11–19 of 19 posts
Some examples:
- Re-implemented Apples "Assistive Touch"
- Made an app launcher
- Screenshot cropper-keep on top (Hard to explain in a word but see: http://cydia.online/package/com.jontelang.snapper2)
Anyway I find this extremely interesting since I can shape iOS to my exact wants and needs.
In the late 80s I worked on (to the best of my knowledge) the first multiplayer/networked AI-based NPC system for DARPA SIMNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET . So M-A-N-Y stories! My most personal one was when we were first installing the system on-site at Fort Knox, in a massive building which housed about 90 4-person M1 tank simulators - all networked. 320 soldiers all participating simultaneously. (I also wr…
It's impressive how far ahead of mainstream computing the system appeared to be in 1980s. Wonder if there's any technology gap of that magnitude anywhere now: things seem to have levelled out.
In the late 80s I worked on (to the best of my knowledge) the first multiplayer/networked AI-based NPC system for DARPA SIMNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET . So M-A-N-Y stories! My most personal one was when we were first installing the system on-site at Fort Knox, in a massive building which housed about 90 4-person M1 tank simulators - all networked. 320 soldiers all participating simultaneously. (I also wr…
Figure you are John Morrison mentioned on that page then? It's impressive how far ahead of mainstream computing the system appeared to be in 1980s. Wonder if there's any technology gap of that magnitude anywhere now: things seem to have levelled out.
It's 15 years beyond 2001 - where is my HAL-9000? There are thousands of times more computing power in my kids' cell phones [insert obligatory reference to cat pictures here] than the computer I shared with 20 other geeks at MIT. The hardware guys have done their jobs - we software guys (for reasons that are probably worth discussing) have not.
My hobby stuff ("it's a hobby until you get paid") is done in Common Lisp wherever possible.
Well, let's see. Beasties was a pond-life simulation on the Mac, circa 1989. It was a Common Lisp program loosely based on a BASIC and assembly-language program I had written earlier that ran Conway's Life with 4 slightly-different sets of rules in the same world. Each ruleset had a different color for its live cells. Panels was a simple experimental window system, in Lisp again. There's a theme here. Once I learned…
I happened to be in the QuickTime group just then, and my boss said, "Steve has said Let there be brushed metal. Make it happen."
So I scratched my head and remembered that I had had a NeXT machine for several years and there was some piece of NeXT UI that had a brushed metal looking thing in it. Surely Steve must approve of the NeXT brushed metal? So I rummaged around and captured an image of that thing (I don't remember what it was; something to do with WebObjects, maybe?) and looked at the image in Photoshop or Studio 8 or something. I copied out a likely looking chunk of that image of brushed metal and fiddled with it in the graphic editor, changing the size and tweaking individual pixels until I got it to tile without obvious visual repetition.
Then I wrote a little piece of code that blitted that pattern into arbitrary areas and checked it in to the MoviePlayer sources and then MoviePlayer windows had brushed metal. Tom Dowdy made it faster. That was his job. He was QuickTime's make-the-C-code-even-faster guy. He was the nicest guy in the universe, but I can be so unintentionally irritating sometimes that I once provoked him to yell at me. Sorry, Tom.
After that, all of Apple's stuff had brushed metal. I suspect that the Apple brushed metal that you see everywhere now may not be my code. I was working on MoviePlayer for MacOS 9, and the code for Mac OS X was mostly separate.
Well, let's see. Beasties was a pond-life simulation on the Mac, circa 1989. It was a Common Lisp program loosely based on a BASIC and assembly-language program I had written earlier that ran Conway's Life with 4 slightly-different sets of rules in the same world. Each ruleset had a different color for its live cells. Panels was a simple experimental window system, in Lisp again. There's a theme here. Once I learned…
I occurs to me that I reported the things that were most interesting for me to work on, not necessarily most interesting in any other way. Maybe people would think it's interesting that I wrote the first version of the code in MacOS 9 that gave the QuickTime MoviePlayer the brushed metal look. That was during the period that I above described as a bunch of stuff that wasn't very interesting to me, but the brushed met…
Wow sounds like the Genesis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Figure you are John Morrison mentioned on that page then? It's impressive how far ahead of mainstream computing the system appeared to be in 1980s. Wonder if there's any technology gap of that magnitude anywhere now: things seem to have levelled out.
I must confess to having a more cynical view than that. I dimly recall some quotation (I cannot recall enough of it to Google it successfully) about somebody being naked, covered in dirt, surrounded by flies, and thinking it's normal. I concur that it describes our current state of computing, and that opinion is based upon the contrast between the non-mainstream technology I've been privileged to use and mainstream t…
Being underwhelmed by software is quite common in the trade. Sometimes at the day job I contemplate why my embedded Linux system is able to run at 32 megs of memory and in 8Mb of flash footprint, while the "off the shelf" Linux server box to the side of it eats 600Mb RAM just to idle in one console. It almost feels as we are forced for the lack of depth in systems development to push into the width just to keep the machines busy.
- One of the original programming department heads of 0 A.D., one of the leading open-source RTS engines. I led the switch to a 3D engine.
- 2D library for the VESA Video BIOS Extensions (paged "hi-res" graphics), written in X86 assembly straight from the lengthy VBE spec.
- Haptic simulator software. Simulated the bending forces applied to a carbon nanotube attached to the tip of an Atomic Force Microscope. You could literally feel these forces using a special input device (http://www.geomagic.com/en/products/phantom-premium-6dof/ove...).
- Made a working physical eReader. Was similar to the Kindle but with a power-hungry LED display and USB drive support (team-based senior project). We asked eInk for a free sample, but they wanted us to buy one for hundreds of dollars.
- FPGA-based graphics accelerator (in VHDL) that rendered 2D and some 3D primitives (team-based for school).
- In 1996 a government agency wanted to compress their file transfers because X.25 was very slow and it connected hundreds of branches. The critical part was running the compression program in an IBM mainframe because they didn't have a budget for that (e.g. buying THE C compiler or specific hardware). We first tried implementing it with Rexx but finally ended up implementing a file compression program in Cobol! If I remember well the use of Cobol improved the use of resources vs Rexx.
Just for fun:
- With a friend, in the late 80s, we removed a keyboard from a Commodore 64C and added it to the Commodore Amiga 500, then implemented a program where two people were able to use the Amiga at the same time in different Windows.
- After the QNX Floppy Disk Demo [2] we ported Squeak from X to SVGAlib to run it from a 1.44 floppy disk [3].
- 8 years ago I implemented Cookiepie in Firefox [1] where the use can simultaneously-cookie-sandboxed accounts in different tabs. To my knowledge it was the first implementation of this concept and it was "impossible" to achieve in Firefox because there was no API to link a tab with an HTTP connection. I solved this issue trying to find indirect relationships navigating between the object graph.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBkB-Yp-zM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pfg-kJ4nAw