2026-03-07 - 2025 Retrospective

I actually don’t know how to describe this year, as you might be able to tell from it being February March as I am writing this.

The first half seemed okay, seemed like I was figuring things out and then the second half totally went off the rails.

Cats

Robin continues to have poop issues. We tried various doses of RestoraLax which was partially affective but I had issues getting her to eat it consistently. I first tried to put it on her food but then she just refused to eat her food. Then I started giving her extra treats of Perfect Portions and that worked for a bit but then she started refusing those as well. We ended up switching her to Lactulose, which she has been better about eating but we are still working to find the right dose.

Lupo had problems with his food again. I don’t know if there was a change in the manufacturing process or how it was stored but the Hills Digestive Care stopped solidifying properly in the fridge which causes problems for Lupo eating it. I think because it’s too soft, too much of it goes down his throat and that bugs him. I ended up switching him to Royal Canin Gastrointestinal, which he is having less problems eating but I’m not sure if it’s better or worse for his poops. I might need to ask the vet about a different kind of supplement for him.

The are about the same in terms of how well they get along. There are times when they seem perfectly content to be around each other and times when Lupo is locked in on chasing her around. I would like to give them more treats together but that requires their digestion to not be questionable

Health

I haven’t had any “flair ups” lately where I just feel terrible for a couple days so that’s something. I have had problems with just feeling tired though. It’s hard to tell what’s a problem with my body and what’s just stress.

I had some severe heart burn issues in the spring. It ended up causing me extreme back pain for a few weeks but after taking antacid tablets for a month I seem to be okay. It hasn’t happened since.

Work

Work has become very challenging. Management is scared that other companies are going to benefit from AI and they aren’t so they are trying to force AI everywhere, if it fits or not. I have issues with AI both in terms of the technology and the companies so that’s not exactly making me happy.

My bosses don’t seem interested in what I have to say about the matter which is also doesn’t make me happy.

Volunteering

I ended up on opposite weeks for volunteering this year and had less luck with the staff supervisors. With all the extra stress of work and cats I was struggling, so I ended up stopping so that I wasn’t losing half a day every other weekend

I found out that there’s a thrift store near me that I an hoping I can start volunteering at, if I can get the rest of my stress sorted out

Collecting

In the first half of the year I opened a second savings account to try and control my spending a bit more. The idea is that everything beyond what I need for a given month goes into the second account and then that gives me a better idea of how much I have to spend. That was working fairly well but then work issues lead me to limit myself even more. Now I am putting the excess into my TFSA so that I can save up in case something happens.

I still managed to get quite a few interesting things this year, moving more into territories that I’m not familiar with like manuals for processors, 8-bit computers, SCO Unix, CP/M-86 and GEM Desktop.

Computers

I bought three retro computers this year, A TI-99/4A, a Tandy Color Computer 3 and an Atari 800 XL. All of them had fun delivery stories. The TI-99/4A got delivered to the Post Office for some reason, the CoCo 3 got lost in the states for about a week and the 800 XL did the thing where they pretend you aren’t home and refuse to delivery it. I also bought a bunch of peripherals for them, both new and old, as well as various software manuals. I ended up replacing the keyboard in the TI-99/4A a few times to get one that looks original but works reliably. I need to take it apart again to see if I can get the keyboard to sit better.

I have been having a lot of fun learning the various flavours of BASIC. I have only been using emulated cartridges, tapes and floppy drives. It’s interesting to see the different ways that the community has handled emulation for the various devices.

I have also done some upgrades to my 486 machine. It now has an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro Mach 32 VLB card in it and 128 MB of RAM. I bought more cache chips for them but I haven’t installed them yet because I don’t know if they are legit. I want to by a Chip Tester Pro but that’s not in the budget at the moment. I also need to do some cable re-work and try to figure out why the floppy drives seem to have errors occasionally.

I built a new media computer this year. I bought a small case and a MicroATX motherboard. It’s very cramped but seems to be working well. I ended up needing to use a combination of several right angle brackets to get it so that the SATA cables for the Blu-ray drive could fit past the CPU cooler. It has no discrete graphics card and is running entirely off the one integrated into the CPU. It’s also an AMD CPU which is new for me. I had some problems getting the DVD software to work and had to buy a different one but it’s been solid since then.

Budgetor

I updated my Budgetor application to have separate tables for account objects. This makes it easier to add or remove an account. I have been wanting to do this for a while so that I could hide the cash account that I no longer use but needing to add the second savings account was the big push.

