Category: history

Virtually Emulating First Loves

In an effort to re-ignite my first love whilst on my leave of absence – I’ve been looking for a good TRS-80 emulator to rekindle the flames of technical desire. Also over the last 4 weeks I’ve also had a small “side project” watching the goings on in the desktop virtualization space, especially on the Mac. Parallels has been an excellent investment to get Windows XP running on the MacBook Pro; just waiting for the ACPI/Direct3D (or VMWare for the Mac) version so I can run a build of Windows Vista.

Admission #1: the first computer my dad purchased for me was a TRS-80 Model I. Not the prettiest, nor the most powerful of machines – 1.77Mhz with 16Mb Kilobytes (I even accidently put Mb!) of RAM. Welcome to 1981. That’s right, 1981. 25 years/ a quarter of a century ago.

The best emulator for the TRS-80 is written by Matthew Reed. Found thanks to
Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site. So, I have TRS32 running inside Windows XP in Parallels on MacOS X. Shells within Shells.

Quest for the Key of Night Shade

Admission #2: the TRS-80 we owned stored data onto a cassette, not a floppy disk. Way-back when I was one of those computer-store kids. Thanks to the sales guys at Tandy Electronics/Radio Shack, we’d spend all day sitting on the computers typing in programs and occasionally demonstrating to prospective buyers. As floppy disks were expensive, we didn’t get access to storage – so TRSDOS was not an environment I was ever exposed to. Getting the emulator working involved remembering how to get BASIC working, and learning yet another OS.

Admission #3: I’ve watched zero minutes of Lord of the Rings. Even from DVD. Ever since the school librarian suggested I borrow The Hobbit, attempting to read a single page, and quickly returning the mush – I’ve actively avoided the fantasy genre. World of Warcraft drives me nuts. Sorry Neil and Mark!

Before this dispassion arose, I did get into one fantasy-style game on the TRS-80: “Quest for the Key of Nightshade”. It is strange how you remember names such as these for many years. Last week I found a version of the BASIC program, originally typed all the lines from a computer magazine into Basic and saved to cassette, on Ira’s website. From memory, this was written by a Canadian programmer and won “TRS-80 game of the year 1981” in some US magazine and was reprinted in 1982 by Australian Personal Computer.

The screen dump above is from this game. Ahh, the fond memories of our first loves.

“Fog of War”

If you have broadband, and a spare 2 hours to watch an excellent documentary: I can highly recommend this one:

From wikipedia: The film depicts the life of Robert McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, through the use of archival footage, White House recordings, and most prominently, an interview of McNamara at the age of 85. The subject matter spans from McNamara’s work as one of the “Whiz Kids” during World War II and at Ford to his involvement in the Vietnam War as the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

It is interesting how someone who was deeply involved in some of the most brutal parts of the mid-20th Century spent many years working at the World Bank. Searching for atonement?

Fog of War.

Thanks to Throw Away Your TV

Hodge History goes Windows Live

Hodge Family History in Windows Live Local Maps. Added some notes, for comments from those who might know more about the History of Melville Hodge.

A project over the last 2 months has been to research the history of one Melville Hodge. Born in 1803 in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland (yes, this is the home of golf), he is the fifth and last child, and second son of John Hodge and Elspeth Clarke. A theory I have here is that he did not take an apprenticeship, and moved to Cupar following is older brother, James.

In 1820 maps of Cupar and St Andrews, a Hodge owns a house in each town. Again, I have a theory that John Hodge was a Baker; and his son James once trained, moved a short distance west to Cupar.

In 1854, Melville, his wife and two children moved from Fife, Scotland to South Australia. Sadly, his wife died on the voyage. Melville remarried, and had a son in Australia: David Melville Hodge. David Melville is 5 generations removed from myself. Using a new rail line that ran through Fife to Edinburgh, through to Liverpool in the north of the UK.

As Australia is just about to go through another Census, some research on Scotland People, I found that the 1851 and 1841 Census’ were online. Quick searching produced Melville Hodge living near Cupar (pronounced Cooper to Australians!) in 1841, and Leuchars in 1851. In both, he is listed as an Agricultural Labourer. It is my hypothesis that he moved to South Australia for the opportunity to own land.

Melville intrigues me: he had wonderlust at a late stage in his life (he was over 50) and left his native Fife for Australia. I need to do more research on the early 1850’s in Fife around Cupar and Leuchars to get a feeling to why he moved, and to Australia rather than the US or to a large city.

David Melville, born in the 1860s near Angaston (Barossa Valley, South Australia) inherited this wonderlust: there is a diary of his travels to the far north-west of Australia in the late 19th Century.

As a “Dawkin-ist” when it comes to the Selfish Gene, in my Y-chromosome lives a part of Melville Hodge. Could the wonderlust many older generation immigrants to Australia and New Zealand — and need to see the world genetic? More research is required, and its fascinating how much you can do via these interweb of tubes.

References:

Hodge on Cupar Map, 1820

Clipping of 1841 Census Record

Carlsogie House, West of Cupar

Mungenet Blogging Platform version 5.0

The blogging platform history of Mungenet:

Version 1.0: self-coded Userland Frontier, version 2.0: Radio Userland, version 3.0: blogger.com, version 4.0: (self coded) mungenetengine.

Today, I’ve moved onto platform version 5.0: WordPress

Rather than re-coding a blogging engine to take into account all the Web 2.0 re/write hotness – moving to WordPress was a part-time project over the space of a week. Based on PHP, writing a plugin, import module and modifying the theme was a relatively easy project. WordPress is like a Lego base plate (or platform) from which a new mungenet may emerge.

The bulk of the content on www.nickhodge.com remains in the self-coded mungenetengine; and thanks to Apache mod_rewrite, CSS and some other small PHP smarts – WordPress has snapped into place.

Machiavelli

Reading a highly informative biography of Niccolo Machiavelli, the Renaissance thinker and writer on Power and Politics. Written by Michael White, from Perth, “Machiavelli: A Man Misunderstood” details the life-and-times of a man today renoun for the perjorative term Machiavellian. Whilst his most famous piece, The Prince, details the methods a prince (or leader) must undertake to gain and retain power in Renaissance Italy – it has modern day implications for all politcal operatives.

Note: For those in Sydney, Machiavelli’s also happens to be my favourite business lunching venue. Save up your dollars and head down to Clarence Street in the CBD for some hearty Tuscan/Italian food.

Defining Event for Australia

90 years ago today, a very young nation sent its men onto an obscure beach in another new country. Australia’s (and NZ’s) soldiers stormed the wrong beach on Gallipoli Peninsula. At the behest of Britain’s High Command, on the idea of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill; soldiers from multiple nations were attempting to take control of a bottleneck of control to the Black Sea and Russia. Turkey, also on the cusp of becoming a nation, defended and defeated the invaders.

It is paradoxical that Australia considers a major defeat-of-arms as the official day of rememberance and national holiday �(rather than November 11th). This goes to the heart of Australia’s laconic nature to thumb its nose at convention in this manner. After the 8 months of battle, where many thousands of soldiers died for no strategic gain; they left the peninsula without casualty.

To those who gave their lives for future generations; either by never returning to their families or those who returned changed men – the debt is difficult to measure.