hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3182.txt

Episode: 3182
Title: HPR3182: Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of Cholecalciferol
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3182/hpr3182.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:27:06

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3182 for Tuesday 13 October 2020. Today's show is entitled,
Yohoho,
and a bottle of Cholly Calciferol. It is hosted by Dave Morris,
and is about 79 minutes long,
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
from Scotland to HPR hosts Shoe the Fat.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
Music
So everybody, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is Dave Morris and with me today is Andrew Conway, over in far, far away Glasgow.
I'm in nearby Edinburgh of course.
Yes, yes.
Yes, so it's good to talk to you, Dave, and yeah, so we're quick, we're quick, fairly
close together, but you have one major difference between us at the moment in that I am not
allowed to go and visit anyone else in our house, an area like Bob, over a million people
around me are all in the same boat, but over in the east has got only 40 miles to the east.
You can still go around to other people's houses, I believe, is that so?
Well, I think that's true actually, yeah, we seem to have got away with things fairly
lightly here for some reason, though how long that will remain the case, I don't know,
but we seem to ease things off.
In fact, I've been in the age I am and with the various problems, medical problems I have,
I've been keeping whatever they call it, shielding or it's sheltering or hiding or whatever.
Although it's not official, apparently there's an official thing you get a letter from
the NHS saying you should go and hide in the cup for the next month, but I hope it will
do that.
It feels like it's a bit of a relief, but yeah, I've not had one of those, it's just a bit
puzzling, but anyway, I'm not complaining.
So my house, before the coronavirus thing, my kids would come over for dinner twice
a week and with friends apart and sometimes as well, and we stopped that, but now we've
resumed because, well, I think we reckon that the sort of bubble, as it were, that we
were operating in is probably safe enough.
And I don't know how, you've managed to do this, but I actually went to visit somebody
yesterday, a friend in town.
It was in Princess Street Garden, so it was out in the open and everything, but I caught
the bus into town and back again and it went pretty well, actually, the bus behaviour
was good, everybody wore a mask, people kept well away from everybody else as much as
you can in the bus, you know, so yeah, but it's a lot more locked down where you are.
Yes, and, well, no, yes and no, yes, the rules were more stringent.
I would say, I want people, I know they're, I can hardly think of a person that's really
taken them seriously.
In fact, it's hard to follow them because on a daily basis, people will say, I'll just
pop it out and they're like, how about your kid comes over for a play date with arcade
or the birthday party and, you know, and actually, what's happened is that most people
have just carried on as normal.
These are people with children and I feel this too, to be honest, I'm thinking, well,
as soon as my children went back to school, things changed because suddenly I went from
being connected to one other household pretty much to being really in quite close contact
through my children, especially my daughters at primary school, with hundreds of other
households.
We stop and think about it.
How many households, you know, people come into contact with through, if you're two
children that I have, then suddenly, you know, and there's really, there's really no
social distance.
So, exactly none at all in primary school and virtually none in secondary school.
I mean, the government says there is, but are you talking to your, or any child at school
or do you find that, no, the social distancing is impossible, really, and I'm fine with
that because my children's education is very important and thankful of this disease does
not hit children as hard as their older people.
So it shouldn't really come as a surprise to me when I look, I don't know if you've seen
this app, but it's from King's College London, the coronavirus app that they've come up
with, where you report every day, whether you're feeling well, whether you've had a taste.
Very simple questions, actually.
Yeah.
Have you come across that app?
I've actually seen it in the, in the fridge where I've heard people were talking about
it.
Yeah.
Well, it's quite nicely put together, actually, it is very lightweight, very simple.
And so you enter your details, and once you've interviewed details, it then says, like,
here are some data from, we've collected, from millions of users across the UK.
And today I was looking at the data, and the region of the UK that has the highest number
of cases per million people, as far as I can tell, and I've been clicking around trying
to check this, but it looks very much to me like it's the city of Glasgow, you know,
for us.
Yeah.
I didn't realise that.
Okay.
I'm looking around the north of England, and for some weeks now, I've known that Scotland
has been hit harder than any other part of the UK, although if you press you, you might
get the observation, but it's been obvious now to me from this and other sources.
But I can't think of another area of the UK, not in the north west of England, which
is also having bad times, which is now.
In fact, when you look at the map, the whole map of the UK is going red, except for
the south of England.
So, England, including London, is sort of a pink colour, and the rest of the countries
go on red, which means over 1,000 cases per million people.
So no, it does, I mean, as far as I can tell, it does look like Glasgow is the highest,
if not, it will be amongst the highest in terms of cases, active, physical, physical,
physical.
Yeah.
I've stopped tracking things quite as clearly as I was maybe a month or so ago.
So I hadn't actually spotted that.
Yeah, that's very, very strange.
The sort of things that I've been hearing about, I listened to a podcast called This Week
in Virology, which I've mentioned before in various contexts, but they are looking at
it from the point of view of Virology, epidemiology, and immunology.
So one of the things that they have been saying is that, well, first of all, removal of the
lockdown is just going to mix the virus up again, and more people are going to get it.
And secondly, with children going back to school, yes, they don't catch it, but they,
well, no, that's not true.
They don't, they're not affected by it, but they do catch it.
I think some of the analyses of antibodies in children have shown that most of them have
seen the disease and generated immunity to it.
But the problem is that while they are building that immunity, they might just feel a little
bit off, but they might not feel anything at all.
They're actually shedding virus.
So if they go to school and then contact somebody who's got the virus and then come home
with it, there's a chance that they would pass it on to the parents who, or grandparents
who are more likely to be affected by it, which was the argument I'd heard.
But I think that's, I mean, that's the obvious explanation that why Scotland is going
from being in terms of number of cases, not as bad as some parts of England, in terms
of death, sadly, Scotland is just as bad as it was the rest of the UK, the way the deaths
were reported in the Scotland, I actually think given misleading impression on that.
But the obvious explanation to the current situation, yes, England, Scottish schools go
back several weeks before English schools, and that's why Scotland is currently ahead
in the Covid cases, but having said that, the big butt there is, that does not explain
why the south of England and around London seems to be slightly better off at the moment.
There's something else, something else interesting about that, and it may be, it may be, like
to what one of the things that you said is that it had greater exposure at the back of March
in April.
In fact, then, London was the worst hit part of the UK, wasn't it?
So it may be related to that that London is now not suffering quite as much as the rest
of the country.
Well, I've listened to a lot of discussion about the factors that lead to very nasty consequences
from this coronavirus, and there is obviously ages one well-known factor, comorbidities,
so if you're diabetic, you've got heart, condition, etc., then you stand a better chance
of a worse chance of being affected by it.
But there's also talk about things like vitamin D. There was a lot of talk about vitamin
D being a factor, because as a country, we don't do well as far as vitamin D levels are concerned,
because we're not out in the sun often enough, and we don't always take enough supplements.
So there's a very strong recommendation that we all should be taking vitamin D supplements.