This required database scripts to create new tables and then pull data out of the old tables as well as changes to the UI to load the accounts from the database instead of just presenting pre-set values

PenguinCooker

I started working on adding support for writing pages to PenguinCooker. I have some models and the root display page done but haven’t implemented any of the update logic or edit pages

Floppy Image Rectifier

I haven’t done as much with this project as I’d like. I was able to document the Greaseweazle code for converting an SCP to an HFE but I think I went into too much detail and need to redo it to be a bit more focused. I was also able to make some progress on documenting how HxC tools does it but that program was written by people who hate using descriptive variable names, so it’s a bit of a challenge.

MakeBoot

This is a project I started this year to make an application to write an MBR to a CompactFlash card and verify the results. FDISK on DOS has a way of doing this but it doesn’t have a lot of protections for making sure it’s updating the correct drive and I have messed up a computer doing it before.

I started writing it on my Vista machine using Visual Studio 2010. It was a very relaxing experience, writing code without all of the distractions of a modern computer. Update this, buy that, do you want to rate this product, would you like an AI to delete all your work?

I have made good progress although I am a little hesitant to test it.

MBRDemo

The MakeBoot program inserts an MBR snippet that I coped off of one of my working CompactFlash cards and verified against a version of FDISK that I found online. While working on that project, I got curious about how the bootstrap code worked. This lead me to write up the instruction set for the Intel 286 in an excel spreadsheet, also on the Vista computer, and to hand disassemble the bootstrap code.

After disassembling the code and trying to understand what it was doing, I created a demo program to verify that the code was doing what I thought it was doing. This demo program contains most of the same bootstrap code, with some changes to handle it being a program that isn’t necessarily loaded into the first 64K of memory and so that it doesn’t actually try to boot.

Stats

• Blog posts – 1 
• Writing pages added – 1 
• Writing pages updated - 1
• Videos made – 0 
• Books read – 2 (0 Programming Textbooks) 
• Programming textbook chapters completed – 5
• Programming project commits – 25 (13 SVN, 11 GitHub)

2025-01-11 - 2024 Retrospective

Once again I feel like I have made progress. It’s not entirely clear how much progress but I think I am moving forward in more ways that just temporally.

Personal stuff first

Cats

The cats continue to slowly get better with each other. I still have to referee a lot but I think the total number of incidents is still going down. The main challenges there is finding ways for them to have positive interactions. Refereeing is also a challenge because I want to keep Robin safe but not upset Lupo in the process.

Robin’s poops continue to be a problem. In September I switched her to half-and-half urinary tract and senior food which seemed like it was helping but then at the end of December she stopped eating and got constipated. I started giving her restoraLax (A stool softener) which seems to be helping but now the trick is making sure it doesn’t cause urinary issues.

Lupo got his teeth cleaned this year without any complications. I started brushing his teeth but I’m not sure if I’m doing a good job or not. It’s difficult to tell how much I am actually brushing and keeping him still for the brushing. He also decided not to eat at the end of December and I’m not sure why. He started eating normally again a couple days later and seems fine.

Health

I have continued to have spats of feeling sick without really getting sick this year although it might be to a lesser degree. I went to a new doctor to get a check-up and they referred me to an allergist. I had an allergy test and nothing significant came up (I am allergic to some kind of weed but that seems to be it). Both doctors had me do a bunch of blood and urine tests with no significant results.

I got properly sick just before Christmas and still have a cough. I’m hoping it will clear out my throat and I will feel better.

I would like to get a camera shoved down my throat just to see if anything’s up but I’m not sure how to properly ask for that.

It’s possible that it’s stress related or sleep related which is related to stress.

House

I bought a new bookshelf for the office/second bedroom and did some re-arranging in there. I also drilled a hole in the wall and ran an ethernet connection to the main floor so that my work laptop could be wired. I also bought a bookshelf for the kitchen.

I probably need to get a new furnace and an AC or at least a duct cleaning but I don’t have the energy to arrange that

Volunteering

At the beginning of this year we got a new staff member who was at most of the volunteering sessions this year. She’s great and helped to make volunteering a positive experience. She was really involved and trying to make things happen. She was also more proactive about getting people to come in.

I also started taking paper folding patterns to volunteering this year. That’s helped to make sure I have something to do without being unapproachable (at least I hope that’s how it comes off).

I think my two complaints are the lack of feedback, I don’t know how well I am doing or if I should be doing things differently, and the time investment. I sometimes feel like losing that Sunday afternoon limits what I cam accomplish. It’s much nicer during the summer when I can take every other Friday afternoon off so I have a bit of extra time to get stuff done on weeks that I volunteer.

Collecting

I think I have managed to buy most of the software that I really want. There’s always more stuff but I have found most of the tentpole software releases that I’m interested in. I have also pretty much ran out of space.

I think the next steps for me are getting more user manuals for retro computers and maybe buying some actual retro machines to play with. The challenge there remains space.

Computers

I have built two computers this year. The first is a high-mid gaming machine and the second is a 486 based retro machine.

