These are my links for January 21st through February 5th:
Tag: hardware
Bookmarks for October 14th through October 27th
These are my links for October 14th through October 27th:
- http://codebutler.github.com/firesheep/ –
- Volpin Props: Budget Build Mini Vacuum-Former –
- IRODS:Data Grids, Digital Libraries, Persistent Archives, and Real-time Data Systems – IRODS –
- INSEAD – Global Executive MBA Programmes – GEMBA at a glance –
- http://markup.io/ – Awesome. I've been looking for this for a looong time!
- Enterprise Samba: samba-enterprise –
Bookmarks for July 13th through July 30th
These are my links for July 13th through July 30th:
Technostalgia
Ahhhhh, Technostalgia. This evening I pulled out a box from the attic. It contained an instance of the first computer I ever used. A trusty BBC B+ Micro and a whole pile of mods to go with it. What a fabulous piece of kit. Robust workhorse, Econet local-area-networking built-in (but no modem, how forward-thinking!), and a plethora of expansion ports. My admiration of this hardware is difficult to quantify but I wasted years of my life learning how to hack about with it, both hardware and software.
The BBC Micro taught me in- and out- of the classroom. My primary school had one in each classroom and, though those might have been the ‘A’ or ‘B’ models, I distinctly remember one BBC Master somewhere in the school. Those weren’t networked but I remember spraining a thumb in the fourth year of primary school and being off sports for a few weeks. That’s when things really started happening. I taught myself procedural programming using LOGO. I was 10 – a late starter compared to some. I remember one open-day the school borrowed (or dusted off) a turtle
Brilliant fun, drawing ridiculous spirograph-style patterns on vast sheets of paper.
When I moved up to secondary school my eyes were opened properly. The computer lab was pretty good too. Networked computers. Fancy that! A network printer and a network fileserver the size of a… not sure what to compare it with – it was a pretty unique form-factor – about a metre long, 3/4 metre wide and about 20cm deep from memory (but I was small back then). Weighed a tonne. A couple of 10- or 20MB Winchesters in it from what I recall. I still have the master key for it somewhere! My school was in Cambridge and had a couple of part-time IT teacher/administrators who seemed to be on loan from SJ Research. Our school was very lucky in that regard – we were used as a test-bed for a bunch of network things from SJ Research, as far as I know a relative of Acorn. Fantastic kit only occasionally let down by the single, core network cable slung overhead between two buildings.
My first experience of Email was using the BBC. We had an internal mail system *POST which was retired after a while, roughly when ARBS left the school I think. I wrote my own MTA back then too, but in BASIC – I must have been about 15 at the time. For internet mail the school had signed up to use something called Interspan which I later realised must have been some sort of bridge to Fidonet or similar.
We even had a networked teletext server which, when working, downloaded teletext pages to the LAN and was able to serve them to anyone who requested them. The OWUKWW – One-way-UK-wide-web! The Music department had a Music 5000 Synth which ran a language called Ample. Goodness knows how many times we played Axel-F on that. Software/computer-programmable keyboard synth – amazing.
Around the same time I started coding in 6502 and wrote some blisteringly fast conversions of simple games I’d earlier written in BASIC. I used to spend days drawing out custom characters on 8×8 squared exercise books. I probably still have them somewhere, in another box in the attic.
Up until this point I’d been without a computer at home. My parents invested in our first home computer. The Atari ST. GEM was quite a leap from the BBC but I’d seen similar things using (I think) the additional co-processors – either the Z80- or the 6502 co-pro allowed you to run a sort of GEM desktop on the Beeb.
My memory is a bit hazy because then the school started throwing out the BBCs and bringing in the first Acorn Archimedes machines. Things of beauty! White, elegant, fast, hot, with a (still!) underappreciated operating system, high colour graphics, decent built-in audio and all sorts of other goodies. We had a Meteosat receiver hooked up to one in the geography department, pulling down WEFAX transmissions. I *still* haven’t got around to doing that at home, and I *still* want to!
The ST failed pretty quickly and was replaced under warranty with an STE. Oh the horror – it was already incompatible with several games, but it had a Blitter chip ready to compete with those bloody Amiga zealots. Oh Babylon 5 was rendered on an Amiga. Sure, sure. But how many thousands of hit records had been written using Cubase or Steinberg on the Atari? MIDI – there was a thing. Most people now know MIDI as those annoying, never-quite-sounding-right music files which autoplay, unwarranted, on web pages where you can’t find the ‘mute’ button. Even that view is pretty dated.
Back then MIDI was a revolution. You could even network more than one Atari using it, as well as all your instruments of course. The STE was gradually treated to its fair share of upgrades – 4MB ram and a 100MB (SCSI, I think) hard disk, a “StereoBlaster” cartridge even gave it DSP capabilities for sampling. Awesome. I’m surprised it didn’t burn out from all the games my brothers and I played. I do remember wrecking *many* joysticks.
