Denny Henke is up at Manuel Morales' P&B (People and Blogs) series. I follow Denny's blog, beardystarstuff.net, but I confess, there must have been a change to his RSS feed, because I hadn't seen an update since September. So I hopped over to the actual page and clicked on the RSS button in Safari and got a new feed in NetNewsWire!

Anyway, I'm (mostly) caught up now! I should pay more attention to regular posters when they appear to go silent. Somewhat in my own defense, we had a busy September and October between closing on the place up north, moving stuff there and coming home to a couple of storm systems.

I'm blushing as I type this, because your genial host appears at the top of a list of current favorites. (Insert meme of Sally Field here. IYKYK).

Anyway, check out the post and if you don't follow Denny or Manuel, add them to your feed. Old-school blogging, the way it should be.

Now you damn kids get off my lawn!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:08 Friday, 25 October 2024

Archive.org is back up. Downloading old issues of Creative Computing.

Hope it stays up now. Why attack the Internet Archive?

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:04 Friday, 25 October 2024

Checked the Supervisor of Elections website and my vote has been counted. That's a relief.

Truly, it was a bucket-list item. I can die now, knowing I've given my country my last full measure of my franchise.

Maybe a little dramatic? Yeah, but not much.

Anyway, I guess I'm glad to see more serious discussion of Trump being a fascist. On one hand, it's kind of incomprehensible. But on the other hand, there has always been a strong authoritarian appetite among some Americans. I guess we get to find out how many.

I guess we get to find out if America is a fascist country.

I know where I stand.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:15 Friday, 25 October 2024

Florida has been a Republican monoculture for more than a generation. There's never any accountability at the polls, because Republicans rigged the state, and they'll just put up another corrupt rubber-stamp if an incumbent gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Anyway, here's a recent example.

Monocultures are more vulnerable to disease and parasites. Ideally, we should want diverse views in our legislatures. But not in Florida.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:43 Thursday, 24 October 2024

Mentioned Aaron Bean yesterday as one of the Florida representatives who votes against his constituents' interests, and who serves in a district hand-created for him by Governor Ron DeSantis to deny Black Floridians the opportunity to elect a representative of their choosing.

In Florida, politicians choose their voters.

Of course, if you're down with the whole Project 2025 thing, and are wealthy enough to afford insurance, then Florida might just be your paradise.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:41 Thursday, 24 October 2024

77% of Citizens Insurance claims for Debby denied.

Because Florida floods.

If you're thinking of moving to Florida, think again.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:39 Thursday, 24 October 2024

I'm still working on Sierpinski. Ahl never identified his variables, some of which are readily identified, others are more obscure. At any rate SP (an integer nevertheless converted into its floating point representation in Applesoft), is pretty clearly "stack pointer," which is the index value in array ST (stack, obviously).

What aren't clear are TP and PS, which are changed in the push and pop stack subroutines. When TP=0, we draw three segments, when TP=1, we draw one. When SP is 1, TP is 1; when SP is 2, TP is 0. These seem to determine which of the four 3-part segments we're drawing, right, up, left or down, or the single, 1-part, connecting segments. I'm making progress.

As regards the RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB AT 190 error, I think I should incorporate a POP statement in the pop subroutine when SP and TP are both equal to zero, which seems intended to indicate the curve is closed. That the curve of that particular order is complete. I've never used POP before, so that'll be educational.

But, I'm not exactly sure about that, because I don't have a clear understanding of the flow of control; and so more study is necessary.

But it is becoming less murky.

In other news. as part of my effort to stay away from the news, I haunt a number of forums. I seldom have anything of value to offer, so I mostly just lurk. Sometimes I learn something. Sometimes it can be as frustrating as watching the news. That happens most often a DP Review where some people are needlessly, or obliviously, harsh in criticizing someone's photos. Especially if the OP is extolling the virtues of some lens. There's always someone who has to display their superior knowledge and experience, and do so in a way that seems intended to belittle the OP.

I tend to visit DP Review far less often than in years past, but I'm kind of grasping about for distractions these days.

But I also visit the HP calculator forums, and can be harmlessly distracted for a while. But, it's like cameras used to be for me. I'd read about someone else's gear, and decide I had to have one for myself. Which probably accounts for the ridiculous number of cameras I own.

