Software Engineering and other forms of wizardry, by Bill P. Godfrey.
People sometimes ask if I’m worried that AI will put me out of a job. My honest answer is no, not really. In fact, I’ve been here before. The first time the machine out-coded me. When I graduated in the 90s, assembly language was still a respectable skill. I wrote most of my code in C, Continue reading "Am I worried AI will take my job?"
How’s that for a click‑bait title. Who in their right mind would defend the monstrosity that is the 8086 segmented memory architecture? By the time I got into 8086 assembly, PCs were mostly 80286‑based, but everything still ran under DOS. A “normal” machine only had the canonical 640KB of conventional memory and every assembly book Continue reading "8086 Segmented Memory Was a Good Idea.…
It started, as these things often do, with a tiny spark of inspiration. I was looking at the way Unicode builds those racially diverse family emoji. These use ZWJ sequences to glue together adults, children, and skin‑tone modifiers into a single little glyph. It’s clever, constrained, and surprisingly elegant. It gave me an idea. What Continue reading "On no! I ve invented SVG badly!"
Dear flat earthers, You might not realise it, but I do genuinely want to help you. I grew up in an environment where you question everything and take no one’s word for it, so I understand the instinct. I am a glober, but I don’t think you’re stupid — I just think you’re wrong. But Continue reading "Notes from a Helpful Glober — “Stationary”"
Every so often a project lodges itself in your brain and refuses to leave quietly. This began as a late‑night thought experiment, the kind that keeps circling until you either build it or write it down. For months it’s been pacing around the edges of my mind. What if I knew what I know now, Continue reading "Hearthfire Part One: Lighting the Flame"
When I was in high school, we measured Earth’s gravity. This number is known as g , or sometimes little g to distinguish it from big G which is something else. This is an acceleration, or the rate of change of speed over time. The number is in units of meters-per-second-per-second, which means starting from rest Continue reading "Let s Measure Gravity!"
What if 2001: A Space Odyssey was a TV series? (If you ve not seen the movie, Spoilers! Also none of this post will make any sense without knowing the movie. But mostly spoilers.) Episode 1: The Signal Cold Open A silent, eerie shot of the buried lunar monolith, half‑revealed by excavation lights. No explanation. Cut Continue reading "2001: A TV Series"
You hear this a lot. Someone wants to make a point about censorship, cryptography, or the futility of banning a particular blob of data. The argument goes like this: a file is just a sequence of 1s and 0s, and numbers are also sequences of 1s and 0s when written in binary. Therefore, banning a Continue reading " All files are numbers "
Years ago, I was watching a feel‑good segment on the local news about a garden centre that had launched a recycling scheme for their used plastic plant pots. Customers were encouraged to bring back the empties once they’d transplanted their new purchases into the garden. A wholesome little initiative, I thought. My warm glow lasted Continue reading "The Short History of a Very Confused Plant Pot"
This was my first ever publication. Wilf Hey, writer of the Programmers’ Workshop column in PC Plus, had run a contest to write what we’d now call a quine, but which he described as a “self‑creating program”, one that tells you what it does by producing its own source. By coincidence, I had just been Continue reading " Too Clever By Half "