The second 2.3.5 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

More bug fixes and minor changes. There will be one more alpha and that’ll be the 2.3.5 beta release.

Marching on towards the 2.4 release!

OK, I’ve already admitted to getting old so I’m allowed to start reminiscing about my childhood

While I used to spend a lot of the time in the video arcades when I was a kid, it was mostly on Xevious (I was a monster) and never really got into things like Mario or Pac Man.

Nevertheless, this is insanely cool. Somebody has found an old backup tape that contains, amongst other things, the source code for Donkey Kong ^[1]. What makes this really interesting is that the guy who wrote it participates in the discussion Even better, he has a long article about how it was written and what was happening at Atari at the time.

At its peak DK was about 20K of code, and it had to go on a diet to fit in the 16K cartridge; a lot of the images were compressed (notice that Kong himself is symmetrical). Towards the end I was crunching out only a few bytes a day, and it shipped with maybe a dozen bytes free.

Jeez, that brings back some memories ^[2]

I started out on the BBC Micro which was an incredibly powerful machine for its time ^[3], especially when compared to the competition (Commodore 64, anyone? Or even worse, VIC 20? ). The operating system and BASIC interpreter were also done quite well (none of those disgusting PEEK’s and POKE’s so common on the other machines) and I learned an enormous amount and picked up a lot of good habits by studying the ROM’s. However, it only had about 8-20K of memory free for programs (depending on which graphics mode you used) and so I also spent a lot of my time squeezing every last byte out of the system ^[4].

The Beeb ruled the education market, largely due to the UK government choosing it as the computer they would subsidize as part of their drive to introduce computers into schools. As a result, there was a huge amount of educational software being written for it, which resulted in it also being adopted by schools around the world. One of the most prolific authors was a guy from Melbourne, moonlighting from his teaching gig at Melbourne High, IIRC He did really well for himself (even though his stuff was kinda ordinary) and while I wrote and sold a bit of stuff myself, I rue the fact that I didn’t get into a few years earlier (ya know, when I was 7 or 8 ) since I just missed the peak. Coulda been independently wealthy at the age of fifteen

Oh well, I’ll just have to wait for Awasu to do it. Sigh…

^[1] If you want to look at it, get it here. There’s also a funny 6502R instruction guide in the comments (well, it’s funny if you’re a 6502R programmer ).

^[4] Certain OS features could be turned off, allowing you to then steal the memory used to manage them for your own purposes

The first 2.3.5 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

We’re on the final run to the 2.4 release so it’s bug fixes and minor enhancements from here on.

The 2.3.4 beta release ^[?] is now available here.

It’s been a bit longer than we would normally like since the last beta release but if you look at the prodigious list of new features and enhancements in this one, it’s easy to see why.

Major highlights are:

• Many enhancements to Awasu’s reporting features.
  • Lots of new report templates are now available.
  • Reports can now be created for channels in a folder.
  • Reports can now be configured to mark items as read or remove them from workpads.
  • Reports can now be emailed out after they have been generated.
  • Reports generated from a workpad can now be configured to be automatically run when the workpad is changed.
• Integration with online services.
  • Feed items and web pages can be quickly sent to online services such as Digg or Reddit.
  • Awasu also makes it easy to subscribe to feeds coming online services and keep them up-to-date.

There are also heaps of other smaller changes that improve the existing features. The full low-down is in the release page.

There will be a quick turn-around for the next release so get yourself set up with the all the chunky Awasu goodness in this one as we make the final push towards the 2.4 release. Woo hoo!

And yes, I am definitely off to the pub tonight…

The third and final 2.3.4 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

No major new features in this release, just spit and polish on the stuff introduced in the previous alpha releases, along with the usual bug fixes and minor enhancements.

I’ll let this one marinate for a short while before serving it up as the 2.3.4 beta release

My esteemed colleague Nick Bradbury writes today about having knee surgery but expresses some concern about placing himself in the hands of a system that works using felt-tip pens.

Just before the procedure, a nurse walked over with a felt-tipped pen and wrote “YES” on my right leg. When the doctor came over, he confirmed it was my right knee that was being operated on, and then proceeded to write his initials above the “YES.”
…
On the one hand, it was reassuring to know I wouldn’t wake up to discover a missing testicle. But on the other hand, it was unnerving to realize I had placed my fate in the hands of a medical system that has to resort to felt-tip markers in order to prevent surgical mistakes.

Avoiding the obvious question of whether they use the same procedure if you go in to have a testicle removed , I think it’s an excellent solution. The more complexity you introduce into a system, the more chance you have of something going wrong. Sometimes people come to me wanting a program written to solve a problem they have and are often perplexed when I suggest an alternative that doesn’t involve computers at all. Much the same way that one of the hardest things to do as a musician is shut up and not play, people often find it hard to see non-technical solutions to a technical problem.

