As an exercise in Windows assembler programming I developed a very fast Mandelbrot zoomer the other day.

The project was started to see if I could write a fast Mandelbrot zoomer from scratch in assembler in one evening utilizing the FPU (Float Point Unit) for the math part. I almost succeeded, and the few bugs that I couldn’t find the first day, was found the following morning.

Download the latest version and read more about the development here

No, I didn’t get a new cellphone, I just saw this video and thought it was so cute, I had to put it in my blog for you guys to see!

Watch the movie…

 The other day someone at work had bought the coolest chocolate I have seen for a long time! The perfect candy for us science freaks who wouldn’t dream of buying pink heart shaped chocolate. With no further ado, here is… Planet chocolate!

http://nafai.org/photos/?album=74

Bit humour is a term I coined during my university days, and refers to technology (often CS) related quips or short pieces of wit, usually intentional but often unintentional. Mostly in the form of jokes, bit humour was often applied as a means of “de-coupling” from long, boring technical lectures, or as a type of friendly satire during homework preparations!

Today, bit humour, has become an accepted genre of rhetoric, usually termed computer humour. While browsing the Wikipedia today I came up with this little jewel (see link). At first it looks like a regular specification sheet for a memory device from the company Signetics. While Signetics is indeed a real company, they have never (and no company ever has) produced something as silly as a Write Only Memory device! A Write Only Memory (or WOM) would be a type of memory to which you could write your data, but never retrieve it again. Absolutely and utterly useless!

Signetics 25120 Write Only Memory data sheet

If you scroll down to the section with the curves, you will see, amongst others, a chart showing “The number of pins remaining” plotted against “Number of socket insertions”! Poor thing has only 12 out of 30 pins remaining after only 10 insertions!

The data sheet also claims that it will “provide 50% higher speed than you will obtain”! But of course it also requires an additional voltage supply in the form of a 6.3 VAC… for the vacuum tube filaments!

Check out this sweet implementation of Frogger in, yes, JavaScript:

http://www.brothercake.com/site/resources/games/frogger

I can’t even begin to explain why this game is actually fun to play. It just.. is. Or maybe it isn’t, but you just can’t stop playing it. One thought though: how come the frog dies if it falls in the water? Gero.