Recently Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3″ disks containing source code to various old commercial games. He imaged them with the Kryoflux flux-level imager (Greaseweazle and FluxEngine are also good options). These tools produce highly accurate images of magnetic media that rips through copy protection and format concerns even allowing you to write the image back to disk with that in tact. This level of detail emits large files — 11.7MB for a single-sided Spectrum disk that normally holds 173KB is quite typical. 4KB data tracks happily turn into 215KB flux.

Powerful as these tools are they don’t give you access to the files contained within that disk although some can write emulator-compatible images like DSK. As somewhat versed in 3″ media and DSK files through my archive experience and my open source Disk Image Manager tool he asked if I could take a look into achieving that.

I’ve always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create — and break — copy protection recently popularised by 4am.

I’m going to be writing a few articles about data preservation and copy protection but first we need a short primer.

If you’ve built a PC desktop in the last few years, you’ve probably been exposed to the confusing array of DDR4 information when it comes to buying RAM.

What it comes down to is not all RAM is created equal. Once you get past pin size and memory capacity, you’ll have to filter down by speed. Speed isn’t a simple one-figure number — you may see a rated speed like 2400MHz, but you may also see another bunch of numbers like 16–16–16–39 indicating the necessary clock cycles to perform certain types of memory operations.

Here are my notes from today’s event by renowned statistician Edward Tufte — author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisaging Information primarily for my own reference but perhaps of interest to others.

No announcement, no preamble. The lights went out, and a visually striking video showing a representation of music started. Conversations were immediately hushed, and devices put away. An effective technique to get attention and signal an absolute start.

Troy Hunt put together a list of top Australian banks and their SSL rating using the Qualys SSL Server Test that reveals the somewhat depressing state of SSL security of various banks down-under.

This got me wondering how US financial institutions stack up, and I thought I’d share:

Virtual machines are called DropletsDroplets at Digital Ocean so hit Create then:

Give your server a name. This has no bearing on the name your customers see and is only for initially connecting to it/in the Digital Ocean dashboard.

Ahmet Alp Balkan on the Microsoft Azure team reflected on his experiences at Microsoft. His experiences do not exactly match mine (initially on LINQ to SQL, then Entity Framework and finally xbox.com) but I recognize some of his points.

Here is some further discussion along with some other thoughts that have come up over the years. A lot of these don’t apply just to Microsoft and some are useful for people new to the industry to think about.

There’s something entrancing about the pixel. Square and elegant and when pushed by the right people they can form beautiful art, stunning animations and gorgeously crisp text.

But as resolution and pixel density increase these building blocks of the screen become smaller and individually insignificant especially as the dpi of displays hits 220+ppi. What once was a building block of art and design becomes nothing more than a indistinct element in a photo-realistic image or a glint in a faux-texture supporting a skeuomorphism.

It’s been a few weeks since I took up Microsoft’s employee offer of a free Windows Phone 7 (when you renew a 2 year contract) and combined it with AT&T’s offer of buy-one-get-one-free for my wife.

So how have things been going?

From an earliest memory of a cream colored box emblazoned with letters, mostly black — some red, came an owl proclaiming allegiance to the BBC.

This small box sat silently, patiently even, in our classroom for the best part of a year. On the few occasions our teacher was brave enough to flip the switch the machine would chirp into life with it’s two-tone beep and would state on capital white letters on a black background that it was BASIC. At this point the teacher would key-in the mythical incantation of CHAIN ""CHAIN "" — handily jotted on a nearby note — and feed the beast a cassette tape.

For some time I’ve wanted to refresh the design here at damieng.com which evolved out of the Redoable theme with my own tweaks to colors, typography, images and background until it was almost my own.

Almost, but not quite.

I’ve been trying to get my content out of Subtext and into WordPress — a process that shouldn’t be difficult however Subtext only supports the blog-independent BlogML format and whilst WordPress supports a number of import formats BlogML isn’t one of them. For export WordPress only supports it’s own WordPress WXR format although the BlogML guys have an exporter available.

The first idea was to put together an XSL transform to convert BlogML to WXR.

Getting my blog out of Blogger.com and into Subtext was not as easy as I’d hoped…

BlogML is an XML format designed to encapsulate a blog, it’s posts, comments and categories. Sounds great for transferring between blogs… Alas while SubText and many other engines support it Blogger.com does not.