Fun
06:11 Monday, 22 December 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 20.64°F Pressure: 1033hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 4.07mph
Words: 817
I really enjoyed Saturday's Tinderbox meetup. I always enjoy the social aspect of these virtual get-togethers, but there is often a performance element to these meetings, and that's part of the attraction as well.
And by "performance," I mean that someone, usually Michael Becker, demonstrates how to get Tinderbox to do something. And Tinderbox is a rich playground for performing "programming."
On Saturday, it was Jacob Evans performing, and it was something to behold.
The added benefit is that we often learn something in the process.
Earlier that morning, I'd skimmed this blog post from Les Orchard. In case you didn't click through, the title of the post is Making Computers Do Things Is Fun. If you're into making computers do things, it's probably worth clicking through.
I was born the year Russia orbited Sputnik, and the Space Age (and "race") was born. When I was at the Naval Academy, the micro-computer revolution was just getting started. My introduction to computers, as I've mentioned here before, was in a class that was intended to teach both calculus and programming, and I had no real way to wrap my brain around either concept, let alone putting them together in one class. Two five credit hour Ds did nothing to advance my academic opportunities. While I graduated with a designated degree in ocean engineering, passed the Engineer In Training exam, and scored in the 90-somethingth percentile in the GRE, my 2.2 QPR barred me from a graduate degree on the navy's dime.
Not a huge disappointment, I was never a "good" student, but it remains something of a regret.
Anyway, I acquired a bad opinion of "computing" from my experience using a timesharing Honeywell mainframe in hot little soundproof booths, housing the teletype terminals we used to "interact" with the computer.
But I recall that I was enamored with programmable calculators. A lot of engineering is "plug and chug," the cognitive portion of it is recognizing the problem to be solved, and the appropriate equations to solve it. After that, it's just grunt work with pencil and graph paper, and I was happy to let my TI-57 do that part.
That was fun.
So, after a couple of years in the fleet, after President Reagan and his administration gave the military a pretty big pay raise, and allowed unmarried officers on sea duty to draw Basic Allowance for Quarters, I had a lot more disposable income. (If you were on sea duty, you had "quarters" aboard the ship. If you wanted to live out in town, you had to do it on your own dime. Of course, if you were married, then you got BAQ anyway. I think there were two separate rates though, "married" and "single," and on shore duty, unmarried officers were entitled to draw "single" BAQ. I digress.)
And I've related here before that I began to encounter micro-computers in stores, and seeing them put text and graphics on a television screen was an epiphany for me, which got me started in the Apple ecosystem.
I can't say I really learned very much with the Apple II until several years later, when I as a lieutenant commander on the Atlantic Fleet staff, I took a course in Pascal programming at Old Dominion University. Another O-4 on the staff and I took it together. We were both Apple II users, and wanted to learn more about programming.
That was the class that finally made computers kind of make sense to me, to the extent that they ever have. I think I got a B in it, because, you know, "never a 'good' student."
The class used Borland's Turbo Pascal, my staff buddy and I used Instant Pascal, which was a Pascal interpreter, but could do all the homework assignments.
UCSD Pascal on the Apple II was an operating system and development environment. It was expensive, and you had to learn a whole new way of managing files, had to compile your programs and so on. It was a pretty heavy lift for just trying to learn "programming."
Anyway, pretty much everything I know about "programming," which ain't much, I learned in that Pascal course using Instant Pascal.
Fast forward to today, and I can muddle through a certain amount of AppleScript, and I'm probably a little better with Tinderbox Action Code, though I'm by no means as fluent as Jacob Evans, Michael Becker, Jack Baty or Mark Anderson.
But what little I can do is often fun. Sometimes it's frustrating, but mostly it's fun.
And the thing that Applesoft BASIC, Instant Pascal, AppleScript and Tinderbox Action Code all have in common is that they're interpreted languages, which makes them far more interactive, and it's the interaction with the computer, the instant feedback, that makes it fun. At least, when stuff, you know, works.
So, yeah, making computers do things is fun.
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05:33 Monday, 22 December 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 20.91°F Pressure: 1033hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 7.63mph
Words: 247
Not entirely to revisit my complaints against markdown, I'd just like to mention an issue I've been grappling with just using "plain" text.
The objection to styled text is that it complicates processing strings, makes it harder for the computer get to the "data" through the "representation." Styling, or representation, is often handled in different ways by different applications, and that adds overhead for both programmers and programs. "Plain" text removes all that burden.
But "plain" text is, today, Unicode. I won't pretend that I understand what that chart in the linked Wikipedia web page means, except to say I think "plain" text today now encompasses over 100K characters, some of which are hard for humans distinguish from one another. These are called homographs, kind of like homonyms, and that particular human weakness is exploited in homograph attacks.
Where I encounter this vulnerability is using Text Sniper to capture text from program listings in books and magazines at archive.org. Many of these documents are relatively low resolution scans, or low contrast, often of dot matrix printouts, and Text Sniper tries to match this ambiguous graphical representation agains the entire universe of Unicode. As a result, I spend a lot of time correcting "typos," that are usually just homograph errors. I sent an email to the support address, asking for a setting to limit recognition to ASCII text.
You know, "plain" text.
Hence the old saying, "If it ain't ASCII, it ain't plain."
The beat goes on...
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