{"id":2279,"date":"2017-03-20T07:44:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-19T22:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/?p=2279"},"modified":"2017-07-06T17:46:21","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T08:46:21","slug":"how-i-spent-last-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/how-i-spent-last-month\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Spent Last Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Charles<\/a>Today, I’ve posted the project on which I’ve been working (and hence hunkered down and largely invisible) for the last\u00a0month: the 2017 edition of The Analytical Engine<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0In the 19th century, Charles Babbage imagined and invented a steam-powered mechanical apparatus which anticipated almost every aspect of modern computers. \u00a0In 1997, I published on the Web a collection of original documents about Babbage’s invention, along with an emulator, written in Java, which allowed people to experience programming this machine, which was never actually built. \u00a0(It is the founding member of the Victorian Brass Vapourware Club.)<\/p>\n

Well, foolish me, I happened to buy into a vapourware fad just as delusional\u00a0and much more expensive for all involved, Java applets, the stake through whose heart\u00a0has just been driven by Firefox dropping support for them in version 52 and Oracle announcing that they are ending support for the browser plug-in which supports them.<\/p>\n

Time passes. \u00a0We age. \u00a0Stuff stops working. \u00a0So it goes.<\/p>\n

The new release, documented here<\/a>, replaces the Java applet with HTML5 and JavaScript, which, being adopted W3C standards, will probably be at least 2.72% more persistent than the last fickle fad of Java applets.<\/p>\n

To get a feel for steampunk computing, go to the sample programs<\/a> page and try running some of them (just click on the \u201cgears\u201d icon, then scroll down and press the \u201cStart\u201d button in the emulator). \u00a0When a program is done, press the \u201cTiming\u201d button under the Attendant’s Log for an estimate of how long the mechanical Analytical Engine would have taken to run the program.<\/p>\n

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\"Charles<\/a>Today, I’ve posted the project on which I’ve been working (and hence hunkered down and largely invisible) for the last\u00a0month: the 2017 edition of The Analytical Engine<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0In the 19th century, Charles Babbage imagined and invented a steam-powered mechanical apparatus which anticipated almost every aspect of modern computers. \u00a0In 1997, I published on the Web a collection of original documents about Babbage’s invention, along with an emulator, written in Java, which allowed people to experience programming this machine, which was never actually built. \u00a0(It is the founding member of the Victorian Brass Vapourware Club.)<\/p>\n

Well, foolish me, I happened to buy into a vapourware … Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2279"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2282,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions\/2282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}