Anyway, some clever people have reverse engineered the little software cartridges for the TI-95 and TI-74 BASICalc. This was exciting news, as I have two of each. I'm a sucker for modern mods to retro gear. In the course of the thread, I learned that later models of the TI-74 were able to address up to 32K of external (cartridge) RAM. TI sold an 8K RAM cartridge with a (non-replaceable) coin cell inside that could be used as a kind of RAM disk, or to expand the available RAM to the cpu from 8K to 16K.

Those coin cells have long since gone dead, and it wasn't always clear to me whether they would work as volatile RAM with a dead battery. It didn't seem to matter, because even after haunting ebay for months, I'd never seen one come up for sale. Even the program ROM cartridges seemed to command rather absurdly high prices. (All of us old farts with too much money and time on our hands keep driving up the prices, I guess.)

Well, the prospect that there might be a new RAM expansion cartridge coming for the TI-74, that would be larger than the 8K original, prompted me to look and see what was on the market. Both of my TI-74s have relatively low serial numbers, and likely would not be able to see more than 8K of additional RAM.

Anyway, as these things go, or luck would have it, there was a TI-74 with an 8K RAM expansion cartridge for sale! It wasn't an auction, and there was a "make offer" button, so I made an offer. It was listed for $65, which was itself, in my experience, a great price. But together with an 8K RAM cartridge, I could easily see it going for twice that price, or more.

Sometimes, you get lucky. Like I did with the seller who sold me an Apple IIc external disk drive, with a free Apple IIc computer included! And a damn good price for the disk drive. Too bad they didn't pack it better. I'm still looking for a replacement space bar.

Anyway, I offered $59 for it and the offer was immediately accepted. It arrived this afternoon.

Cosmetically, it's in great condition. LCD screen isn't showing signs of degradation. Serial number is astronomical, 9-million something. But the date of manufacture is 7/87, which is only a year later than the 1986 year of manufacture of my other two. (One is 00847, the other is 10k-something. That one has a rotting LCD.)

Batteries were installed, but not leaking. Powered on fine. I have the manuals, so I had to look up how to check to see how much memory was available. It's a ROM routine you have to CALL to turn the cartridge into RAM available to the cpu. CALL ADDMEM, makes the RAM available and turns off the file storage function.

To see if it worked, I entered FRE(0), which reports the amount of RAM available. (FRE(1) would report the amount of RAM consumed by the program in memory.)

Well, success! FRE(0) reports 15902 bytes available. So it would appear that a dead battery doesn't preclude using the RAM for program memory. I'll have to fill a large array to verify it, but it seems reasonable to believe it'll work just fine.

Of course, what the hell need do I have for a nearly forty year old handheld BASIC computer with a single-line LCD display? None. Just something to play with, to pass the time. To recall what "the future" once looked like.

I have a printer for the TI-74, and it can power the computer while you're changing batteries. (I think. It's been a while since I've played with it.) So the idea would be to write a little menu-driven program with a number of little sub-programs to call from the menu. 16K is quite a bit of memory for a little computer. Really, its biggest limitation is the display, but it's intended to be portable.

And I just recalled that I bought a little arduino device someone made that's supposed to allow the 74 to interface with a cassette tape drive. I was planning on trying to use the recorder feature in my iPod.

And someone else on the HP forum is building new HP-IL interface boxes (PIL-boxes), and those are supposed to be available sometime soon. I have a couple of HP-75s and an HP-71b with the HP-IL interface, and the HP-IL video interface.

I don't know what my kids are going to do with all this crap when I die. I'm sure it'd be a pain in the ass to sell it, but they'd probably get a fair amount of money for their trouble. I'll be past worrying about it though.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 17:44 Wednesday, 23 October 2024

If you're getting a "sign in to prove you're not a bot," on these embedded YouTube videos, please let me know. There's no point in embedding them if you have to jump through hoops to watch them.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 12:26 Wednesday, 23 October 2024

When you have an individual disaster, your house catches fire, or a pipe ruptures, it's just you, your insurance company and the county.

When you have a major disaster declaration, and thousands of people are going to be needing federal dollars, in a situation that is simply asking for fraud, there are going to be a lot of rules and regulations to prevent fraud. And everything gets harder. Slower. More bureaucratic.

Ultimately, the assistance is there. You get some relief. But it's not going to be quick, or easy, and you're going to have to take your place in line.

