Rick's b.log - entry 2025/03/24

Wood

In the morning I did some work on SimpleSeq (see below), and if the afternoon I chainsawed the fallen willow, keeping the good looking bits of wood for when I get a little wood burner.
Willow isn't good wood to burn, it isn't dense like oak. But, hey, it would be dumb to toss out burnable wood, right?

A small pile of wood.

As I was doing this, my neighbour was trundling up and down the field spraying diluted slurry onto his crops. Oh joy! I had washing out on the airer, I took it in so it wouldn't pick up l'odeur-de-caca-de-piggie.

SimpleSeq v0.27c

Ghost notes.

What may be the headline change is that - at long last (and about bloody time!) - SimpleSeq is now mode-adaptive. That means no longer are there separate builds, so you can delete the files !RunIm720 and ChooseMode if you're updating a previous installation.

How it works is that as SimpleSeq starts, it will examine the mode geometry of your current display mode. If it is 16:9 then the 1280×720 mode will be chosen, otherwise it will pick the 1280×1024 mode. If the chosen mode does not exist, then it will try the other, and if that doesn't exist either it'll downgrade to 1024×768.
Yes, there's now a 1024×768 mode. It's still experimental as there are some minor redraw issues and it's not as nice looking as the higher resolution modes, but it largely works.

You can force a specific mode to be used by including a command-line argument:

In addition, since the mode switching has worked out better than I had planned, you can press ^` (that's Ctrl and the backtick that's under the Esc key) to call up the mode changer...

Changing screen mode.

As a purely visual thing, the piano keys on the left are now drawn to look more like piano keys. The reason I say it is purely visual is that if you click the white to the immediate right of a black key, the black key note will sound. Handling this would be a lot of additional code for little benefit.
Note, also, that it doesn't exactly replicate a piano - which has the black keys actually offset from the centre between the whites. It has been done like that for two reasons - to allow a finger to play the white key between the blacks, and for historical reasons to do with the positions of the linkages going into the instrument. At any rate, even though it's not entirely accurate, it's much nicer looking.

Piano looks more like a piano.

The help screen that shows the available keypresses is now generated programmatically. This makes it that much simpler for me if/when something changes. And, yeah, there's quite a lot them now.

So many keys it's almost a flight sim! ☺

Before the download, some stats:

The executable is 115,428 bytes, targetting ARMv5 with scheduling for a Cortex-A8 (not that I'm convinced that option does a lot...).

The source is split into 17 modules which total 17,971 lines of code and adds up to 555,986 bytes.
There are also two header files to define a lot of things. These are 1,249 lines and 40,117 bytes.

The top three largest modules are editor (4,764 lines; 146,521 bytes), dialogue (2,983 lines; 107,120 bytes), and note (2,380 lines; 73,754 bytes).

That's not bad for something that was written entirely from the ground up and pretty much as a hobby. On the 14^th of August 2023 I talked about my new dialogue UI system and just a week later a very early version of SimpleSeq was released.

This download is smaller as it no longer needs two executables.

Everyone is autistic...

The comment read:

Every one is autistic these days its the new trend

Yes, it's true, there has been a huge surge in people being diagnosed as autistic - according to the CDC it's something like 1 in 36 children (in the US).
While Robert F. Kennedy Jr (currently leading the US Dept of Health) may have some bizarre opinions of autism, especially how it pretty much wasn't really a thing twenty years ago, I think it might be useful to give some of my own perspective here.
That is to say that I say that I have been diagnosed with ADHD. This is not technically correct. When I was diagnosed, back in the very early '80s, it was for hyperactivity (the HD) and attention deficit (the AD). This was still considered two separate things. It's only more recently that they have been so prevalently together that it is now called ADHD instead of AD and HD.

So to autism; well it has been known about for a long time. For example, when people describe themselves as having "Aspergers", that's a variant of autism sometimes described as "higher functioning" (in other words, capable of existing without specific external support) that is named after a man called Hans Asperger.
Unfortunately Hans Asperger was a dirty sticking Nazi, and I mean that in the awful Third Reich sense, who described the condition now named after him as "autistic psychopathy" and seemingly was quite okay with referring children to a special children's clinic in Vienna. A clinic that murdered hundreds of children deemed "unworthy of life" under the Third Reich's child euthanasia program. Note that "unworthy of life" was a catch-all phrase for people with disabilities or those considered inferior according to Nazi ideology - untermensch or subhumans. So, yeah... I can see why people have a problem with the phrase "Aspergers".

