Books: The Little Typer

I thought it would be useful to give some recommendations of some of the books I’ve read or am reading.

I’d like to start with “The Little Typer“. I’ll warn you that you won’t get much of practical use out of reading this book straight away (you’ll get it later!), but it’s such an amazing book that I recommend it to everyone anyway. If you have read these series of books before, you know the format. For those who haven’t read these before, I can just say go try it. Some don’t like the format, but I find it to work really great for me.

The book is about the dependent types. The authors use their own toy language called Pie to introduce you to the concepts. The book is strictly sequential and introduces everything gradually, building upon previous chapters, spoon-feeding you. It’s not an easy read, especially if you’re new to the topic. Expect to put some effort into it and do some extra reading.

I found this book very illuminating and it served me as a good gateway to the topic, and worked well as a prerequisite to another book “Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development” aka Coq’Art. (I’ll write about it later.)

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Z80 Emulator

My first personal computer was ZX Spectrum 48K. I enjoyed it very much. I spent many evenings writing my first programs on it. It was amazing.

I wanted to write my own simple emulator of ZX Spectrum for a long time ever since I got a PC. I didn’t want to have a very accurate emulator or anything like that. I just wanted something that could run the OS.

I knew I wanted it to be a literate program, so that after some time I could come back to it, read it, and get the context restored quickly.

After spending a few months on this project I have finally finished it. It was so exciting to see the boot routine, memory check done, and that copyright line appear on the screen. So nostalgic:

sz80em

Let’s type in something:

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Let’s run it :-)

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The program is written in F#. The emulator runs Sinclair BASIC operating system as you can see above. I haven’t tried it with anything else.

I therefore invite you to download and explore this program.

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JConsole Patch

I’d been using JConsole quite a lot until recently. Although the application is pretty awful (in all senses) on its own, and yet still useful, I had to keep using it because at that time there was no choice really.

There’s a funny UX decision in it, an unprecedented usability flaw, is that the Remote Process field doesn’t preserve text that was entered there (well, I don’t know, perhaps security considerations?:-) It has not been rectified for more than 10 years since the first user’s complaint.

At some point I’d decided to step forward and fix it.

Patch files can be downloaded using these links:

ConnectDialog.java.patch

UserPreferences.java

Before:

image2015-8-26 17-21-11

After:

image2015-8-26 17-22-49

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Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park is the place where all the code breaking took place during WWII in the UK. This is also the place where legendary Alan Turing worked and successfully code broke the infamous Enigma cipher machine.

My wife and I went there last September. I had just finished reading Andrew Hodges’ “Alan Turing: The Enigma” book (which I highly recommend to everyone) and so was keen to visit the historical site.

The area is pretty nice, and quite family friendly. There were a couple of things that I didn’t like though. Most noticeably is the quality of air in the huts and other buildings. Another thing is that staff at one of the canteens were not friendly at all. Highly not recommended visiting the canteen, number of which I don’t even remember. Besides, the food was pretty bad too.

Other than that it’s a very nice place to visit.

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There’s a nice statue (by Stephen Kettle) of Alan Turing.

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You can find the Bombe machine reconstructed from the blueprints in one of the huts. Pretty impressive!

Interesting thing is that the initial machine was build from scratch in two years by Alan Turing and his team, while this one took 13 years to replicate, even though all the detailed blueprints were available.

The machine is working and the staff members demonstrate it to visitors.

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The Mansion.

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Inside of it, a beautiful discovery.

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Another Bombe (in the Mansion):

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Bletchley Park is a must for everyone interested in British history, Alan Turing and his contribution to code breaking during WWII.

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