vivdunstan

Hyperland (1990)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:28:54 GMT

Very belatedly watching the 1990 documentary “Hyperland” about hypertext, starring Douglas Adams (who wrote it) and Tom Baker. It originally aired on the BBC just as Martin and I were starting as undergraduate students at St Andrews.

And for the computer science folks, my St Andrews CS PhD which I had to drop out of in 1996 due to my progressive neurological disease (still not then diagnosed properly) was about creating a system to support hypercode, a hypertext like programming system built on underlying persistence technology.

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Old style coding

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:57:00 GMT

Martin just describing his daily programming practice on the computer for work. “I use vi. I don’t use a GUI.” Yup, that’s him 😜

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Wordpress wrangling

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 11:30:25 GMT

Still working on my list of fave/rec books published one for each year of my life. Last night I managed to figure out how to persuade Wordpress to support expanding/collapsing details if you click on a title.** So then added expanding notes for the 1970s portion of the list. 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s to do another time!

** which more than anything else reminds me of Occam's folding editor I used to program in for a brief period as an undergraduate!

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Still compiling - nearly finished! - my list of fave/rec books published per year of my life to 2024

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 19:16:47 GMT

Now up to 51/53 of the year entries chosen and filled. Was highly amused when I mentioned before dinner to Martin that I'd just added a "certain programming book". And he knew immediately which one it was. Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language. Which was a life saver in 1991/2 during a particularly problematic (lecturing wise) portion of my computer science undergraduate degree at St Andrews.

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"1 records found"

Wed, 28 May 2025 10:14:31 GMT

Finally getting around to contacting ScotlandsPeople to ask if they could fix their code so it doesn't report "1 records found" in search results rather than "1 record found". That's really poor programming, as hammered into computer science students in my 1st year class 35 years ago at St Andrews!

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The Visible Zorker

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:32:34 GMT

Gosh this looks fun from Andrew Plotkin: The Visible Zorker, a new way of visualising the game source code being executed as interactive fiction / text adventure game Zork 1 is played.

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Musing favourite computing books

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 14:34:02 GMT

Me just now: “I wonder what my 3rd favourite computing book would be?” I rediscovered my 2nd favourite today, complete with school prize bookplate in there. I had form for spending school prizes on computing books! Even a 5th year French prize on a Pascal programming book 😜 Will ponder. Then probably blog about it. So far we’re talking 1980s though.

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Python check

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 09:00:53 GMT

Double checking that my family reconstitution code still runs ok on my MacOS upgraded Mac. The only Python program I have ever written. 233 lines of Python code (upgraded a while back to Python 3) to reconstitute families from baptism and marriage indexes from Scottish parish registers. After figuring out the families it outputs all the resulting family groups in GEDCOM format to load into an external lineage linked genealogy database. Still gobsmacked the code basically worked first time 😜

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Struggling to visualise Moria in Lord of the Rings reread

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 03:46:16 GMT

I'm continuing my reread of The Fellowship of the Ring. And the party have just got through Moria. But I was struggling hugely to visualise in my mind the different rooms and levels that the party were going through, especially later on in their time in Moria. But I can remember a time when I could visualise them clearly. For many years. So this seems to be something I've lost since, or can't do now anyway. It's not that I'm not remembering the Peter Jackson movie version. But my image of the journey through Moria was memorably different from the movie I saw in 2001. I remember clearly having "thoughts" about the film's depiction of Moria, and how different it was from how I imagined it looked ever since I'd started reading the book for the first time as a young child. But now I can't really visualise any geography at all as I read.

Relatively recently I tried an aphantasia online test. And scored highly. Which would fit with my struggles to visualise things in my mind now. Including faces. Even very close family! But I'm now wondering after this LOTR rereading experience if it's something that I've developed more in recent years. Perhaps as a result of my progressive neurological illness.

When I was young I could visualise things, and draw from images in my mind. However when my neurological illness started in 1994 at age 22 I quickly noticed my ability to think abstractly diminishing. Rather a big problem for a computer science PhD student needing to program. I quickly lost the ability to program effectively in lots of languages. Though at the time I just coped as best as I could. It's more distressing looking back.

So yup, I wonder if visualisation is another loss with time, perhaps due to my long term illness. It's partly also why I dreaded designing cover art for my latest IFComp game. But hey, got there!

Curiouser and curiouser anyway. I am enjoying my LOTR reread despite this. Next up Lothlorien.

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Game coding

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 20:10:27 GMT

Brain in gear enough finally at some point this week so I was just able to quickly code most of the final section of my latest interactive fiction / text adventure game that I will be entering in IFComp 2024. This isn't all the game coded by any means. I have much to go back and finish / fill in / expand. But hey, it's playable right through now! And I'm having fun playing - oh no I mean testing! - it 😜 Written in Inform 7/10, a natural language / declarative / object oriented programming language.

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Declarative / imperative

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 15:42:30 GMT

Good spurt of IFComp game coding. Inform 7/10 is a largely declarative language, very like coding in Prolog. But sometimes you have to go imperative. And I've just coded a ridiculously large set of nested IF ... OTHERWISE ... statements to handle a key situation. Now approaching the end of the game, though still have masses of earlier stuff to go back and finish off writing properly.

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Coding by playing

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:32:38 GMT

Back to Inform interactive fiction text adventure coding, and there's something really magical about trying early stages of the game myself as a player, thinking "This is the experience I want the player to have here", then coding it, replaying to try it out myself, tweaking and so on. Like alchemy! It is a phenomenally iterative process, and it does take time. But it's stupidly fun. I never had this much fun with programming during my computer science degree, when we learned loads of languages and IDEs. This is just brill.

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90s throwback

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:52:19 GMT

Me to Martin just now: “It’s like an Occam folding editor!” as I try to explain cut/spoiler sections in DreamWidth blog posts. That won’t make any sense except to fellow computer scientists possibly of a certain vintage. But sharing for them! I can still vividly remember coding Occam in the Edge basement Sun lab on the Scores in St Andrews in the early 1990s.

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