Visited Slapton Ley today. It is the largest freshwater lake in the
south west of England and yet a shingle beach, car park and a road is
all that seperates it from the sea. I ended up on a walk with my Dad
and the dogs around the Ley. Lots of butterflies and dragon flies to
admire. One dog had a paddle where she was drinking water as she
waded in a pac-man sort of way.
I bought a recent Humble Bundle of O'Reilly books which were mostly
cookbooks for different programming languages. There was one book in
particular which caught my eye. One on regular expressions. It has
been a good read so far and seems useful in work dross. I have also
been reading about heirloom computing, written by Steve Lord, thanks
to a comment from Agk's phlog. The concept of a 100 year computer
seems ridiculous to the electronic engineer in me but actually, we
could keep such a thing going. We only have to look at the WITCH at
the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park for how long a
computer can keep going. Sure the GUI is via decatrons and that you
could work out the answer to an arithmatic question quicker but the
WITCH is the oldest working computer in the world. It was released in
1952 so we have 69 years of computing. However, the concept is more
about having a consistant set of IO standards and OS rather than
hardware which will keep operating for 100 years. The idea of
emulating a basic OS which could be done with cheap and cheerful
processors galore is appealing. Things to think about along with how
to harvest energy from radio broadcasts. I need to do some circuit
building with that one. Got to explore the reality of the theory.
