Zombie Zen

I’m finishing up my game, “Urge to Merge”, for...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:50:17 +0000

Urge to Merge: The Splash Screen

Gameplay

I’m finishing up my game, “Urge to Merge”, for my Intro to Computer Graphics course. This is the first time I’ve worked with OpenGL shaders; I’m pleased with the results. These are screenshots from the game.

popculturebrain: So you want to be a poster designer… (by Dr....

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:38:34 +0000

popculturebrain:

So you want to be a poster designer…

(by Dr. Mosnter, via reddit)

Nice! Each of the posters is spot-on, I’d say.

Something about the simplicity of the characters made me laugh...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:57:00 +0000

Something about the simplicity of the characters made me laugh even by the fourth panel.

The Stanley Parable

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:38:04 +0100

(cross-posted from my Google Plus profile) I know this is old news for some. After watching Extra...

My father worked on How to Train Your Dragon as a Character TD...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:07:55 +0100

My father worked on How to Train Your Dragon as a Character TD Supervisor. The film is dear to my heart. And Toothless always makes me smile.

This made me chuckle more than it should have. Hooray for...

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 17:21:24 +0100

This made me chuckle more than it should have. Hooray for memes!

engineering: This is a VT220 serial console (circa 1983) set up...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:01:16 +0100

engineering:

This is a VT220 serial console (circa 1983) set up as a terminal for my Mac Pro (circa 2010), a nerdy dream I’ve had for a long time that I finally made a reality yesterday.

Some quick history: in the early days of office computers, it was rare that you would actually have one on your desk. Instead there might be a central mainframe (running Unix) and everyone would have a terminal that connected to it over a long serial cable or modem connection. One computer, many users.

The terminal has a keyboard and monitor, but it’s not a full computer and worthless without the mainframe. It’s more like a teletype machine, all it can do is display the text sent to it (like a paperless printer) and send text back. It doesn’t have any knowledge of pixels or colors or graphics of any kind.

In modern times we don’t have mainframes anymore, but Unix is more prevalent than ever. It runs on the servers delivering this page and the iPhone in your pocket. For developers and power users the command line has never gone away, but instead of a dedicated hardware serial console we have Terminal.app (with translucent backgrounds and anti-aliased fonts). The software is just emulating the old hardware, though. The protocols haven’t changed much in 30 years. The Unix underpinnings of OS X still have all the stuff required to use a real serial terminal, it’s just no one actually does it (well, almost no one).

I’ve always thought those old terminals were beautiful, and I’m not the only one—there’s a Mac app called Cathode that does a convincingly wonderful job simulating vintage terminals, using OpenGL to degrade things into a nice analog haze. But it’s not quite the same as the real thing…

Hardware terminals regularly crop up on eBay for around $100. They’re actually still used in a lot of places (old warehouse systems, supermarkets, banks) and there are still companies that support and refurbish them. Back at Vimeo we discovered one abandoned in a server closet when we moved into the office. Finding one isn’t a problem, the main challenge is stringing together the right adapters to use an ancient serial port with modern USB.

My biggest source of information getting this going was Paul Weinstein’s post about setting up an Apple IIc as a terminal for his Mac mini (which is similar, but not quite the same since the IIc still has to emulate the terminal in software). I got the same USB-to-serial adapter, a Keyspan USA-19HS ($27), which has Mac drivers that I can happily confirm work well with 10.7 Lion. I also needed a null modem cable ($7) and 25-pin female/female converter ($4) to connect it to my VT220.

At first I used the same method as Paul to get it working, gluing together the terminal and OS with a utility called screen. As Paul notes, this is less than desirable. It still requires you to open a software terminal to make the connection, and you’re still operating through a layer of emulation. On most Unixes you can simply add a line to /etc/ttys and everything just works via getty, but apparently this has been disabled in OS X since 10.5.

Eventually I found this page, which explains the problem and how to fix it. After adding a line in /etc/gettytab to manually set the terminal type to vt220-8bit everything works perfectly! A real hardware terminal directly connected the old fashioned way, with no emulation. Awesome.

If this is something you want to attempt yourself please drop me a line; I learned a lot about how terminals work over the last couple weeks and the final result is quite satisfying, a soft amber glow and one less window on my desktop. It’s also a nice reminder that we didn’t get to where we are overnight, user interfaces and software development have been evolving in an unbroken chain for a long time and some of the old ideas are so solid that they persist 30 years later. Why not use the proper hardware?

This is too awesome! I don’t think I would be quite committed enough to do it myself, though.

The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:08:51 +0100

The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov: A friend of mine shared this essay with me. This is a neat...

therothwoman: spastasmagoria: If you don’t, I do not wish to...

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 05:58:59 +0100

therothwoman:

spastasmagoria:

If you don’t, I do not wish to know you any more.

I am a proud patron of the Oxford comma.

I am a closet grammar fanatic; I am passionate about delimiting data properly.

Server Migration!

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 06:57:19 +0100

Hello everyone! If you are seeing this, then Zombie Zen is working properly. I just migrated to...

Reblog if you've seen a girl with hair like this

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:48:09 +0100

supernaturalunlimited: Just watched Scott Pilgrim again a few days ago. It continues to grow on...

This is truly an amazing achievement. It’s a nice little...

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:21:03 +0100

This is truly an amazing achievement. It’s a nice little contained film, even if you don’t know too much about Portal.

"Because vacuum tubes are awesome."

Fri, 20 May 2011 22:34:47 +0100

“Because vacuum tubes are awesome.” - Doug (after a discussion of the simplicity of VGA)

This is amazing. I approve. :D

Tue, 17 May 2011 16:59:58 +0100

This is amazing. I approve. :D

goray: A Drop into BitBucket

Thu, 12 May 2011 07:18:05 +0100

I’ve moved goray from SourceForge to BitBucket yesterday. This also signals a switch from...

9gag: Spare Time!

Sun, 08 May 2011 17:42:14 +0100

9gag:

Spare Time!

FIRST Team 973 Victory at St. Louis

Thu, 05 May 2011 03:07:00 +0100

This is my second year mentoring FIRST Robotics Team 973, and last weekend, we won the world...

New Go Stable Release

Thu, 05 May 2011 02:47:00 +0100

Yesterday, the Go programming language announced their second stable release, introducing language...

obama@whitehouse:~$ sudo chmod +x /bin/laden

Wed, 04 May 2011 01:43:15 +0100

One does not simply FTP into Mordor. :D

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:45:00 +0100

One does not simply FTP into Mordor. :D