Can you imagine staying inside a sealed building for two years without physical contact with the outside world? That’s what happened at Biosphere 2 in 1991. It makes an interesting story and the Wikipedia page has a lot more on that mission and a second one that followed.
We visited there today, here are a few photos!
Most of the Automattic team are in the wilds of Arizona this week. Looking out the window I see an environment as alien to the green Irish landscape I’m familiar with as I’ll probably ever see. Cactus grows everywhere, dark green bushes cover the hills and the dirt on the ground is bone dry. The sun beats down out of a clear blue sky. It’s warm outside, but so cold in the shade. It’s still winter after all, even if it doesn’t feel like it to me.
It’s WordPress this, WordPress that. Despite the broadband going down yesterday there’s plenty going on here. Stay tuned for new developments!
PS. Act Two, Automattic Fundraising. Great news for Automattic and WordPress!
Creme Eggs go on sale earlier and earlier every year. It’s like Christmas all over again. Maybe we’ll see special “Christmas Creme Eggs” later in the year?
They’re still yum though!
One of my external drives failed yesterday and for an hour I thought I had lost a lot of family videos and other stuff. My photos are backed up on to another drive with backuppc, but there simply isn’t room to backup everything there. Luckily the drive came back after I unplugged it and let it cool down but I don’t trust it now. I think I need a RAID server with at least 1TB of space to be future proof for the next 2 or 3 years.
I would love an application that you could point at a directory or a list of files and directories and it would burn them onto multiple DVDs, filling each disk to it’s maximum. Backing up my photo archive has always been a bit painful, trying to find and remember which directories I had just burned, comparing file listings, etc.
Tar doesn’t cut it however. I want to be able to restore a single file or directory by looking at the DVD contents in a file manager.
I used to have a DOS app that did this. I can’t remember what it was called, but point it at a directory of stuff and it would prompt for a floppy disk, write to it, prompt again, write, and so on until finished. Simple.
Is there a Linux or Mac app that will do that? I think I’ll write a shell script to do it if nobody else knows of an alternative.
Some guy called John Waters says bloggers are stupid and can’t string two words together. Now, we all know that’s a bare faced lie, but maybe he had been trawling Bebo when he came up with that freakish idea?
I missed the radio interview where he said that and frankly I couldn’t care less. I only picked up on it when Irish bloggers went gaga over it. I did get a kick out of John’s new blog though. That’s funny. Thanks Niall.
We had lunch in the Long Valley Bar a few days ago. This is an old pub on Winthrop Street in the heart of Cork City. It’s a great place to go drinking at night, it’s full of atmosphere and lovely old decor. Unfortunately for lunch it’s only ok. Not that I can judge properly, all we ordered were toasted sandwiches but they weren’t great, and the staff member my wife dealt with was quite grumpy. Are we expecting too much of bar staff these days perhaps?
Anyway, great pub to drink in, but don’t go for the toasted sandwiches! 🙂
Here’s a more positive review of the pub, just in case someone tries to lynch me for daring to say a bad word about the dear old Long Valley Bar!
Irish Credit Unions recently announced that they would be rolling out an ATM system around the country. So far I’ve only seen one ATM. This one is in the Savoy in Cork and it looks like Credit Union members still haven’t got the hang of these pesky ATMs. It swallowed someone’s ATM card! Not a very successful start, eh?
Last week I bought a new Macbook battery from the Apple Store to replace the slightly aged one that came with the machine. I’m travelling shortly and I need enough juice to play MAME and Doom do some work while I sit in airports waiting for connecting flights.
Late last week a parcel came for me, my new battery! Here’s how I replaced the old battery and calibrated the new one, with nice pictures.
Continue reading “How to replace and calibrate your new Macbook battery”
If you’re wondering why trackbacks and pings aren’t working on your blog then you might want to do what I did earlier today: allow your blog to talk to other servers.
WordPress needs either allow_url_fopen to be set On or to have the Curl extension loaded. If you’re having problems receiving pings from other blogs then both of these are probably turned off or missing. Wouldn’t it be nice if Options->Discussion warned that pings wouldn’t work?
Look in your php.ini, or the output of phpinfo() to check for both. If you want to enable fopen, then the entry in php.ini should look like this:
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Fopen wrappers ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Whether to allow the treatment of URLs (like http:// or ftp://) as files.
allow_url_fopen = On
I switched to Litespeed web server a while back and by default allow_url_fopen is set to Off and the curl library isn’t included. Check /opt/lsws/php/php.ini and make sure remote fopens are allowed!
Thanks Barry for helping me fix that.
PS. if you linked to this blog recently, feel free to save your post again. WordPress will ping my site again and this time the ping will get through.
.C:2101 A9 3A LDA #$3A .C:2103 CD 12 D0 CMP $D012 .C:2106 D0 FB BNE $2103 .C:2108 A2 09 LDX #$09 .C:210a CA DEX .C:210b D0 FD BNE $210A .C:210d A2 00 LDX #$00 .C:210f BD 00 09 LDA $0900,X .C:2112 8D 21 D0 STA $D021 .C:2115 8D 20 D0 STA $D020 .C:2118 BC 00 0A LDY $0A00,X .C:211b 88 DEY .C:211c 10 FD BPL $211B .C:211e E8 INX .C:211f E0 65 CPX #$65 .C:2121 D0 EC BNE $210F .C:2123 A2 01 LDX #$01 .C:2125 CA DEX .C:2126 D0 FD BNE $2125 .C:2128 A9 00 LDA #$00 .C:212a 8D 20 D0 STA $D020 .C:212d AD 21 D0 LDA $D021
So, who knows what’s happening above? Come on, it’ll come back to you if you look at the screenshot! I found a great tutorial on C64 demo coding. Unfortunately it’s a 404 now, but Google cached it and I downloaded it here for safe keeping: intro-to-programming-c64-demos.html
Look for the part on $d012
$d012 might be the most important address of them all, when it comes to demo programming on the C-64. $d012 has two different functions:
* When read, it returns the number of the current raster line.
* When written, it is used to set the number of the line where the next raster interrupt will occur.We’ll get back to raster interrupts later. You need to know about $d012 to understand them, so pay attention to the stuff in this section! The first item above is interesting, but it may not be obvious why it is interesting.
The current raster line is the line that is currently being redrawn on your screen. The whole screen is redrawn 50 times per second. Each time it is redrawn from top to bottom, from the left to the right. So, if you want something to happen 50 times per second, all you have to do is to check the current value of $d012, and when it reaches a certain value, call the routine that performs the desired task. When finished, go back to checking $d012.
That blew me away when I found out about that. You could literally change the background colour of the screen halfway down the screen, have multiple text and graphics modes, use more than the default 8 hardware sprites. The PC was disappointing in comparison.
That code above is for Justin who reminded me that Vice has an ASM monitor!