Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility

For those we lost, We will not forget 09/11/2001

“Our God given unalienable rights are given to us all as individuals. They tell us what me may do for ourselves, and they are the embodiment of liberty. The so-called rights that government gives to some of us are parcelled out to select groups as classes. They tell us what one class of people may require another to do for them, and they are the very essence of slavery.”
— Perri Nelson, February 9, 2010

A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?

Random stuff

Published Fri, Nov 23 2007 10:17 AM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Software Development

Well. Thanksgiving day is over. The holiday weekend continues though with a day off on Friday. Now we'll eat leftover turkey, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, green bean casserole, cranberries, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie and all for a couple of days.

Today is "Black Friday", supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year. That in itself is a good enough reason for me not to go shopping. I'll put out Christmas decorations instead. Most of our shopping is already done anyway.

The anti-spam updates I put in place yesterday appear to have been a success. I'm still receiving notifications of trackback spam, but the quantity has been vastly reduced.

There were only about 70 or so notification messages in my inbox this morning instead of the usual thousand or so. Some of that may be due to the holiday, but most of it is from the user agent trap.

Internet Explorer is still a memory hog. It was in previous incarnations, and that hasn't changed. I wrote an application using it to do page scraping of some of the Blogshares pages. It runs continually, waking up every hour or so to gather and re-organize some information from the Blogshares site.

The problem is that it uses Internet Explorer and that application never seems to give up the memory it acquires. The result is that every now and then Windows want's to increase the size of my virtual memory paging file.

It looks like I've still got some work to do on that application.

Most of you probably don't remember when computers were primitive machines without monitors or keyboards. Once upon a time you had to program them using patch-cords or toggle switches. You had to read their output by interpreting arrays of lamps.

Hearing tales of those "heroic" days discouraged me from even approaching the things when I was in high-school and college. Now I've written a software simulation of a computer based entirely upon relays, toggle switches and lamps. It's become one of my favorite toys.

Electromechanical Computer User Interface

The simulation is based upon a description in Charles Petzold's book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. I basically stopped with the machine described in chapter 17 of the book.

Eventually I plan to add a bunch of features to it, but it runs too slowly to ever be of much use except as an educational exercise. Running at its top speed, the clock cycles about three or four times per second. Compare that to the clock speed of your computer!

That slider at the top of the screen is actually there to slow it down. Move it all the way to the right and each step of the clock (half a clock cycle) takes a bit more than five seconds. That makes it possible to look at what it's doing and explain it to someone.

This linkfest is for the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of November, 2007.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.