This year has been a roller coaster, and that is putting it mildly. Attended my first conference this year, presenting in the Doctoral student symposium. I was probably more nervous about leaving for the conference than actually presenting. The feedback was excellent, mainly points and questions that I had answers too. "I seem to be well-read" was the closing comment, which I take as good sign! Other than that, I have met the worlds most exceptional minds in the Modelling community, and they seem like a friendly bunch. I managed to get a Spectranet interface from Ben over at ByteDelight. This might have had me distracted for a few hours and kick-started another little software project. It is well worth the wait, and Dylan sure as hell was ahead of the curve when he designed it all those years ago! ZXGo4it is my latest little project, a gopher client for the spectrum. So far it is a working prototype not released, there is a demo kicking about in the Spectranet group on Facebook. I should probably look to get the videos I make on here somehow, maybe off a YouTube channel? Back to the topic, so the gopher protocol is a bit of a dead protocol these days, but once upon a time, it was the other protocol rivalling HTTP and HTML. The specification for gopher is actually straightforward, based on formatted lines to form pages as menu indexes. Each line is recommended to be 74 characters long to enable access from 80 column terminal. Yes, gopher is intended as text only 80 columns which is almost practical for a speccy! The downside is the specification doesn't limit page sizes, the largest I have seen is 50K (bigger than a speccy 48K!). This project turned into an excellent refresher on Pointer, Malloc and Structs in C. The dynamic memory allocation and linked list for handling the page data are working really well. When a page contains more lines than the 16K heap lines are discarded without crashing the program! Next big challenge is to rework the prototype so it can handle pages larger than the heap. I have a few bright ideas that might work, not giving away any spoilers on the magic yet ;)
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AuthorMe, slightly crazy engineer type. Generalist in nature, hardware or software with nonspecialist skill set. Archives
January 2020
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