Unless you're an entitled prick like this guy. And Florida is filled with entitled pricks.

If you're thinking of moving to Florida, change your mind.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 12:16 Wednesday, 23 October 2024

It's this kind of stuff that I shouldn't read, because I swear to God I'm going to have a fucking stroke!

When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”

I struggle with the idea that people were once loyal to Trump and supported him and now speak out against him. I mean, what the actual fuck? On one hand, I'm glad they're, I don't know, seeking redemption, or forgiveness, or the ability to sleep at night.

But on the other hand... What the actual fuck?

Why did you work for him to begin with? Are you blind? Stupid? Or just figured it'd work out for you somehow? Needed the paycheck?

I see that dipshit Michael Waltz, the congressman from the district just south of here on TV (via YouTube). He's a sell-out. He was among those brave souls who "stormed the SCIF," during the Trump impeachment investigation. He's a performative asshole. A moral coward. But he gets a lot of air time because is a Green Beret colonel in the reserves. He's a chump. A disgrace to the uniform. A "Florida man."

My own congressman, John Rutherford, is a liar and a moral coward, but he's been keeping a relatively low profile on Trump and hasn't been actively voting against the interests of his constituents. Lately, anyway. (Bearded Aaron Bean is also on that list. Freshman from the district north of Rutherford's. DeSantis drew a special district for him, eliminating a district drawn to allow Black Floridians a chance to elect a representative of their choice. This fucking state.)

I think of the faces of the voters I saw going into the library yesterday morning. They looked grim. I don't know why, but it didn't look good. I live in the highest median-income county in Florida. These were people with money. Education.

I'm convinced they're voting for Trump. They're just unhappy that they can't be openly proud of it.

I hope I'm wrong.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:28 Wednesday, 23 October 2024

If you look up "insanity" in the dictionary, there ought to be a picture of Florida.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:14 Wednesday, 23 October 2024

Better. Not "great," but good enough.

I get up in the morning and watch the monologues from Colbert and Seth Myers. I need a laugh first thing in the morning. I look a little bit at Apple News+, mostly I do the Quartiles game.

But I can't stand to look at election news. There was one good story about the Georgia state supreme court letting stand a lower court ruling that puts those new election rules on hold, at least through this cycle. That was one potential source of chaos. But the rest of the headlines were all about how "close" this election is. Then I just move on.

I don't know if it's me, or if the media is trying to drive clicks, but they seem more hysterical by the minute. What are we supposed to do with this information? Well, click on it, obviously. But I've already voted. I don't run Kamala's campaign. I can't do outreach to America's millions of young men who seem delusional.

What's the point?

I watch a lot of local Florida news in YouTube. Anecdotes (news stories) aren't "data," but it does feel as though a "get the hell out of Dodge" theme is beginning to emerge. It may be an illusion. People love Florida winters and no state income tax. This state won't be depopulating soon. But smart people will leave. I think I'm making progress with Mitzi.

Our situation is like the last 50 years of the climate crisis in a microcosm. There's the growing awareness that we might be vulnerable to something catastrophic, but the reluctance to do anything about it. It's a "low probability, high impact" risk. My assessment is that, while it may well be the case that our particular part of Florida won't see a hurricane with significant storm surge in our lifetime, if we do, I don't want to have to be trying to cope with the aftermath.

As I've told many of my friends, I don't want to be in my 70s, dragging all my shit to the curb and dealing with all the paperwork to try and "recover." If I'm lucky, I've got maybe 10 or 15 years of decent quality of life left. I don't want to spend two of them grappling with this bullshit.

There are folks in Tampa who just gutted their places to the studs and are putting them on the market, hoping institutional investors will buy them and rent them to folks who will eventually have to carry all their crap to the curb.

It's insanity.

Anyway, Mitzi's talking more about it, so I know it's in her mind. I don't push. I don't think I'll be out of here by next hurricane season, but maybe 2026. Hope so anyway. I'll be 70 in 2027.

I know New York isn't paradise. It'll be gray much of the year. But it's safer, at least in terms of large-scale catastrophes. We're always at risk of individual catastrophic events, no matter where you live. But it's unlikely we'll see an event where thousands of people around us are all competing for resources to recover, adding to the doubt and uncertainty and stress.

And I just don't like Florida anymore. I guess "hate" is too strong a word, but this is a cruel state. It does something to people. Something that isn't good.

