Charge!

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(C)Copyright 2022, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

If only there had been an obvious solution...

I'm working with a computer class (which I was quite reluctant to take) and we finally obtained a laptop cart for the classroom. The students love the idea of laptops but not so much the idea of taking care of them. I even found one tucked away in the bookcase by a young man who didn't want to walk to the other side of the room (by the window) when he was already sitting two steps from the back door.

Such is life. I give extra warnings on Fridays (and we had a four-day weekend this past week) and there's usually, at least, a 10% failure rate.

There used to be a novelty song that said "Dead Puppies Are No Fun". Ditto for dead laptops.

This comic was originally going to have Ms. Barbara Graham as the math teacher, but I don't get to use the History teacher Mr. Ibsen all that often, and I've used him with Anthony and Hank before.

I also write Fiction! You can now order Devilish And Divine, edited by John L. French and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which contains (among many, many others) three stories by me, Christopher J. Burke about those above us and from down below. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon. Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

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Nibbles and Bits

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(C)Copyright 2022, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?). Barely half a byte!

The Nibbles and Bits line popped into my head the other day when I thought about the 8-bit characters and how I haven't used them in a while. It wasn't until I started typing the dialogue that I suddenly started channeling Sheldon Leonard from It's a Wonderful Life. It wasn't on purpose, but I played into it. To the point that I nearly forgot to make a "nibble" reference.

For those who don't know (FTWDK), a nibble is a four bits, or a half byte of data. I thought my Comp Sci teacher was making a joke way back when. Nope. Someone else made that joke long before, and it stuck.

The witch seemed to be the appropriate character to mention nibbling on the little ones and the little zero.

Now I have to think of some new 8-bit characters, and then find the tools I used to create the ones I have.

And maybe name them.

I also write Fiction! You can now preorder Devilish And Divine, edited by John L. French and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which contains (among many, many others) three stories by me, Christopher J. Burke about those above us and from down below. Preorder the softcover or ebook at Amazon. Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

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Dongle

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(C)Copyright 2020, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

Git along l'il data.

Yes, I'm old. No, I'm not that old. I'm old enough to remember variety shows on TV, and old enough to have older siblings who were old enough to remember things like this. And then there's my parents and grandparents.




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DIM

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(C)Copyright 2020, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

This is why programmers get so hungry. The power of suggestion.




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(x, why?) Mini: BASIC

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(C)Copyright 2019, C. Burke.

COBOL wouldn't fit in the window, and forget about my knowledge of FORTRAN!

Seriously, I went to review some FORTRAN IV online and I couldn't tell if it was what I learned back in college or some version from the past 30 years or so.




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(x, why?) Mini: Peripheral Vision

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(C)Copyright 2019, C. Burke.

Floppy eyes.

They may be out of date, but the Save icon hasn't changed yet.

I thing that it funny is how I do these "minis" to save time when I don't have enough for a full comic -- and yet I spend so much time making these work.




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Clip - Art

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(C)Copyright 2018, C. Burke.

That Art! He is the Clipper to the Stars!

Ten years in the making, at least. And I originally wanted to put some familiar head shots in there, like you see on barber walls.

I've had the joke, but not the means to do it. Then, on a whim, I checked the web for 8-bit creators, and found a couple. I created a witch in no time. And then I nearly crashed my iPad when I tried using some of the site's functions to either save or email the picture. Seriously, if was a half-hour or more before my iPad was responding, and I was afraid I would have to do another factory reset.

Luckily, the second site was a little better and PC friendly. I recreated my witch, print-screened and saved it that way. Then I re-colored it to match my original witch, which I liked better. (Which witch? The first one.)

I made the next three in a couple of days, and passed them by the expert: my son. I thought they came out good, but didn't know what was sticking on the side of the second guy's head. I said I was going for "Elf". Oh, well. I changed the coloring a little.

Next problem was that the joke was ALWAYS "Four SHAVES, Four Haircuts". Only one guy had a beard -- and one of the others was female.

First try was to create the pirate, who I thought was "okay" but I wasn't happy with his eyepatch or his hat. Keep in mind, he came before either of the two pirate jokes that I already posted this week. He could've tied them all together very nicely. (He might've been part of the reason I came up with the other two jokes, and well as the play on "Barber".)

But I liked the witch, and I thought that a wizard wouldn't be a difficult transition. So I went that route instead.

For those who are interested, the original artwork is posted below. The knight always had a beard, even before I "remembered" the joke. Witch, elf, barbarian (part satyr?), knight, pirate, wizard.

I hope you like them. I could try to recreate them sometime, but it won't be easy though.




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Math Horror Movies: Nosferatu

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(C)Copyright 2018, C. Burke.

Once he bugs you, you'll never debug!

And leave out one semi-colon ... lose one NEXT ... increment the wrong index ...

Terror Stalks the Code!




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Repeat the Sounding Joy!

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(C)Copyright 2016, C. Burke.

Couldn't decide on one, so I did both. Choose A or B at your own leisure/peril.

Sorry, I hadn't expected such a long delay between comics. And if I had, that last one wouldn't have been my first choice for top of my page for so long. I mean, I thought it was cute, but c'mon now.




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Prove You're Not a Robot

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(C)Copyright 2016, C. Burke.

When we have to bow down to our Computer Overlords, someone will have to answer for this!

Click for other appearances of Tomorrow's Teachers of Tomorrow.




