Comments, comments, everywhere, but are they making your code clearer or just distracting you? Comments are meant to be there to explain code and help you to understand it. However, they are often out of step and therefore can confuse. Think seriously before adding comments; it is often better to...   Read More

I have often noticed programmers getting worked up about the legacy code they are maintaining. I know it is annoying having to wade through poor code, or worrying about making changes for fear of unexpected side-effects. However, it is important to see the code for what it is and in the context o...   Read More

This is the second in a series of articles looking into whether when you were born affects your future. In the previous article I looked at Nobel laureates, which are, of course, from a range of fields. Now it is time to focus on just one discipline with poets. I have again used ScraperWiki to sc...   Read More

There has been a lot of talk in the UK recently about whether when you were born affects your schooling. Lots of teachers have noticed how pupils born at the end of the Summer often struggle compared with those born in the Autumn, which makes sense because the latter group are almost a year older...   Read More

Now that I have converted TechTinkering over to Jekyll, I have come up against a bit of a problem with site.related_posts: The results are always just the latest posts, and are not filtered or ordered for relevance. I see that lots of people are struggling with a similar problem and have therefor...   Read More

I have recently released Mida as a Gem for parsing/extracting Microdata from web pages. Not many sites at the moment are using Microdata, in fact, apart from this site, I only know of one other: Trust a Friend, which is another site that I work on. However, as HTML5 is more widely adopted I am su...   Read More

I have been using Jekyll a lot recently on the Trust a Friend website and found the need to display a rating as a series of stars. Initially I implemented this in JavaScript, which worked fine, but I like to limit the amount of JavaScript on my sites. I could have done this with some straight Liq...   Read More

The National Museum of Computing is the UK’s largest museum dedicated to computing. It is located on the Bletchley Park estate just south of Milton Keynes and is easy to get to by car, bus or train. Tickets are £10 for an Adult, with a discount for booking on-line. They allow you access to ...   Read More

xAce is a great Jupiter Ace emulator and is in fact the one that I use the most, however it hasn’t been actively developed since 1997 and therefore has some shortcomings. I am keen to improve the emulator and have quite a few plans for it. I have been in touch with Edward Patel, the origina...   Read More

I have today released TextPix v0.1 This is a program to take an image and convert it into a redefined character set and the associated text mode screen data referencing that character set. The program came about because I wanted to be able to load images on the Jupiter Ace, but the Ace has no wa...   Read More

I have noticed that the number of people interested in using telnet to access BBSs seems to be growing, which I’m really pleased to see. However lots of people seem to be having trouble getting colour ANSI emulation working properly with telnet under Linux. I have therefore put this tutoria...   Read More

I have been doing a lot of work recently on Linear Genetic Programming. This requires a great deal of processing power and to meet this I have been using Open MPI to create a Linux cluster. What follows is a quick guide to getting a cluster running. The basics really are very simple and, dependin...   Read More

Recently, I have been playing a collection of text mode games that were commonly found on Unix Systems during the 70s and 80s. These games are surprisingly playable and, for me, they really show that there is more to gaming than flashy graphics. As with any top 10 list, everyone will have their o...   Read More

4K FORTRAN was a subset of FORTRAN II and was the first high-level language available for the DEC PDP-8. It consisted of two parts: the 4K FORTRAN Compiler (nicknamed “Fivetran”) and the 4K FORTRAN Operating System. The compiler was written by Larry Portner and the operating system wa...   Read More

Before re-writable storage devices, such as tape drives, become popular for the DEC PDP-8, owners had to rely on paper tape. This was fine for loading programs on pre-punched tape, but left the problem of how to put new data onto punched tape and how to edit existing data. This could be done off-...   Read More

This is an interesting history of computer development around the world during the 1940s and 50s.  The book grew out of a radio series on BBS Radio 4 and contains lots of original material gained from interviews in 2001 and 2004.  It is very accessible as it focuses slightly more on the...   Read More

The DEC PDP-8 mini-computer was launched on 22 March 1965 and was a great success. It was fairly cheap for the day and could easily be expanded. What attracts me most to the PDP-8 is its simple design. I therefore decided to experiment with the SimH emulation of this machine, but found that the d...   Read More

When I first came across The SUBLEQ URISC (Ultimate RISC) / OISC (One Instruction Set Computer) Architecture, I really liked the beauty and simplicity of the design. However, I have now been experimenting with it for quite a while and have noticed one aspect of the standard implementation that I ...   Read More

I have a number of older printers that I would like to connect to my modern machine, but have been unable to do so because my computer doesn’t have a parallel interface. After searching the internet for a review of a usb to parallel cable that works reliably with Linux, I pretty much drew a...   Read More

I remember reading about Corewar roughly 20 years ago and thinking that I will have to have a go at that when I get the time. As often happens in life, things got in the way and I only recently managed to give it a go. I love the challenge of programming and the competitive aspect of this program...   Read More

I was going through a backup of my dos machine, taken in 1998, and came across some source code which I haven’t seen for a long time. It was great to see that old code, and I must set-up a machine so that I can run some of it again. In particular I came across an attempt at writing the worl...   Read More