And I just want to get out of here.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:42 Wednesday, 23 October 2024

We did poll greeting for early voting this morning. A lot of turnout, but since this is a very red county (almost 3 to 1), it was mostly Republicans. We were there from 0800 to 1030. There was a fairly good-sized line from about 1000. It seems Republicans have gotten over their distaste for early voting.

Didn't get as many dirty looks, and nobody gave us the finger, which was refreshing. If someone stopped by the Republican table and took a slate guide, I assumed they were Republicans. Some of them were energetic, enthusiastic, but most of them looked grim.

The Dem volunteer who set up our table said he was confident we were getting a lot of crossover votes. I'm not that confident at all. We'll know in a little more than two weeks after all the tallies have been analyzed.

The Dems who voted while we were there came by and thanked us for being there. More than one said, "You're braver than I am." There were no acts of voter intimidation that I observed.

Checked on my ballot this afternoon. Not reported received yet. Tomorrow I'll start to be concerned. Thursday, I'll be worried. But, plenty of time to take corrective action.

We watched Lee last night, a bio-pic about Lee Miller, former fashion model turned photographer, turned WWII war correspondent. Fascinating story. I'd only learned of her when I was doing so much reading about WW II the past couple of years; and that was mostly in the context of her iconic photo in Hitler's bathtub in his Munich apartment. Her story is remarkable, and she was a talented, complicated, damaged and powerful woman.

Kate Winslet was magnificent. Highly recommended.

We're off to Georgia on Thursday for a family wedding and other family business. Back here on Tuesday. Two family members are Trumpers, one with a frequent wish to engage in "debate." I will be biting my tongue.

Hoping I sleep tonight. I'd go to bed now, except I know I'd wake up around 0100 and who knows if I'd fall back to sleep.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 19:36 Tuesday, 22 October 2024

It must be something in the air. Just catching up with the blogs I follow and stumbled on this.

Mass deportations require "informants," people ratting out their neighbors.

Well, they were never really their neighbors, were they?

"They're eating the cats!"

Trump voters.

People like you and me.

Really?

A nation of cowboys.

A nation of Staszi.

Read the post.

Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:39 Tuesday, 22 October 2024

I forgot to mention "the enemy within."

"Round 'em up!"

Anyway.

Moon was directly overhead. Hardest elevation to shoot. Got two decent shots. Here's one.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:32 Tuesday, 22 October 2024

I've been awake since 01:49. Wake up to piss, go back to bed and lie awake wondering why people want to vote for Donald Trump.

I don't know that I've come to any stunning insight, but it seems to me that these people are among those, from any time in history, who want to "Round 'em up!"

Immigration seems like the biggest issue for the Republican Party. An easy "other" to demonize.

"Round 'em up!"

Expel them from the country.

Germany in 1933? The Jews.

"Round 'em up!"

Originally they supposedly just wanted to expel them from Germany, but we know how that worked out.

America in 1941? The Japanese.

"Round 'em up!"

America in 1830? The Five Civilized Tribes.

"Round 'em up!"

America in the '50s? The communists.

"Round 'em up!"

(Probably couldn't "expel" them from the country so soon after WW II, but they did expel them from economic and cultural life.)

Fugitive slaves?

"Round 'em up!"

I definitely think this is, either consciously or unconsciously, the thing that most appeals to Trump voters. There are people who feel as though there are always some "others" who are getting something they don't deserve and the expense of the "good people." People who feel as though they might be better off if those "others" weren't "scamming the system."

This idea of "rough men," with guns and wearing uniforms "rounding 'em up," appeals to them. Excites them. Because it is "action," taken for them. "Protecting" them. Their "way of life."

Their pets.

I think they know this at some level. I think they're not proud of it. That's why the enthusiasm level is down. They're still going to vote for him, but they're not proud of it.

They want those "others" rounded up. Locked up. Roughed up.

Kicked out. To the curb.

To, "Make America Great Again."

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 04:53 Tuesday, 22 October 2024

I decided I'm not going to eat breakfast ("The most important meal of the day.") before this appointment. There's no blood work that I know of, but whatever. I'd rather do this than cook and clean up.

I struggle with my anxiety about this election. I ask myself how my life will be different if Trump is (re)elected? Short of starting a thermonuclear exchange with China or Russia, it probably won't be. My problems will largely remain the same. So why should I be "freaking out?"

I guess I just don't like what it means. That there are enough people in this country that think a guy like Trump is acceptable as a leader. I mentioned that we don't have our street festooned with American flags this time, unlike in 2020. And the guy who had a Trump/Pence bumper sticker on his CRV for two years after Biden was elected, hasn't replaced it with a Trump/Vance one.

But that doesn't mean these folks aren't going to vote for him anyway. They may just not be proud of it this time. But they do like the cruelty. They like someone beating up on an "other." And they do think they'll do better economically, even though I think they're just fooling themselves. But it's the former point that troubles me the most.

They want a "strong man" leader. They figure if Trump loses his mind, they've got Vance, every bit as cruel as Trump.

I don't know what's going to happen, but if Trump wins again, it says so many things about America that I'd be ashamed of.

"Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:23 Monday, 21 October 2024

I've been enjoying trying to understand this Sierpinski curve program. It's led to a number of interesting diversions. My efforts have been set back somewhat by the fact that the Internet Archive is still offline. I have a large number of computer magazines from the 70s and 80s already downloaded locally, but not that July 84 issue of Creative Computing. When my iMac started showing signs of instability (Finder wouldn't run, "relaunch" even.), I had to reboot to get everything back in order and those tabs with three issues of Creative Computing opened at archive.org became inert.

Anyway, I do have Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which was the original source of the algorithm that became the BASIC program that Ahl was converting. If you have the book, the discussion begins on page 134. I can't say I truly understand Wirth's Pascal implementation, at least not by inspection, but it's less opaque than the BASIC version.

So I've been adding PRINT statements to various subroutines, chiefly those controlling the stack. This has the effect of breaking up the TRACE output into digestible chunks, which are far more illuminating than anything else I've tried so far. The program draws one segment, then three segments, then one segment, and so on. Which subroutine is called depends on which way that portion of the curve has to go, right, left, up or down (whether you're adding or subtracting values to the preceding coordinate).

To be clear, the program works insofar as it draws the Sierpinski curve for orders 1 through 5 (the limit of the Apple II's hi-res screen). But the first order curve is drawn twice, for reasons I don't understand, and the program always ends with a RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR AT 190. And it hasn't, until yesterday, been clear to me exactly what was going on in terms of the flow. It's basically (Hah.) a list of subroutines that call each other recursively.

One brief diversion was to try and answer definitively whether Applesoft could do recursion. The answer is yes, it can. But I was put off briefly by Lon Poole's assertion on page 136 of the second edition of his Apple II User's Guide,

While it is perfectly acceptable and even desirable for one subroutine to call another, a subroutine cannot call itself. Neither can a subroutine call another subroutine that in turn calls the first subroutine. This is called recursion and is not allowed in BASIC on the Apple II.

To be fair to Poole, I suspect that this was text that was left over from the first edition, which may have only covered Woz's Integer BASIC, which may not have allowed recursion. Applesoft does.

The test that kind of satisfied my uncertainty was in a cool little book, Illustrating BASIC (A Simple Programming Language) by David Alcock. He writes about BASIC in general and some versions don't permit recursion. To find out if one does, on page 55 he offers a little routine to find the highest common factor of two numbers, which calls itself. I entered it, and played around with it for a while, entering successively higher numbers. I didn't get to a point where it error'ed out, but I believe the stack depth for GOSUB is 25 in Applesoft and I probably didn't enter a large enough second number to exceed that limit before I was satisfied Applesoft does indeed allow recursion.

Of course, the fact that the Sierpinski curve program worked should have resolved that question from the beginning, but I had a little nagging doubt (plus all these books on my shelf). Interestingly, the Applesoft BASIC Programmer's Reference Manual, volume 1 (for //e only), doesn't mention recursion at all, nor does it explicitly address a subroutine calling itself. It does mention that you can nest GOSUB calls up to 25 levels deep, as mentioned above. Exceeding that results in an OUT OF MEMORY error, which really means "out of stack space."

I think I need a POP statement when the last curve is completed to get rid of that final RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB AT 190 error.

