Wedge

Hmm, I thought this was fixed? It's worked for me though I haven't tested it recently.See, I didn't realise it wasn't supposed to be in there, knowing that the selectbox was coming up...

...weird. Compression is a harsh mistress.

Interestingly but not really that surprising.

Let me explain the reason why it works. The Deflate algorithm doesn't work on single characters but repeating character strings; I'd imagine for example that 'if (' is one such string it notes and inserts a reference for. By putting in extra { and }, you elevate them from single characters that typically don't make much in the way of repeating patterns at the byte level, into something that *explicitly will* be a repeating pattern.

I'm not sufficiently au fait with the LZ77 and LZ78 algorithms and Huffman encoding that underpin Deflate but there's the base cause, that you're giving it a pattern to match rather than individual characters that will be largely just added verbatim in the stream.

In other news, I felt a pang of nostalgia this evening so I fired up a Spectrum emulator and typed in a listing from a book written before I was born.

And you know what? I discovered two things.

Firstly, the Spectrum is awesome. If you never came across its keyboard, you will either love or hate it. It's a 40 key device, where each key had anything up to 7 different uses, depending on which key it was and what the circumstances are. There is something quite invigorating about using an editor that forcibly checks your syntax as you enter a line, and an editor that essentially wires *every* language construct to a keyboard macro. I do mean that literally. You want a common keyword? In keyword mode it's a single keypress. Want a more complex function, it's probably a symbol-shift + keypress away, or maybe extended mode (caps shift + symbol shift, puts you in extended mode)

I find that sort of imagination and ingenuity quite intriguing, because there's nothing like it today. I'll attach a screenshot of the result of what I typed in with a screenshot of the virtual keyboard in a minute. (Yes, the *real* thing had that printed on the metal faceplate around the rubber keys)

Secondly, there is actually something really rather nice about typing a listing in from a book. I don't know why there is, but in the course of ~80 lines of code maybe, I was able to play a working if simple game with graphics and sound, and see it be constructed as I went. I think we've lost that today, even with all the code samples out there, where you can copy/paste in a jiffy.

(By the way, the game's called Nightfall, the plot is that you're an aircraft flying along and you'll crash into the buildings unless you can bomb them all out the way. Interestingly, there is no 'win' condition written into the game, because such a thing is actually impossible in the game's design. Never mind.)

Also interestingly, the book this listing came out of, was the one that I learned to program from, years and years ago. The 20+ years I have since have taught me how many problems there are with the program structurally but the language doesn't allow for anything nicer. (No multi-line if statements. No separate functions, everything's with global variables etc. Heck, there's even DATA statements.)

But it reminds me of a simpler time, and I think we've kind of lost that a bit lately, you know?

Also: posted on Facebook. I may actually have to start re-entering other stuff and posting it there too. I feel really nostalgic at the moment, and have done so for a little while.

Yes, but if the parser can safely avoid accounting for those things, it can be made faster...

Shame, because the Christmas Invasion is actually very good considering how much time Tennant spends in bed in it. Though it has one of RTD's worst deus ex machinas, and quite a few of Ten's best lines, IMO. Certainly his most quotable episode.


You're not missing so much with the first episode of series 2 (New Earth) though. It's cute, mostly as a reminder of series 1's opener, and is lightly plot related as far as certain arcs are concerned (it comes up again in Gridlock when Ten meets the Face of Boe again) but other than that... it's not that awesome.

WebGL isn't really OGL but iOS uses OGL pretty natively.

That's kind of ironic, and sad in a way, that you don't play Mahjongg any more after the amount of time spent on KMJ :(