Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Those Were The Days My Friends
This would be another update post. I am still writing up a "Larry's Life" entry about last weekend. Up to 2,000 words so far. I expect it will top out at 4,000-5,000 -- so decent in length but not a record for these posts. I have some other episodes that I should fill the gaps in with. Maybe this thing will end up as a book someday. If so, I will have to go back and do a lot more proof reading. I browsed through some of the older posts and am amazed how many mistakes there are. Things like "their" for "they're" and "there", not to mention whole missing words that must have been in my head but never made it to my fingers.I still haven't worked on improvements to MEME Watch or Zen Image, but only FGL and I are using MEME Watch. Zen Image has yet to have its first comment from someone other than myself. The Graffiti Board has no entries yet for May. I'm not really complaining, I still like the way Zen Image looks at the top of the page, and if I don't post, at least the picture changes. MEME Watch will eventually get graphs and Zen Image will eventually have a past posts page, but now I have a new toy in mind to code and may start tomorrow. The game will be an online version of Star Trek. Nothing fancy, a board based like game you play against the computer, but could play offline with a chessboard against other people. The thing that makes this project of interest to me is that it would be the resurrection of a Game I coded back in 1978 on a TI-55 calculator with a max of 56 calculator program steps and 8 variables. The game rules required typing in pairs of numbers representing board locations and reading pairs of numbers representing opponent's moves. The resurrection will be decidedly more user friendly. The basic premise was to find 3 cloaked Klingon ships and destroy them before their randomly fired shots depleted your shields. It borrowed a lot from battleship, though I never actually played that game. The challenge to myself will be to see if I can code this game in less than an hour in PERL and HTML. As I remember it was quite the chore to shoehorn this thing into a TI-55. In those days I salivated over getting an Apple ][ with 64k and a 1mhz 8 bit 6502 processor. My machine now is a 32bit 3ghz+ Pentium with 1 gig memory, 200 gig+ disk drive, Dual Monitors, and HDTV tuner card. Even without adjusting for inflation the cost was about the same as the Apple ][ I wanted back then.
Wow a wave of nostalgia washes over me having found a picture of the old girl to go along with this post.