I can't remember what was something like, 25 milligrams, I think it's, sorry, micrograms
is the recommended amount, but I've heard of people taking two and four times that amount,
but it's not a problematic bit of a minute, so.
The argument, though, was that with a low level of vitamin D, your immune system does not function
as well. So it's not a magic thing that kills coronavirus. It's that with you up to the
appropriate level of vitamin D, you are more likely to have your immune system zapping it.
And the other thing that I've been hearing about is that there's quite a number of people of all
different ages, probably the more healthy people, ones with better immune systems and so
forth, who get it, have no idea that they have it. And it passes, you know, they develop
immunity to it, and then, you know, they are shedding it while they have it, the shedding
the virus to others, but along the way, they're building immunity and coming out the other side.
So I wonder if there's actually a lot more people who've managed to get it in a mild form,
or an invisible form, and get a building immunity as a consequence, you know?
Yeah, I think there's something to that. I mean, that would see the problem I have with when I
said earlier that London might be getting an easier time of it, because it had a harder time of it
back in March April at the beginning. The problem with that is that sort of is saying that,
yeah, we didn't get to herd immunity levels. Sorry, you know, assuming we all started, if we
make this up, should we all started with no immunity, there is no way that a sufficient number of
people got it in London, or anywhere else, back in March or April. There wasn't enough people
that got it to get us anywhere near herd immunity, but even to the stage where it would really
significantly interrupt the transmission of the virus, because to get that, you need to get
a herd immunity, you need to be up at 60-70%. That's right. Start to slow, to start to see an effect
and transmission, you need to be up at 30-40-50% level. But if we started at a baseline of zero
no immunity, there was no way we got there. The effect I just mentioned that London is having
easier time of it now, because it had a hard time. That shouldn't happen at the stage,
because not enough people have had it. So the obvious solution to that is that the assumption
that we started with zero percent immunity was wrong. So then the question of how many people
had some form of coronavirus, because it has been shown now in a really well-known nature
paper, that it's not antibodies directly, or I don't understand that, I'm sure you understand
it better than I, but it's these things called t-cells in the generally immunity. And what that
nature paper showed that I thought was extremely significant was one t-cell immunity can last
for years, up to 17 years for SARS and Mars, which were, you know, outbreak was 2003 for SARS.
So 17 years on, people still have resistance immunity against that stream of SARS.
But the other thing is, they found people had immunity to COVID-19, or as they called it SARS-CoV-2,
even though there was no evidence they'd ever had it. But they had had exposure to some other
similar coronavirus. Oh, that's interesting. Yes, I was going to mention that. I heard some
discussion about this, they're saying that if you have been exposed to certain other illnesses
and have just shrugged them off, then it can lead you with a immune system that can cope better
with the coronavirus that we're currently suffering on. And there was some speculation,
well, definitely the common cold stuff, if you'd had that recently before the SARS-CoV-2
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus, by the way, and COVID-19 is the disease. And that's so stupidly
why did they do that? I don't know why they did that, but anyway, that's right. I almost wondered
why, because we have the new sensory coronavirus. I think COVID-19 tends to be the hashtag,
and scientifically first tend to talk about SARS-CoV-2. Yeah, because SARS-CoV-1 was the
original SARS that was all over Asia, as you say, several years ago. That's my understanding
of it anyway. This is the World Health Authority, came, or organization, came up with this because
of being various political reasons behind it or something. So, when you say COVID-19 is a disease,
that means when you say it's a disease, that is identifying it by a collection of symptoms.
Yes, yes. That's how the virus manifests itself. If you actually saw this little thing through
a microscope that was the virus, that SARS-CoV-2 or COV-2, every time we're prone to that.
The acute respiratory syndrome is SARS, COV is just a rebeviation for coronavirus,
and one was the one that got called SARS, and the two is the one that produces COVID-19.
So, it's a little bit labored or the nomenclature, but if it helps, that's where it is.
No, that's really good to know. But, coming back from that digression for a second,
there was also some debate as to whether people who had fairly recently had an
anti-TB injection, which is some called BCG. I see the galmetaguerre, I don't know, I just like that.
I did not know that sort of stuff.
That sort of, yeah. Anyway, it's just me being silly. But that seemed to have done something
to their immune system, obviously it does something to their immune system at this whole point of
it, but it got it into a state where it could fight off the coronavirus, was being
speculative. I don't know that that has actually been proven, but that was some quite strong
speculation, and I'm supposed to go back, I was hearing.
Well, the significance of that nature paper, and they mention it, but they're very careful.
See, our result is based on what? Their result is based on sample of 36 people, and all it shows
is that they've found evidence, and they call it n equals 36. That's the way they like to present
in the abstract, in papers, in the abstract. I read the whole paper. Some of it was beyond me,
but the statistics was not. So it's a small sample, but what they did find is evidence of long-lasting
immunity, and the fact that some people seem to be immune to SARS-CoV-2, even though they had,
there was no evidence that this person had ever had it. So the conclusion was it was likely that
they had another coronavirus, and that's what the evidence of the paper was, and then they
speculate that perhaps that people in the general population have immunity for the same reasons.
