Free Arash and Mojtaba

It made me think of the haunting words of Martin Niemoller.

ZX Spectrum on your smartphone

PocketClive is the sort of program that can reduce bitter IT workers to a state of geeky rapture.

Just the music from Manic Miner gives you waves of nostalgia, and there are plenty more games available from World Of Spectrum.

It all works fine on my SPV500 despite a fiddly joystick. Just follow the install instructions and copy TZX and TAP tape images into the Tapes folder. For some reason it took PocketClive a while to find them (it all clicked after I added the StarQuake TAP file for some reason). Mounting the tape images is one part of the battle, then you need to resort to the manual to find how to type the LOAD "" and start the tape.

I feel a "Top Ten Speccy Games of All Time" blog entry coming on...

Hunting ban in the UK

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4272623.stm

As of tomorrow, hunting with dogs will be illegal in the UK. Almost twice as many people in Britain actively support this move than actively oppose it. It was an election pledge that the government have honoured.

Obviously this will not mean an end to animal cruelty, but hopefully it is the beginning of a more respectful relationship between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Remember Brion Gysin: “Man is a bad animal”.

2 minute guide to C++ locales

Until recently I was afraid of writing international C++ using the locales system, but actually the most common operations are very simple:

Start like this...

    #include <iostream>
    #include <locale>
    #include <sstream>

    using namespace std;

    void main()
    {

...then you are ready to ask what the current global locale is...

        locale global = locale();
        cout << "Global:   " << global.name() << endl;

...in the beginning this is always the same "classic" locale (called C)...

        locale classic = locale::classic();
        cout << "Classic:  " << classic.name() << endl;

...which means that if programs don't monkey about with their locale, they will behave the same regardless of where they are run. Apparently this is not mandated by the standard, but any other behaviour would be crazy.

Now to the main event: what is the user's runtime locale? Just use an empty string like so...

        locale native("");
        cout << "Native:   " << native.name() << endl;

Now we know how to create all the locales we want, how do we retrieve two popular pieces of information from them? Here is the currency symbol...

        const moneypunct<char>& monetaryFacet = use_facet<moneypunct<char> >(native);
        cout << "Currency: " << monetaryFacet.curr_symbol() << endl;

...and here is the radix (a fancy name for decimal point)...

        const numpunct<char>& numericFacet = use_facet<numpunct<char> >(native);
        cout << "Radix:    " << numericFacet.decimal_point() << endl;

Streams are also affected by locales: on a per-stream basis like so...

        cout.imbue(classic);
        cout << 2.7183 << endl;

        cout.imbue(native);
        cout << 2.7183 << endl;

...or globally (for all new streams)...

        locale::global(classic);
        ostringstream globalStream;
        globalStream << 3.1415 << endl;
        cout << globalStream.str();

        locale::global(native);
        ostringstream localStream;
        localStream << 3.1415 << endl;
        cout << localStream.str();

    }

So that is the 2 minute workout. What about the result? Here it is for my native locale (UK)...

        Global:   C
        Classic:  C
        Native:   English_United Kingdom.1252
        Currency: ú
        Radix:    .
        2.7183
        2.7183
        3.1415
        3.1415

...and here's what happens when I change my Windows location to France (from the control panel)...

        Global:   C
        Classic:  C
        Native:   French_France.1252
        Currency: Ç
        Radix:    ,
        2.7183
        2,7183
        3.1415
        3,1415

...now let's go to the USA...

        Global:   C
        Classic:  C
        Native:   English_United States.1252
        Currency: $
        Radix:    .
        2.7183
        2.7183
        3.1415
        3.1415

Perfect - except for the fact that ú and Ç are not the respective currencies of the UK (£) and France (€). Unfortunately these symbols are not in the terminal font, but rest-assured they would appear in any normal typeface. If you serve up console information to your customer, your biggest problem is NOT internationalization ;-)

Obviously there is much more to this subject, but I am already out of my depth. If you want to know everything (and I mean everything) about this and other stream related issues try Standard C++ IO Streams and Locales.

New Scientist news feeds

New Scientist have a very comprehensive set of news feeds indexed here: New Scientist Feeds. I haven't subscribed long enough to comment on the quality of the content, but I am avid fan of their publication.