After writing a previous article: The SUBLEQ URISC (Ultimate RISC) / OISC (One Instruction Set Computer) Architecture. I was left thinking that I should really have given at least a “hello, world” program as a demonstration. I was then inspired after seeing John Metcalf’s post: ...   Read More

For the past 6 months I have been using Test-Driven Development (TDD) on a new project. It has made such a difference to the quality of my code, that I feel I just have to share it’s benefits with those who may not have heard of it. TDD reverses the normal order of testing as it requires de...   Read More

I have been interested in the limits of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture for a while and recently came across OISC (One Instruction Set Computer) \ URISC (Ultimate RISC) architecture when looking for a simple way to implement a Virtual Machine for an A.I. project I was working...   Read More

The only Jupiter Ace emulator that I found, which would work under Linux, was written by Edward Patel and is called xace. There is also a Windows version available, but I don’t know anything more about that. The following instructions, taken partially from the site’s help instructions...   Read More

This book, written in 1975, offers a fascinating insight into the software engineering process used at that time. The author draws from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 and OS/360, and in doing so also sheds light on how they were put together. The 1995 edition, reviewed h...   Read More

Bouncing Babies is one of the first games I remember playing on an IBM PC Compatible. I recall looking at this funny game and thinking that it really was a strange concept. It was released as Shareware by Dave Baskin, but I believe that it is now Freeware. Here you can see the CGA graphics as th...   Read More

It really is funny the things that we spot sometimes. Most of us must have looked up at the clouds and spotted animals, houses and other imagined objects. We are also used to the occasional news report of people finding images they recognise in the strangest of places, such as the girls who found...   Read More

There are so many great demos for the Commodore 64 and the demo scene is still thriving. Surprisingly there are even new effects being created for this machine. I have spent many hours going through a huge amount of demos to compile this list and I know that some of the entries are controversial,...   Read More

Beneath a Steel Sky was released for the PC in 1994 by Revolution Software. It was received well and has gone on to be considered a cult classic. It uses the Virtual Theatre engine which was first used in Lure of the Temptress and among other things allows the non-player characters to have a basi...   Read More

The real advantage of Open Source software is that many people from all around the globe can work to make it better. This means that bugs can be detected and often fixed much more quickly than with closed source software. The software does tend to be run on lots of platforms however, so there is ...   Read More

ScummVM is Virtual Machine, that allows you to run adventure games created for a number of game creation engines. This is a great way of playing those classic adventure games that you loved so much, or never got a chance to play at the time. Some of them such as Beneath a Steel Sky have rarely be...   Read More

I have long been fascinated with entering programs into computers by methods not involving a standard keyboard and monitor. This interest was peeked by my last article: Using the latest z80pack, version 1.17, to emulate an Altair 8800 or IMSAI 8080 using the new graphical FrontPanel. I have there...   Read More

Udo Munk has just released the latest version of his z80pack emulator, version 1.17, which now includes John Kichury’s FrontPanel library. As well as being a superb emulator to run CP/M on, it now gives you a great graphical representation of the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 with fully functi...   Read More

I was preparing the walls of our nursery on the weekend, ready for the arrival of our first child in December. I was about to start steaming off the border and thought I’d better look at the instructions on the steamer. The only writing on the steamer is the label pictured below and I could...   Read More

There were some brilliant games and applications released for DOS, and some of the games such as Command and Conquer are still very playable. There are a number of options to play these games today, from using a Virtual Machine such as QEMU, to DOSBox which is a dedicated DOS emulator. Both of th...   Read More

My language of choice is C and I am currently getting more involved with the CP/M operating system. I have therefore decided that it would be nice to have a C compiler working under CP/M. There are a number of options available in the archives, but I have found that HI-TECH are allowing their CP/...   Read More

To do any serious programming under CP/M, the first thing you need is a good programmers editor. There aren’t many in the archives, but I have tried most of them and found ZDE to be the best. It is small, has lots of features, and uses Wordstar commands which are familiar to me and easy to ...   Read More

I have decided to try out some old CP/M software, but need something to run it on.  I could either do this on my Commodore 128 or through emulation.  Unfortunately the 1571 disk drive for my Commodore is currently out of action, so that leaves me with emulation.  I was going to use...   Read More

I watched ‘Three Days of the Condor’ the other night and loved seeing what I believe is a Dec PDP 8/E being used. Also featured in connection with this machine was a DecWriter, paper tape reader and possibly a VT-52 video terminal. The film revolves around a CIA researcher, Robert Re...   Read More

It was fascinating to read this book from 1979 and see how operating system design was viewed then, compared to now. The biggest change being the shift in importance from batch processing to the interactive use of computers. Despite the advances since this book was written, it is surprising how m...   Read More

Website hosting companies often provide a shared SSL certificate, but this presents the web designer with the problem of how to use it for a site that uses cookies. I have read many people say that this can’t be done. However, this article will show a simple way of using a shared SSL certif...   Read More

COBOL has been in the news quite a lot recently and I have been reading that there are still huge amounts of COBOL code running and being written. This led me to wonder why this language was still being used. I therefore decided to look at a few sites about COBOL and see what they said was good a...   Read More