Thefoggiest.dev

February 20, 2025

A few days ago, one of my kids asked me why our TV was called Hypnotoad. He was standing next to me when I was changing some settings.

At my first job, the hostnames we used internally, were names of different kinds of trees. I don't know where that idea came from. I worked for microbiologists, but perhaps protein names don't work for host names. Anyway, I quickly learned not to set up a server with names like apebroodboom because it's simply too much to type when ssh'ing into that server.

I forgot what hostname I chose the time I first installed Linux on my PC but I remember reading Douglas Adams' the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I added a second monitor, so I changed it's hostname to Zaphod. If a PC without a monitor is called headless, one with two monitors surely can be called double-headed, right? It remained the hostname of all my subsequent PCs, even though I now use a single, albeit very wide, screen.

By the time that the number of devices in my household - that I needed to be able to ping or ssh into - grew larger than one, I was watching Futurama, so my server became Bnder, and, apart from Zaphod, I stuck with Futurama characters since. I've even made it into a little hobby of mine to select the perfect character names. I decided on Hypnotoad for our living room TV, because of the effect it has on our children, and my Pi-hole is on a RaspberryPI that is approached as Hermes. My Acer Nitro laptop with its red and black theme and flexible cheap plastic casing is called Flexo.

My son is eleven, so I suppose it's about time he knows what a hostname is. I think he's still a bit too young to watch Futurama though.

February 17, 2025

Consider the following musical fragment:

Schönberg, Verklärte Nacht, first violin, m171-185

For our last project, we split our orchestra in two. The wind section performed Mozart’s Gran Partita while the strings were playing Arnold Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The latter is one of the most difficult pieces I’ve had to master for this orchestra. Having played the violin since I was very young, I’ve never been afraid of heights, so to speak, and this piece is even from Schonberg’s tonal period. Still, when in measure 170 the melody climbs well above the bar, the chromatics become disorienting quite fast.

Whenever I encounter something like this, I have a secret trick, and it involves a bit of coding on an MSX:

10 ’Schoenberg, Verklaerte Nacht
20 ’175
30 PLAY "t60"
40 PLAY "o5l8e-.l16dl4a-.l8gc-b-"
50 PLAY "o5l8e-.l16dl4a-.l8gc-b-"
60 PLAY "o5l8e-.l16dl4a-.l8gc-b-"
70 PLAY "l8d-cag#o4bb-o5gf#"
80 PLAY "t90"
90 PLAY "l8fdo4ba-do3bg#fdfg#b"
100 PLAY "o4dfg#bo3bo4dfg#bo5do4g#o5f"

In MSX BASIC there is the PLAY command, that accepts a string that it translates into commands for the internal sound chip. That string is just codified musical notation, so it’s really easy to type in a fragment like the one above. The characters A through G will play the according note, t<x> will set the tempo in x beats per minute, just like my metronome, o<x> will change the octave to x (1-8) and l<x> will set the length of each subsequent note to 1/xth of a full 4/4 measure. Following a note with a minus or pound sign will flatten or sharpen it and a dot will add one half of its length. If you compare the notes with the code, you can see I’ve started coding at measure 175. Sadly, MSX BASIC doesn’t know about triplets, so I had to cheat by changing the tempo in line 80.

Coding this costs me a few minutes and when it’s done, I can play it in a low tempo until I have the melody firmly in my head and I can focus on rehearsing it to get it in tune. It’s a really effective method, and I’ve been doing as long as I can remember. My father, who was a musical teacher and choir conductor, used an Atari ST with Notator Alpha to do the same thing, but turning on an MSX will immediately land you in BASIC and to me, typing these strings with commands is faster than dragging the notes onto a bar with an Atari Mouse. My father used a keyboard attached to the Atari’s MIDI ports, of course, but I’m lousy at playing the piano, so for me that’s hardly an option.

On an Atari, putting in the floppy and waiting for the program to load, was all that required your patience. Starting a MIDI environment, with or without a MIDI attached keyboard, on a modern PC, is even more involved. And that is why, as far I know, nothing beats my MSX BASIC solution in sheer effectiveness.

February 13, 2025

I have been working as a programmer at the Dutch Railways (NS) for three years. In my team, we work, of course, Agile/Scrum with three-weekly sprints, the daily standup and other meetings such as reviews and retrospectives (retros). Especially those retros always used to last a very long time and were often overly imaginative. Role plays, expressing feelings with lego, everything came along. I just participated, but I didn’t always feel really taken seriously. And if anything was learned from it, it was forgotten five sprints later. But in this, our retros did not differ from what I was used to from other employers.

When I started at NS, I landed in a large team of about fourteen people. We had a product owner, a full-time scrum master, a UX designer, an architect and a few testers. About half of the team were programmers, including myself. With that team, we worked on a growing number of APIs built in Dotnet, Java and Kotlin, which mainly ensured that people could rent one of our 20,500 nation-wide available OV-bikes or park their own bikes in our bicycle parking garages. At first glance, this is not a very complex matter, but if analysts and other colleagues are allowed to come up with sub-products for seven years, then more and more code has to be added. So much more, in fact, that those APIs continued to grow in number and size to such an extent that we slowly lost control.

