test please delete

[NickFitz]

Exercise bike done

I wasn’t going to bother today, figuring that a brisk walk round a few blocks this evening would see me right, but I seem to have got sufficiently in the habit that not doing it would have felt like an unwarranted disruption of my routine

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I am a creature of habit. Most of those habits have traditionally been things like “sitting down” and “eating” but it doesn’t take much to get a new one sufficiently ingrained to become part of the routine, and it seems that even works with repellent stuff like “exercise”

[NickFitz]

It seems they treated the Z80 implementation as the canonical source and had a translation tool that would convert that into the assembly language of other target processors; clever stuff. I encountered something similar for converting 6502 to 8086 but it turns out that highly-optimised C64 code isn’t worth converting to anything else, as all the important stuff has to be rewritten from scratch anyway and the rest tends to be spaghetti

The output of their tool would no doubt also have required some degree of manual tidying, but a BASIC interpreter would have had a clearer separation of concerns than some C64 game written by a 16-year-old, and the platform-dependent stuff was isolated in its own module for the exact purpose of allowing quick porting to different platforms. But obviously nobody bothered wasting any time changing the comments for the stuff that just went straight through

[NickFitz]

For lunch today, a roast pork and apple sauce bap (white). Very tasty

[DoctorStrangelove]

The design, such as it was, of the 8086 was apparently like that so 8080 code could be run through a converter to get 8086 code, presumably in a form suitable for a .com executable.

Z80 code is much the same as 8080 code as we CP/M programmers well remember.

Bit of a pity the assembler mnemonics are different.

Cottons out of the TD.

Freecell score (final for today): 84%, running average, unsurprisingly: 83%.

<hiatus>

Tea: Tesco battered haddock (rather more oily than M&S, might get the breaded one next time), orange segments & custard, 0.91 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Rather a fine tea as it transpired, the peas (BBE Oct 2012) were rather nice too.

Entertainment: TBD.

[NickFitz]

Pleasant enough evening out there now

Only 17°C and still a tad breezy, but it's holding at about 22° in here even with one of the windows as open as it'll go.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Entertainment: TBD.

After much contemplation over 20 minutes or so, the selected epic was "Give 'em hell Malone (2009)".

Give 'em Hell Malone (2009) - IMDb

It's an alternate universe sort of film noir.

Liked the car, a 1952 Chop Top Buick Straight 8.

Which doesn't really explain why it sounds like a V8.

Inneresting gun, being one of that rare things, an automatic revolver.

Mateba Autorevolver - Wikipedia

All in all it was just about alright.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been a pork chop, chips, peas, and gravy. Lovely it was

I got these pork chops off the market before *gestures broadly* all this malarkey. I ought to go back before too many people start infesting the city centre again

[NickFitz]

Brisk walk round a couple of blocks or so, and my exercise quota for the day has been fulfilled

I’m still pretty unfit, but I’m beginning to feel some small degree of improvement now, particularly on the walks

[DoctorStrangelove]

Entertainment (continued): The Beiderbecke Affair E1, wherein Trevor Chaplin purchases 4 Bix Beiderbecke LPs off a platinum blonde door to door sales lady, but receives 4 totally unrelated LPs.

I thought it was a long time since I'd seen it.

(c) 1984.

The Beiderbecke Affair (TV Mini-Series 1985) - IMDb

San Quentin High.

[DaveB]

It's a bit breezy out there.

Mind you, it's a bit breezy in here too. Curry and a beer for dinner....