From the depths of time: a 30-year-old bug with a funny explanation

It was 1990 or possibly 1991, and I was working for System Simulation on an Application for Windows 2 – which at that time was a rather exotic extra that a few adventurous people were running on top of their MS-DOS systems. There was no graphical development environment in those days: you’d compile your program using the command-line C compiler cl, and compile your resources (dialogue boxes, menus and suchlike) using the command-line resource compiler, rc.

I AM A SITH

SITH DICRIPTION

I, Darth trilon am a Sith.

A Sith is a Jedi who has found the true sorce to powor.

A siths primary hand weapen is a Light Saber like a Jedi.

Unlike a Jedi we are evil.

A Jedi Trusts justice and their own puny uce of the force.

A Sith uses fear as powor.

We use our puneshments to feed our force abilaties.

The Jedi only use their own force powor when they have to.

They say they seek wizdom, not powor.

why do they have their powor when they

don’t want it?

Metal Jester: the full story

Three years ago, I posted about an early 1990s heavy metal band, Metal Jester, whose singer Richard Whitbread had also been our singer in Anne Heap of Frogs. Since then, I’ve heard from Simon, the lead guitarist, as well as Martyn, who at one point auditioned to be the bassist. Simon sent me a bunch more material, and, well, here it is!

Artwork for demo tape: see below for the actual songs.

I miss my Commodore 64

Building modern software is so complicated. So many layers where things can go wrong. Vagrant, VirtualBox, Docker, Maven, JVM, Vert.X, Spring, Node, NPM, Cypress, Chai, SSH, tunnels, git, GitHub, Jenkins, Travis, the list goes on and on.

I understood everything about my Commodore 64. Now I barely understand NPM. I know there are good reasons why things are the way they are. But that doesn’t mean I don’t lament what we’ve lost.

 

Metal Jester at the Marquee in 1991

A few years ago, I wrote about the heavy metal band, Anne Heap of Frogs, that I was the guitarist for in my late teens; and then about Crossfire, the band that come out of that, and some other bits and pieces. But there is one more chapter to the story, and it’s much more impressive.

After singing with AHOF and Crossfire, Richard Whitbread went on to front a much more serious band, Metal Jester, which did well enough to get a gig at the Marquee — then, one of the top rock venues in the UK. The layout of the ticket suggests they were third on a bill of three, which would still pretty darned impressive, but as Richard elucidates below, they were actually the main act.

Revisiting Flood Control Dam #3

As a long-time lover of Zork, I’ve been familiar with Flood Control Dam #3 since about 1984, when after years of desire I was finally able to play it on my new Commodore 64. The original Zork was of course a text-only adventure game, but the graphical Return to Zork (1993) included this rather underwhelming image:

But how accurate is it?

Artwork from 1980

I wonder, does anyone recognise this?

My mum found it recently, when she was throwing out some old stuff. It came with a note carrying my address and saying that I’d drawn it when I was 12. I am pretty sure we sent it to 2000 AD (hence the note with the return address) and I think they published it in Tharg‘s Nerve Centre. But, stupidly, I don’t have a copy of the issue that included it.

How much do I really remember?

A lot of my key memories of my childhood aren’t really mine. They are of incidents that I don’t have my own memory of, but which I talked about and laughed about with my parents so many times that they have become canon. I suspect this is pretty common: most of the memories that most people have of their early childhood are not authentic.

But some are. And the reason I know this is because there are little incidents that I never told anyone else about — so there has never been this reinforcement that you get from do-you-remember-when and what-about-the-time-when. A trivial example: I remember stopping in a cafe with my mum when we were shopping, smelling real coffee for the first time, and being mesmerised by the tanks of juice with their paddles constantly churning. I would have been very young: maybe two, perhaps three years old.

All the cool kids are using JSON instead of XML

My colleague Kurt Nordstrom mentioned a few days ago that there was this period of time when XML-based everything was the future. It was going to solve all our problems. Let’s use XML for everything!

Now, of course, we’ve all seen past the crazily naive idea that anything as mundane as the XML meta-format could make any real difference to anything, since it’s just a solution to the easy part of every task (syntax) and leaves the hard part to be done (semantics). No, we’re much more sophisticated than that now. Now we realise that JSON is the metaformat that will make everything suddenly work.

The inauspicious beginning of my musical career

My sister Lindsey (that’s her at the bottom of the photo, enjoying experiencing my performance) recently found this old photo, taken in our back garden when I was about three years old. So that would be 1972, the year of Fragile, Machine Head, For the Roses and Paul Simon’s first solo album.