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Activities, Travel, Vacations, Computers, User Interfaces, Science, Space, Technology

My Trip to Krakow, Poland: The Conference

September 20, 2016 kleucht Leave a comment

This past Friday I had the honor of giving the morning keynote presentation at the 6th annual DevDay software developer conference in Krakow, Poland! Here is the website! (Check it out! It actually has my face on it!)

http://devday.pl/

This conference is sponsored by ABB Automation Group, which is a huge industrial robotics company in Europe. They also manufacture industrial electronics, industrial control systems, and industrial power systems. They’re kind of a big deal.

DevDay is a 2 day conference for software developers that is limited to only 500 attendees, so it’s a small and intimate event. The speakers are truly able to interact with the attendees and networking at this event is highly encouraged by the organizers. During the 2 days, DevDay packed in 4 separate keynotes and a total of 30 technical sessions! It was a really great event! The organizers did a wonderful job!

The DevDay organizers feel strongly enough about using only live speakers, that they pay for their airfare, hotel, food, and also ground transportation. The venue for the conference was a movie theater and the screens were enormous! Can you imagine giving a keynote address on a screen like this?!?!?

By the way, that’s Zach Holman in the photo getting ready to give his keynote.

My keynote presentation was called “We Are The Explorers!” and it presents the story of the great westward expansion by the early American pioneers. It describes how difficult the task was and how great the payoff was. It then explains how the settlers had to live off the land to survive and then it transitions to NASA’s space exploration plans and how we will have to live off the land too. Then it shows off a bunch of living-off-the-land technologies (ISRU) that are being developed by NASA to support future planned long term human exploration missions on Mars.

Here is the official DevDay 2016 video of my keynote on YouTube:

My keynote presentation was very well received and I got a ton of compliments from both attendees and from other speakers! One of the biggest compliments I received was from another speaker who speaks at a lot of conferences all over the world. He said “You rehearsed the *bleep* out of that, didn’t you?”. Yes, I did rehearse the *bleep* out of my keynote during the weeks leading up to the conference. I guess it paid off. 🙂

I also gave a technical presentation called “NASA’s ant-inspired Swarmie robots” which gives the background of the Swarmie project and describes the software technologies that we used as well as various challenges and solutions that we encountered along the way.

Here is the official DevDay 2016 video of my technical presentation on YouTube:

Full videos of all the keynotes and talks, are posted on the DevDay YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ABBDevDay/

There are tons of great professional photos from the event posted on their Flickr account too:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/96896358@N04/albums

Here are my favorite professional photos, though:

One of the highly experienced professional speakers at this conference paid me a huge compliment after my keynote when he asked me how long I had been a Tech Evangelist for NASA. He didn’t know that this was my very first professional conference keynote speech. Sure, as a NASA employee, I speak to students a lot. And I give technical presentations to co-workers and to managers all the time. But the keynote at a conference like this. Never before. I’m honored to have been invited to come speak at this amazing conference!

Also, this was the first time I’d ever left the United States. I had a really great experience! Tomorrow I’ll publish a blog post about the sightseeing that I was able to squeeze in during my short time in Krakow, Poland.

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt

P.S. Here’s a selfie of me standing outside the venue soaking up some sun in an effort to counteract some of my jetlag.

P.S.S. And here is a photo I took of Russ Olsen giving the closing keynote which was a very inspirational story about the race to land a man on the moon!

P.S.S.S. And finally, here is just a photo of me striking a pose after the conference was over.

Computers, User Interfaces

My Apple IIe: A simple text based arcade game in Applesoft Basic

September 4, 2016 kleucht 7 Comments

If we type this simple 8 line Applesoft Basic program into my working Apple IIe computer, we will end up with a cool little text based arcade game! Watch the video below to see the game in action!

This small Applesoft Basic program was published in one of my Beagle Bros Apple Software Catalogs from 1987 (volume 0, number 10). This little program was credited as being submitted by Beagle Bros customer Tim Boehme, who received a box of Beagle Bros magnetic write protect tabs for his efforts!

Wow! Write protect tabs! Amazing! 🙂

Applesoft Basic

Applesoft Basic is the programming language of all the early Apple computers and was provided in ROM (memory) to make it available to the user without the need for a startup disk or the need to load it into memory from a cassette tape.

Applesoft Basic was actually created by Microsoft for Apple. Hence the name. It is interpreted and not compiled, so it is not very fast. And it can throw syntax errors at runtime if it’s unable to interpret a line of code.