Now, the extrapolation, some people run quite excitedly away with that result, based on fairly
small sample, but there are some circumstantial things that would suggest that there's something
first of all, is the fact that there are so many asymptomatic cases. I mean, that's a bit weird
for starters, but what's also interesting, if you look at studies, it seems to vary from place to
place, what the asymptomatic rate is, now that could be because it's actually quite difficult to
know it, but there are a few cases like cruise ships and other circumstances where you can get a
lot of testing was done, so you can get some idea, but it does seem that this statistically
significant difference in the number of the asymptomatic rate, so people would get it 50 percent
journal symptoms, or maybe it was 30 percent or 70 percent, it seems to vary like that depending
on studies. Well, that would suggest this, if you're asymptomatic because you actually had some
immunity to it, like you were describing, then that would explain the high and variable asymptomatic
rate, the other thing that was interesting, and this is a bit more spectacular, but when you look
at some countries, it's, you scratch your head and look at the measures that they took, and
you think, well, why the number of cases takes such a different trajectory to the,
a similar nearby country, or a country that seems to be not that different, so
and the one that we've discussed most is Sweden, so Sweden had a, yeah Sweden had a,
and we didn't have no lockdown measures, but no lockdown, much lighter lockdown, no face masks,
you know, I mean, certainly the, famously, the country with the least measures implemented in
the world, and for a while, because sadly, in UK and Scotland, they let the virus get care homes,
they had a horrendous summer of deaths from the COVID-19, but recently, a number of cases
have just dropped, and you can actually, looking at, you know, here you could say that the drop-in
cases was coincided with lockdown, the exponential, almost like an exponential drop-in cases,
at the end of the summer, in Sweden, during the summer, towards the end of the summer, is not,
you can't, you can't match it to anything that the government has said, do this lockdown more,
you know, there's no connection, something else has caused the drop, and I don't know what that is,
but one amazing, that's really interesting, the suggestion that I've heard is because they let
it spread enough through their community that they've achieved herd immunity, but they've
done that, not because they got from 0% to 65% whatever you need, the speculation, and this is
just speculation, they've gone from 30 or 40 or 50% up to 65%, that would fit with the numbers,
we're 0% up there, so actually what happens next in Sweden is probably very interesting, you know,
I'm not, I'm not some mad libertarian that wants to, you know, I don't mind personally
the restrictions, if they're for good reason, I'll go along with them, and be happy with them,
I certainly was back in March, but then I look at Sweden, and I think that is a different
interesting case, you know, I'd like to see what happens here. Yeah, I'd like to hear more
about it, I haven't really followed up the Sweden information, I have to admit, but yes, I've heard
people saying this is a bit puzzling, we're not quite sure we understand this, in the case of
Asia where it's been quite well controlled, I think Vietnam has been particularly good,
Korea has done a very good job, Singapore has not been bad, et cetera. In many cases,
it's been put down possibly to the fact that a bit of Indian levels in those countries may well
be a lot higher, you know, by default, because there's plenty of sun, and people don't avoid it,
as they do in some countries, apparently Italy is, in Italy people don't like getting out in the
sun very much, so which is news to me, I don't know, actually that one. So that was the speculation
with Italy more, Italy had such a rough time of it in the early stages. The other factor was that
a lot of the Asian countries had had the SARS virus originally, and a lot of them tended to go
for a mask wearing in general. No, if you go to Japan, or if you went to Japan before the coronavirus,
everybody tended to wear a mask, not everybody, but a high proportion of people would be wearing masks,
particularly if they had illnesses or whatever, or they were keep trying to avoid pollution,
and that other thing in Tokyo, et cetera. So it's relatively common for people to wear masks in
those countries, apparently. So the effect of mask wearing has come to be seen as a significant
factor in avoiding the virus, because the outgoing virus and the person who's got maybe asymptomatic
is reduced by some considerable amount. I don't know what the numbers are, but I heard somebody
doing a sort of demonstration of how it would work if it was 50 percent stoppage. It may be more than
that, but and then the person at the other end who hasn't got it, but is receiving the virus,
the virus is being sent to them by the person who has it, then also gets a reduction in the amount
of virus that gets into their lungs by 50 percent. So the overall reduction, if there's a virus
laden person and a non-virus laden person is 75 percent, and that fits with some of the
discussions about how coronavirus affects people, which seems to depend on the so-called viral load,
the number of viruses you actually get to start the whole thing off, and also where they get to.
I think it infects your mucous membrane of your nose and throat stuff in the first instance,
and then drops down into your lungs where the majority of damage is caused. If it's not stopped by
your immune system, but so I think that the reduced virus, you won't avoid the virus because
these masks are not 100 percent unless you're wearing a mask, and then in 100 masks, which you wouldn't.
Then the amount of it that you're receiving may well be enough for your immune system to deal with it.
Yeah, no, that's quite interesting. I think the thing that I mean, I've been
wearing masks when I've been not shopping, if that's really the only time I have to do it.
I generally, if I have to wear a mask to do something, I really stop and find twice what
I'm going to do in the first place. That's my attitude. So shopping I have to do,
it's good to eat, and I don't want to do home deliveries. I'd rather leave home deliveries for
people who want to avoid going to the shops completely, you know, as I feel, yeah, you know,
I'm not that vulnerable, and I'd rather just go to the shops myself. So the way I'm asked for that,
but when I look at what you just described makes sense. All that makes sense to me, but
while I was somewhat surprised to learn about, especially when certain people usually in social
media evangelising about how brilliant masks are, how effective they are, is that actually
have never been any control trials on the question of whether how much a face mask will reduce
the viral load that you receive and your chances of infection, those kinds of questions,
there's never been a control trial. Not one, I don't think. No, no, no. Please, if anyone
knows better than that and knows of a control trial, I'd like, I'd love to be wrong,
but it just surprises me that, you know, as you see, mask wearing has been a cultural norm
in the Far East, has been for some time now, and yet nobody has actually done a control trial on it.
Is it that it's actually quite hard to do because you actually need to be, I mean, would you
use a non-viral substance and then how would you detect whether the person had, how much they'd
picked up and so on? I don't know. Would you just do it in a, you know, in a dummy or something like
that to see how in a chamber of some particles or other, how many got through to the, to the
mouth of the nose area or something? I don't know quite how you would run such an experiment.
I don't know. I assume that the way you control trials in the same way we do, in the same sense,
we do control trials of a vaccine in that you give face masks to people, but not tell them anything
about the quality of the face mask. It's a bit difficult because with a vaccine, you can't see it.
Face mask, somebody gives you a flimsy piece of gauze and here's your face mask.
You can be pretty sure that you're the possible guy. I'm on the saline.
You know, I did a person that's got auction times, we're in the back.
Maybe I've got the N100 mask. So maybe you're right, maybe it's difficult,
but it surprised me, well, I see it, because the model, why I've come to think, really, as
somebody who's done a lot of scientific modeling, not in viruses, admittedly, but I think you have
to be really careful with modeling, because your model results are only as good as the assumptions
you put in, and there are many assumptions in the model that you might have done tacitly or
implicitly, you might not have deliberately made them, but they're there, and a lot of models
fail, I think, because of bad assumptions, or assumptions that you just couldn't, you know,
you had to assume something, because you didn't know better at the time you did them.
So if all the evidence for face mask is based on modeling, then I'm less confident as to their
efficacy, you know, and I'm not saying, I'm not arguing against face masks, that's not what I'm
saying, but what I would really hate is for people to wear face masks and get a false
sense of protection from them, and then stop doing other things, because that is actually advice
in Sweden, the techno is somewhat controversial head of their health organization, and he's
basically said, look, I don't advise using a face mask, best just not to do the things
that would make you want to wear a face mask as much as possible, he says that is a better strategy.
Now I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, but that is the strategy that he's encouraged
in Sweden. Well, that's quite interesting. That's quite interesting actually, because that's more or
less what I've been doing for the past 10 months, because I've not, until, you know, the past,
the past month, but I've not actually gone out anywhere that needed a mask or mandated a mask,
and I've just sort of kept, kept and walked around a little bit and kept very, very distant from
people that are out on the street and that sort of thing, so that does make a degree of sense,
you know, that is the way that a lot of people are avoiding things in this country as well, so yeah.
Actually, I think it's as funny as you'd see, other than the supermarket where we're the mask,
I take much for the same attitude, and even in the supermarket, I do try, if I see an aisle that's
absolutely rammed with people, because that occasionally happens as a bit of a, it comes on the
door at the same time when they kind of move for the similar path, so you end up with, you know,
a sort of congested aisle with supermarket for one reason or another, and I think, well, I'll go
down the next aisle, which is for you at the moment, you know, so I think this, people don't talk so
much about the strategy that you just mentioned, you know, going down the quieter aisle, but actually,
I think that a bit of that is actually quite effective, you know. Yeah, it makes sense, isn't it?
