h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On a superficial level, Gothly and I have almost nothing in common. Perhaps that's why we work so well as a couple: plenty to argue about.

Gothly's a sci-fi reading, arachnophobic techno-geek who has always lived in the same area of Wales. I'm a literary, technophobic animal freak, brought up by hippies who moved around all over the place. We frequently try to inspire each other's interest in, say, compilers and Asimov, or beetles and Shakespeare, as the case may be. It doesn't always work.

But a couple of days ago, Gothly stepped into the room and delivered the whole of Hamlet's to-be-or-not-to-be speech to me, from memory, with thespian hand gestures and everything. It was hilarious--and terribly romantic.

Awwww... to you both...

Note to self - must try something like that...

Are you going to return the gesture by writing him a little program? Eg putting 2 hearts on a screen/window and having them move together (linearly, sinusoidally, as a spiral or whatever).

Hey! That's a great idea! Hee, hee. (Keep it under your hat. I'll trawl some C books and see if I can make something happen.)




...Can it be done with C? By an incompetent, I mean? Perhaps HTML would be better....

It can easily be done in C on DOS (or possibly Unix depending on set up). You'll need a reasonable compiler to make it "easy" under Windows. You can't do quite the same things in HTML, because all the silly effects are add-ons to the real point of displaying textual content, but you could put heart characters/entities from a suitable font (eg with symbols) into MARQUEE tags. You could try that first just to see if you can find the bits now I've hinted what to look for.

Windows? I wouldn't know where to begin. I was weaned on Linux; the only thing I've ever done on Windows is play computer games. So, unless I can't get anywhere on Linux, I'll stick with what's familiar.

I've just been poring over one of Gothly's books: 'The C Programming Language'. It was written in 1988! I can't find anything in it about making things move. And MARQUEE isn't in the index--but, I've decided against hearts, anyway; I think I'll stick with text characters. Moving in straight lines. No point in biting off more than I can chew.

I reckon one of those 'Idiot's Guides' is the way to go. I can get one from the library....

Would that book be Kernighan & Ritchie? Except my copy says ©1978. You would need to find the graphical interface section of any manual (which relates more to a particular computer environment than to the language C itself). NB graphics *does* include putting text characters on a display screen.

Sticking to the HTML option though, not all browsers display the MARQUEE tag and it has nothing to do with C anyway. So one of those might be the reason you couldn't find it in the index of whichever book you were using. The library is bound to have some sort of idiot's guide to HTML. Hint: you can nest marquees so that one wobbles the up and down while the other scrolls along in order to get more varied effects - assuming you get that far.

"Would that book be Kernighan & Ritchie? "

Yup. Gothly thinks it's great, and I must admit, the tutorial at the start's not bad, but it seems pretty useless for what I wanna do. After trawling the contents fruitlessly and skimming the whole tutorial, I looked in the index for "graphics", "pictures", "movement" and "animation" before running out of ideas. Oh, and I looked up "MARQUEE" as well, having misread your earlier post.

Then I remembered having been told that Java's good for graphics, so I looked in a Java book. I was tired by this time, and concluded that Java consists of magic string and can only be used by someone born with arcane powers.

Never mind. I visited the library yesterday, and had a look at their computer books. There's nothing on programming, but they do have an 'HTML for Dummies', so I might get that out next week.

"it seems pretty useless for what I wanna do"

Yes, it tells you everything and nothing because in order to do anything you still need to know something about the hardware and software on which your program is going to run. There is no such thing as software which runs on anything. Even the simplest of programs always has to be recompiled for a different environment (ie different type of processor chip hardware with different instruction set) and, if it does anything much useful, it also has to be modified for whatever external interfaces that hardware has since there is no universal software interface (beyond the obvious bits hidden by the compiler for you behind things like "printf" and "getc").

Think of C more like the glue between the bits of the broken jar or airfix kit that you don't have. If you had the pottery or plastic too then you could make something - or anything because it's such really superb glue!

HTML it is, then.

HTML nothing. If I'm gonna impress Gothly, I should do it properly....

I have managed to ascertain that *somewhere* on this computer there is a library of those jar shards and Airfix pieces you mentioned. Now I just have to find them.

I've just read a most inspiring novel: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. It kept reminding me of you the whole way through. I don't suppose you've come across it?

Ooh - you've gone all determined suddenly.

I'm not really a novel-reading person. So although the name(s) sound vaguely familiar it is unlikely I've read it and more likely that I've seen someone else reading it. The last few nights when I've taken anything to bed at all it was some topological stuff I was working on and before that a huge computer manual (which is still sitting there not finished). When I have scifi around the place to read it tends to get gobbled up all in one go.

"when I've taken anything to bed at all it was some topological stuff I was working on and before that a huge computer manual"

Hee. This is why the book reminded me of you. Here's a review that describes the book better than I could: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/books_magazines/print_books/last_samurai_the_helen_dewitt/_review/298072/

This is one of those books which I used to stock in the hopes that someone would buy it and be as bowled over by it as I was. Invariably, they ended up in the bargain bin. Buncha philistines.

Did anyone make a film of it? I couldn't see a published/copyright date on there but I'm not used to looking at the layout of that site.

There's a film of the same name, with Tom Cruise in it, but it's got nothing to do with this book. Were you unable to see the review? It's about an eccentric mother and her prodigy of a son. But it's the way a book is written that makes me love or hate it.

I don't expect you to go out and read it--hence showing you the review instead--but I need to enthuse about it for a wee bit longer. I want to own it for myself, to dip into whenever my life starts to resemble a damp grey sock.

Gothly programmed a bouncing sphere the other day, as a fun little exercise--which gave me the perfect opportunity to glean information without raising suspicion. So I've gathered that I need some 'array' things, in loops, and then I can make a piece of text move from one side of the screen to the other, because the 'arrays' give the position of the text, or say how many spaces across the screen they are. Or something. The internet seemed this incomprehensible to me not so long ago....

I did a bouncing sphere last year in HTML. It was on my PS here for a while.

Arrays are just a way of organising data of the same type - like lists or tables. The loops are to do the same thing over and over again, eg for all the things in the array. The screen memory is itself an array (though, depending on the hardware, it is not always sensibly organised). So moving the contents of the screen (which might be a sphere) around can be simply a matter of going through the entire screen array and copying each item into its neighbour's slot. Otherwise the array might contain the colours for the sphere and its position need only be stored as the top left corner and its size. Then the loops are to copy this colour data onto different places on the screen as it is supposed to move.

I think Gothly's sphere is in C++, because that's what we were discussing with regard to arrays and things. My plan is to have two words move towards each other at different rates, with other words appearing and disappearing above them occasionally, like speech. So presumably, I need to have an array that changes the words' position on an x and y axis with each round of the loop. Sorta thing. I'll make sense of it eventually.