Caution: Singularity Ahead

Caspian is deeply, madly in love with Ariel (from The Little Mermaid ). This isn’t precisely recent. Prior to our last trip to Disneyland he’d written a letter to Ariel (with a drawing of his robot bunny), and on said trip he delivered it to her she sits and talks with children at her grotto (not the restaurant, but a dedicated spot near the Matterhorn at the boundary between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland). It is, however, much more pronounced lately, perhaps more so after receiving a Little Mermaid fleece blanket in the mail (a cereal box offer ). He’s requested to watch the movie several times of late, and has the movie soundtrack on his MP3 player and listens to it often. He is also, apparently, an R.E.M. fan. He asked me to put that on today, and then had to specify “No, I want Out of Time .” But I digress. This has led to some interesting conversations. He wants Ariel to come live with us, perhaps “stay in our bathtub.” On more than one occasion he’s whispered to us, so...

I blogged about it previously , but one side project I have going on is an Applesoft interpreter in Javascript .  I've been adding updates to the page as I went, and it's getting pretty complete at this point. Worth calling out: It has DOS emulation (basically, you can use ye olde PRINT CHR$(4) trick to open and read text files) Joystick and Paddle support (using on-screen controls) Low resolution graphics (40x48) PEEK/POKE emulation for the keyboard and display strobes, so you can do asynchronous input, e.g. games Tested on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (Windows) There are two samples - DEMOS (which is a collection of test samples) and TRADER (which was the point of the whole exercise) Check it out!