Yeah, so, where we seem to have died, and to quite an interesting discussion about the virus,
which I wasn't expecting, what have you been doing to distract yourself from the, or have you
managed to avail yourself of any of the new film freedoms that you have since the fall of film
in Scotland? Well, I, like I said, the family come to eat with me, so I do, I'm doing a lot more
cooking, because there's, we have four people around the table, and three of them are extraordinarily
hungry, so it's a fair amount of cooking and in bulk that needs to be done. So I make large quantities,
well, you know I do, because I sent you a recipe without telling you, oh, this will feed eight or
something in you. I sent you a recipe for a raguas and it was my, the one that I use, and I
forgotten the quantities were vast, so you ended up with enough to feed the family for a week, I
think, didn't you? Yes, and I'm really happy because it's absolutely delicious. I'm good,
but yeah, so there's that. I go shopping, but I don't go in the shops, my daughter who's just finished
her MSC, she very, very kindly comes with me and goes and does the shopping with my list,
and I sit in the car park, quite important, she doesn't drive, so, so we do a bit teamwork,
so that works, that works, that works virtually, and I sit there looking at social networks on my phone,
and also waiting for her to say, Dad, what does this mean? And where is the such and such?
Did you really mean that you wanted to get 14 bags of pasta?
Those sorts of things, no, no, that was a typo, sorry.
No, you're a, you're, you're a pro stripper in the pocket.
Yes, yes, those sorts of things, so yeah, yes, so that's actually quite fun, I'm enjoying that,
getting out and doing a, doing the shopping by proxy, by remote control from the car park,
that's quite good, it's quite good, and I'm not going to the gym, although the gym is open now,
but I'm not, I'm not sure about whether the gym is a good place to go, if you're not,
100% fit, right? Well, I was, I was humming and pouring about that, and because actually through
the lockdown, I have kept up quite a good routine through walking a little bit of cycling,
a little to a quiet, although the road soon became not quiet, by what may time, I think.
But walking and a sort of regiment of exercises in the house, and I don't even have any weights,
but I managed to find a pair of great heavy wooden stools that are a bit late, but I managed
to adapt exercise, so I was doing, you know, I was extending my arm to its full length, so in the end,
I was thinking, you know, actually, I'm probably doing more exercise now than I was when I was going
to the gym, because I think that's good. Yes, because I'm waiting for something to let's move to
compile the computer, I'm playing a computer game where I'm flying my spaceship through space,
not much is going on, I think, pick up the stools, you know, do a few press-ups, you know,
actually means that I do little sports of exercise throughout the day, but so then I had the opportunity
to go back to the gym, I thought, well, you know, I'm not getting as much cardio as I did, you know,
I like cross-training, particularly my favourite machine to do in the gym, so then I'll go back,
and then I went back, and it was quite quiet, and we didn't have to wear face masks,
well, no, okay, that's fine, you know, it was quiet, and my gym just happens to be big and open,
a big open area, a lot of area, big open-changing, big open gym itself, and they don't change
10 score into a gym, and every other machine was out of action, so this is pretty good,
actually, people were noticeably, you know, wiping machines down afterwards, and I felt like,
you know, I wasn't really coming into contact with many people, it felt to me this was negligible,
increasing my exposure compared to my kids being at school, so I thought, okay, I like this,
and then I got a text from the gym after my first visit, just telling everyone, oh, by the way,
you need to wear face masks when you're not in the changing rooms, and in the gym, or something
pool, basically when you're walking, like, or either between these things, went, okay, but we're
not allowed to take towels or bags or anything else up to the gym with us, so what do we do with
our face masks, once we get to the gym, because I don't let many people, especially women, I suppose,
don't have pockets, so sure enough, I went to the gym next time, and I saw face masks hanging out
with pockets, and, you know, people carrying them around, and then a few cases hung in the
handle of a machine, oh, the sisters, you know, I'm not sure that's makes any sense.
That's an odd thing, actually, I was just thinking, you were saying that the gym I go to
has got some pretty powerful aircon in it, in fact, it's got all these ducts, it's an old supermarket,
I think that was converted, so it's got quite high seams, but they've got these heavy tube
tubular ducts that go across the floor, you know, in the ceiling, across each of the areas,
and it's got down pointing louver type things, so if you're on particular machines, you can,
you get a fair bit of air moving past you. One of the things they say is very good for avoiding
the virus is to have plenty of fresh air, so whether the local bus service is saying, don't shut
the windows, the windows are open, so we get plenty of air through the bus, which makes
down good sense, because this is a virus, which is just floating about in the air, and if it's
getting blown out of the windows, then so much the better, you know, and I'm just wondering if the
gym is a wee bit safer, if it has that type of aircon, I imagine yours does.
Yeah, you know, it's just, I mean, you think of how often I heard you got the turn over of the
air in the room, I think there's a lot of better things for it, but you know, you know, and
they're just like, yeah, in those two environments, these big tubes must be quite short,
but then I think, you know, a face mask to be in your home in machines, and you know,
taking all of the off-cons and living people going in and out the gym, I'm thinking, well,
you know, I don't know, can you pick it up off-services?
You can, to some extent, but although it's nowhere near as contagious through that route,
as was originally thought, they were working on the basis of it being similar to measles,
because measles is one of the most contagious viruses around, but the, I think you can, if you touch
a surface with virus on it, then you put your fingers in your mouth or your nose or in your eyes
or something, any immunosmembrane, you could deliver virus to your system that way, but if you don't
do that, and there are hands energised around and you use them, after you've touched stuff, then,
you know, that's, you're going to be pretty safe.
Yeah, so, certainly, yeah, I definitely do a lot of that. Anyway, so, yeah, so they didn't bother me
too much, but it was just one of these annoyances that seemed to be a bit silly, because it was
to have face masks just to go between the changing rooms and the germs, which is a very short
distance. I didn't really see the point in that, but I did it, but my third visit to the gym,
I thought, hang on, let's get it, it was actually, it was absolutely packed, you know, the changing,
it was hard to find the spot in changing rooms, I mean, put every other locker to use, but that was
really, you know, there's no, there's not enough space, physical space, you use all even half the
lockers, you know, and it seemed to me what was happening is usually at that time of day,
people who go to the office would be in the office. And now that people are working from home,
they can pop up to the gym. So, and by in that fact, the gym is only just to open one
a week, beforehand. I thought there's too many people all coming to the gym, and I've heard this
from other people, and I said, okay, I can see, I can see cases in God going up last week.
All right, now I don't find, this is a good idea anymore. It was fine in the first week, I went
six weeks, third visit, I thought, you know, and I think actually in that case, and I didn't go
to the gym, I brought my swimming stuff, so I went, there's an outdoor pool, which was quite quiet,
and that was perfect, because yeah, all that chlorine floating about, yeah, it's going to be fine,
I think. So, and I'm not going to go back until this current increases, going back down again,
yeah, seems to me. And I'm not actually that worried about me getting it, but I do feel, I don't
want to be part of the transmission, if you understand what I mean, I don't want to be passing on.
