95% Chimp

I turned on my work PC this morning to be greeted with the 'Your password has expired, please enter a new one...' screen. OK, hit enter to be taken to a new screen with three text entry boxes. The top one labeled 'old password' was already filled out for me - good. The next two were labeled 'new password' and 'confirm new password' or something very similar... I can't remember verbatim. The text entry cursor was already set to the 'new password' box so I typed in my new password and hit enter... 'ERROR: Passwords Don't Match' Of course they don't match - I've only entered one you stupid machine. OK, press enter to try again. This time my old password was not filled out for me for some reason, so I entered my old password but this time, using my experience of how stupid computer UI's can be, rather than hit enter to complete my old password I pressed tab... this took me to the next text entry box... new password.....

Aah, here I am again... trying to kick-start this blog into shape. The plan of course is to write in here more often and actually include some stuff that I'm doing or mooching about with. So here goes... again... My latest hobby stuff is writing a stochastic path tracer, which is a kind of ray tracer. It 's all the fault of Peter Shirley and his ' Ray Tracing in A Weekend ' books on Kindle, which are a decent little kick-start into the topic. My weapon of choice for doing my own version of a path tracer is Qt on Linux... which should give a lot of options for platform and capabilities. It's going OK so far - in the limited time I give it - but I'm still partial to over-engineering various non-critical parts of the code. Although I'm aware of it at least this time, I'm still letting myself do a bit of faffing, just because why not... it's all good practice writing code I've not necessarily done before in any sort of anger. The upshot of the ...

The last few years has seen a crop of high quality game developer oriented channels on YouTube. I'm not talking about 'how do I do xxx' channels here... I'm talking about channels which spend time on game analysis and drilling deeper into game development companies and individuals. Here's a few you should watch... Ahoy Game Dev Underground No Clip Game Makers Toolkit

A few years ago I inherited a couple of binders full of old computer magazines from my father-in-law. He was a radio HAM and was a keen computer enthusiast back in his day. What I found inside the binders were the first 20 issues of the UK computing magazine Personal Computer World... in mint condition. In an effort to save these magazines from the ravages of time I'm going to scan them in and put them on here. This first post contains issue 1 from February 1978. If anyone finds this useful and would like me to scan the rest of them in please get in touch... from what I can tell this stuff isn't available anywhere else on the internet. My aim here isn't to abuse copyright or annoy anyone who was involved in the magazine... I'm putting this stuff here because it is important historical documentation about the birth of home computing. If anyone has any copyright issues please get in touch. Enjoy... ...