Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

Remembering the Beeb

For those of you who owned or used BBC Micros, a couple of articles just popped up on BBC Online:

Creators of the BBC Micro re-unite to look at the micro and its legacy — Acorn were working on the Arm chip as a result of the BBC Micro and BBC Master project. It’s a wonderful British success story; Arm chips are in practically every small mobile device that are in the world today.

David Braben (co-author of Elite) looks back at the BBC Micro — It would be great to see the spirit of the BBC Micro live on today; perhaps the excitement of being part of perhaps the most important entertainment sector of the future can be used to entice students into Computer Science, Physics and Maths?

Update: More memories, from those who designed and built the Beeb.

Help needed for retired computers

The Australian Computer Museum Society is looking for benefactors to help them keep their collection intact. They had moved to an empty warehouse a couple of years ago, but now need to find somewhere else to store all their gear, some of which is a century old. Evidently they need about 400 square metres.

8-bit Graphics retrospective

From the ACM SIGGRAPH, Vol.32 No.2 May 1998: Game Graphics During the 8-bit Computer Era – a look at what was possible when all you had for graphics hardware was a large rock and a piece of chalk operating at 2MHz, some of the hacks that were used to squeeze the very last drop of functionality out of those systems and some of the more notable games insofar as their graphics.

Blog (noun)

I normally think of the term blog as being a web site of dated entries. As a noun, you can have a blog. As a verb you can blog (eg post) something to it.

It would seem there are people out there using the word blog to mean what I would normally call a blog post:

I’m back, starting with an apology for the lack of blogs over the last few months.

— Garry McGhie, V/Line

Not to single this instance out, because I’ve seen other examples of this use around the place, too. But it just doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Wiktionary / Dictionary.com / Urban Dictionary / Merriam-Webster / YourDictionary.com / Encarta — All these appear to agree with me.

Commodore 64 turns 25

CNN: Commodore 64 still loved after all these years

Getting tricksy

Jeff Atwood reminds us of the consequences of tricksters taking advantage of unlocked computers, including installation of the joke Clippy, which pops up Office 97-style, but more annoyingly.

It reminds me of some of the tricks I used to play in my youth (well, my early career), back in the days of Windows 3.1.

Change the screensaver to call up Calculator, or Notepad, every few seconds (I wonder if you can still do this)
Change the mouse buttons, or the sensitivity on the X and Y axes — one really fast, one really slow
That old favourite, putting a desktop full of icons on as a background image, so you couldn't click the icons (significant in Windows 3.1 when minimised programs sat as icons on the desktop)
Swapping keyboards or monitors with computer next door
Swapping individual keys on the keyboard over (didn't work for touch typists)
Spoofing a frequently-used icon to look like it had sent an abusive message to all the network users (followed by another colleague tapping the victim on the shoulder and saying the boss wanted to see him in her office).
Emails advising of an imminent audit of pirated software (this caused a rapid deletion of files before anybody could stop the victim).

Low-tech tricks worked too. The pisstake-de-resistance was one morning putting a notice on a late colleague's desk to advise him that he'd been moved to elsewhere in the building. (This was met with an accepting “Oh.” and shuffled departure.)

The scary thing is that all of the above tricks were tried on one person, and he fell for them every time.

Here comes another bubble

What a classic!

(via Scoble)

iPod Touch and the ‘classic’ geek blunder

The most famous blunder of all time, according to Vizzini from the Princess Bride, is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” but the most famous blunder, I think, for a geek is not to research fully the geek tech they are going to buy.

I treated myself to an 16Gb iPod Touch yesterday, I’ve been meaning to get an iPod for a few years and being a user of iTunes at home for my music collection it was a logical step. The iPod Touch is a great little device, not too heavy and has a great screen but hey you already know that because “we” geeks have read all the reviews, and if lucky enough to have a nearby Apple Store we’ve had a play with one.

So late yesterday afternoon I took a spin down Pitt Street here in Sydney to Next Bytes (Apple Reseller) and purchased my iPod Touch, I even bought a nice silicon protector for it. I resisted the urge to open it and play with it on the trip home and ripped the packaging off once I was in front of my PC.

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Another day, another broken form

Form This time it’s the BBC’s Children In Need appeal. Okay, so CIN isn’t meant to be seen outside the UK, but what with Channel BT and YouTube, it should be no surprise that bits of it (such as the superb Doctor Who short) have been seen around the world.

And I decided I wanted to donate. ‘Cos it’s a good cause and the dollar’s going well against the UKP.

A quick Google and I figured out what they were talking about when they asked about Gift Aid. Something for UK taxpayers only, alas.

But the billing address caught me out. Okay, let’s put my state name in the County field. That should work. Country… well they only seem to have continents, not countries. Australasia is it I guess. Dunno what the credit card company will make of that.

Submit… ah, it seems to be doing something. Uh oh, it rejected the postcode. Wrong length. Uh no, my four digit postcode is all I have. Tell you what, I’ll stuff it with zeroes. 0000003204. That would crack Aussie Post up, I’m sure.

Resubmit and… oh. It thinks it’s already running. “Your request is being processed….. Please be patient….”

Well I am normally, but at time of writing it’s been giving me this error for 20 minutes.

Has it gone in? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll check my credit card transactions in a day or two, and hope the Children In Need don’t need my donation that much.

(Oh what the hell, you might as well enjoy it here too.)

This is not news

Look, I’m all for citizen journalism. And Cameron Reilly is a good guy — an intelligent, witty, talented individual.

But “Man disputes $66 traffic fine” is NOT news. Something that happens thousands of times a day across Australia is NOT news. Not unless the protagonist is a senior cop or politician.

Certainly it’s worthy of a blog entry. But showing up on a news site (particularly as the top item) just makes a mockery of what citizen journalism could be and should be.

Surely there must be some real news people could be reporting on? I mean, stuff that actually matters to more than one person?

The latest splogging method

A new example: http://sl-weekly.com/

Basically an excerpt from a blog, with a random introductory paragraph up-front to make it look human, presumably in the hope that the trackback will be accepted.

Random introductory paragraphs:

I’ve a passion for X and keep looking for good articles. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘Y’ in Google and found this
People are always asking me to blog more often, well here you go, I looked up some info on ’Y’.
Last night I used Technorati to find more info on ’Y’ so I could post it into ‘X’. And this is one of the many results I found
Today I was digging for some info on ’Y’ and came across the following section

Of course, it’s pretty obvious if you look at a few posts in a row. Less so if you’re getting the occasional trackback request.

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