One sort of funny feature of Applesoft Basic is that variable names are only significant to 2 letters, although it allows more. So if you initialize a variable named “KURT” to a value of 10, you can PRINT the variable “KU” and also the variable “KURT” and also the variable “KUPP” and they will all three show a value of 10. They are all three pointing to the exact same memory location.

applesoft-iia

Code

Here’s the source code:

10 REM "MUNCH THE SNAILS!"
20 TEXT: HOME: H = 20: PRINT CHR$ (21): POKE 35,22
30 K = PEEK (49152): ON K < 128 GOTO 40: H = H + (K = 149) - (K = 136)
40 POKE 49168,0: IF RND (1) * 10 < 1 THEN VTAB 20: HTAB RND (1) * 20 + 10: PRINT "@": GOTO 70
50 VTAB 22: HTAB RND (1) * 39 + 1: PRINT CHR$ (46)
60 IF PEEK (1535 + H) = 192 THEN S = S + 1: VTAB 5: HTAB H: PRINT "#"; CHR$ (7): VTAB 23: PRINT "MUNCHED: ";S: GOTO 80
70 VTAB 5: HTAB H: PRINT "V"
80 T = T + 1: IF S < 10 THEN 30
90 TEXT: VTAB 23: PRINT S;" SNAILS MUNCHED IN ";T;" SNAIL SECONDS.": END

Emulators

If you don’t have a working Apple IIe of your own to try your Applesoft code on, you can first try it in a JavaScript implementation of Applesoft Basic. There are some things that this emulator cannot do, though. It’s just not terribly robust.

A very robust option is the standalone Apple II emulator program that you can install onto your Windows computer. It’s called AppleWin. Just scroll down to the bottom of the Github page and download the latest release. It’s in a zip file, so just unzip it and run the executable.

Once it starts, just click on the floppy disk 1 icon and choose the master disk file that comes installed with the emulator. Then reboot with the Apple button and it will boot to Applesoft Basic. Or, you can download ROMs for various Apple games and programs from the Internet and boot those instead. It emulates the speed of the processor, so it’s a very realistic emulation of the Apple IIe. Including several monitor types to choose from.

Thanks

I hope you found this post informative and/or entertaining! Thanks for your interest! And feel free to leave comments or questions below!

Thanks,
Kurt

Computers, User Interfaces

An open letter to Facebook: I have friends, so why do you show me mostly stranger’s posts?

August 7, 2016 kleucht 2 Comments

Summary: Right now, 52 percent of my Facebook News Feed consists of photos of people that I don’t know and they don’t know me. Does that make anyone else uncomfortable? What’s the deal with Facebook’s algorithm?

Dear Facebook

What’s the deal? Seriously! Why do you insist on showing me all these posts from people that I’m not friends with? What is the intent of your algorithm?

algorithm

I have 240 friends on Facebook right now which I believe is a very reasonable number. Not so many that I miss important posts in all the noise. And not so few that there’s little content to show me.

But when I scroll through my Facebook News Feed, sorted by Top Stories, it feels like most of the posts are from folks who are NOT actually my Facebook friends. It feels like most of my News Feed is taken up by stranger posts that a friend of mine has liked or has commented on.

I understand the reasoning to show me some occasional stuff outside of my direct friends list, in case that helps me make a connection with my friend’s friend. But it feels like stranger posts are all my News Feed consists of these days.

stranger

So I got all scientific on you. This afternoon, I scrolled through the first 100 posts on my News Feed and I put each post that I saw into one of the following four categories:

my friends acting towards their friends, but they are strangers to me (writing on their walls, tagging them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts)
my friends acting alone (sharing something or posting text or photos or videos on their own timelines)
strangers acting towards my friends (writing on their walls, tagging them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts)
my friends acting towards others of my friends (writing on their walls, tagging them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts)

Here are the results. From my own News Feed. And just as I suspected. I’m being exposed to mostly stranger’s posts. 52 out of 100 were posted by people that I am NOT friends with. My friend liked their post, so Facebook thinks that I also need to see this person’s post, even though we don’t know each other. I’m seeing into the personal lives of all these complete strangers, every single day. Does that make anyone else uncomfortable?

So now every time a friend of mine hits the Like button on some stranger’s photo or post, I have to see it in my News Feed? And now I have to spend more than half of my time on Facebook just scrolling past a bunch of strangers graduation pictures or duck face selfies or political opinions or whatever?

