Being viewed as having a 'weird' hobby has never had, does not now have and never will have anything to do with my opinion of somebody.  I mean, as long as nobody is getting hurt. Then again, I'm probably weird. On 1/24/22 2:17 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:

Hmm. I view the word "weird" in a positive light. I think your interests (which obviously overlap with my interests since we're both here) are weird, but I consider that to be a compliment. Weirdness is something I value, and a consider weirdness to be independent of whether I'm interested in something. Playing with silly obsolete computers is weird to me, and I love it. Collecting little porcelain dolls is also weird to me, but something that I don't personally find interesting. I consider the lack of weirdness to be kind of boring, in any case. -- Mark J. Blair <nf6x(a)nf6x.net> Blog: https://www.nf6x.net Git: https://gitlab.com/users/NF6X/groups HECnet: DOGPAK::MBLAIR Twitter: @nf6x

Maybe the folks who you don't want to associate with aren't so much people who think that your interest are weird, as people who think weirdness is undesirable? I *know* I'm weird, but I like hanging out with weirdos. Well, not *all* weirdos. There are weirdos I'd rather not hang out with, and also weirdos whose weirdness I appreciate without sharing an interest in it. I think we may share about the same feelings with respect to "the mundanes". I don't feel a lot of connection to them, and generally prefer to stay in my weird little bubble of weirdos. I think that weirdness and creativity necessarily go together. If one is going to come up with new stuff, I think they necessarily need to be wired a bit differently than the center-of-the-bell-curve folks who make up most of humanity. -- Mark J. Blair <nf6x(a)nf6x.net> Blog: https://www.nf6x.net Git: https://gitlab.com/users/NF6X/groups HECnet: DOGPAK::MBLAIR Twitter: @nf6x

Funny you should mention that. For several years, the only time I noticed that the super bowl had happened was first, during my morning commute, after the game.  There would be a rather large number of individuals (all men, it seemed), lovingly going over each particle of activity, never coming to any conclusion, but never getting tired of it, either.  It was the same thing coming home.  However, this was certainly better than them yelling, but either way, my earphones went in and I worked remotely via cellular based VPN. At work, football analogies abounded for a few days, which I often needed to Google, having not paid any attention whatsoever for the other 364 odd days.  I eventually found that knowing the terms was unnecessary because the people using them weren't saying anything that a technologist needed to hear.  I could concentrate multi-tasking on something else. I adore being weird.

Indeed.  We must not lose sight of the fact that there can be good points about 'the ball'. In days past, whenever I happened to have either been dragged over a house with an active super-bowl party or so unfortunate as to have stumbled into one, I have been happy to drink the beer and /delighted/ to eat the snacks. And then finding literally /anything/ else to do, such as playing with the Dog, snooker, the kids and helping the house Mrs. to clean up. The conditions of satisfaction for the 'bro's are that you claim to inhabit a male body and have active respiration, heartbeat (or even having a heart) being unnecessary.  Being coherent or even conscious appear to be optional.  It's fine to be passed out drunk.

Running antique software isn't any stranger than jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, or punching holes in cardboard from a distance. paul

Well, this was complicated by the fact that sources are not available... I had to write a disassembler (because the ones that other have written couldn't deal with the object code I was looking at). Then after the disassembler was done, I had to actually disassemble the module I was interested in, figure out how it works, rewrite it so it would allow concurrent use of Datatrieve-11 and DECnet, then rebuild, create a test, and verify that all worked. So now I have a PDP-11 disassembler for RSX object code, which is "better" than any other I've found. And to make that long story a bit shorter: the problem is that I am facing object code generated by BLISS-11 or BLISS-16. Actually, I have seen the source code that BLISS-16 generates, and I've generally been pretty impressed by it, so I suspect this is actually from BLISS-11. It generates some pretty stupid code, but it also takes advantage of the rather free form TKB (the linker) allows object code to look like, and does the object code in a very different way than any other compiler I've seen. Basically, it creates all the code in one run, and then it goes back and patches all of it in select locations, where needed. The usual output from compilers is that they generate a chunk of code, and then follow that with updates to select locations in the previous chunk where references to symbols or expressions needs to be resolved at link time. The code that does all the data and then goes back and patches it all over the place just wasn't handled nice at all by any existing disassembler. The end result was unreadable and confusing. My (new) disassembler now collects everything before doing any disassembly. Requires more memory, but means this kind of object code gets handled correctly. And of course, I try to do some more clever things while I'm at it. I'll probably release that disassembler as well, eventually. For now it's still not complete. I just needed it to work enough to handle the code I wanted to disassemble in order to fix Datatrieve-11. So now I'll continue on the disassembler instead. :-) And while I don't particularly enjoy writing documentation, I do think I need to do it, or otherwise noone will at all know how to make use of these things. Tests are mostly done for specific things. I usually don't write that many automated regression tests for the things I do in my spare time... And then I try to spread my fixes. Currently my TCP/IP package is where I do this, but it's sortof not the right way, really. I should work on a more proper RSX and layered software patch management system instead. Johnny On 2022-01-24 19:56, Thomas DeBellis wrote: -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol