ASCII by Jason Scott

Frontalot Video Released (Sort of)

Entry written on August 9th.

Frontalot finally released my video of his text adventure song. However, a caveat: you have to be a member of his Valued Sucker Program to grab a copy. So, for the moment it's "out there" but only in a limited fashion.

Remember, this thing is ending up on the GET LAMP final DVD set, with a high-def version available besides a typical DVD viewable one, so it's not like it'll never see the light of day as a fully-available thing. It'll also be licensed Creative Commons NC-SA, so you'll be able to pass it around at that time, in 2008.

I was sent a very breathless fan mail that went to Frontalot, which was under the impression that the mass of stuff behind Frontalot was his own basement; whoops no, that mess is mine, and that's all part of my various collections I've been getting over the years. Frontalot brought his costume and his dancing skills and the rest is all my own junk.

I've covered this whole project extensively over the last few months, so I'll just show you a cool picture. Here's my favorite shot that one of the crew took of the shoot:

Proof I did the actual shooting of the video, I guess. But also showing how things look differently from a few feet back when you're constructing an artifice.

People are now seeing it! Hope they're enjoying it.

Koalas Are Little Bitches

Entry written on August 8th.

For years the most popular textfile on textfiles.com was the dependable and old-school ASCII Middle Finger. It definitely continues to reign as the most searched-for phrase that leads people to the site. There's over a dozen files scattered throughout the directories that would answer the call for a text-based flip-off, so a bunch of them share the load as far as serving up the most requests. I consider them a group to be counted together, for the sake of accuracy. This has been the case for pretty much the whole life of the site.

But we have a new winner these days: Koalas are Little Bitches.

I was sent this file a couple of years ago. I talked to the uploader at length and can attest that it has been presented to me that this file is really what it says it was; an as-accurate-as-possible transcription of an 8th-grade student's essay. The person I spoke with got it from the student's teacher. I will not give more details than that, as it doesn't ultimately matter if the thing is real or not, because it's pretty damn funny. But as far as I know, this is a the real deal.

I've been in this kid's position, which is why it resonates with me (and probably with the thousands of readers a month who get sent to it). A stupid, fill-in-the-idea essay where you're tossed a dog of a writing assignment, and made to come back with the necessary 200 words to make the teacher happy. Every once in a while, that same frustrated outlook on life bubbles over and you toss a grenade over the fence, going for absolute broke. Start with an insane position, toss in a little profanity, dash off some insults, and boom, a nice little blow-off of energy before going back to TV.

Koalas aren't hard they some little bitches. They start climbing up the tree soon as they see a deer from like 50feet away. They stupid as hell they should put their brain in their pouch and put the kid in they ten they're be able to think better. They try to be in the fucking kangaroo family. They weak as hell, talking bout they got a pouch a kangaroo so they their cousins and shit. Kangaroo's have some big ass legs and whot do a koala got? Some little ass legs, they tails is little and weak as fuck kangaroo's got a big ass long tail that can kill a fucking koala.

Faced with describing why he should save a species, he instead blows out into an all-out turf war among animals, revealing what we all knew: Kangaroos are the shit.

This is a long way from BBS textfiles in some fashion, if for no other reason than this is from 2004, but in other ways it fits right in. Compare the all-koalas-must-die writing style with this collection of sadistic ideas from exactly 20 years earlier (1984) and you see how they sort of come from the same place; a kid writing crazy-ass stuff to blow off some steam. Generations apart, they're indications this isn't an aberration or a kid in need of a mass of drugs, but someone who decided to have a little fun in his writing.

And really, the kid's right. Koalas are little bitches.

Major BBS: The Warezing and the Winning

Entry written on August 8th.

Someone pointed out a MajorBBS torrent to me. I've downloaded that particular collection and put it up on the BBS Software collection. The directory with the files that I got is here. Specifically, the zip file has the jaunty name of "MBBS4EVER", that kind of overly ambitious and breathless filename I like to see on a collection.

It's quite a collection, too; probably would have fetched a pretty penny way back when (1992-1994 era software). The listing is here, and you can see the effort put in to make a "complete" collection, or at least one where any reasonable person wouldn't complain about the contents being lacking in any way. I especially like the "how-to" and "R&D" portions of the descriptive text, where the compilers tried different configurations with the software. This is meant to run in the present day.