Anyway, I think back in those days autism was likely a diagnosis if a person had difficulty in functioning - as such I don't think I was ever tested as a child. In more recent times, Autism has expanded into what is called a "spectrum disorder" (and note that the use of the word "disorder" is contentious) which means that while there are autistic traits, one doesn't need to have all of them and/or be incapable of autonomous functioning in order to be called autistic.

So, rather than being a new trend that everybody wants to be a part of, maybe - just perhaps - there is better awareness that the distruptive child in class that really annoys the teacher and reads grown up books isn't misbehaved or has bad parents, but is probably bored mindless by the drivel because their mind works differently.

In short, there's not more of us and it's not a bandwagon. It's just that it is now being better recognised as "a thing".

And, no, it has bugger all to do with vaccinations. That's just halfwits who don't have a clue how these things work drawing completely illogical conclusions...and there's just such a person in charge of the US department of health. Oh boy...

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John, 24th March 2025, 22:28

My theory is: Yes, we're all autistic to a greater or lesser extent.    My wife taught "autistic" children in a special school, and went on to get her Advanced Diploma in Education studying the topic.    This was some time ago, but I developed the theory described at the start from my experiences!    I have some autistic tendencies. They may be inherited.    My mother, before retiring to bed, would put out a match ready to strike to light the gas stove in the morning. An extreme case of logical anticipation.    She ended-up being diminished by electric-shock therapy after being diagnosed with (mental-elf!) mental problems! Her mother had already been "hospitalised" with "dementia".    I have behaviour which I think is totally logical.    Whilst I could never be thought of as "tidy" or "organised", I find that repetitive actions can be refined to make life easier/more-predictable.    I like the tooth-mug balanced on the basin so that it can drain freely rather than fester in a humid state (black mould!). My dyspraxic wife cannot manage this.    Things I find important and personal need to be where I put them/left them.    I would never "share" my mug. I prefer that the "handyman" uses a particular "visitor' mug", not an every-day spare.    I keep the inner front-door locked always by habit, even if I may be going out later. This applies to other "default" states equally.    I have "rituals" which I can always justify. I try to refill the kettle after using it, for the next "cuppa"!    These things seem logical to me, not obsessional. I find what is the best way to perform a task, and then that's the course I follow next time. I try to share it with my partner, but often without success.    It's like a recipe: You follow it and get consistent results! If it fails, you haven't been entirely consistent! Analyse, correct!    I like computer programming - it's logical, predictable according to rules. This doesn't mean I'm any good at it!    But would you necessarily diagnose me as autistic?    I suspect not, but I wait to be corrected!

C Ferris, 25th March 2025, 09:10

How do we know how someone else thinks - and what is correct:-/

Rick, 25th March 2025, 10:12

John: I know what you mean about the mugs.    Sadly, to get where we are now with mental health, far too many people had to go through horrific things.    Colin: You know what they're thinking by asking them, and evaluating what you know to estimate if they're being truthful.  As for what "correct" is, well that's often based upon what the majority thinks but more importantly what the person with the most power thinks. It's tied in strongly with the psychology of propaganda. In a more personal context, correct is defined by a person's morals and values. That being said, morals and values in one place are sometimes remarkably different to those in another place. Quite a number of Shari'a Law countries are quite okay with child brides (and, one supposes, the subsequent consummation), the southern US has "beauty pageants", and if TV is anything to go by in Korea it's normal for superiors to physically abuse work colleagues. And I'm sure people from those countries regard us with things that we do that seem really off to them.

jgh, Hong Kong ID card holder, 26th March 2025, 22:33

Well, yes, everybody is "some quantity" of autistic, just like everybody has body temperature, or hair length, or blood pressure. It's an analog(ue) quantity, it has a range, it covers, shall we say, a *spectrum*.

jgh, watashi nihonjin nai., 26th March 2025, 22:38

re: mugs. I have hooks above the sink for hanging pans 'n' cups 'n' stuff. Because of the spacing you cannot put pans on adjacent hooks, as they'd bash into each other and splay out all over the place. So, naturally, the obvious thing to do is cup, pan, cup, pan, cup, pan, etc.    Years ago I had a lodger who couldn't seem to comprehend this, and she'd *INSIST* on pan, smashed up to pan, bashed up against pan, in a complete mess with pan. I'd come down in the morning and furiously re-arrange everything so they didn't knock things off and smash the crockery on the counter top.    .......she also NEVER RINSED THE SUDS OF THE DISHES!!!!.... and was a trainee nurse!!!!!!!

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