The gaming machine seems to be working well. I had some issues with game crashes at the beginning but managed to resolve those by disabling the BIOS setting which makes RAM run at the speed it says it does. Now it’s running all the games I play without issue. I have it slightly underclocked to keep temperatures manageable but I haven’t noticed any issues because of that. It was a fun experience because it was my first driveless build. There are no optical drives and it’s using M.2 SSDs which plug directly into the motherboard. That means that the whole front of the case can just be fans and there’s a lot less wires.

Building the new gaming machine also means that I can use my old gaming machine as a dev machine which is nice. My previous dev machine was starting to show it’s age and have some stutters when doing a lot of work. I have reinstalled Windows Vista on it and now it can be a retro machine. I also found out that the telephone activation for Windows and Office still works, so that’s interesting.

The 486 machine has been a fun and educational exercise. Learning about all the complications with older hardware and figuring out how to make things work. I had to re-wire the PS/2 mouse connector because the one I bought didn’t match the motherboard. I have also learned a lot about serial RS-232 connections because of this machine. Apparently there are two ways that the motherboard can be wired and this machine uses the less common one. I’m actually really proud of how I figured that out. I bought a serial tester (A box with lights that indicate what each signal is doing) and then I compared the results from the 486 machine to my other machines. From that I had a pretty good guess as to how things were miss-wired and was able to look up the issue and have my guess validated.

Penguin Cooker and Website

At the beginning of this year I finished up the management of pictures and picture sets. This includes the functionality for picSet parents, using a UUID to sync data between local and remote instances as well as cleaning up functionality.

The ability to sync pics and picSets was also added which required refactoring the creation and updating logic into separate classes so that it could be used by the edit pages and the sync pages.

Website

I’ve made some minor changes to the website, mostly cleaning up issues from the changes made for pictures such as cleaning up some URL issues and how thumbnail images are used.

The display scripts were updated to handle changes to how pictures are organized. Some files were moved so that the the content files were stored separately from the page scripts, this was done so that the content could be removed from source control.

The pic page was updated to add name and description. This makes it easier to understand the images when navigating. The pictures page and picSet pages were updated to have the link boxes wrap correctly. Also added parent links to picSet pages.

Floppy Image Rectifier

My big project for this year has been the Floppy Image Rectifier. This is a project to unify some tools that I started building last year. My goal is to have a single program I can run on an SCP floppy image to generate HFE and IMG files with feedback and options that I feel are important. I have made a lot of progress and have most of the application implemented.

Mainly what I still have to do is verify that I am doing things correctly. My process for this has been to read through the code of a couple other tools that do similar things and compare how they work to how my application works. The challenge there is understanding other people’s code and having the motivation to look at it.

I stopped working on other projects, book exercises and writing blog posts in order to focus on this project. I don’t think that has been super successfully as typically it just meant I didn’t do any programming but I’m hoping I can get more done this year.

I was hoping to get more done over Christmas but I got sick before going to visit my parents and then the cats had problems after I got home.

I would like to get this project done as it would allow me to archive all my disks which is the first step to going through them and making progress on other retro projects.

Videos

I have not made any videos this year. The challenge I have is that I think I need to dedicate more time to them and that requires taking time away from other things that I want to do. I was thinking about trying to make some one-off videos to practice but that just means I have more videos to make.

Part of the problems is that I don’t really want to make videos. That’s not something that I am really interested in. What I want to do is show people how weird the story changes in Mafia: Definitive Edition are, but video is the best way to do that which means I have to make videos.

Stats

• Blog posts – 3 
• Writing pages added – 1 
• Writing pages updated - 8
• Videos made – 0 
• Books read – 10 (0 Programming Textbooks) 
• Programming textbook chapters completed – 22 
• Programming project commits – 134 (58 SVN, 76 GitHub)

2024-05-25 - In IL: Field Declarations

Last time we looked at the options for declaring fields in IL, today we are going to look at some examples.

This C# program has a variety of fields defined.

Let's start by looking at the accessibility attributes.

As expected we have the .field directive, the accessibility attribute, the type and the name of the field. The accessibility attributes line up the same as they did for the nested classes that we looked at previously.

Next we have some examples of the contract attributes.

Again this is as we expect. All the fields are private because we omitted the accessibility marker. The const field became static literal to indicate that it is stored with the class and it can only have the value specified. Note that the literal assigned to the field is wrapped in a type specifier. readonly became initonly with both meaning that the field can only be set in a constructor. The static field is also marked as static in IL.

Now let's look at some different type identifiers.

First we have the FileMode field, in IL this is marked valuetype to indicate it's a value type (it's an enum) and then we get the fully qualified name of the type [mscorlib]System.IO.FileMode. The [mscorlib] part indicates the assembly that contains the type. The FileInfo field is marked class to indicate that it's a reference type. The Complex field is also marked as valuetype because it's a struct and we can see it's from a different assembly ([System.Numerics]) than the others. Finally we have the built in types which just replace the C# name for the type with the IL name for the time.

