T.I.meout

Spinning off from the momentum of my JX-3P decoder, I’m attacking the TI tape decoder project again. Managed to successfully detect the tape dumps and get a bit stream, overcoming all the problems of the first attempt. But decoding the bitstream into program code is going to be harder than I thought.

I was hoping that the TI-BASIC program would be stored on tape as the raw source code text. That’s not the case. The only readable bits in the bitstream are the strings from all the PRINT, REM, and CALL commands. Everything else appears to be packed into middle-level code; TI-BASIC is doubly-interpreted from source text to a secondary code which is then interpreted by the TI monitor program. So it’s just as I feared.

If I’m to make progress, I have to figure out how the variables, line numbers, commands, and their arguments are packed into symbols and delineated in the bitstream. Good luck on that without some outside help and lots of time at a hex editor.

You Too?

Those of you who may know me will eventually know that I love U2, the band. Like really love. Yes, even through all their creative periods and changes. Yes.

Some of you have opinions about their music and message. I understand that. Here’s what I think. Bono (the balls of the guy to name himself after the Italian word for “Good”) says some things people don’t like. For some reason they don’t agree with what he says on and off the stage. I don’t care. An artist’s statement is on the album. Anything outside of that is music press. It’s that simple.

They, the band, have brought some beauty to this fucked up world, and I have full appreciation of that.

Poor Workman

“It is a poor workman who blames his tools.”

This is a fortune cookie I first read years ago. This one has stuck with me because it has stuck in my craw. There are many ways to interpret this phrase, and none of them sit well with my needs-to-be-assuaged-of-guilt soul. Is the skillful workman lacking in resources and unable to meet expectations? Or is he lacking in workmanship and putting the blame on his tools?

I’ve never quite reconciled with this. I’ve always felt that I could do well with the right tools. But I’ve always held in my mind the idea that anybody who is determined enough, has enough fire, has enough desire and need, can make do with whatever tools he has. If I really, really, really want to make music, I could do so with a trashcan and a kazoo. And then sometimes I myopically don’t use my tools in whatever way is necessary to do the job, which leads me to wonder if I ever had the desire in the first place. People in companies are praised for being resourceful, and this fortune cookie reminds me that I just might not be resourceful if I’m finding fault in what tools I have available.

Really, can a man be held accountable because he’s not exceeding the potential of his tools?

History of Future Decay

Digging through file archives of my websites of yore tonight. I’ve been keeping websites for most of the duration since 1997. Mixed among the archives are all the journals, side projects, one-off experiments, and futuristic snazzy things that I loved to do. Good times.

It surprises me just how many of these hardcoded pages are still viewable with modern browsers. Those are the ones where I wrote with sane, near-standard HTML; sure, the CSS is wrong (or nonexistent), there are open tags all over the place, and every HTML tag is in upper case (definitely not XHTML4 compliant), the page is designed using nested tables for formatting and spacing, etcetera. But, for the most part, they still look like they did 15 years ago.

More surprising (or less, depending on how much you know) is that some of these pages I wrote between 1999-2002, the ones where I used “advanced” Javascript techniques and libraries to do this new thing called Dynamic HTML — where you can move DIVs around, change images on the fly, modify page text after the page is loaded, stuff we totally take for granted in the post-Facebook reality of today — those pages don’t even render. More often than not, it’s just a blank colored background and nothing else. Nothing appears. The futuristic, cross-browser libraries I copied and used to do these things were built rather myopically, so functional decay was imminent. In order to do their magic, the libraries had to detect if the end user was using Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, or Internet Explorer, what version of each browser, etcetera, in order to select which Javascript commands to execute. This was all primitive before-there-were-standards days. Before DOM days. Wild West days. The later fix for this sort of DHTML arms race was to use libraries that detected not the browser nor the version, but what capabilities the browser actually had. Sanity eventually reigns.

So, I’ve been knocking around the thought that maybe I should make a copy of the archives, update the copy to use modern scripting techniques to work in modern and future browsers, and then post them here. Most of the work I did was a bit amateurish, some of it fun, but it was a moment in my life when this was my A-1 hobby, and that’s important to document and share. I’m also considering taking the text of the journals and duplicating them into this WordPress format, just for historical sake. As far as dynamically-generated content, I’ve been using some sort of journaling engine on my site since 2003, but really, I’ve been writing journal entries since 1997 on the first iterations of my first site, The Farm.

Call it a documentarian’s itch. Call it an old man and his modern memoirs. Call it a trip down memory lane in a wheeled desk chair. Somebody’s got to remember and share these things, and that person is me. Archive.org has only so much of my old stuff archived in the Wayback Machine. My turn to take up the slack.

Who?

An earlier conversation brought up a story.

During the spring semester of my senior year in high school, I received a letter from the publisher of “Who’s Who Among American High School Students” stating that due to my scholastic achievements (there were a few), I would be listed in their annual publication, distributed widely to universities and employers nationwide. It sounded swell. The letter went on to mention how prestigious it is to be listed in the book. That very mention made my mother beam with pride; she patted me on the back and gave me a high-five.

And then there was mention of how wonderful it would be to have our own copy of the book on our own bookshelf complete with a commemorative keychain and assorted bric-a-brac. “That sounds great,” mother said, “but we just can’t afford that.” My dream of moving up from the low class by the petards of my own academic strengths and showing off my new status to future friends and employers was dashed on that blue-sky afternoon.

But what if we had been able to afford the book? Well, hundreds of thousands of proud parents and students were sent the same offer letter. How many of those could afford it? How many of those actually bought it?

I suppose for each transitional period in life, there’s someone whose business plan involves making money from it. I can’t begrudge them the initiative, but what’s the true cost versus the true benefit? The form letters went on and on with rosy words stating that being listed lent a weight of prestige to a student’s future career. Well of course it was prestigious; the sales letter said so! But how many people bought it? And who among those still proudly bring out the books to show friends and neighbors? It’s just a publication; it carries no resumé-fodder, nothing that would make a future employer think twice about overlooking this kid. It’s the same as a high school class ring — it means absolutely nothing in the real world.

I’m not surprised, from the Wikipedia article linked above, that the publication has gone bankrupt. Obviously it’s not prestigious enough. But, really, the business model didn’t allow for the free-as-in-beer fiesta of the Web; people just don’t put value in book publications. I hope others won’t get taken-in by the life-changes marketeers like I almost did. On this side of the transition, I can say that nobody gives a tinker’s dam about your tokens of passage. Keep that in mind.