Anyway, I've got a doctor's appointment this morning, so further investigation will have to wait. It's more like a "wellness check" than a physical or anything. I never look forward to these things.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:25 Monday, 21 October 2024

Rode to Publix this morning to pick up a few things. Didn't record the ride as a "workout," so I don't have a lot of specific data; but the watch records the activity anyway, including my heart rate. It's a windy day today, enough so that I wouldn't have ordinarily taken the bike. But the motor essentially negates the wind as a factor. (One minor exception, riding into the wind creates enough breeze that if my mouth is open, because I'm grinning like a fool, my tooth hurts.)

On the way there, I stayed in level 2 assist. When I went out biking with Mitzi last weekend, I stayed in level 1 and it was comfortable in 3rd gear without overtaking Mitzi or leaving her behind. With the wind today, I needed level 2 to keep up a decent speed. And by "decent" I mean 15mph, which is 25% faster than I could ride without the motor!

So the ride to the store was basically effortless.

Riding home, with the groceries on the front rack, I bumped up the assist level to 3 to quickly get up speed. I probably could have just started out in first gear and accomplished much the same thing. In a lower gear, the pedal would have been turning faster and the assist would have kicked in sooner. It's just that transition from standing at a light to rolling with a large load on the front tire that gets kind of wobbly. Without the motor, I'd always be in 1st gear starting out.

Along the way, I noticed a rider across the street from me, apparently also on an ebike, because I wasn't really gaining on them. So I felt a little competitive and bumped the assist level up to 4 (out of 5). On the way home, the wind was at my back, so I quickly got up to 19mph where the motor essentially cuts out. I did overtake my unwitting competitor, who seemed to take notice and accelerated, closing the distance between us. But I was at my turn for home, so the "race" was effectively over.

I stayed in level 4 and pedaled hard. I was riding in the road on the bike path and the faster you go, the less the relative speed between you and the jerks in cars who won't move over at all. ("People are great. Drivers are assholes.") In this instance, it was a guy in a super-duty truck with a diesel and some kind of resonator exhaust, pulling a Bobcat front-loader on a trailer, who seemed to feel as though he had to make some sort of statement by passing me as near to my lane as he could, while accelerating as hard (and as loud) as he could.

That's probably where my heart rate reached 164, according to my watch. Definitely got a workout.

I hate Florida.

But I love my bike.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 12:38 Friday, 18 October 2024

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2024/Images/PA170023.JPG" alt=“Telephoto closeup of the full moon, technically a couple of hours from being officially “super”">

Technically, it's a couple of hours from being officially "super," but close enough.

Photographically, the full moon (100% illuminated) is less interesting. No shadows to generate relief. This is contrast enhanced, but little detail.

Sure was bright up there though.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:40 Thursday, 17 October 2024

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a "coder." I stumble through this stuff as best I can. Sometimes I can grasp it clearly, other times it's utterly opaque. But, I'm retired and what I lack in keen analytical insight I make up in an abundance of free time.

I'm trying to understand Sierpinski and the "RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR IN 190" thing.

I did something Ahl did in the article, and modified the program so it only drew the first order of the curve, and I did it with the TRACE command enabled, outputting it to the virtual printer. This records each line number as it's executed until the program halts. Because you can have multiple commands within a line number (separated by a colon), it'll repeat each line number for every command it contains.

Well, I got a lot of commands for just one curve, so I counted the number of times the plotting subroutine was called. There are 16 segments in the first order curve, but the plotting routine was called 32 times. It was doing it twice.

That seemed like a clue.

Because I modified the program to only draw the first order curve (DI=0), I didn't need the FOR...NEXT loop, so I just deleted the NEXT line, which also meant I didn't need the GOSUB 100 that was nested in that loop. Removing all that, it runs once and halts with the usual RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR.

What this suggests to me, kind of apart from the GOSUB and RETURN stuff, is that this "stack" construct is double counting somehow.

That's the next thing to investigate, how often the "PUSH" and "POP" routines are called and where.

While I do have an abundance of spare time, my interest and enthusiasm flags a bit, so I'm putting it aside for now.

But the beat goes on...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 15:18 Wednesday, 16 October 2024

I received the 65c02 and ROMXe yesterday, so this morning I installed them.

I started out replacing the cpu. I removed the SpeedDemon, but left the Disk II controller in Slot 7. The Yellowstone card was already out of the computer. Didn't have too much trouble removing the cpu. There were some troubling sounds as 40 years worth of stiction was overcome, but it came out nicely with no bent pins. Socket looked clean, so I didn't do any Deoxit or anything.