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Code a Movie Quote #1 Answers

First of all, thank you for the tremendous response to my first Code a Movie Quote comic. I never expected it because this has become, far and away, my most popular strip, beating out Coffee Logic and almost topping my Irregular Webcomic tie-in strip (but that one was a bit of a flash in a pan from IWC readers).

This started as an exercise in logic, but I morphed it when a couple of coding ideas came to me. You can see that in the second Casablanca quote, which is basically meta-code of some type, not any real language.

As for the actual languages, I mixed it up a bit. I haven't experimented a lot with them since a few college classes on different languages. Most are basically the same, and I varied them because I didn't want anyone to get hung up on syntax. (Thus, the semicolons and the periods doing the same thing.)

Answer Key to #1

As noted twice now, I'm referring to this as #1 because I have 20,000 reasons to do it again. Maybe I'll wait a month or so, and post another ten. (What do you think?)

1. Field of Dreams. "If you build it, he will come."

2. Casablanca. "You played for her, you can play it for me!" (Bogey never actually said, "Play it again, Sam.", except maybe in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.)

3. The Wizard of Oz. "There's no place like home."

4. Batman. "I'm Batman." Duh. (Seriously, I included one obvious thing for the humor value. I don't need 100 similar submissions!)

5. Apocalypse Now. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

6. M*A*S*H. "Suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. And I can take or leave them if I please." Lyric.
Note: Not having Google 40 years ago, I always thought (until just about the time I typed this) that the line was "I could take all evening if I please." Thank you to everyone for NOT pointing that out. No, seriously, I'm not alone in that misconception, but then those were other kids who misheard the same thing. Or just believed what someone else said were the words.
What kills me is that now that I do have search engines, I usually check that sort of thing!

7. Planet of the Apes (1968) "Damn you all to Hell". (Yes, the line is actually "God damn", but it works without taking my Lord's name in vain.)

8. Casablanca. "Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon" (and for the rest of your life). The entire quote was on Twitter, but I snipped it for the comic.
This was one of the earlier "meta" code examples, but I didn't want to lead off with it.

9. Forrest Gump. "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." So it's random.

10. A Few Good Men. "You can't handle the truth!" Okay, I thought that was a clever way of coding it.

11. EDIT: If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. The quote is the title. I haven't seen this film, so I don't know if that's actually a line of dialogue from the film or just the movie's title. Thanks to William Ricker for posting it and allowing me to use it.

12. Annie. “The Sun will come out tomorrow." Lyric. Thanks to Evan Weinberg for posting it, and allowing me to use it.

13. Braveheart. “They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!” (Originally, on Twitter, I didn't include the "may" because that seemed to be another "If" condition which wouldn't code in a way that made sense.)

14. Citizen Kane. "Rosebud." If you don't get this, I can't explain it without spoiling the movie. Well, that' not really true. It's the last word that Kane utters before dying. It's his end, so I thought that would be a good end to these quotes.

Code a Movie Quote

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UPDATE: The solutions (and a major correction) are posted here.

(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Every now and then I like to hash things out.

This started online from a couple suggestions which were more "logic" oriented. I can't find them now because it was a lot of tweets ago and they didn't have a hashtag. I suggested a few ... and then started coding. It didn't really catch on. There were only two entries that weren't mine, and when I stopped for the evening, everyone was thankfu-- I mean, when I stopped, the hashtag died.

I didn't start it the following morning, but I figured that they shouldn't go to waste.

Special thanks to William Ricker (‏@n1vux) and Evan Weinberg ‏(@emwdx) for participating and for allowing me to use their entries.

You can add yours in the Comments section, or on Twitter with #CodeAMovieQuote.




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The Twelve Days of Christmas (Reprise)

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(C)Copyright 2014, C. Burke.

Expressing my True Love mathematically and recursively.

This comic calls to mind my Twelve Triangle Numbers of Christmas from way back in 2007.

Once again, I used pseudo-code here, and not any particular programming language. I wouldn't program it exactly like this, but I wanted it to be readable.

As for the summations, those actually caused me some problems -- or at least a bit of thought about how they work, which is something I'll have to refresh my memory on. However, the one thing that occured to me is that I wanted the gifts in order, not just an actual sum of the number of gifts, and I wanted it to match the code. That meant that I had to count backward (or count down). Unfortunately, summations (to my knowledge at this point) count up. That meant minus signs and +1s, which I eliminated by starting j at 0 instead of 1.

More on this tomorrow, probably.

Hooked on a Flowchart

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(C)Copyright 2014, C. Burke.

Have you ever known anyone who just does the chant waiting for someone to jump in with the words. Have you ever been that person?

Flowcharting: a lost art. It doesn't have to be complicated, but it shouldn't be too "clever", either. Mostly, it should be readable so people in your audience can understand it (not everyone involved in a project is an expert coder). Readability, and easy understanding, are why I incremented the counter at the start of the loop instead of the end, and why there are two decisions instead of using a remainder function (Modulo) to see if the counter is two more than a multiple of four (or one more, if I incremented the counter at the end of the loop.) Going for the punchline, not the coding specs.

And, like Ken, when the chant starts, sometimes you wonder if it'll actually end.

October, already? Anniversary month.

Kidsongs Flowcharted: Ears

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(C)Copyright 2014, C. Burke.

What if they do? What if I can?

What if they don't? What if I can't?

The song never tells us!