I’ve just converted a load of my old BBC BASIC V and ARM Assembler programs from tokenised to ASCII files using Brandy.

Most of my old ASM programs are graphical so don’t work under Brandy, but I guess would under ArcEm, Arculator, or if VirtualAcorn ever do a Linux port.

Here’s one of my favourites – a screensaver I wrote that uses chaos theory to make a “life” simulation. It was so fast I had to slow it down a bit for StrongARM usage….

I’ve not done much this weekend, I’m not wonderfully motivated for some reason.

Saturday I went out and did my first real test of the new GPS – it went pretty well actually, I like the way it says go over the roundabout, or turn right at the roundabout, not just take 2nd exit or 3rd exit, plus its accurate – my old Acer was always 200m out in the UK (France was alright).The speed camera database is interesting, it seems to show that most of the signs are bullshit, as there really aren’t any cameras around. Some of the speed limits are wrong though, a lot of places were 40mph that the GPS said were 30mph, but I guess its better than the other way around.

I reformatted my 2.5″ external hard disk last night – well first I tried resizing with GParted, which worked but was going to take 4 hours to copy the data onto the new partition, so I quit it and did it manually. So now I have a 45Gb NTFS primary partition (Windows only sees the first partition of an external drive) and a 100Gb ext3 partition. It works a treat on Linux using ntfs-3g, and also on WindowsXP (although seem to have permissions issues on NTFS) which handled a 3.8Gb ISO file fine, and I even managed to use Acronis to backup my F7 laptop to the NTFS partition. The office laptop and desktop powered the drive via USB just fine, I didn’t need the extra power cable as with eSATA.

Incredibly boring day at work today. My agency is trying to make all sorts of changes mid-contract, to which I say a royal “fuck off”, plus I don’t seem to have been paid for last week yet.

I played a bit more with VMWare Workstation 6.5beta2 again today, it seems Solaris 9 and 10 tools are completely broken and 64-bit support is pretty rubbish. I’m seriously thinking of nuking my Fedora7 install at work and installing Fedora9 to try Xen/KVM again.

Urgh I hate bank holidays – when you’ve got nothing to do (and have a cold!) they can really drag – plus you don’t get paid! Weather’s been pretty good lately though.

I’ve been playing with my GPS a bit more, and I really like iGO8. I tried to get it to direct me from Boulogne to Chaillac without going through Paris, and it found the same route that I usually take – after I told it to go via some point on the N154. I also installed the 3D buildings, which are quite cool. It can also tell you if you’re speeding silently via an onscreen warning, and it can tell you about UK speed cameras too.