Booted the machine to make sure the cpu worked before I did anything with the ROMs. Came up normally, so I went ahead with replacing the ROMs.

Similarly, the two 8K ROM chips came out without any trouble. The video ROM was harder because it's near the keyboard and I hadn't removed the case, so there was no place to really get much leverage with the front part of the chip. Bent a couple of pins getting it out, but they didn't break and straightened out easily.

I have two USB-powered LED desk lamps on the work bench, so I had good light as I aligned the pins with the sockets. The ROMxe is a circuit board, so it obscures much of the socket as you're getting it aligned. Patience and a good "feel" are helpful, and everything went in with no difficulty.

Next step was to boot the machine and see if it worked. Booted right into the configuration screen for the ROMx. The manual calls for launching Choplifter as a verification test. Launched fine and I had a joystick connected. Hard to play on a monochrome screen though. Saved a couple of hostages and powered down to install the SpeedDemon to see if that was compatible.

I was worried because both the ROMXe and the SpeedDemon kind of take control at boot-up to give you an opportunity to either disable the accelerator, or choose a different ROM image. I didn't know if there'd be some kind of contention conflict.

Worked just fine. The SpeedDemon grabbed control first, then the ROMXe. There's a countdown timer for the ROMXe configuration menu, which you can stop by pressing Escape; if you don't it goes through a normal boot sequence. But since the accelerator was active, the countdown timer went by in a flash. Then the computer booted normally from a floppy.

I removed the SpeedDemon and installed the Yellowstone card with the Floppy Emu attached to verify it worked with the new cpu and ROMs (didn't anticipate any problems, but best to check). Worked fine. I didn't put the Yellowstone in a higher numbered slot to see if it would automatically boot, but I'm confident that it would now with the enhanced ROMs on the motherboard.

Now was the moment of truth. Would having essentially an "enhanced" //e, albeit in a Rev A motherboard, allow the Yellowstone card to get along with the SpeedDemon?

Nope.

Same effect. Computer tries to boot from Slot 7, as intended, ProDOS splash screen appears and then we crash into the monitor.

At some other time, I'll use the monitor to examine where in memory the crash occurs and see if that offers any clues. For now, I've removed the Yellowstone card from the IIe. For the kind of recreational "programming" I'm doing, it's more fun to watch programs run fast. And since I do most of that programming sitting in the recliner on the IIc, I can just save it to floppy and take it into the garage to see how it performs at 3x speed. It's more important to have that 32MB HD capacity there, where I can swap around tools quickly, switching quickly from Program Writer to Beagle Compiler and back.

Cloudy and breezy this morning. Time to go take a walk.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:54 Wednesday, 16 October 2024

I guess these are going behind a paywall soon. No great loss, this is only the second one I've ever listened to and I've written off the NY Times as a legitimate source of news and information that serves the public interest. It's just a media outlet that serves its own interests.

Anyway, here's a brief podcast, about six minutes, from Florida resident and novelist Jeff VanderMeer, briefly recapping how we got here, and why he thinks "Florida is worth saving."

Florida is the third most populous state in the union. It's going to take a long time to depopulate it. So, whether it's "worth" saving or not, it's going to need a lot of federal help in the decades to come.

Florida is a slowly unfolding catastrophe, and I don't think the country has the resources to do anything other than "manage" it. It's never going to be a paradise. Parts of it will fare better than others, chiefly those with wealth.

It's already two states, one inhabited by the privileged and served by its permanently entrenched Republican government; and the other is inhabited by the ignored, the marginalized, disenfranchised and deliberately "othered."

It didn't have to be this way, but greed made it so.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:55 Wednesday, 16 October 2024

I'm not going to suggest that sea level rise is the proximate cause of this particular flooding, but sea level rise is a game of inches. When there is no place for the water to go, it just sits around. Watch as the county engineer issues a statement that there is no place to pump the water to. It's pretty telling.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:37 Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Progressive reporting preliminary figures exceeding $1B for losses in Florida due to Helene and Milton.

The $200 million estimate includes what are known as “allocated loss adjustment expenses,” which can include such things as adjuster costs and legal fees.

Yeah, the part where they invoke the "heads I win, tails you lose" rule.

Anyway, I'm no actuary or insurance expert, but that sounds like a lot to me. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's couch change to Progressive.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:59 Tuesday, 15 October 2024