Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCVII

[northernladuk]

Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode - Ken Shirriff excels himself here, explaining the hidden/unused instructions of the 8086, with microcode listings:

Love trying to make sense of these 8086 articles but this one is totally beyond me. When he says stuff like

An inconvenient part of segment addressing is that if you want to access more than 64K, you need to change the segment register

One tricky part is that the FARRET micro-subroutine examines bit 3 of the instruction to determine whether it does a near return or a far return.

You know he loves what he is doing. I mean, yeah, that FARRET the tricky little rapscallion.

[northernladuk]

Stags Hens & Bunnies, A Blackpool Story - Dougie Wallace photographs groups of revellers in the seaside resort.

Well those pictures have pushed Blackpools tourism drive backwards about 20 years. 20+ reasons never to go back to that hell hole again.

[NickFitz]

The flying gokart thing appears to be behind a paywall.

Aaaagh! How come I was able to read it the other day?

Give me a few minutes, I'll find a substitute

[DoctorStrangelove]

The flying gokart thing appears to be behind a paywall.

[NickFitz]

The government may be running out of ideas, but there's no need to follow their example - you're bound to find a few in this lot

• The Man Who Pierced the Iron Curtain in a Flying Go-Kart – and Left Civilization Forever - The story of Ivo Zdarsky, who crossed the Iron Curtain in 1984, flying a homemade aircraft: ”The Trabant engine came in hot from the east at around 700 feet, then lazily circled over the sleeping city with no apparent plan… Rotating on the engine’s drive shaft whirred a fiberglass propeller. Engine and prop were bolted to the backend of a skeletal go-kart contraption with a hammock-like seat and landing gear consisting of three wheels previously employed by wheelbarrows.” EDIT: FFS, it's been paywalled (HT to DoctorStrangelove for spotting it). Instead, try this interview with Ben Tarnoff about the encroaching privatisation of the Internet: Mediaquake: Internet for the People
• How Far Will Salmon Swim for a Craft Beer? - ”Guided by the odors they imprint on in their youth, most adult salmon famously return to spawn in the stream where they were born… Several years from now, however, if scientists at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center have their way, some chinook salmon will be chasing a very different scent: the rich, beery bouquet of brewer’s yeast.” Cheers!
• How to Build a Big Prime Number - ”A new algorithm brings together the advantages of randomness and deterministic processes to reliably construct large prime numbers.”
• Bizarre ancient sea creature brings evolution mystery to the surface - ”Beneath the waves, there are strange, almost alien creatures that raise questions about the evolution of life on Earth and our own earliest origins. The answers might be hiding in tunicates. Tunicates are filter-feeding invertebrates that include sea squirts and salps.” I can't help but feel that the kinds of lives these things have confirm that we did the right thing, moving on to the land
• Berlin's Cold War Cage Fight - ”I still tease my mother from time to time about the fact that if it hadn’t been for her intervention, I would probably be doing my dream job right now: scrubbing an elephant’s backside with a giant broom… My love for zoos is intrinsically linked to growing up in East Germany. I was only four when the Berlin Wall fell in the autumn of 1989 but some of the clearest memories I have of the time before contain peacocks, bears and said elephants.” Katja Hoyer, author of the recently-published book Beyond the Wall, on the rival zoos of East and West Berlin.
• My Health and Wellness Plan? Icelandic Horses - ”Serious illness gave our writer an urgent need for physical and spiritual rebirth. She found both by bonding with a unique riding breed that seems touched by Viking spirit.” Nice horses
• Imagineering Style Guide ’94 - ”It doesn’t get more niche than this, but here we are… The Walt Disney Imagineering Style Guide (1994). This document would be used by writers in the company to make sure everybody is using the proper terminology, trademarks, punctuation, and phrasing.” Whatever you do, don't commit the gaffe of saying "cafeteria" - as any fule kno, it's a buffeteria!
• Fast - ”Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.” The iPod only took about 290 days from starting the project to launch
• Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode - Ken Shirriff excels himself here, explaining the hidden/unused instructions of the 8086, with microcode listings: ”Early microprocessors didn't include the circuitry to detect illegal instructions, since the chips didn't have transistors to spare. Instead these processors would do something, but the results weren't specified… Most of them are simply duplicates of regular instructions, but a few have unexpected behavior, such as revealing the values of internal, hidden registers. In the 8086, most instructions are implemented in microcode, so examining the 8086's microcode can explain why these instructions behave the way they do.”
• Stags Hens & Bunnies, A Blackpool Story - Dougie Wallace photographs groups of revellers in the seaside resort.
  

Happy invoicing!