Merry Christmas

The date just changed, so I’d like to wish everyone in the RISC OS community a happy Christmas. I hope we’ll all have a great day.

Merry Christmas everyone! I’m 13 hours ahead of the UK so I’m happy to report that it’s been a great day. Despite the threat of rain we ended up with sun, and got to spend a bit of time at the beach :)

We have a White Christmas here in Ely. Not snow, but a Very Heavy Frost.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Happy Christmas everyone!!

Merry Christmas everyone! I’m 13 hours ahead of the UK so I’m happy to report that it’s been a great day. Despite the threat of rain we ended up with sun, and got to spend a bit of time at the beach :)

The wife put on R2 Junior Choice and I’ve just checked my tea for unusual additives because I could swear I just listened to Pinky & Perky doing Reet Petite – that’s it I’m thinking the next drink is beer or scotch.

Merry Christmas all.

PS. Anyone here not old enough to remember P&P on TV?

@Steve Pampling Who do you think we are, little oinks. ;)

Anyone here not old enough to remember P&P on TV?

Windy Miller is more my time. Or, rather, inane TV in colour.

One that amused me was a production with a name like “Why don’t you just switch off your TV and go do something less boring instead?”. :-)

At any rate, two pigs singing Reet Petite is indeed time to progress to a stronger beverage. After all, it’ll be ’er Maj in a few hours talking some rubbish about togetherness, as if Her Royal Highness has somehow managed to miss noticing the degree of antagonism regarding a certain farcical failure to “take back control”.

Merry Christmas, anyway. :-)

“Why don’t you just switch off your TV and go do something less boring instead?”.

Fortunately it hasn’t been on and following the Pinky & Perky incident the music changed to a selection of Genesis, Yes, members of the above and some odds including Camel. Meanwhile, my computer use moved to a much-needed tidy and browse to see if some bits were worth the space.

Because I was aiming for something less surreal (not difficult) I wandered through some old links to follow up and I can only say “The things you find when you least expect…”
On this page (that’s Imperial College (University of London)) from 2002-2003 the students are advised that this link is a “Useful link”.
I wonder if the author would like to update any of the, clearly degree level, material?

Merry Xmas Mr. Murray. Any letters after that? :)

!MerryChristmas

In Sweden we started yesterday.
No tv. Choir of kings college has been on living room HiFi . Carols for the win.

I was aiming for something less surreal (not difficult)

Not difficult? Are you sure? Because it looked a lot like you ended up at my website there…

I wonder if the author would like to update any of the, clearly degree level, material?

Certainly.

I’ll replace it with a single word on a single page:

Don’t.

Back when I taught myself ARM code, it was used frequently to do stuff because the processors clocked around 8MHz, or 25MHz if you had an A5000. It was a decent way to speed up games. It was also a short time away from the time when Acorn advised programmers that major applications would be written in assembler and implemented as modules (seriously – the Arthur PRM says that).

These days, we have processors clocking near a GHz (plus/minus a few hundred MHz either way), we have fast integrated memory (and loads of it). We have two decent capable compilers. And AmCog’s games show us what’s possible using pure BASIC even when doing silly things like using reals as flags (instead of ints).

The only plausible reasons for assembler these days are talking to hardware, writing OS veneer code, need-for-speed, and because you can.

Talking to hardware and need-for-speed will always be issues, but some of the sorts of things that would be required can actually be offloaded to other processing units. My PVR for instance runs a 200MHz ARM yet records broadcast video (S-video) in realtime. How? By pretty much not using the ARM. There’s a programmable DSP, a DCT engine, realtime resizer, and something to sample CCD imager data (the tvp5150 video chip ‘pretends’ to be a CCD) directly into memory. But these are special purpose requirements.

OS veneers? OSLib, DeskLib, and (god help you) RISC_OSLib ought to have you covered.

Because you can? That’s mostly my excuse. Old habits die hard. :-)

Suffice to say that Linux is ubiquitous perhaps because it only needs a few small support functions to get the machine going and bash the hardware appropriately. The rest of the system is written in C. Okay, that might explain the bloat and lethargy compared to RISC OS, but on the other hand RISC OS is a casebook study in trying to keep an OS written in assembler working on newer machines. The 26 to 32 transition went better than expected (so much so that one can be forgiven for being angry with Acorn for not bothering to do it when the market was vibrant). The 32 to 64 transition is going to be a show stopper.

So. The 2019(ish) revision of my assembler programming tutorial would simply be:

Don’t.

Any letters after that? :)

Nope.

In Sweden we started yesterday.

Took you that long to get the wax out of the poor girls’ hair?

Carols for the win.

I’ll be glad when its over. Don’t want to sound a grinch, but every supermarket playing what sounds like the same selection of carols performed by some over-perky Americans in the cheesiest way imaginable.
About the only Christmas song I like is “A Spaceman Came Travelling” because, hey, aliens for the win!

Merry Xmas Mr. Murray.

Merry Christmas everybody. Was going to watch “The Jungle Book” but my class 10 SD card clearly wasn’t able to keep up with the satellite receiver so it pooped out after a couple of minutes. I… found it elsewhere, if you know what I mean. ;-)
Interestingly, the incapable card is a 16GB class 10 Sandisk Ultra SDHC card. The one I had been using before (that kept pace with 2GB/hr off S4C) was exactly the same thing, only in MicroSD size. Go figure…

Finally, if you’d like to hang some rubbish Christmas lights on your desktop, then…
https://www.heyrick.co.uk/binaries/xmas103.zip

Don’t want to sound a grinch, but every supermarket playing what sounds like the same selection of carols performed by some over-perky Americans in the cheesiest way imaginable.

Anyone easily offended should avoid the lyric page but it seems like a good antidote to the wall-to-wall stuff in shops. Feel free to find the video on the web, when mums not in earshot. >:-)

Interestingly, the incapable card is a 16GB class 10 Sandisk Ultra SDHC card.

Or at least marked as one. There were a lot of Sandisk fakes around last I knew.

I’ll replace it with a single word on a single page: Don’t.

Top rant, Mr Murray. That’s exactly why I haven’t got into serious coding in post-26-bit assembler, despite writing the book on the subject. Not that I write in C either – BBC BASIC does me just fine. I only ever coded the speed-critical bits in assembler anyway.

Or at least marked as one. There were a lot of Sandisk fakes around last I knew.

That’s Sandisk’s story and they’re sticking to it? 8~P

That’s Sandisk’s story, and they’re sticking to it?

A few years ago I was told there was fake Cisco kit about. Genuine electronics in genuine cases assembled by workers in the same factory, after hours, and given a duplicate serial number. Sold cheaper in Europe than the UK, but some got imported to the UK.
So, were the fakes worse quality? Actually, given the failure rate of items I know are genuine, I really hope not but the only difference appears to be a dodgy serial number anyway.

Complex issues there. Quality control on the non-fake fakes might not have been quite the same, depending how the scam was organized. It might even have been better, who knows? Not an easy thing to find out!

Merry Christmas to everyone.
Also a big thank you to everyone who helps to keep Risc Os alive.

Happy Christmas. A day late but better than never I guess.