "move the point along the line until it's on screen", it makes it sound as if it literally moves one step at a time until x is on screen. Which sounds mad.
Flamingo, Like a flame in the sky, Flying over the islands, To a Russian nearby.
I wonder what Herb would have thought about this. youtu.be/9ZJYAO3ouDg
I mean after taking the lifelines. Can you still bail out if you're down to two answers?
What a plonker. It's decades since I watched that programme. Can you caah out once you've seen the question you can't answer, or do you have to follow through and answer once you've said you'll continue?
Our current Mickey Mouse constitution, if it gives overseas residents a say in every detail of our lives but allows governments to choose arbitrarily who vote in referendums of constitutional importance, is stupid. But hey, this is the UK so what do you expect?
Ah... But "why should those people get to determine VAT rates etc they don't pay?". This is why a federal constitution with overseas citizens as a "constituent state" could protect their constitutional rights in the upper house but not give them undue power over our daily lives in the lower house.
Perhaps the baseline argument is "if a UK political party had a manifesto which included removing your birthright citizenship because you live elsewhere, wouldn't you want representation?".
I'm mildly curious as to what the question was.
Which reminds me. Back in the 1980s we had two of these programmable ones at home. Possibly through my father's work. I see someone has one up for £350 on Ebay. That's a bit mad. Not sure what happened to the two we had.
It seems that it's now acceptable to publicly call for people's throats to be cut. Nobody is doing Palestinians any favours by lowering themselves to the standards of Netanyahu and Hamas. Are we all butchers, or are we civilised? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The BBC News still stupidly calling them "settlers" and "settlement", rather than invaders and colonists conducting colonisation and displacement. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I was about to say "Aha! An obscure Larry Niven joke" but I looked it up and gather there's some modern TV series that uses the term.
I don't know why the blazes I didn't get twice as many panels back in 2009, the peak time for getting ridiculous feed-in tarrifs here in the UK, on the extremely long south-facing bungalow roof. What a plonker. Get as many as you can - and maybe a battery system too.
Had a fun rehearsal with Bob Hunt's Harlem Jazz Orchestra on Monday. Had a few solo spots on baritone - one of Bob's compositions.
Why is this bullshit headline about the government's AI data centres rather than about people's domestic electricity bills? BBC News - AI can make us UK's biggest firm, Rolls-Royce says www.bbc.com/news/article...
But really, it's quite scary. I wouldn't dream of walking back to my hotel late at night in #washingtondc, for fear of being mugged. It's so awful. Thank heavens for the National Guard. Said no Michael Kilpatrick, ever.
I'm looking forward to my trip to #washingtondc in four weeks when, dressing as an excessively English gent, I will walk around loudly proclaiming my bafflement as to why the army are on the streets. That could be amusing.
Have agreed to meet Donald for his first 1-1 employee review of 2025.
The USA is such a bloody Mockery-Mouse democracy it seems it hasn't even got an independent Boundary Commission. What a joke. BBC News - Texas Republicans vote to arrest Democrats blocking redistricting plan www.bbc.com/news/article...
Silent Running! Always makes me cry at the end.
I'm making sketches and thinking of coding shortcuts to render visible walls through gaps as part of my simplified perspective maze rendering on the Microbit.
Oh my! The v2 Microbit is nearly 10 times faster than the v1. My maze drawing routine:
It's inevitable that sooner or later, he's not going to get his way by bullying lots of individual nations into unwelcome trade deals. Any unified or semiunified response will backfire, if that union comprised Europe + X,Y and Z, for example.
This moron will use trade war as a tool to threaten absolutely any country making political decisions, whatever the nature, he disagrees with. It's that simple. To suggest it might only be used in relation to Israel and Palestine, say, would be naive. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c2...
10/ That's dead quick because the SSD1309 has 8 rows of 128 bytes, each byte being 8 vertical pixels. So that's 8 blocks of code with a defined length, dumped very quickly to the screen buffer. Woof!
9/ Aha. Rendering trick: draw the two mirror image major triangles (solid border and stipple pattern) first, render the maze by deleting/overwriting segments were side-junctions appear. Next trick: render the triangles as several rectangular blocks, hard-coded. Really fast. No Bresenam nonsense.
When there are violent football thugs fighting each other on home soil over just a silly game, do these clowns refer to those thugs as "fighting-age men"? No, of course not, because they're not brown.
When there are violent football thugs fighting each other on home soil over just a silly game, do these clowns refer to those thugs as "fighting-age men"? No, of course not, because they're not brown.
8/ I've also just bought a Microbit V2 which uses a more powerful processor and Thumb 2,with some conditional execution - the optimisations in the SPI buffer delivery and Bresenham lines, etc, could he significant. Far fewer silly little conditional branches and faffing.
7/ I remember posting a lot about the 2D stuff 5 years ago on Twitter and making a few online friends from the retro community, which was fun. @breakintoprogram.co.uk @6502nerd.bsky.social @kevedwardsretro.bsky.social
6/ I'm also wondering if the fastest rendering is achieved by drawing the two major triangles (with stipple pattern?) first and then deleting/overwriting sections for any side junctions and facing walls.
