Monthly Archives: February 2007

Computers are too clever for their own good sometimes

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I have a 1gig microSD card that goes in my Nokia 800. It goes in an SD card converter, and because of the design it’s really easy to pull the card out of its converter, leaving that inside the SD slot. Today while removing the card to fill it with music I did just this.

This seems to do really bad things. Either my Nokia was still trying to unmount the card, or by pulling it out in this way the card got corrupted. Either way, after that the card just stopped working. I put it in my PC running Linux and it denied its existence – it even went and turned off the card reader, claiming it was malfunctioning. Putting it in to my Windows PC gave the old “this card is not formatted” message, a “Delayed write failure” message and then half of Windows locking up.

It wasn’t until I pushed the card into my digital camera that I got any sense out of it. My camera bleeped and said the card was unformatted, would I like to format it? Yes, I most definitely would! And it did, no hassle, no errors. It also then quite happily took two pictures.
Then it crashed. Yes, my digital camera crashed. It’s like the card was spreading some sort of card reader virus around. I took the card out the camera and poked it back into my PC. Evidently something good happened because my computer wanted to show me the photos on the memory card.

So you see, sometimes it’s good to have dumb devices that don’t really understand filesystems, FAT tables and other computer concepts.

I wonder how many of these “dead” memory cards and USB drives people own aren’t really dead, they’re just really really corrupt and need a load of zeroes writing across them to sort things out?

AAARGH! When File Synchronisation Goes Wrong

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I’ve just managed to wipe out half of my latest University assignment. And how did I manage this amazing feat of stupidity you’re probably wondering? Well…

At school I have a place on the network to store files. At home I have a place to store files. I also have a USB pen drive with files on. That’s lots of files and no easy way to copy them around without overwriting them. So I found the rather handy SyncToy from Microsoft and use that to keep everything in sync.

It seems that one day the sync went the “wrong” way and wrote the old version of a file over a newer one. You may pretend there is a long line of expletives just here ->

So backups are great, they stop total data loss. Now what I need is a versioning system so I can roll back things when they go titsup. I wonder how I can do this without there being any manual stage. SVN would work, but I’d need it to automatically update the repository as I won’t remember. I need my home system to always contain all files, in whatever state they’re in.

Returning from The Zone

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For the past few weeks I’ve been re-reading Neuromancer, a bit here and there – sitting on the bog, before going to bed, etc. Pick the book up, read a page or two, put it down again.

Then tonight I just hoovered up 142 pages to finish the book. I remember starting at about 5pm, and now it’s somehow 7pm. Thing is, when I read a book, it’s not words on a page – that’s just how the story gets into my head. No, my brain fills out the world of the story in a way that plugging my brain into my computer would have a hard time beating. I don’t see words, I don’t see letters, a film-strip plays inside my head complete with audio. Time also seems to match the story.

… and that’s the bit that totally screws me up. For those two hours I [i]was[/i] the story. I wasn’t sat on my settee listening to The Chillies reading a book, I was in the story, running around the corridors of Straylight. Then the story ended and there was a large jarring sensation as reality took over, followed by a few minutes of slight confusion. A bit like being woken suddenly from a dream. For a few minutes your brain isn’t sure what’s going on.

And like in the story when the characters jack out, I’m hungry and need a pee ;)

Mind Mapping Software

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I’m doing an assignment for university that needs me to create a mind map. Since these school computers haven’t any mind mapping software installed on them I went to find a web based version. Surprisingly this isn’t something the might of Google has created yet (give them time though ;) ).

A bit of searching came across this post on a blog dedicated to Mind Mapping software. It reviews a web application called MindMeister which is an entirely web-based mind mapping tool. It’s all DHTML and Javascript, the way Google do their apps (I assume, it’s definitely not Java or Flash) and is pretty good. There are keyboard shortcuts allowing you to pour ideas into the map without too much extra thought. It exports as RTF or GIF and has some collaboration features too.

Currently it’s an invite-only beta, but I have nine invites left, and sending an email to privatebeta @ mindmeister.com will give you one. You can also get them by subscribing to their newsletter.

I like this new “web 2.0″ thing, I use many different computers each day – as a teacher there’s at least 200 PCs that I can log into and use, and they all forget my settings at logout. Also I can’t install new applications on them. However, providing I have web access I can still get to all my mail, calendar and now do productive things too ;)

Distellamap – Seeing the operation of code in Atari 2600 games

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Here’s a novel way of seeing the flow of program code:

Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there’s “go to” a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.

When a byte of data (as opposed to code) is found in the cartridge, it is shown as an orange row: a solid block for a “1″ or a dot for a “0″. The row is eight elements long, representing a whole byte. This usually means that the images can be seen in their entirety when a series of bytes are shown as rows.

Distellamap is disassembler for Atari 2600 carts, but with a difference. Rather than simply dumping the ROM as a load of assembler, it uses the fun (if slightly confusing) visualisation tool Processing to create a visual representation of the program’s execution. So instead of simply seeing a jump statement, there’s a neat curved line drawn from the jump statement to its destination. Take a look at the images of such blocky classics as Pacman, Pitfall and Adventure.

Now I wonder what Vista would look like through the same process? ;) Spaghetti anyone?