I think it’s telling that in the article Nick linked to explaining that even using a felt pen doesn’t always work, they used an “X” to mark the appropriate body part which is clearly asking for trouble, given the ambiguity of “X”. You can be sure that had they have written “Yes, this one!!!” or “No, the other one!!!”, it wouldn’t have made any difference how the operating theatre had been set up, they would’ve double-checked.

Technical or non-technical approaches, ya still can’t eliminate the possibility of people screwing up

A post came my way today that talked about Awasu’s channel reports:

The feature that I find lacking in the readers I’ve looked at is the ability to export selected articles to an attractive and customizable report format that can be cut and pasted into an email.

The closest I’ve found so far is a reader called Awasu. As you review your feeds, you can move any feed items you want to save to a “workpad.” You can set up as many workpads as you want, and create reports from these workpads. That’s a start. But the report formats (templates) provided are fairly basic. While you can customize them, it’s not quite as straightforward a process as I’d like.

With posts like this, I normally get in touch with the author and have a chat with them about what they found difficult to use and how they would like to see things improved. But in this case, they’ve made it difficult to post a comment (you have to sign up) and there’s no email address or any other way to contact them

Blogging has often been described as having a conversation but if you set up your blog like this, you’re really just shouting out into the void. The blog doesn’t seem to support trackbacks either so unless Cindy is subscribed to us, she’s not going to even know about this post and miss the chance to request some new Awasu features.

Having said all that, her comment is spot-on, the supplied report templates are a bit basic. We used to have the same problem with the channel summary templates, the idea being that we supply some simple, easy-to-understand templates so that people could work with them and come up with their own. However, I have to admit that a certain amount of laziness on my part was to blame (I don’t really like working on that kind of stuff) but I rectified this once I realized that it was important to have some cool templates come with Awasu as standard.

I’ve long held that channel reports are one of the most useful features of Awasu, letting you do something useful with all the information coming in, and so it’s important that they look just as good as the channel pages, out of the box. So the 2.3.4 release will be pushed back a bit so that we can provide some better report templates.

Sigh, it never ends…

The second 2.3.4 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

Lots of chunky Awasu goodness in this release with new features offering integration with a swag of online services

The new Feed Services feature lets you quickly subscribe to feeds from places like del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr and YouTube. And if they change the format of their feed URL’s and break your channels, Awasu is smart enough to try fix things up and get them going again

And I’ve already written about the new Send-to feature that lets you send feed items and other content to places like Digg, Furl and StumbleUpon.

Alpha3 will be out in a couple of weeks with a few minor fixes and that’ll be the 2.3.4 beta release. In the meantime, I’ve just loaded up Bioshock so I might be a little (ahem) busy for the next few days…

I posted a while back on the Awasu DevLog feed that I had implemented a new feature that lets you send feed items to online services such as del.icio.us and Digg. However, that was only the first stage and I’ve been busting my ass these past few weeks extending it to make it Totally Awesomer™. This was a big job since it required re-architecting some of the guts of Awasu but it was totally worth it since it works really well now.

You can right-click on an item to send it to the clipboard, your email program, a workpad or any of the available online services.

You can also right-click on a window tab to send that page.

There is also a cool new popup menu that appears after each item in the channel summary pages.

This last feature was a particular PITA to implement Every time I think that it would be a good idea to bring my skills up to the noughties and do some web-type development, when I actually sit down and do it, I realize (yet again) how utterly frustrating it is. Web developers already know what I’m talking about

Awasu has to work with IE5, IE6, IE7 and Mozilla/Firefox and each of these browsers is different. The hoops you have to jump through to get things working consistently is insane and it makes testing really unpleasant. Not only do you have to test every small part of the new feature against every browser, but if you find a problem and put in a fix, you have to go back and start testing everything from the beginning again! This is because fixing something for one browser easily causes problems with something else in another browser so you get stuck in this horrible loop, trying to stabilize things so that everything works in every browser And to make things worse, Awasu offers a lot of different templates so I have to check every combination of feature, template and browser. Aaaarrgghh!!!

I am so off to the pub tonight and then a big jazz festival for the weekend (not to play, although some friends are performing so I might bring my horn along and try to quietly sneak on stage ).

2.3.4.alpha2 will be out in a few weeks so you’ll be able to play with the new Send To feature Real Soon Now…

So, I was all set to send this article to a tri-athlete friend of mine based on the title alone, “Jet-Powered Bicycle Makes 50 MPH Feel Waaaaay Too Fast”. I titled the email “I think you’ll want one of these” but then I read the article and saw the second photo.

Maddox has been into skydiving for 20 year and used to compete in tracking contests, where free-falling skydivers move horizontally across the sky at speeds approaching 120 mph. His buddy was always just a little bit faster, so Maddox thought “it’d be fun to strap a jet engine to my chest and make myself into a human missile.”

Holy cow, I want one of those

I used to skydive a lot until discretion also got the better of me but I can definitely understand how “it’d be fun to strap a jet engine to my chest and make myself into a human missile”