5/ As the sketch suggests, I'm thinking of having the screen memory buffer extend above the screen in order to simplify drawing without messy boundary checks, etc.
4/ And then I lowered the vanishing point and took the ceiling corners /above/ the edge of the display window. A much better view. Also, the ceiling diagonals are at 45 degrees - opens up coding optimisations.
3/ I started thinking about rendering it in a simplified perspective. The first idea with a central vanishing point is not ideal because of the screen aspect ratio. If makes the walls look insufficiently claustrophobic.
2/ and worked on some optimisation and even more parameters for the maze aesthetics and complexity. But following that, whilst today waiting for four hours for some minor surgery...
1/ Recently I dug up the Microbit and revisited the maze drawing routine from 5 years ago. Rewritten it using a proper ARM assembler environment...
The littie bastards.
In usual sloppiness, BBC News don't actually explain fully the border dispute "going back 100yrs when the French drew it". Why not give us actual details so we can decide if the French, Thais or Cambodians are/were being stupid? I despair. "News" my arse. BBC News - www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9...
Self-doubt or stupidity? I wondered for hours if there were some bizarre wiring fault that could make a solenoid valve draw 1kW rather than 7W. I /assumed/ a fault thus ignoring the obvious: the rain harvester pump energises when water is drawn by the valve. Unbelievably thick.
5/ Ahhhhh. But I'm not looking forward to all the graft of repairing the ground and paving.
4/ And there's a Shelly automation device which is /just/ within reach of the WiFi to control it all with a phone app.
3/ The cascade pump has a new access hatch - my handyman made it unserviceable years ago, and that wasn't good enough. A separate 32mm MDPE pipe through the conduit:
2/ All pipes and cables in a conduit of 110mm drain pipes and now fully serviceable.
1/ I don't do anything by halves. Engineering overkill, but IMMENSELY satisfying. Here's my pond filler valve enclosure (with frost protection heater cable) over a drain access hatch. Video in the next post.
One more go, and ChatGPT has act written some reasonable #poetry as the quatrain within a #sonnet She carries silence, not for lack of care, But sharp defence against a world too loud. Her words, when offered, feel intensely rare — As though the air must earn the right to sound. Not bad.
ChatGPT admits its flaws but says that its model has improved since last year. True, but it still "front loads" and the just generates gibberish in attempts to complete a verse or rhyme.
...I asked it to try again: She carries silence, not for lack of care, But sharp defence against a world too loud. Her words, when offered, feel intensely rare — As if the hush had parted like a cloud. That's better: 3rd line continues the correct theme but 4th is still a daft contrivance.
It wrote this quatrain: She carries silence, not for lack of care, But sharp defence against a world too loud. A single smile can reorganise the air - A hush, then music forming from a cloud. And I told it the first couplet are good and fit /her/ precisely. But followed it with drivel. So...
I just had a chat with ChatGPT and discovered that it's improved it's ability to write #poetry. Well, a bit. I asked if it remembered a #sonnet I wrote. It said yes, but proceeded to make it up. Except that it remembered just two lines precisely. That's weird.
3/ I've dug up the paving near the pond's edge to install a new access hatch where the pond cascade pump goes.
2/ it involves digging up the half-baked mess that my handyman left years ago, because the 110m drain pipe conduit system wasn't actually complete. What's the point of installing such a thing if the last metre of pipes and cables go through so I lmao? Bonkers.
1/ I've been doing some pond electrics today. My back and knees are now killing me. This is part of a very long and complicated process.
Interesting, thanks. So any "think tank" that calls itself an institute has basically proved its intellectual worth before it is allowed to use the name?
Oh? In what sense is "institute" protected? I've not heard that before. I'm curious.
9/ All this because I couldn't stand the fact that a few people had bought tickets to Harmony In Harlem concerts but put their name as "judith smith" or "DR C BURT" rather than "Judith Smith" and "Dr C Burt". Oops. That's several days of life I won't get back!
8/ Blimey, it's an absolute mess. But I think I ended up with a solution that normalises most names if they are entered with stupid upper/lower case inconsistencies, and accounts for strange names, strange positioning of articles, and also puts Mr/Miss/Dr/Prof/etc always at the front.
7/ But it has to avoid falsely changing the case of two-letter names such as "Li", and so the search for particles "van de" de la", "du", etc, is separate from the logic that differentiates names such as "Li" from pairs of initials such as "CJ", primarily based on whether there's a vowel or not.
6/ Their name could be Susan van de Ven or Aiden Van De Meyer. (Some non-Dutch have normalised the capitalisation so the Van might not be van). What about "Daphne du Maurier"? There are sets of particles in some languages to look out for, so the script does that too!
5/ Also they might right "Robert R Brown" and you need to know that middle initial wants to stay where it is, so that needs to accounted for also. Sorted. Erm, but what if they are Dutch?
