Posts by Sargs

If I wanted to fill in stupid questionnaires, I'd be browsing Facebook, boss.

At BigCorp, we seem to get a questionnaire about some aspect of business life at least once a quarter. They tell us they're anonymous, but the password to the external website is our employee number. They tell us that they're not mandatory, but we get email reminders until we've filled them out.

Regardless, employee morale and trust has never been higher. The responses tell them so.

I recommend Blackpool pleasure beach's "Big One" rollercoaster as a very effective nasal decongestant. After the big drop and pull-out, I thought I'd had a stroke and was bleeding out through my nose. That was snot the case.

This is what innovation is?

Seriously, it's a sad state of affairs when "innovation" translates to a couple of millimetres shaved off the case dimensions and a few dozen grams off the weight.

And we were supposed to pronounce SCSI as "Sexy"

... but that didn't happen either.

Aw...

I briefly worked with Mike on the probably justly-obscure Starlord back in '93 at Maelstrom's office in Birkenhead. My strongest memory is of his sitting there staring at the code for an hour, suddenly going "Ah!", typing furiously for twenty minutes and one quick blat through MASM later, the 3D engine had a brand-new feature springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus, so to speak.

Oh, and the code in question was 80x86 assembler with no meaningful symbolic address labels as that would have made it too easy. Even back then, most PC/Amiga/ST development was done in C apart from very low level graphics operations, so his assembly-abilities impressed even then.

It's a shame to see him go.

One thing; I'm fairly certain Carrier Command was done by Realtime Games in Leeds, which was Baird, Oliver and Onions, not Singleton.

I hope their marketing department gets fired. Out of a cannon.

It's not the telly ads that bother me, it's the sheer amount of paper they're shoving through my letterbox every week. I'm getting thick, glossy brochures and ridiculous Tivo box offers two to three times a week, week after week. I've signed up to Mailing Preference Services, but since Virgin's crap is all addressed to "The Occupier", it makes no difference.

I'm stockpiling it to burn for heat when the double-dip recession dooms us all.

Fond memories

But not of playing the game, as I do. What I do remember is reading an article in a games magazine written by Andrew Braybrook of Paradroid and Uridium fame. He did the Amiga port of Rainbow Islands and in his article described how he handled compressing and decompressing the level data. This was my first introduction to the mysteries of compression routines and actually helped kick off my love of programming and resulted in a bit of a career shift.

So it's Rainbow Islands' fault I do this stuff for a living.

Lowering the (ring)tone

Perhaps morale is now so low within Nokia, they feel the need to actively punish their users? "Damn you all! Stop buying our products so we can all get our redundancy money and the company can die in peace!"

BT got there first

Back in about 1987, BT came round to my high school to show all us cool kids in the GCSE Control Technology class how to splice fibre optics with a fusion welder. One of the things we learned was that when BT replaced all the old copper trunk lines with fibre optics, the scrap value of the cable bundles they were ripping out more than paid for the whole process.

We also learned never to look into the microscope of the fusion welder whilst it is welding. Some people just never listen DO THEY, HEADMISTRESS?

Sometimes upgrading something that works well enough can be beneficial

I think I recall reading in Siddiqi's "Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge" that in the seventies, the Soviets managed to save something like over a tonne of mass on their Soyuz launchers by scrapping all the old analog electronics and control systems and replacing them with digital, so there's two sides to holding on to proven tech.

Dan Brown: CERN Recruitment Consultant?

I applied for a position at CERN recently and was amused and distubed to find that in amongst the billions of questions on the on-line form was something like "Where did you hear about us?" with multiple choice options.

Two of the options were "Angels and Demons - Film" and "Angels and Demons - Book".

I didn't pick either of those options but I still didn't get the job.