wee doors banging

Hot on the heels of the impressive Batman Forever demo on the Amstrad CPC, comes this state of the art effort on – wait for it – the venerable old Commodore VIC-20.

And it really is State of the Art. It’s a remake of Spaceball’s famous Amiga demo “State of the Art”. On a VIC-20. Unbelievable!

Programmers (and all geeks) enjoy Christmas too, so here’s my seasonal take on the #songsincode Twitter hashtag game. How many can you get? Feel free to submit your own!

Georgina from poemtweet has written a little poem about me. Sadly, it’s all too true. Check it out.

I like to keep abreast of new technology, and recently I came across some new research from a group of networking boffins based in Silicone Valley that outlined a relatively simple plan to enlarge the volume of data the internet can carry.

The computing pioneers of the 1940s could not have envisaged the recent surge of bandwidth heavy internet applications such as music and video streaming, online gaming, social networking and so on. The binary systems they invented, while adequate for the requirements of the past, are creaking at the seams under these modern workloads.

The new research describes a plan to break away from the outdated and limiting two-value binary principles, by adopting instead three valued trinary logic.

A bit of geeky fun cropped up on Twitter a few days ago in the form of the #songsincode hashtag game, the purpose of which was to rewrite popular songs in the form of programming code and still have the song be recognisable (I said it was geeky). I’ve listed all my entries below, written in a Java-like code. Can you name the songs?

Take a pinch of The Good Life, a classic 70′s BBC sitcom starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal and placed 9th on a Britain’s Greatest Sitcom poll. Add one fan of the show with a rapidly approaching birthday, in the form of a Mr. Hood who’s retired and spends a lot of time in the garden growing his own fruit and vegetables. Mix with one software engineer with a rudimentary grasp of Adobe Illustrator and send the results to a photo printing website. What do you get?

Here’s a little verse to recite for all those struggling to develop websites to work Microsoft’s latest and “greatest” web browser, Internet Explorer 8.

Our Browser, Which art after IE7…

I had a hard time choosing the title of this post. I was toying with “My Brother: Triple Awesome Comedy Genius” in recognition of the tale of magnificent lolmastery it describes.

I started a new lap of Sol today, and to mark this special occasion one of my three brothers sent me a birthday card. An unremarkable event you might think, but this was no ordinary card. Oh no, this was a card with a jest-quotient the likes of which you’ve never seen before and are unlikely to see again in your or your grandchildren’s lifetime.

There has been much media and online 2.0 hysteria about the recent outbreak of the dangerous H1N1 strain of Swine Influenza, a.k.a. “Mexican Swine Flu”. It’s important though that we all sty calm. H1N1 swine ‘flu is still just a snoutbreak, a minor hamergency the health services can contain for now.

Originally written by Rupert Goodwin, I first read this excellent ode in an issue of The Home Computer Course back in the 1980′s. The C programming language is just as popular today as it was back then, and this poem is just as funny too.