River Crossing (and crossing and crossing and…)

Posted on by March 1, 2006
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One of the things I did in Prague – more info shortly, promise – was buy a really cheap copy of River Crossing (called 'Crocodile [something]' there).

And being the sort of person whose response to Sudoku was to write a program to solve the puzzles (starting with one that would do 16×16 ones as well as 9×9) I've written a program to find solutions to this too.

(Ok, one incentive was being a bit stuck on puzzle 38 of the 40 in the box. The solutions are included, but that feels like cheating in a way that writing the solving program doesn't.)

It works 🙂 but several things have surprised me… Continue reading →

You know, I don't have very high expectations of The Sun

Posted on by January 26, 2006
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But they've managed to sink to new depths. Today's front page:

A SECOND LIMP-DEM CONFESSES:

I'M GAY TOO

[..] In an exclusive admission to The Sun, he apologised for twice denying he is homosexual.

He told me at his Westminster office: “I am perfectly willing to say that I have had both homosexual and heterosexual relationships in the past. [..]

Another one bites the pillow: page 6 & 7

The Press Complaints Commission is here.

Legacies

Posted on by December 20, 2005
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I needed to write a quick program to extract some data from a binary file today, so I reached for Borland Pascal 7. The actual program took a couple of minutes to get right… most of it because of a 'feature': if you open a file in binary (as opposed to text) mode, you have to say how many bytes you will read at a time.

If you forget – as I do every so often – it defaults to… 128 bytes.

Why 128 bytes rather than one?

Because that was the size of a sector on the original 8" floppy disk, which had 77 tracks of 26 sectors back in the early 1970s. Early versions of CP/M could only read and write in 128 byte chunks, and Turbo Pascal was originally released for CP/M, so that was the sensible value for the default.

I've upgraded my beard comb

Posted on by December 14, 2005
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It used to be a 486 – the 33 MHz version I paid about £100 for in the late 80s, not long after Intel brought out the 486/50 and the price of the 486/33 dropped.

It was the first CPU in what was my main PC for some years in the 90s, and ended up being replaced by a 486 DX-2/66 and then the wonderful pin-compatible Cyrix Xc5x86/100.

Now it's a Pentium/133 from a PC found in the street with almost everything else ripped out. Even more gold pin goodness 🙂

Caveat emptor

Posted on by February 5, 2012
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One of the clients at work wants help updating his ads on various escort sites and he brings in a CD with three photos so he can upload them from here.

I look at them and… "Erm, they're not you. In fact, there are at least two different men in these, if not three. And I can tell they're scanned in from magazines."

Apparently this is Not Uncommon because if you want someone to take a photo of you, it's three days down the gym and a day starving so you appear to be in shape.

Much easier to scan in someone else…

This is why the magazines we work with most closely want you to turn up in person with your new photo so they can check (and that's why we have someone at one of their offices on deadline day, so we can say 'hello, heard about our services?')