The factor, isn't it, that if you have it and it's fairly mild, you're still a bit of a time bomb
for others who might get to get it really badly nearby, so yeah, this is very wise, I think.
So, let me just seem to have got back onto the virus again,
if we can. It's everywhere though. It's hard to avoid.
I, yeah, my gym, of course, I've got a lot of direct debit with them, and they suspended it
during the lockdown, and then they said, we're starting up again, we'll be, we'll be, you know,
taking money from you back at catch shortly, but if you want to freeze the thing for a bit longer
you can freeze it for six weeks or eight weeks or something, so I, I opted to do that. Now,
I'll rethink a bit later on, I think, to go in at that stage, you know, so yeah, yeah.
Now that was certainly here, I'm not going to do it. Anyway, so to really change the subject
away from the virus, it seems to be that normally the virus might have an R number of 2.5,
but talking about the virus, it seems to have an R number of about 100.
The other thing I've been doing, I think I mentioned it to you in an email,
that in the latter part of lockdown is, I've got a sold BBC Micro,
which I did a HPR on last year, probably the year before, and, no, it was last year.
And this sold BBC Micro, 8 bits, 6502 processor for those upside beauty,
who might not be familiar with it, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a Commodore 64,
a bit with half the memory, 32k in the name, but similar technology, similar era.
And I decided to play an old adventure game called Twinkington Valley, which I love.
It was my favorite adventure game. Also, it was the only one in the BBC that I knew of,
certainly the first one that had graphics. It had a, rather,
rudimentary by the way, standard, but quite elegant,
very beautiful photographic, with the display. And also, it contained clues
into us, to the game itself, actually. So the graphics weren't just for decoration,
but they were actually an integral part of the game. And so I played it, and I have thought I'd
completed the game when I first played it in 1982 or 33, so 37, 37, 37, 37,
37 years ago, I think. But it turned. So I hadn't, because I filmed when I got to some point
in the game, but there was something I hadn't done. So I enjoyed finishing the game. So,
technically, it took me 37 years to come to my game. That's so wonderful. I like that.
So not content with computing the game, I then decided, because it's really a machinehold,
I thought, it's completely remarkable that fits into 32k of memory, fat less than 32k,
because I think 20k is taken up by the screen graphics, just the display on the screen
needs 20k of memory. So that actual code is under 10k thought.
Actually, that's quite remarkable, because it's an adventure game, it's got graphics,
and it's got NPCs, it's got non-player characters, that actually, they're quite,
I mean, okay, they're stupid, they're robotic, but for an epic microphone, so little memory,
they're actually remarkably interesting. Their behavior is not trivial. So I thought,
how the hell all this works? So I went back and from scratch, just assembled the code,
and I've really written most of the code, not the graphics, but the actual game code itself in C.
And I spent weeks doing that. I just totally, totally, is it geeky or is it nerdy?
One of the two, geeky, I think it's nerdy, and I'd probably both, actually.
But I just loved it. It was a real intellectual challenge to go from a sense to the bunch of
hex numbers, turn that into mnemonics, and then use my rather rusty knowledge of 6502.
Did you have a disassembly? Or did you have a disassembly? Yes, I did. There was a film one
called BebeDis, which was, it's really 6502 disassembler, but as the name suggests,
with, particularly with the BBC and mine, but actually it wasn't as useful as you'd think,
because you get screeds of code, but the way that the, this code is written,
I don't think it was uncommon, you get screeds of code, and then you'll get a little bit of code
that then operates on a string of a series of bytes, which are in fact ASCII codes.
So the disassembler doesn't know, it can't tell when these ASCII characters are in line with the
code, as it were, because it's just a big sequence of bytes. Yeah, yeah. So it then produces,
data embedded in the code effectively. Yeah, so it then produces these nonsense set of instructions,
and then because of the offset of the bytes, because some instructions and assembler are not
just going to be one byte, and they mostly are not, they're mostly two or three bytes,
then because the offset is wrong, then everything disassembled from that point is gibberish.
Yes, yes. So that was the hardest thing. Then I had to write my own disassembler,
it was kind of bespoke to this, the idiosyncrasies of this program, and then,
so I had the disassembler, and then my custom disassembling code on top of that,
that then after some iterative, well, steering my hearl, frankly, but if it's an enjoyable
feeling, you know, I actually got the whole thing disassembled in the state where I could call
into it. Wow, that's quite an undertaking. I did do a bit of assembler level code on the
BBC micro. I think I've said this to you before, but maybe not in recorded mode.
My friend, I was working with a colleague at Lancaster University, was very much into
the BBC, and he wrote an assembler for it, so I used to use his assembly. The B had a facility
where a chunk of memory could be a ROM. I don't remember how that worked, no. That was the ROM
did you have to swap out an existing bit of code in order to get your own ROMs in?
No, the way it worked is, if you think about FSA, but you can address up to 64k to
power 8, so 8 bits, no, sorry, the address is on the BBC, the address line's BBC could address
up to 16 bits, that's right, two bytes, so that takes you up to 16, which is like, you get up
to 64k, but as I said, the original BBC only had 32k of RAM, so I think what it does is
that the upper 32k, which isn't RAM, that is ROM effectively. If you address stuff up there,
that is going to a ROM, and that will be pitched out, so you could then replace that.
That's right, there was something else. There was a switch, a software switch you could do to,
you could have a stack effectively of ROMs, and you could switch between them, I don't
remember how many, they were actually add-ons that let you add more to it, so you could, you could,
presumably it was a byte or something like that, address it or something, anyway, potentially there
was quite a lot of ROMs that you could have, because you could buy compilers and other systems
to go into those ROM slots, and there was on the box itself, there was a panel you could remove
on the front of the case, and underneath it was the PCB had a slot where you could put
a ZIF socket, you know, a zero insertion force socket in there, and the one with a lever that you,
I'm just saying this in case, and the listens, I don't know what I'm talking about,
you flipped a lever and it opened up the holes in it, and then you dropped a ROM into it, and then
you flipped it shut and it hung onto the ROM, so that was a possibility, but there was also a
thing where you had permanent ROMs on an extender card, which you could, you could, you know, you could
think, they could be things you bought, or they could be erasable e-proms and stuff that you could
develop software for, and then you just jumped to that to run your code, I think they were even
games that ran in ROM, I can't remember anything, but I was one, it was Doctor Who in the
Mines of Terror, oh nice, yeah, the thing is, it wasn't really a very good game, it was a big game,
you know, it was big, but it wasn't actually that much fun, you know, and yeah, yeah, so yeah,
it was, yeah, and also I think it, I kind of wish company, I remember which company actually
published it, but I think it was also a financial disaster for them, because, you know, they got
around the copyright problem, it's much harder to copy a ROM as a disk, of course, but I don't
think producing ROMs was very cheap, to sell it in a retail game level, so yeah, yeah, because
these were hard, hard-wired or whatever, they were baked in ROMs, weren't they? We used to
work, we had a lot of the e-proms, the ones that were erasable with an ultraviolet thing,
because there was some hardware development going on in the department I was in, and so there was
all the ultraviolet erasers and stuff too. I think you could write those ROMs only on the
beavers are a core, but I can't remember the details. Well, maybe we had an external ROM writer or
something like that, but so yeah, we were actually playing around developing our own ROMs up on time.