4/ But if they've got their CAPSLOCK accidentally inverted and write mACdONALD, you *know* it should be MacDonald. So you can make intelligent guesses based on the case of the second half of the name.
3/ and if they write jenny smith or JENNY SMITH, you can convert it to Jenny Smith. Easy. Erm... But what if their name is McInnes or MacDonald, or Machi? How do you differentiate the last two without a dictionary of Scottish surnames and they write it all in lowercase? You don't.
2/ I mean, if someone writes CA Roberts or C A Roberts or C.A. Roberts, you can't be sure "CA" isn't a two-letter name (Li, Wu..?) but you can format the rest in a consisent manner. You can also put the initials at the front so that Roberts C A becames C A Roberts.
1/ Well, this ballooned somewhat! I just wanted a PHP script to add to my band website that would tidy up people's names in my ticket database. It annoyed me seeing some names all in lower case, others all in upper case. The resulting script got rather out of hand!
I'm sure I'm not misremembering, but my immediate boss at ARM said he drew chips manually, so when I joined in 1993 I had a direct link to people who actually did this on enormous pieces of squared paper! It seems wild.
You couldn't possibly push an animal that big through it.
Oh fuck off. Can I have some subsidies for my jazz orchestra concerts, please? Those big boys can take a hike. BBC News - Call for tax breaks to support festivals - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Americans: stop banging on about "Mo kings". It's stupid. The majority of monarchies around today have less power than your bonkers idea of an executive president. You made this mess and chose not to remain a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary democracy, like Canada, for example.
I wish Americans would wake up to the fact that the majority of monarchies today are constitutional monarchies with a sensible parliamentary government system. Your mess is a function of choosing to have an executive president rather than an apolitical figurehead.
Unsung hero of WWII
Cripes, it may as well say "Keep your gentleman's vegetables fresh!".
Sheffield is already one of the most wooded cities in Europe. I just don't want to see such a gruesome sea of paving or tarmac with trees inserter in silly little holes. Just a small bit a grass or earth linking 4 trees, breaking the paved expanse, would make a massive difference.
The most important thing is that there are at least eight trees without more than a square metre of earth around them, in a sea of paving. Hideous.
Woke up to see ten texts from amazon.com with a verification code - someone has got my password but couldn't log on. That it was amazon.com not amazon.co.uk suggests the hack was elsewhere and they were trying their luck with amazon? Still, a site with my details has been hacked.
Casual incitement to normalise the stoning to death of gays or transsexuals. This is the sewer that is Twitter:
Hope you're OK, my dear. Let us see some poetry! Mx
He's a moron. Why haven't you lot deposed him yet? He's no friend of the UK or Europe, which is why I took this when I was in DC in March.
Someone please present a simple list of "equivalent everyday things made by American companies but manufactured overseas" just to show that this clown's ridiculous idea of picking on Apple is just infantile, arbitrary and inconsisent drivel. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I wonder what the "correct" number of communitied bearing infrastructure burdens is? Also, what is horrible about questioning why it's OK to have housing in areas of beauty but for the infrastructure to support that housing somehow being undesirable?
He's like the old bloke propping up the end of the bar in a pub who collars you when you walk in and starts going off on one about any old stuff, and you stand there waiting for the barman to see you as soon as possible.
I'm getting a bit tired of running my jazz orchestra and, every fortnight, having the disappointment of someone giving short notice that they can't make the rehearsal. Particularly trumpeters. It's a bit soul-destroying and unrewarding.
2/ and... b) if anyone says "you can't build this near our village. It's an area of [outstanding natural beauty | special scientific interest] the response is: WHY HAVE YOU GOT A BLOODY HOUSE THERE?
1/ I have two simple rules: a) People who want to have electricity in their homes should be able to see the means of either its generation or conveyance from their bedroom window.
4/ This is the state of all the material stuff that surrounds me every day. It's all junk or inadequately designed. You try to invest in smart things to save power, water, whatever, and they just fail all the bloody time.
3/ Oh, and the pond cascase is leaking somewhere so I can't run the cascade pump until I find the problem (that's why the pond was half empty). The fountain in the small pond exploded. Every couple of months the drain gets full of roots and I have get splattered with shit trying to rod it.
2/ I was filling the pond up manually with the hose from the rain harvester tank. I put a float switch and relay so that it cuts the pump if it starts to run dry. The fucking float switch just stuck. It's an absolute pain priming that pump sometimes as it's pernickity. And very heavy.
1/ DOES NOTHING BLOODY WORK ANY MORE? Tom says his laptop (11mths old) is bluescreen. The Renault Zoe has crap charing firmware. I allowed someone to sell me a charger that is a bag of thick shit. The solenoid valve for my pond filler circuit is dead. Yet again. IP65 my arse...
General Sir Gwyn Jenkins should be sacked, stripped of rank and locked up for overseeing not only a grotesque cover-up but the betrayal of our Afghan friends. BBC News; Top Special Forces general oversaw blocking of Afghan 'war-crime' witnesses to Britain www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...