The next day, everything was back, visible, working and fine.

Weird.

You Shine at Midday and Midnight

You’re the type of person who has trouble waking up in the morning, but you’re good to go after a while. And just when everyone else is going to bed, you make a comeback late at night. You have a lot of energy, and you tend to go at full speed. You thrive during the summer when the world is alive at almost any hour.

Blogthings: When Do You Shine?

Your Summer Sense is Touch

You are a very in tune person, and it doesn’t take a lot to overwhelm your senses. You tend to be both mental and physical. Sometimes you need to get moving in order to really think. It’s likely that you dream about the hot summer sun all year long, especially during the winter. There’s nothing like the feeling of being sun kissed – especially if you can follow it up with a dip in the pool or ocean.

Blogthings: What’s Your Summer Sense?

Your Home is Comforting

You believe in putting your needs first, and you avoid depriving yourself. You are likely to have a home full of your favorite things – from soft pillows to delicious food. You believe in living in the moment. If you feel like having home baked pie, then you’ll have home baked pie! You could never feel at home in a sterile or unpersonalized house. The best homes feel lived in.

Blogthings: The Homebody Test

For those of you who don’t know, the Year 2038 Bug will affect computers in early-mid 2038 depending on the operating system. Any program on a non-64-bit operating system involving usage of a timer, a clock, dates, or random number generation will face unpredictable problems. At best we will face Y2K-style wraparounds to 1901 (or 1899) and at worst we will face buffer overflows. Without getting into technical details, “buffer overflows” are responsible for such things as (poorly-developed) programs crashing or acting bizarre until you restart your computer.

The Year 2038 Bug is easily solvable with usage of a 64-bit operating system, as Microsoft has been phasing in since Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Windows XP had a 64-bit version as well). However, this isn’t feasible for “embedded devices” – for example, a dishwasher powered by a software timer may never stop running, do tasks in the wrong order, or refuse to start, depending on how it was designed.

I also got A Sound Relief, a 2005 concert by The Gathering off eBay. I watched the first disc (there is also a bonus disc I have to watch before leaving feedback on the seller) and can only come up with a simple one-word review: “Wow.”

I also ordered A Noise Severe, the heavier “sequel” to the softer material on A Sound Relief, and am awaiting it in the mail.

After weeks of being up at night listening to my favorite night talk radio host, I finally got it done. It is a great program, with three character classes, each with their own 6 levels of unique weapons and armor, 13 enemy types plus 5 bosses at the end of the game. All in less than 6K of calculator RAM.

Sounds good? Well, it turns out there was a lot more to that “ERR: MEMORY” I was getting on those games.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975

TI calculators include assembly programming and (in my case) TI-BASIC. If you’re familiar with BASIC, you know how completely unlike modern professional programming languages (like C/C++, C#, Java, and even modern MS Visual Basic) it is. Instead of storing data in an object or passing parameters to a function, BASIC is procedural – the code is read in the order of a page, from top to bottom. This result in you hopping all over the place with GOTO commands. Thus it was very difficult to program.

But there’s much more.

TI-BASIC has a major fault in it – unlike other BASIC languages, GOTO commands leave behind pointers with each step – causing memory leaks! It wasn’t about squeezing variables in on my calculator, it’s about a poorly designed programming language leaving allocated memory open – with no means of deallocation as with modern programming languages.

The only solution would be to redesign the whole thing. Having put off writing this program for probably almost a year, this is not likely to be done for a very long time.

All the wasted nights. I could have been screwing around but instead put all my effort into a pointless waste of time. So sad. And the TI Calculator Community is in desperate need of a program like this. We have great, simple hacking-related ones, but not working, complicated medieval ones.

This YouTube video, linked to by Ren & Stimpy creator John K’s blog, shows them side by side.

You may have also noticed that the calculator section was separated again. I plan on doing more programs under the X-Cop name, notably one of those quasi-RPG games popular with calculators where you buy gear and fight enemies (Hacker RPG, etc.). I want a medieval one which doesn’t suck or isn’t a memory hog. But right now I’m too much of a lazy ass. Stay tuned!

The blog is my personal blog, just as the Azz Pizz Institute blog was, while the other pages deal with X-Cop Fly Company matters. I also released the first TI calculator game, Vegas Casino, under the X-Cop Fly Company name.

Here’s the code Technorati wants as I set the new blog up: tgr5p8kw2d
(Fortunately the word “gay” doesn’t appear in the code this time