Well, that's, that's, it's funny you should mention that, because after I finished
just assembling this code, I became quite familiar with the 6502 processor, you know, and you're
really, when you're doing assembly, you're really done there in the guts of the machines, you know,
and I found that quite interesting, and so I started going down a bit of a rabbit hole with the 6502,
and to my astonishment, the 6502 is still made, it's still manufactured to this very day,
not the original one that was in the BBC, and the Commodore 64 I think had a 6510, and that it was
a cousin of it, but not those, because 6502 is actually I think 76, it's mid-70, so it was already
good for at least five years old by the time the BBC Model B came out, but it's astonishing,
really astonished me to discover that it's after over 40 years, there's still manufacturing,
essentially an 8-bit processor, it's slightly improved, 6502, I think that this code now is there,
so I think it is closer to the one that was in the BBC Master, which came after the BBC Model
thing that I had, and the reason I discovered this is an excellent YouTube channel, it's a
highly recommend if you're into such things, by a chap called Ben Eater, which you might have heard.
I have actually, yes, yeah, I mean he's got, I didn't realise that when I was watching him,
but he's got like half a million subscribers who all want to watch him play around with 6502
processors, but he takes a breadboard, sticks a 6502 processor in it, connects up to Ellie,
the address lines up to Ellie D's, and goes, well look they're flashing, you know,
doing this, and then, you know, and with, and I thought that's really remarkable, I actually
he's made, you know, whenever I saw one of these chips with, I don't know how many pins,
6502 has 40 pins, perhaps something like that, it just seemed like that's incomprehensible,
something with 40 pins, I mean, iPhone transistors with three legs, quite difficult to comprehend,
you know, resistors, I'm fighting with capacitors, yeah, transistors, three legs, not getting
tear, it's scary, you know, so 40 pins, nah, not a chance, and then he described what the 40 pins
did, you know, and like things like the address lines, but each leg of the address line,
the voltage is either higher low, if it's high, that's a one, if it's low, it's a zero, and there's
16 of them, one for each bit of a 16 bit address, hence why, you know, you can have a, you have a 2-byte
16 bit address on a 6502 pose, there's a 16 legs that can go higher and low, you know,
just that very simple thing, at least to me, I was quite a revelation to see all connect up to LEDs,
so I've actually bought a kit off-bender, and now we need to build my own, I'm building my own 6502
computer, all the breadboards, so I, that sounds like fun, yes, yes, yeah, when I worked at
Lancaster University, I left there in motor in 181, but in the time before, there was a group
within the department, this is a service department, right, for running the main computers for the
university, but it was just the start of the time when micro-processes were started to come
popular, and there was a small group of about three people who was the microprocessor unit,
or something like that, they all had different names in those days, and they did a course for us
for the staff in the department, you know, to bring everybody up to speed with what the microprocessor
was and what you could do with it and stuff, it was a really good course they did, but in order to
do it, we each got, I think there was maybe 10 of us max in the room, we each got a 6502
very bare machine, I can't remember what it was, I think it was the, my memory says an AIM-60
no, AIM-32, was it? I thought, remember, it was just a bare socket board with a, not bare,
so it was, it wasn't in a box, it was just sitting on a base, and it had 6502 on it, and it had
LEDs on it, and it had a bunch of switches, so you could actually program it like the old-fashioned
way of, you know, putting it in a, working out what the sequence was, the bit sequence was for
an opcode, and clicking in and then pressing the button that said, load this into memory and stuff,
and so we were writing little teeny tiny things that ran on that that made lights flash and
talking, it took ages to do, but it was really quite exciting, especially since you could actually
see your guts of it, so a bit like what you're describing, you know, if you're getting that close
to the bare metal of it, you get to really appreciate what makes it tick, you know, well, so,
yeah, that was, we never used that course, we never used any of it, but the guys who were running
it were very, very good, I think they went on to much higher things later, yeah, it's really good.
Yeah, well, I find it interesting, when late you see probably what uses it now, well, I don't know,
but I tell you what, find more remarkable is who is using these newly manufactured 6502 processors?
Is it all people like me and Bingter, and people who watch this channel was half a million of them,
so maybe that is driving it, but looking at the blurb that goes with it, it doesn't seem like that,
it does seem that these processors are used for something, but I haven't yet discovered what.
Because the design of the 6502 is effectively a risk machine, wasn't it?
A lot of risk, isn't it? I've got a reduced instruction set compared to
its successes, so I thought I'd heard that argument made.
Well, you know, you're right, it is extremely small, I mean, it's only got three registers,
and only one accumulator can actually do the rest of the x and y registers can only count up and down,
that's all they can do. So that, as you can imagine, means that it's got a very small set of
instructions, and the funny thing is that after I finished with the BBC Micro back in the 80s and
early 90s, I tangled with its successor, a spiritual successor, which was called Darkenedies,
and it did have an ARM chip inside it, and this is the same ARM incidentally,
this is that it's in all our mobile phones today, and tablets, same ARM, and it definitely is,
that deliberately was a reduced instruction set unlike the 80x86 series in the Pentium,
which was still a few years ago at that point, but the thing that's quite funny is to me,
I couldn't understand why they called it risk, because there's the echoing risk it was at that time,
was a bigger instruction set than 6502, which I already knew. So you're right, the 6502 was
risk, but not intentionally, so I think it was probably done because a team that built it in the 70s,
where it's trying to make a cheaper consumer version, or, I don't know, I don't think of a
6800, not a 68000, but the... I think you're right actually, I don't remember much about that,
but about the 68 or the 68xx chips, but yeah, I think you're actually right, because it is very much
paired down to the bare bones of an instruction set, isn't it? Yeah, and the other thing about risk,
that's famous advantage of risk, and why it's ended up in our mobile devices in the form of
armchips, is that it's low power consumption, that if you reduce the complexity, you reduce the
power consumption, and the interesting thing about this original 6502, like the one that's up in my
UC micro, I think the one that replaced it, the 6502, the one that I currently have got this kit
to build my own future, I think the power consumption of that was incredibly low, I can't
remember exactly the technical reason for this, but it was an order of magnitude lower than the
original chip, so that may be, I think, that may be why it's still in use today, it's because it's
extremely low power consumption. Well, that's where I was going with the question about risk,
maybe there are applications where you want something that is extremely lightweight,
and yeah, it's effective enough with an 8-bit device, or an 8-bit address line, or whatever,
it's a 16-bit, but yeah, maybe there's still an application for that type of thing,
but it's hard to know, I don't know where that is, given that there's all these other
devices coming out, apparently all the time, all the ESPs and 8266 and ESP32 and stuff like that,
about their instructional set, because you tend to program them in C variant, or C++ variant thing.
