test please delete

[DS23]

who is online at this time on boxing day i wonder?

[DS23]

DS23, bored, Clippy, clwd, d000hg, IR35 Avoider, shoes, thunderlizard

[DS23]

bugger. i need to learn the shortcuts.

[NickFitz]

"Oh, Lucky Jim,
How I envy him"

As I was walking back from the pub, Lucky Jim came past in his brand new bright red Ferrari. Unfortunately he didn't seem to have got the hang of driving it at 30mph (as in, he was doing so, but with great difficulty and much hopping along), leading somebody eating on the pavement outside a burger shop to shout "Three days until it turns into a pumpkin, yer poser!"

He then pulled into the petrol station over the road (just in time for me to arrive). However he initially tried to go to the wrong side of the pumps for the filling cap (admit it, we've all done it in a new car) and, being uncertain of where the car's corners were, had to order his mate out to assist him in reversing and moving forward without hitting the surrounding scenery

I was tempted to scuttle over the road and ask if he minded me taking a photo of his new car

[NickFitz]

that's the one.

My MacBookPro at ClientCorp was 2.2... it flew :-)

On the other hand I found the keyboard harder to work with (possibly because I don't touch-type) to the extent that I'd rather have a faster MacBook (i.e. like yours) than get a Pro... I mean a MacBook Pro, for the smutty-minded...

[NickFitz]

bugger. i need to learn the shortcuts.

If you mean on the Mac, the OS X help file is actually worthwhile (the Help menu when in the Finder) - try putting

shortcut lists

in the 'Help Viewer" search box and you'll get a list of the various categories of shortcuts that apply to various contexts, such as "Shortcuts for menus", "Shortcuts for copying and moving files" and, because nobody, not even Apple, is perfect, the all-important "Shortcuts for freezes"

FYI, you can use a certain key combination when starting your Mac which will drop you into the command line of the firmware - the place you'd be on a PC if a PC's BIOS had a command line. The Mac uses the Open Firmware architecture, which means that the equivalent-of-a-primitive-PC-style-BIOS is written in FORTH. So at that command line you have a fully-functional FORTH environment, if you fancy a bit of Reverse Polish

[NickFitz]

Enough of the Mac FanBoyism.

So, that Vista, huh?! Rocks, huh?! (breaks down in laughter )

I'm sorry, I can't manage that

Earlier this year I was at Microsoft's place in Reading in the week Vista was released to the UK consumer market. They had an inflatable "WOW" by the duckpond.

Losers

[NickFitz]

I appear to be here alone.

Shall I write naughty words on the wall?

Shall I shove the bog brush round the bend as far as I can, break the handle off, then defecate on it and vomit on top of that?

Shall I surreptitiously deploy one of those wretched plug-in "air fresheners"?

Or shall I take the opportunity to relax at home, in the way one never can when one has to drive back to London 60 hours hence?

The latter I think - so , and to whoever gets the xx000

Oh, and to Carling and/or AtW if they pop in - manly in AtW's case, of course

[NickFitz]

For some reason (possibly related to my earlier ruminations on Open Firmware), my mind has turned to the glorious beauty of the FORTH - or, as I prefer to call it, Forth, either form being acceptable, according to its creator, Chuck Moore - as I was saying, the glorious beauty of the Forth programming language.

I have always taken particular delight in the fact that all Forth development environments incorpororated a Reverse Polish assembler.

SEI B0FF LDA 47 # EOR 23 # CMP CLI

... and so on

Those were the days...

BTW, don't try to run that - it does nothing but corrupt the accumulator and the ALU-dependent status flags on your 6502. Might work on a 6809 too, actually.


Well, that's not quite all it does: if it so happens that the result of exclusive-oring the value of the contents of memory location 0xB0FF with 0x47 is exactly equal to 0x23 then the Z flag will be set. If the result of exclusive-oring the value of the contents of memory location 0xB0FF with 0x47 is greater than or equal to 0x23 then the C flag will be set.

Oh, and whether the interrupt disable flag is set or reset when the code is entered, it will definitely be reset when the code exits.

[Diver]

Morning