Cooking With Richard

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Sorry about the downtime over the past two days. I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the web server.

Everything should be back to normal now.

(Photo by Nicu)

I went to Bletchley Park today (Wikipedia page), home of the code-breaking efforts during World War II.

On my own!

They are starting to preserve the original nissen huts and later brick buildings like this one …

The rebuilt Colossus, arguably the first digital computer:

Captured Japanese codebooks:

They have their own Harrier:

and at the end of the day there was a fly-past by a WWII Hurricane:

I’ll have to take N-sama next time!

I just came back from a conference in Grenoble where I did a short talk about work.

Grenoble itself was seedy, the food we had was simply awful (to the point of €35/person inedible/unsafe to eat in one case), but at least the conference itself was good.

I finally got too jealous of Lady E and got an iPhone 3G 8GB:

My cousin and I actually did Manic Miner in a whole weekend using an infinite lives poke and lots of reloading. But this is just ridiculous …

I love the way he does the Warehouse. IIRC we spent literally hours trying to work out that level.

(Nice bit of drama if you watch it all the way to the last level).

Rather excellent “Mii-like” tool for making people who look like Legos.

Can you guess who these people are?

“Text” should say something else ??

Looks a bit like a junky:

Photos from the Boston Skywalk, stitched together into a panorama using hugin in Fedora:

Click to enlarge

Click to supersize me (TIFF image)

Today is the 10th anniversary of bubble3d, a screensaver that I wrote while I was very bored and trying out OpenGL for the first time at Orchestream, previously known as INmEDIA Concepts Ltd. I think I left Orchestream only a couple of months after this and because I left just before the peak of the dot-com scam I missed out on millions of pounds of potential wealth (so it goes …)

It feels like a long time ago, maybe not 10 years. One thing I remember about writing this was that the bubbles are actually inside out because of an error in an issue of the OpenGL red book.

The iPM programme put up the full, unedited version of my interview:

(IPM blog, Previously …)

New Scientist commemorates 30 years of spam and links to the spam archive.

So does the Grauniad.

This morning I was called out of the blue by “George” a researcher at BBC Radio 4 iPM programme, interactive little brother of the PM programme (Radio 4′s 5 o’clock daily news).

George wanted to talk to me about the Great Spam Archive, all the spam I’ve collected in my inbox since August 1997 (archive by date), and I was happy to oblige. I ended up going to Broadcasting House this afternoon, and being interviewed by Eddie Mair about my “favorite” spam, and why on earth I started to collect it (answer: I simply never delete any old email).

The process is a bit strange — they sit you in a sound-proof booth and you talk to the presenter over a microphone. (Eddie was sitting in another BBC studio). The whole interview lasted perhaps 10 minutes after which Eddie politely thanked me and I left. Now I guess they cut the ‘umms’ and ‘errs’ out and cut it down to a 1 or 2 minute slot. I’ll find out soon — the broadcast is due on-air at 5.30pm (in about an hour).

Update

Well, it’s over. They edited it a lot to make me sound intelligent .. I’ll have an MP3 clip from the show up shortly in case people want to listen.

Update #2

No sound file posted by the BBC yet, but they’ve put some background information up on the iPM blog here.

Update – audio

Here it is –> Edited MP3 file with my interview <–

If you want to hear the full program, it’s available for the next week on the iPM podcast site.

Previously: Uncanny valley of the dolls …

(Skip to 2’50 in the video to see the effect at work)

More info on the project page

I tidied up my office!

…

For the past few weeks N-sama has been wondering about the strange secret project I’ve been engaged in. Well, here it is, revealed to the world for the very first time:

JONESFORTH

The internet in all its glory forgets my first brush with FORTH, which happened in around 1981 or ’82 with ARTIC’s FORTH. I still have my original cassette and manual.

Ever since then I wondered how it worked …

Only now have I found out and become enlightened.

Please somebody buy me a Jupiter ACE.