Anyway, that's a great story, I do like the fact that you do that,
I used to read magazines way back in the 70s, there were various, I could know their practical
electronics and that sort of stuff that used to say, here's how you would make a terminal,
I was following the, I was quite keen on the idea of actually making one, though I never did,
I probably couldn't have afforded it at that state anyway, but it was talking about how you would
make a terminal in the sense of a keyboard with a monitor, which I think was a TV, and how you
would scan the memory to turn, it's a similar sort of thing to the feed where there was a sort of
DMA type thing where you direct memory access thing, you plot things in the memory, and there
was a scanning process that went through it line by line effectively and then painted it onto the
screen, that type of idea. It went into a lot of detail about how you would do this, what
kit you would use, the clocks that you would put into it to get the scan, to build the scanning
code, and how you would then pump that out as a RGB or something, or whatever to the monitor.
I don't remember the details of it, I just remember in a maze that what was involved in
pressing keys on a keyboard, which made things go into memory, which then got displayed on the
screen, and it seems ridiculous, so about today's standard, but it seemed quite exciting at the time.
Yeah, that's something that I really appreciated, that the simple process of displaying a
character or the reverse, pressing a key and telling computer that you want something to be done
with a lighter X, for example, involves a phedish amount of electron. It's not like a little, it's not
it's not like a little, you know, a little electrical pulse goes along in the computer,
it's like, it's an X, you know, it passes through a surprising number of chips and angates and
vatters and man's and nor's, you know, there's a translation stage, isn't there, where the
actual representation of the X has then got to be translated into how the thing would actually
look as a bunch of pixels on a screen, and that type of thing.
Yeah, just, I was sorry, what were we talking about? I actually looked it up. The original
6502 processor uses 450 millawatts, so it's half a watt, which is quite a lot for a little chip,
actually, yeah, I don't know what it does. It's 65 CO2, which I think was in the BBC Masters that
came up few years later, and it's the same as the one I have upstairs in my house in the kit.
It will only use 20 millawatts, some more than fact of 20 times its power improvement.
So that may well be why the 65 CO2 is still in use today.
Mmm, mmm, mmm, it's pretty remarkable, actually, 20 millawatts, considering what it can do,
you know, as 20, you know, I mean, I mean, how much Raspberry Pi is way more than 20 millawatts,
when it does a lot more than the 6502 processor, but yeah, 20 millawatts is really
making control of territory and the thing. Absolutely, yes, yes, yeah, a lot of the early
systems went for that, the 6502, but it's more about availability and cost, one with the
imagine than anything else. Exactly, yeah, yeah. That's great stuff. Yeah, so I suppose that's
been talking for over an hour or not. So easily done, isn't it? So easy to do.
Good to attain the goal. Yeah, I know. I was going to, on my list of possible things to talk about,
I've got, there's some company just installed optical fiber in the street outside here, so I'm hoping
that before too long I'll get a proper, proper connection rather than ADSL. What's it like in glass
for that? You've got fiber? Well, I've got cable, which I think is, I think it's 120 megabits,
down and 20 megabits up, but more importantly, I mean, I don't think I always get those speeds to
be fair, but more importantly, it's very stable, you know, I can really rely on it being up, and
I know other people don't have that on the same ISP, but I am very lucky, because I don't mind.
The bandwidth is not the important thing to me, it's the reliability, it's more important. Yes.
Because you can optimize for bandwidth, but you can, nothing you can do if you're connection,
let a lot of people that I talk to in Zoom calls and such, like, just disappear every so often,
because they're, which is falling over. So no, mine's pretty good, I have to say, and the fiber has
appeared. I saw the people installing it and tearing their hair out. Have you drilled? Yeah.
Are you? Yeah, because there seems to be a drive in Scotland to get high speed internet to
everybody over a period. I know that Edinburgh has been one of the cities that's quite high on
the priority list for getting sick. They've actually laid bundles of fiber through a trench,
they dug and filled in again. So there's a box in the ground just outside my
boundary of my house. And apparently there's a gigabit available if you're prepared to spend
the money on it. Yeah, there's a gigabit fiber, though. I have no idea whether they're going to be
able to provide gigabit to an entire state of houses for a very long time here, because even though
the fiber can handle it easily, have they got the infrastructure in terms of all the intermediate
boxes and stuff to do that? It's a non-trivial exercise now. But yeah, I mean, that's my
issue with what's the point of the bandwidth? Even a hundred megabits per second, what's the point
of it? Because there's no website or server out there that I ever use. Look, quick and open,
they can serve up data, because the only advantage I can see is for the speed of a large download,
if I'm downloading my gigabits and some bits of software at my lab, a Linux distro can be
settled gigabits easily. A Windows update could be that big. Again, it could be tens, maybe even
over 100 gigabits these days and reviews and so forth. But no servers will serve it up that fast
to you. To use up my 100 megabits, even if the kids did stop streaming everything they're doing,
an interesting older movies into the house. And I had that for bandwidth. There's no server
out there to serve it up that fast. So I don't really see what the advantage of 100 megabits per
second is, let alone a gigabit. No, I know, I know. I wonder if, because I think the sort of thing
that's coming is a gigabit in both directions. Though I think you would, that's really good
businesses. The expectations you spend a lot of money on it. But you could actually run your own
servers in your house if you wanted to do that. I don't know how desirable that is, but it's always
seemed to me to be something that would be quite nice, have your own VPN or something in your house.
I think, rather, I mean, what I would like to see done is more of a reliability of internet
connections and latency. I just don't see, I don't see, it seems to be that people are a bit fixated
with bandwidth. I've seen a couple of cases in software that I support, the software which needs
to contact a SQL server over a network connection. The only network connection I've ever seen
that's reliable enough is an old-fashioned ethernet cable. It doesn't even have to be cat 5E or 6,
you know, it could be, it doesn't even need that. It just needs to be a cable connection.
Wi-Fi and anything that goes through the wider internet is generally not reliable enough.
It's not useful enough because of latency issues. I mean, the data that this is for a software
application, but it needs to send the data from database and back as fast as the user can click
around and type stuff in, you know. Now, whether you could argue that maybe the software could be
designed better, but I'm going to start software that I'm supporting and can't control that.
So I will, I keep saying to customers, yes, you've got 100 megabits or 10 megabits or whatever,
that's, that's, that's, that's plenty. The problem is that your latency is all over the place. It's
anywhere from, you know, it's anywhere from let a few hundred milliseconds, which is probably
okay from those purposes. To some cases, several seconds, occasionally, you know, presumably because
the packets are getting corrupted and sent multiple times or something, I don't know.
But whatever it is, it means then that, you know, a secret phrase for typing
furiously away into the computer, presses the button, then it has to wait three seconds for
something to update, you know, or maybe an error message gets generated because it timed out.
