2011 — 31 August: Wednesday

Happy birthday, Michael! Now which CEO and founder of which software house1 had this forthright (and accurate) opinion...

For the first 12 years we didn't develop software for the early IBM PC, simply because it was a lousy architecture, lousy processor and ran bad software (in our opinion at the time). It was successful for one reason only — the letters IBM. The Apple II computer was much more up our street, but was too expensive in the UK, and didn't sell enough.

Charles Moir in a Xara history


... back in the day? Some might even think that not all that much has changed.

My colleagues at IBM used to wonder why I stayed with Acorn's Archimedes RISC PCs. Yes, I had that LaserDirect printer system (it used a neat video interface and some fancy dithering algorithms to inject the high-resolution bitstream directly into the Canon's print engine with [generally] exquisite timing and results2), and my 203MHz StrongARM processor upgrade card was #119 out of the factory a mere 15 years ago :-)

For a change of pace...

... last night (keying in hundreds of UPC numbers can be a little tedious) I switched to using the same software to track down cover artwork images and details of some, at least, of the various DVDs I've burned for myself over the years (copies of laser-rotting LaserDiscs, films broadcast on 'the telly', and so on). A fun exercise bringing the total (before I resume) to 1,174. It's all now visible here, by the way.

Breakfast, Mrs Landingham? It's about time, after all. A steam train has just gone chuffing past... has there been a Time warp?

[Pause]

Lunch seemed like a good idea (it's now 13:14) as my shaky hands were proving incapable of threading a network cable through the little hole in the wall I'd supervised Peter drill through from his room into what's now my reading room. Of course, it may just have been muscle fatigue from shifting the upstairs stack of A/V kit (most unused, but merely stored on the rack) out of the way. The Roku SoundBridge network music player — I've actually found all its documentation, too late, of course — will now live upstairs and spend its time listening to the Firefly server running on that unfeasibly tiny Asus white box. With any luck, it will pass on what it hears to me via the tiny audio system I now have up there.

[Pause]

With a little rebooting, all is well. But I have too much music for easy access when the interface is a tiny two-line display. I really must look into Roku playlists, or resign myself to a life of random shuffle playing. It's 16:24 and time for the letter "H".

  

Footnotes

1  30 years ago!
2  It paid for itself several times over in freelance work.