Like so many others I learned more assembler, 68000 this time, as I’d done with the BBC, by typing out pages and pages of code from books and magazines, spending weeks trying to find the bugs I’d introduced, checking and re-checking code until deciding the book had typos, but GFA Basic was our workhorse. My father had also started programming in GFA, and still did do until about 10 years ago when the Atari was retired.
Then University. First term, first few weeks of first term. I blew my entire student grant, £1400 back then, on my first PC. Pentium 75, 8MB RAM, a 1GB disk and, very important back then, a CD-ROM drive. A Multimedia PC!
It came with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups but with about 6 weeks of work was dual boot with my first Linux install. Slackware.
That one process, installing Slackware Linux with only one book “Que: Introduction to UNIX” probably taught me more about the practicalities of modern operating systems than my entire 3-year BSc in Computer Science (though to be fair, almost no theory of course). I remember shuttling hundreds of floppy disks between my room in halls and the department and/or university computer centre. I also remember the roughly 5% corruption rate and having to figure out the differences between my lack of understanding and buggered files. To be perfectly honest things haven’t changed a huge amount since then. It’s still a daily battle between understanding and buggered files. At least packaging has improved (apt; rpm remains a backwards step but that’s another story) but basically everything’s grown faster. At least these days the urge to stencil-spray-paint my PC case is weaker.
So – how many computers have helped me learn my trade? Well since about 1992 there have been five of significant import. The BBC Micro; the Acorn Archimedes A3000; the Atari ST(E); the Pentium 75 and my first Apple Mac G4 powerbook. And I salute all of them. If only computers today were designed and built with such love and craft. *sniff*.
Required Viewing:
- Micro Men
- The Pirates of Silicon Valley
Bookmarks for June 8th through June 14th
These are my links for June 8th through June 14th:
Bookmarks for April 24th from 14:14 to 21:25
These are my links for April 24th from 14:14 to 21:25:
Bookmarks for April 14th through April 16th
These are my links for April 14th through April 16th:
Bookmarks for March 9th through March 17th
These are my links for March 9th through March 17th:
- OpenCL Hello World Example –
- Introductory Tutorial to OpenCL™ –
- Mac Dev Center: OpenCL Programming Guide for Mac OS X: Basic Programming Sample –
- Mac Dev Center: OpenCL Programming Guide for Mac OS X: OpenCL on the Mac Platform –
- OpenInkpot – Replacement firmware for some ebook readers
- Quake-Catcher Network –
- wmarow’s disk & disk array calculator –
- UX London –
Bookmarks for January 26th through January 27th
These are my links for January 26th through January 27th:
- Mechanical Spider –
- Japanese Food Mount Fuji International – Online Japanese Food Shopping –
- teapigs | fine green white black and organic herbal teas – expensive leaves
- Temperature Logger – solar water heating data-logging controller
- Tom’s Planner | Gantt Chart Software | Faster than Excel easier than MS Project –
VoIP at Home
Some time ago I bought myself a Netgear TA612V broadband VoIP adaptor. I’d been looking around at Sipura , Broadvoice , Vonage and the like and quite liked the idea of the TA612V. It provides two separate analogue phone lines out, ethernet in from the DSL or cable router and ethernet out with QoS traffic-shaping to give the audio lines precendence. It even came with 555 Minutes of calls from Sipgate (a German company).
If you make less than around £10 calls per month (above which I think Vonage would be cheaper) then the initial layout (around £60 from http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/ ) for the netgear adaptor probably pays itself back under a year. All UK calls via sipgate are around 1.9p per minute at time of writing.
So I signed up for a free sipgate number. I went for 0845 as it’s Lo-Call rate in the UK – that’s to say I make the same savings as with calling out with any other sipgate number, but it also works out cheaper for people to call in. Sipgate’s tech support are pretty prompt and helpful though as with so many support services, don’t necessarily answer the questions they’re actually asked.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t like so much was that the TA612V turned out to be tied to the sipgate service – I was really hoping for a terminal adaptor + router with QoS which was configurable by hand. Netgear’s support also seems minimal and I’ve also developed the impression that only ten of these units have been sold. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a BIOS flash which allows the SIP configuration by hand.
What with VoIP being flavour of the year I’d expected a little more hype from Netgear about their neat little adaptor. I guess they’re keeping quiet to see if it’s all as big a deal as the pundits are making out. Asterisk certainly continues to make a stir.
One other point to note is that my TA612V sits behind my DSL+NAT+Wireless router. Unfortunately my entire home network *apart* from the VoIP adaptor is wireless and that renders the QoS on the VoIP adaptor utterly useless. I guess I’ll need to invest in one of those fancy MIMO access points or something and disable the 802.11G-network on my primary. Maybe when Alex moves back up to Leeds he’ll give me back my old Netgear FM114P wireless + firewall.