A bicycle parking at a train station

For six months now, under the guidance of a new architect, we have been working on a project to make the APIs a bit more specific again and to split the team in two workable ones. However, this coincides with a budgetary problem, so it has been decided that all teams of the department have to make do with a total of two scrum masters. They won’t have time for retrospectives any more, so we have to do those on our own now.

The first thing we decided was to keep them simple from now on. Two columns with post-its: one for what went well and one for what could be improved. No more lego. One of my team members called it retros for adults. I don't know about that, but it's certainly refreshing.

Perhaps we'll even learn a thing or two from them.

February 10, 2025

In a blog post called Evolving Together: Redefining Mozilla in the AI Era, Mozilla president Mark Surman states that Mozilla is restructuring because it needs to diversify its revenue stream. That’s fair enough, but I have doubts with their two-prong solution being A.I. and privacy respecting ads.

First, open source A.I. is a tricky thing, because both the code base and the training data need to be open source for it, which means users need to be able to inspect, fork and change them and contribute to them. For the massive amounts of data required for an LLM to function at least a little, that’s hardly imaginable.

But what I really can’t agree with is the statement that the web needs free (as in gratis) content and that without advertisements, this can’t be. My point, see this blog (perhaps not including this particular rant). Not only does it not have ads, I daresay most of its content has a lot more originality and quality than all those well-SEO’d (Search Engine Optimised) sites that pop up on top when you do a Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or any other online search.

A bill board advertising SEO next to a traffic jam. It reads “We know Google’s secret”

They don't raise the bar high, though. When comparing sites like GeeksForGeeks, Hackr.io, Medium, DigitalOcean and others they seem to just scrape sites with actual original content, and each other, to repeat it, often incorrectly, decorated with ads and other trackers. They’re getting search engines to put them high up in the results, overwhelming the user and thereby preventing them to find useful content. The ad-sustained free internet model that Surman talks about inherently makes it so that sites must work like this to increase their income.

Meanwhile I pay for my newspaper, for Nebula and other online services that I use without going via a search engine, and they do in fact deliver quality, without SEO and mostly without ads. So while the part of the free internet that is sustained by ads is useless, if not unbearable, others, like those found on the indieweb, actually produce original content for free without needing ads, instead often being sustained by donations. I would be perfectly willing to buy a licence to use Firefox or another browser, based on the quality of its product. In fact, I am paying for it, but I increasingly wonder why.

The free internet model is useless and obnoxious. Ads ruin the internet. It is better off without them.

February 06, 2025

As of late I’ve been binging this person’s videos and one I particularly enjoyed was one where they list their top five computers from between 1980 and 1985 and judge them on how good they were. Not per se for gaming, but for serious stuff, like word processing, programming, and general fitness for functioning in the (home) office or classroom. For that purpose, these machines need a proper keyboard, the right amount and types of output ports, an actual operating system and a well populated ecosystem with supporting hardware expansions and such. The original 48K ZX Spectrum came last. I find that hilarious, since Clive Sinclair famously marketed all of his machines as professional apparel and would have none of that silly gaming business. Honestly, I was surprised it even made the list, because it had precisely none of the requirements mentioned.

Retrobyte’s Top 5 Retro Computers (links to video)

A few days ago, while driving back home with my son after attending a concert given by his bassoon teacher, my son asked me if the MSX computers that he plays games on were ever used for other things than games, to which I responded with a resounding “yes”. Of course, I told him, there was no internet, but when I went to university, all I had was an MSX with a printer, so that’s what I used to hand in my essays. I didn’t need anything else, and for documentation you went to the library, not the internet. There was of course also programming, and online banking.

An ad from 1986 showing an MSX2 with a modem, connected to the BBS of the Postbank

When he asked me how you could do online banking without an internet connection, I told him about BBSes, but his questions made me go back to the video and wondered whether MSX computers were in fact available in the UK. There is the story about a ship full of Mitsubishi MSX computers from Japan heading for the UK but denied access by none less than the iron lady herself, to protect the UK’s home (computer) market. The ship found refuge in nearby Rotterdam, which is supposedly the only reason MSX as a product landed in the Netherlands the way it did¹. And whether that story is true is not, landing it did, in such a way that the Postbank, which not much later merged with ING, saw fit to produce their own MSX modems so that their customers could use them to visit BBSes and do banking at home.

On this blog, I have dedicated a whole series of posts reviewing MSX word processors, and I didn’t even include Wordstar. Wordstar did run on MSX because MSX-DOS2 implemented almost all CP/M 2.2 calls. That fact was also the reason I could run Borland’s Turbo Pascal 3.0 IDE natively on my MSX. Any CP/M 3.0 software could run as well, but you’d have to boot into the OS first.

CP/M 3.0 booting on an MSX

MSX computers all had standard Centronics printer ports, many had RGB or SCART output to connect them to a monitor and some had very good keyboards, like the Spectravideo SVI-728, which was available in 1984 in the UK for £250,- and would tick all Retrobyte’s boxes, I suppose.

As mentioned, I did use MSX machines for over a decade to do my school and university assignments. I even had a little self-made program in BASIC that I used to learn foreign vocabulary. It had me ace those tests. MSX computers, especially when providing 80 columns per line on a text screen, were very capable machines for the small business or home office, right until internet became mandatory.

And then even that.

Notes

1. ↑This story was told by the late Wammes Witkop, editor-in-chief of MSX Computer Magazine when he was interviewed by The Retro Hour Podcast (episode 276).