To finish off, let's look at some array fields.

Arrays are indicated by the [] at the end of the type name the same way they are in C#.

Well this was all very straight forward. Next time we will look at the instructions used to work with fields

2024-03-16 - DataTypes: Negative Numbers

In the last two posts we've been looking at positive binary numbers but what about negative binary numbers? How do we represent those? The simple answer is that you put a negative sign in front of the number, so –101 would be –5, but that just changes the question to how do we record a negative sign with bits?

Well, we have a few options.

Sign and magnitude

The simplest way is to use one of the bits to indicate the sign. This is typically the most significant bit. So if you were using an 8-bit byte to store a number, bit 7 would encode the sign and bits 0-6 would encode the value. This means you can encode the values –127 to +127. The sign bit is usually 0 to indicate positive and 1 for negative but it's only really important that the machines using these numbers are consistent about the meaning.

The main problem with this approach is that it requires computers to analyze the bits before performing operations.

5 + –7?

We are adding a negative value so that can be converted to subtraction.

5 – 7

The right number is bigger than the left number so we know the value will be negative and the value will be the same as if the subtraction was done the other way around.

-(7 – 5) = –2 = 5 + – 7

5 + – 3?

We are still adding a negative value so that can be converted to subtraction.

5 – 3

This time the right number is smaller than the left so we know the value will be positive and we can just do the subtraction.

5 – 3 = 2

Another oddity with sign and magnitude is that you have both –0 and +0 as we can have a zero magnitude with either sign.

This isn't terribly complicated and, as we will see later, this is how standard floating-point numbers are encoded. It would be nice to speed up the process if we can, especially when computers are going to be doing these kinds of calculations billions of times a second.

Ones' complement

Another option is Ones' complement which defines negative numbers as being the binary complement of the positive number with the same value. Binary complement means to flip all of the bits, 0 –> 1 and 1 –> 0. So for –56 we take 0011 1000 (56 in binary) and flip all the bits to get 1100 0111. The most significant bit still acts as a sign bit as it will only be set for negative numbers but now it's also a part of the value. The range of values is still –127 to +127 and we still have two zeros (0000 0000 and 1111 1111) but we have to do less special work to handle negative numbers in calculations. We add and subtract numbers as normal but if we get a carry or a borrow left over then we have to apply that back to the result.

For example if we were using 4-bit numbers we could do 5 + -7 which would be 0101 + 1000 (The complement of 0111 which is 7).

We know the result is negative because the most significant bit is set and if we take the complement we get 0010 which is 2. So 5 + –7 = –2 as we expect.

What if we try 5 + –3? That would be 0101 + 1100.

Our current result is 0001 which is 1. 5 + –3 = 1? That doesn't seem right. We have a carry left over though, so with ones' complement we need to add that back to the result.

Which gives us 0010 or 2. 5 + –3 = 2 makes a lot more sense.

So Ones' complement simplifies performing math with negative numbers at the cost of making negative numbers a little harder to decode. Can we do better?

Two's complement

The answer is yes. Two's complement defines negative numbers as being the complement of the positive number plus one. This is sort of like pre-including that extra addition step. The easiest way to determine the Two's complement of a value is to switch every value after the first 1. So for –56 we start with 0011 1000, keep all of the bits up to the one in the fourth spot the same and then flip all the bits after that to get 1100 1000.

You can also think of this as simply making the most significant bit negative. So you can determine the decimal equivalent of 1100 1000 by calculating –2⁷ + 2⁶ + 2³ = –128 +  64 + 8 = –56. Like Ones' complement we don't have to handle the sign separately but now we also don't need to perform a second calculation.

For 5 + –7 we do 0101 + 1001

Again the most significant bit is 1 indicating a negative number. If we take the two's complement of 1110 we get 0010 which is 2, so the result of 5 + –7 is –2.

And for 5 + –3 we do 0101 + 1101

We ignore the carry out in this case and get 0010 which is the correct result of 2.

We can also think of negative numbers in two's complement as being the positive value subtracted from 0. To determine –9 we can calculate 0 – 9 or 0000 – 1001.

Which gives us our expected result of 0111. To do this calculation we had to borrow from some kind of nether space but that's okay because we got the result that we wanted.

With an 8-bit Two's complement number the range of values – 128 – 127. So we have an extra value now. Another benefit of Two's complement is we only have one zero because the two's complement of 0000 0000 is 0000 0000. So that's nice.

Two's complement is by far the most common way to represent negative numbers because we don't need to do any extra steps to get the correct result.

Next time we will start to look at fractional numbers