Facebook, why would you do this? What’s your angle? What do you want me to do with all these stranger’s posts and pictures of their town and of their family and of their car or whatever?

Are my Facebook posts being shown to a bunch of people who don’t know who I am and who don’t care about my robots, or my space program, or about my computers, or whatever I’m posting about that day?

What do you think about your Facebook News Feed right now? It is what you expect? Is it what you need? Do you get fulfillment out of it? Or does it frustrate you and waste your precious time? Does it make you uncomfortable?

Please leave any comments or feedback below! And thanks for reading my blog!

Kurt

Miscellaneous

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978). What has been seen cannot be unseen.

January 5, 2016 kleucht 1 Comment

Wow. I don’t recall actually watching this 2 hour television spectacle when I was 8 years old. But maybe my subconscious blocked it from my memory. It had good reason. This was probably the worst television variety show that was ever made.

Ever.

And that’s saying a lot because there were a lot of really bad variety shows made in the 70’s.

It’s like watching a train wreck. It’s so horrible. And yet you cannot look away.

Try it yourself. This YouTube version is just over an hour and a half long because all the commercials have been removed. There is some copyrighted content in this version so if it gets taken down, just search the Internet for another version.

George Lucas isn’t really to blame for this travesty. He did not produce it. He did not direct it. He did not write it. He didn’t even consult on it. He was starting to work on his follow-on to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back. He did greenlight the Holiday Special, though. And that started this big ugly snowball rolling downhill.

The special was broadcast only once on Friday November 17, 1978 which was the week before Thanksgiving. It aired on the CBS television network from 8pm to 10pm, which pre-empted both Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk.

And then everyone promptly tried to forget it ever happened.

In case you don’t have the stomach to watch a recording of the entire special, I’ll summarize. The main characters from the Star Wars film were in the television special. Reluctantly. In several scenes it appears their hearts were not really in it, though.

“Starring Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. With Anthony Daniels as C-3PO. Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca. R2-D2 as [pause] R2-D2. And James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader.”

The variety skits in the show had several high profile guest stars. “With special guest stars, Beatrice Arthur, Art Carney, Diahann Carroll, The Jefferson Starship, and Harvey Korman.”

Most variety shows had been filmed in front of a live studio audience or at least had a post-production laugh track added. This special had neither. So every time an actor tried to say or do something funny, the viewer got an uncomfortable feeling like something odd just happened. It’s like when you tell a joke to a room full of people and all you hear are crickets chirping.

Awkward.

The plot, if you can call it that, is very very boring and pointless and only serves to tie together several musical numbers and some attempts at humorous skits. I’m not even going to try to summarize the plot here because it is so long and boring. It centers around Chewbacca’s family on his home planet, though. The main characters in the show are Chewie’s wife, son, and father.

The best part of the show is an animated cartoon that features the debut of a new character named Boba Fett. You may have heard of him.

If you suffer through all the way to the end, you will get a special treat. The final musical number sung by Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. She’s not a terrible singer. But the whole scene is just as uncomfortable as the rest of the show. And the finale isn’t at all inspiring, as it intends to be.

Thanks to Josh and Chuck of the Stuff You Should Know podcast for bringing this production back up from the annals of my subconscious and forgotten memories.

And thank you for reading this!

Kurt
(a Star Wars fan since 1977)

Miscellaneous

The kids are paying attention, Disney. And they disapprove of cursing in Star Wars.

January 4, 2016 kleucht Leave a comment

Today is the last day of Christmas break for my 11 and 13 year old boys, so I just now offered to take them to see their second showing of the blockbuster film Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I was surprised by their lack of excitement.

When I pressed them, they surprised me with their reasoning. They both said that they were turned off by the cursing in the film. They said the cursing didn’t fit in with Star Wars and they said it didn’t fit in with Disney, either.

Wow, I don’t even remember any cursing in the film. I looked it up on the Internet and apparently there were exactly three swear words … one use of “d-mn” and two uses of “h-ll.”

So Disney, if you’re listening … there’s no reason for the Star Wars characters to curse. It just doesn’t fit in with that universe. It feels out of place. Well, at least for kids it does.

It’s been several years since we saw Episodes 4, 5, 6, so we may have forgotten if there was any swearing in those movies.

Thanks for listening.

Kurt Leucht
(a Star Wars fan since 1977)