John Graham-Cumming

After my initial videos were somewhat popular, I've made a few more exploring Westworld (new and old), Knight Rider and more.

I was persuaded by buddy Mr H to make a YouTube channel out of my Source Code in TV and Film Tumblr. The Tumblr shows the source code that flashes by on computer screens in films and TV programmes and look at its heritage.

This is sometimes surprising, funny, or relevant, and often ridiculous. For the first experimental episode I looked at what I believe is an Easter Egg in the original Iron Man film:



I would be interested to hear people's thoughts on this format.

The second episode is a forensic examination of the opening sequence of the Doctor Who episode The Bells of Saint John:

Regular readers may know that I like ambient devices: devices that fit into the environment unobtrusively and provide information at a glance. One such device is my bus monitor that shows times of buses at the stop near my house.


Recently I decided to solve the problem of answering the question "Do I need an umbrella?" when I leave the house. For this I chose to use an ESP8266 in the form of a NodeMCU running Lua and display the coming weather by illuminating the eyes on a small Totoro figure.


This was my first NodeMCU/ESP8266 project and there's definitely a bit of a learning curve. I ended up using luatool to upload my Lua code to the device, and esptool to flash the firmware using a custom firmware build from this wonderful website with the following modules present: cjson, file, gpio, http, net, node, tmr, uart, wifi, and ws2812.

./esptool.py --port /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART write_flash -fm qio 0x00000 nodemcu-master-10-modules-2017-04-08-20-28-08-integer.bin

The first …

I was thinking about the various languages I have learned over the years and why. Here they are in rough order. I don't think there's a great insight here, just a personal reflection.

Pre-teen

TURING/REGISTER MACHINE

Around age 6, I was sent to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University to a sort of camp for bright kids. I asked a man (undoubtedly a professor or lecturer from Cambridge) to tell me how a computer worked. This was the early 1970s and I'd only seen computers on television.

The man sat down with a piece of paper and drew a long strip of boxes and described a machine that looks at the boxes and decides what to do next. He also showed me a language for programming this strip-of-boxes-machine.

He had described both a Turing machine and also a register machine and I was absolutely fascinated: computers were so simple!

Teen

FORTRAN

My first hands-on time with a computer came via a teletype that no one seemed to touch. It was kept in the corner of a room at schoo…