05.31.09
Posted in Books, Culture, Media at 9:51 pm by thomas
Bruce Sterling posted a rather rough wakeup call about the state of current literature and publishing at his beyond the beyond blog – Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature.
The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away from the current state of the industry and all eighteen points by Bruce Sterling are worth a thought.
I don’t think any of the existing large publishing houses will survive in their current form since even if these businesses want to change at this point (and that’s a big IF), there is preciously little that can be done.
Ditch paper and go online? Yes, but the ebook market is already carpet-bombed by small startups and behemoths like Sony and Amazon.
Make everything a free download to support paid copies? Yes, but that should have been done long ago. That would have been GREAT advertisement before the Internet started to drown in free content, but now?
Go viral? Yep, like everybody else. Doesn’t help with the revenue, though.
At this point traditional publishing is dead, with the possible exception of coffee table books and niche publishers that will sprout like weeds around the edges of the old system. There will still be book stores and new books from many (many!) more smaller publishers, but the times of million-dollar advances for books and monolothic publishing deals will be over for good.
Permalink
Posted in Programming at 2:12 pm by thomas
After a few months of not much time (actually that’s still true, I’m just coping better!) I have dug up my unfinished emulation project.
The 68K emulation now knows maybe 75% of the instruction set and my virtual Atari ST runs through a good chunk of the early initialization code, before it currently all blows up in the MFP setup routines. This is of course where things get really hairy – up to now all I’ve done is I have created a software model of the 68000 CPU and just enough of an environment to load the original TOS roms and to step through the instructions..
Now I will have to create the virtual equivalent of the Atari hardware, and while I’m pretty sure I can ignore much of the original hardware, I will need some basics to get to a working emulation. My goal for now is to have TOS boot all the way, have the GEM desktop come up and to be able to interact with it with the mouse. For that I will really only need the keyboard 6840 ACIA chip to provide mouse and keyboard input and of course a working video system.
There are a number of uncertainties for me around the overall interrupt handling in the ST and it is surprising how deep I had to dig in some of the documentation around the ST and the CPU to figure out some of the details that I had to never even think about back when I was still actively writing machine code on the actual machine. It’s funny that in a lot of ways I am now more of an expert on the Atari ST than back when I still had the physical machine on my desk!
As a second step, once the good old green desktop comes up on the screen, I will see if there is a way to load disk images – and I would very much like to avoid having to recreate a software emulation for the Atari disk interface. The 3.5″ disk interface was spread over several chips – some of the signals were handled by the sound chip! – and all I remember from the software side was that this was a very cumbersome interface with lots of interrupt polling and register work.
It would actually be even easier to not do the floppy disk interface at all and to just provide the hard disk interface – the AHDI (Atari Hard Disk Interface) is handled by the DMA controller and it has a relatively simple command structure. We will see… first I’ve got to see some pixels on the screen!
Permalink
Posted in Modern Life at 1:34 pm by thomas
This has been going around the blogosphere for a few days now, but I just have to say – the Big Mess o’Wires is one of the coolest hardware projects I’ve seen in a long while.
Steve Chamberlin set out to build a CPU and the computer around it from scratch – as in, he designed and built his own CPU from common chips, built a computer to support the CPU and then put it all into a nice case with several running demo programs!
Not only is that quite an achievement, but Steve also created a very readable blog with progress reports and his thoughts around the design of small computer systems. Being done with the Big Mess o’Wires, he is now embarking on a project to design and build his very own game console. I’ve already put his blog on my bookmarks shortlist and I will be happily following along…
Permalink
Posted in Tech Nostalgia at 1:24 pm by thomas
Here’s an interesting new clone of 80s home computers: The FPGA Arcade (not sure if that’s the final name) is based on a Xilinx FPGA and will be a multi-machine clone for the Atari ST, Amiga and older 8-bit systems all on one main board.
From the blog it looks like they will be very close to production status soon, and for (hopefully) under 200 Euros that looks like a very interesting system.
It looks like there is now a whole wave of FPGA based systems coming up, since the prices for the development boards are now generally below $200 and there are now many free tools and resources available for the casual hobbyist who wants to expand into VHDL development.
Permalink
05.21.09
Posted in China, One World, Travel at 11:40 pm by thomas
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989.
Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships.
There were the banners, held high.
And the faces. Sweaty excitement in the faces of the young students, many of them looking like they were still in high school.
Bold, colorful characters put down with a heavy brush. White banners. Red characters, rippling in the wind.
The faces, so open, so happy with the sudden empowerment. Shouted slogans filling the air.
Crammed between other onlookers, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people on the old Garden Bridge. Marching students ahead, coal barges on the water behind. The steel girders of the bridge digging into my back.
So much applause, people clapping in the rhythm of the marchers. Arms raised, fingers pointing at banners.
The infectious excitement of the crowd. Waves of emotion passing through us like the wind through trees. Laughter, shouts, chants picked up by group after group of marchers.
Students. Workers. Teachers. So many faces.
Happy, excited faces.
Even if only for a brief moment,
Freedom.
Permalink
05.18.09
Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life, Science at 10:27 pm by thomas
I’m currently glued to NASA TV’s YouTube channel, with its daily dosage of videos from the Hubble repair mission in glorious HD.
It’s quite astonishing to think that the Hubble telescope has been in orbit now for 19 years – I was in university when Hubble was launched into space! It’s been out there, faithfully taking tens of thousands of photos of the universe, enlightening us with amazing photos of moons, planets, stars and galaxies.
It’s a testament to the hard and dangerous work of all the astronauts who have maintained Hubble over the years that we can still look forward to possibly another decade of mind-blowing science to come out of the the Hubble. And watching the current mission in HD brings it so much closer what amazing work the astronauts have been performing.
Permalink
05.15.09
Posted in Modern Life, Programming, Tech Nostalgia at 10:22 pm by thomas
I’ve written before about the roots of my programming life – while I first had a ZX81, I really consider the Sinclair ZX Sepctrum as the machine where I developed a taste for programming and thinking in algorithms.
Most actual Spectrums are now rather long in the tooth, and many have probably near irreparable damage from several decades of Atic Atac or Manic Miner gameplay. Those rubber keys don’t age well even under the best circumstances.
There have been clones – mostly from Eastern Europe – since the early 90s, but none were successful enough and of course by the mid-nineties even the most diehard fans of the platform had moved on. But there have always been new attempts to re-create actual in-hardware Speccys… and here is the ultimate list of all the clones that have come and gone over the years.
Among all the semi-commercial projects that never had much of a chance, there are a few interesting home-made Spectrum clones and projects that are still ongoing, like this site from Sweden that has a number of projects based on original hardware, like notebooks and Flash card disk systems built into the original case.
Here is an interesting Speccy clone from Italy called ZX-Badaloc. Alessandro Poppi is creating a Speccy based on his original re-build from 2006 as a more modern FPGA-based machine.
Then there is the Harlequin project, which looks like it is very far along to a full re-build of the machine and Chris Smith is now actually in the process of publishing a book about the internals of the Spectrum ULA – the custom chip at the heart of the original Sinclair design.
It is interesting that we are now at a point where more than a dozen hardware projects of this complexity and just around one original platform can exist side-by-side, often feeding of each others success and learning from failures made across the community. Since many of these new machines are reverse-engineered from scratch, their designs are mostly open source and publicly available – if you feel like building your own, go ahead and download the sources and schematics and off you go!
And the same is going on for every 80s and 90s hardware platform that I can think of. It’s an interesting time we are living in – the birth of a whole ecosystem of small computers that can be built without license, with several decades worth of compatible software available from the get-go.
Permalink
05.11.09
Posted in Books, Culture, Japan at 11:41 pm by thomas
Last year I had picked up the first US translation of one of Arimasa Osawa’s books – Shinjuku Shark, and just recently I’ve found a new translation in his series around a cop in Tokyo in our local Japanese bookstore.
The title is The Poison Ape, and where Shinjuku Shark was an in-depth study of Tokyo police procedures, this new book is a hard, cold-edged dive into Tokyo’s brothels and the many illegal immigrants from China and Taiwan that live and work there.
Detective Samejima hasn’t changed much since the last book, but this case is definitely rougher. Samejima stumbles over a case of drug sales in Tokyo’s subways that leads on to illegal immigrants, but there is much more going on as a bloody feud between Taiwanese gangs spreads into Tokyo, rapidly decimating gang members and bystanders alike.
The book is a good read and offers insights into a Japan that a casual traveler to the country would never see, but it is also a very brutal book, probably in many ways a more truthful account of the underbelly of Tokyo’s society than most writers would dare to offer.
Permalink
05.05.09
Posted in Culture, Good Stuff, Japan, Media at 11:23 pm by thomas
Last weekend we had a chance to see the Japanese movie “Departures” as a preview of its official release in the US during the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Departures won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, and it must have been a close call as best film all around.
Where to begin? It’s a movie about funerals, or specifically about the act of transferring bodies into the casket, which traditionally is often done in a cleansing ceremony in the house of the recently deceased before the undertaker removes the body.
The story is beautifully crafted around the life of the young man who finds himself freshly jobless and uprooted, as he stumbles into the unusual job of preparing the dead, while at the same time trying to hide this new income source from his wife.
It is a testament to the craftsmanship of the film makers that this movie is not just incredibly tasteful around its morbid subject matter, but the sequences with the deceased take on a beauty, elegance and meditative rhythm that makes the experience uniquely emotional for the audience.
The movie opens on May 29th across the US and if you only see one foreign movie this year, I’d make it this one – and maybe bring some tissues.
Permalink
05.04.09
Posted in Modern Life, Science, Tech Nostalgia at 7:34 pm by thomas
I’ve been gone for quite a while from this blog… it’s been a busy few months!
To restart the blog, here first something geeky: 25 Microchips that Shook the World.
A great article with short histories of 25 chips that had wide-ranging influence on… really, everything. Between them, there is no part of modern human life that has not been transformed to be near-unrecognizable by their impact.
Permalink
