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Well, I’ve gotten her to post but she won’t boot. The boot disks were new old stock, MS DOS 4.01. So old enough that the disks might have failed even sitting in the shrinkwrapped package. But it could be other things. The odd part is it would POST one out of maybe 3 attempts, then…
I’ve wired an appropriate size DIN connector to an ATX motherboard power extender, and soldered the PSON line on the extender to a ground wire so that it will run. Plug it in, and my Compact XT does power on. I don’t get any video display. I’m unsure if my modern(ish) TV is incompatible with…
So I have a new computer. A Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. So not new, but new to me. What is it? It’s a laptop computer from 1983, one of the first widely successful models. It’s got a 240×64 resolution display, 40×8 in text mode. Very limited, but also quite useable. Other portables that approached or…
So every once in a while I play around with the Ackermann Function. It is a brutally recursive algorithm that grows very, very fast. Ackermann(3,3) is trivial even on old hardware. Ackermann(4,3) in its straightforward form can take longer than the lifespan of the universe on typical hardware, and will likely outlast the best hardware.…
So, when I was in middle school/high school, my parents bought me my own PC. It was a Laser Compact XT. 8088@8mhz, 512k ram, 1x 360k floppy. I eventually got a second floppy for it. Having watched an 8 Bit Guy video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa0B0hiVqxA) detailing his efforts to restore a one of these machines, I was eventually…
Trying to figure out some multiprocessing code from last night. As one would expect, the single thread code maxes out a single core and the other three(it’s a dual core HT chip) are very lightly loaded with random background crap. For multiprocessing, the average load per core is in between the peak vs…
I have the lottery project for programming practice, but that would require much more statistics knowledge than I have to come up with the algorithm and to interpret the results. Another I have might not require as much stats knowledge. Possibly some, because it’s looking for correlations, but not nearly as heavy on the numerical…
So, the latest Daily Programmer project I’m working on(I’ll get to finishing the last one, eventually) is this weeks Easy level project, Game of Threes. This one wasn’t complicated, here’s the code. [code language=”python”] def get_diff_from_multiple(n): """ Returns -1, 0, or 1, whichever will add to n to make the sum divisible by 3 """…
One of my current projects is the Daily Programmer challenge here. It’s a project to write a program to play a version of a hacking minigame from the Fallout series. Here, I’ll work through my design process for a Python 3.4 implementation. I started by just throwing out a little bit of code. I didn’t expect…
NSA dreams of smartphones with “split” crypto keys protecting user data | Ars Technica. Ideally, the legal and technical difficulties involved in getting past someones encryption, and getting past the lock on their safe, should be the same. After all, these two things do essentially the same job. Some details of various laws and regulations…