Observations from a Hill

I was watching an interesting piece on YouTube the other day about bare metal coding without an Operating System , which took me back to the 1990s and a couple of old Mac applications from the era. Both had an influence on ideas of mine when we were engaged in developing software for the use of film producers in finding appropriate North Wales locations for their productions. A couple of the inspirations for my 'discovering', or rather, misappropriating the easiest solution to the problem, were two pieces of Mac-based software produced in the early 1990s, both of which saw good good service with me throughout the decade. The game 'Maelstrom', by Ambrosia Software, written by Andrew Welch, was a firm favourite of mine throughout the decade, as I'd been a bit of an addict of the arcade game upon which it was based: Atari's 'Asteroids' from 1979. The original game was hard-coded in logic chips and was very much of its era: simple line and point rendered o...

Earlier today we visited the boys over on Ynys Môn, and one of the topics of conversation was AI, a subject difficult to avoid these days. But I put forward my thoughts that after the speculative market bubble bursts - as it inevitably will - the perceived existential threat that a lot of people imagine to be posed by the technology will simply evaporate, and AI per se will simply slot into our global toolbox of technologies to be used in the pursuit of our quite mundane needs and requirements. Every disruptive and apparently revolutionary technology in its day appears as a threat to the societal status quo, provoking often violent reaction to its implementation. This scenario is true of any radical technological innovation: at first disbelief, then astonishment, followed by a gold-rush to exploit it for all its worth in the markets. This is where the kick-back starts; where the disquiet at the potential for negative societal impact begins. Outrage against the machine on both moral and...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

OK - to go some way to explain last night's apparently psychotic improvisation - I offer the following. I was riffing on the theme of a couple of significant anniversaries this year: the 100th. of Quantum Mechanics, and the 25th. of the death of Douglas Adams. There are two Douglas's that feature in the improvisation [it was made up as I wrote it] and a third which deserves a mention on a personal level. The thread of the thing was composed on the fly in the manner of a Round Britain Quiz puzzle, using the kind of cryptic allusion common to crossword setters the world over. Pictured above, some of the references laid out in Scrabble tiles. The full list is larger than this, but I'll leave it to you to work out the rest: it's all internally consistent, and follows some manner of logic which I can see clearly; which is to say I wouldn't have bothered with it otherwise. Douglas Adams famously wrote 'The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy' "Trilogy...

I was hoping someone might have spotted the allusion in the title of last night's scribble: I deliberately didn't pose the the question directly, as it might have broken the superposition between statement and inquiry and led immediately to a stable state and the answer, or rather even the question itself. What is the strange loop that links Bach, a sofa in a state of infinitely variable fixity with a staircase, and early personal computers? Which piper played the tune that oversaw my three-day thesis-writing binge in 1978, via the medium of my old valve radio set? Where is the leopard indeed? And what do Nina & Frederik have to do with it? [clue: nothing immediately apparent, that's for sure]. I'd hazard that Q might have had some input, had Bond been involved, albeit at a rather macro level at the scale in question, but c[?] almost certainly would have a massive [inertial] impact here. Effecting a cause is always problematic in a space which doesn't yet exist ...

I've just been watching a YouTube - yes, I know - about getting about as close as is possible to bare-metal programming as it's possible to get without descending to the depths of what is now ancient history in computing terms: namely the early-mid 1970s. This example was essentially demonstrating that it is possible to produce "useful" programs without the presence of a high-level operating system and programming languages, at BIOS [basic input output system] level, using assembly language to address the hardware directly. Obviously the degree of sophistication at which you can work at this low level of abstraction is pretty primitive by even the standards of twenty or thirty years ago, but useful stuff can nevertheless be achieved, even if the example in question was a version of an 8-bit arcade game of the 1980s. Having had some personal experience of programming at such a low level myself [blog posts passim], back in 1979/80, a lot of what was demonstrated in thi...