That actually for the speed of the way people work with this software in the office is actually
very inconvenient for them. You know, when you click a button, you want to see it depress and
under press straight away. You don't want to hang around and wait for a few seconds.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. It's, yeah, so I think there is a, there is a tendency to
get very, very excited about the incredible bandage without necessarily thinking about why.
My car will go very, very fast. You'll find a road that you can drive it on.
Yes, yes, exactly. That's exactly the kind of thing or if it crashes.
Yes, yes. You know what? I mean, we've all had a, maybe a,
not someone we know or maybe a friend who said, I've just bought a Porsche and then you're thinking,
yeah, you're not a good driver. Are you the first weight D smash?
Oh, yes, yes, yes, acceleration and on a slippery road.
No, anyway, well, I guess having just hijacked the wind up that we should have done
50 minutes ago, maybe we should do it now. No, no, no, that's absolutely fine, do you feel it?
No, it's good. When we get together in normal times, we tend to wrap it on about all sorts of
things, which is great and fascinating. So just sharing our chat with the world, which is great
stuff. How was each PR doing for sure? At the moment, I know the queue got a bit dry over the
summer, but is it looking realty again? Not too bad, I think, moving away, not sure whether I've
lost mumble, there's a kind of, we've got enough, we've got next week's stuff.
We've got all of this, we've got stuff the following week, we've got gaps the week after that,
so we're okay, we're okay, but it's always the case that you see a gaping void, and then
well, what we're going to do, and then people come in and fill the gaps, and then you think,
oh, that's fine, then, because that same problem is going to occur again in a matter of days,
whether it be a week or two weeks or three weeks, it's going to happen again, because it's not a
steady flow that comes in, but that being said, my little traffic light system just went red to say
somebody just sent in a show, so I can't really complain. So your traffic light system goes to
Vade when you have to get moving? Yes, yes, the logic of that, it's calling it a traffic light system
is wrong, because it isn't that, it's just a bunch of lights, and the red one is urgent,
and the green one is, I just got an email from my daughter or something, and so I better do something
about that, so yeah, so it's not so much, it's more like a, each, you know, like death cone,
it's like HPR cone, but alert level, that's right, yes, we're on alert level pink or something,
yes, yeah, well yes, so I suppose the message there is more shows please, and we're doing this one,
and I probably have at least two shows, one of them, more of what, 6502 Disassembly, and I've
probably another show, once I've built this, 6502 Computer, so we'll give it a theme to my shows,
if I, yeah, when I get them to them, yeah, I shall do that one to assembly. Yeah, it'll be cool,
I went on training courses on assembly language, I am not that keen on it these days, I got lazy,
I think, but those courses were pretty good, I went on an ICO course for their mainframes,
right, December for their mainframes and stuff, and that's quite interesting, but you know,
it's not a thing I'd want to do now, but it's, I should, you know, I think you might change my mind a
bit. No, I mean, I don't know what it is that attracts me, but I like simplicity, all of the
two languages that I'm drawn to, in assemblers, the most extreme form, 6502, more so, are compact,
so my favourite language, I mean I've programmed Java for years, but I really want to go back to
programming and see, because it's just so little to know, you know, I mean, look at Garnigan
Richie book, the first, it's a very slender book, and then you consider that the first half of it
is telling you how to use it, and the second half is the reference for the language itself,
and then you go around and look at other languages like Java, the huge big fat thick volumes,
but people write on it, you know, but see can really be condensed into something as slender as
Colonel Henry Richie. No, it's very true, it's very true. I was quite attracted to a fourth,
I had a fourth Roman my B, and it's a very, very, very strange language, but it's incredibly
compact, that, and have you ever looked at post script, post script is another, post script is a
language, it's very, very, it's in post script files, yes, file, yeah, yeah, it's in there,
I never thought of it as a language, it's a programming language, yeah, no, I've often wondered
about to do an HP OS show on post script, because I always assumed it was a more like a markup
language, I never thought of it as a programmable language. No, it's an RPN stack-based language,
so you know, you put three, seven plus to add three and seven, and all that sort of stuff,
and it's all stack oriented, and as is fourth, so yeah, it's quite, I know nothing about fourth,
that is, it's funny, you should mention that, I mean, I've been a dabble with just about
every language, especially the unusual ones like Prologue and Arlang, and you know, you know, I've
gone, you know, I've that, I just go in and have a little play with them, every time I see
I think I've got to find out what this line is different, you know, I've never, I've never done
four. It's neat. Well, there was a time when it was really popular in the astronomy world,
wasn't it? Because it's quite a number of telescopes that were driven by, by fourth programs.
No, I never got, I never got, I never tangled directly with Salesforce, just analyzing
data from my professional career, so I think, yeah, I think you're right, but no, I never,
I was never required to do that. No, no, no, I just imagine everybody be learning four, and
writing things and all of that. It's just, it's just the weird, weird idea that sort of thing.
Yeah, well, there's definitely an HPR I'd listen to and forth then, and I think after I pop to write
that wrong, after I've listened to, if you do one, I'll listen to it and then go away and have a go.
Yeah, well, it's in my list, but my list is very, very long, and I don't know if I ever get to
some post scriptures fun. We had laser printers at work when we got our Vax cluster, part of the
bundle was two laser printers, just sort of desktop things, but they were really, really popular,
because all of a sudden students could make reports very quickly and easily, whereas previously
they had to send stuff to a daisy-wheel printer or get somebody to type it or something,
and we didn't have a means of billing, so I got given the task of trying to write something,
which would detect how many pages of a post script thing wrote, because it was a post script,
they were post script printers, that's all they talked. So I ended up having to write things that
got loaded into the printer before and after each, each job, each print job that was sent to it,
which counted, looked at the in-built counters beforehand, and after to say,
this job produced so many pages, and then at the right, a log that we could then fill people with,
because the world became far more sophisticated, and lots of people did this sort of thing,
and then were commercially available, et cetera, et cetera, and I did end up doing that for a
post script, it's a weird thing. Oh yes. I've never, I just never appreciated the course that you can do
that. So yeah, yeah. So let's, let's call it end. It's been really good. Thanks very much,
Chandu, it's been really fun to have a chat, and I could go on for ages, and I'm sure you could,
be a stop. You've got to, you've got to keep eGPR episodes to a finite length, I think that's,
I don't think that's actually written down anywhere, but I think implicitly, given the
constraints, and the laws of physics, yeah. So let's say our goodbyes then. Okay, well thank
you very much for listening, and record a show, and please let me know if you, please do a show
about 6502, or leave a note in the comments if you know why the 6502 is still a production to this day.
Yeah, good question actually, yeah, yeah, but there are some people out there who do know a lot about
this sort of stuff. Okay, bye, bye.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community podcast
network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was found
by the digital dog pound and the infonomican computer club, and it's part of the binary revolution
at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment
on the website, or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status, today's show is
released on the creative comments, attribution, share a like, 3.0 license.