I interviewed Scott Brinker for the BBS Documentary; he'd left the company many years previous but had a great collection of memories and feelings about that time. He'd moved on and not moved on, which is the kind of blend anybody who cares about what they do should have. Those hours of interview will get up on the archive.org collection soon. It was one of the best, which is why his interview is all over the final work.

I also dedicated the MAKE IT PAY episode to Tim Stryker, who created MajorBBS, ran Galacticomm, and then retired and committed suicide.

Galacticomm as an entity still exists; the webpage is over here and doesn't give a full listing of the large, interesting history of Galacticomm. This important task is instead being done to near perfection by themajorbbs.com, which is collecting photographs, histories and software related to MajorBBS and its company. They have documents that I'll probably swipe for my own collection, including customer letters and announcements.

I wish there was more in the way of efforts like this to preserve the history of BBSes, but some were definitely one-person affairs with less than a few dozen adherents. More than once I've been told by an author that the copy of the BBS I scraped up is one the original author doesn't even have any more.

The search never ends for these little artifacts. It's delightful when I see others down in the woods with me.

The Undone CONPHOTOS

Entry written on August 8th.

Some time ago, I started a project to capture all the photographs taken at hacker conventions/conferences, with "hacker cons" being defined as "things I would attend and not feel out of place at". There were disparate places where people had collections of stuff up, photos they'd taken, but they were all over the place and the history was in danger of being lost and the rest.

It's been a big failure. There's a website up at conphotos.org and conphotos.com, but you'll see it's kind of half-assed, an example of a work-in-progress with little obvious work done (even though a lot was done). This directory is clickable, and a few others are as well.

I was working on a system to tag photos with the names of who was there, ways for people to add comments, ideas for nomenclature. You know, basically flickr except when I started this project there wasn't really a flickr to talk about.

What there was and what I was trying to emulate was Slengpung, the demoscene party photo collection. It has everything I'd wanted, from being able to search by party, attendee, and year, all the way through to commentary and a strong sense of style. It's really done very well, and I couldn't even hope to get there.

Along the continuum of my projects, CONPHOTOS is like that part of the attic behind a bunch of boxes that you never, ever quite get to, even if you're in a cleaning mood. I see how much advancement has been made in the world of photo albums online, and I sense nothing but a pile of reinvented wheels, each more crappy and non-round than the previous, while entire teams of people are working on similar sites.

Another problem is that this thing was really for my buddies; photos of my buddies, photos of conventions I liked, photos of places that I considered worth having photos of. While that sometimes works, the fact is that the way to do a site like this is for all conventions, be they anime, sci-fi, marketing, boats, medical supplies, and so on. And then it's basically a busines. And then I'm basically in hell.

Also, I find people are really nutty about photos. Mirror them locally and they go nuts, bitter about ownership and stolen souls and what have you. It's really more trouble than it's worth. And on top of everything else, people take a lot of shitty photos.

The project has been on hold for years, probably one of my biggest regrets, and one that reminds me of making sure you have even the slightest idea where you want to "go" with something.

Goodbye, Rat

This fellow appears in the BBS Documentary in several places. He talks about phone codes and dialing to new places using phreak codes, and he happened to be talking when someone in the background fell off their chair and it ended up in a blooper reel on the DVD. He asked to be called "Ratphun" on the documentary. He generally called himself "Rat". He also called himself "Gthckrayon" and, on very rare occasions, "Ross LaMora", his actual name.

We did the interview in 2002, and a couple years back he stopped by the booth I had at a DEFCON and we chatted for a bit, about how things were going. Things seemed to be going pretty well for both of us.

This past Friday, Ross died. He is the third person I've interviewed who's no longer with us, after John Sheetz and Jeff "Ninjalicious" Chapman. I suppose at some point this will all get easier for me, but not yet.

My intention is to put all the interviews up as time permits. As people are discussing him and remembering him, I thought it appropriate to push his interview up to the top of the line. It was conducted for 12 minutes on July 13, 2002, at the H2K2 hacking conference.

Click here to watch. This is in Windows Media Format, and will be converted to other formats soon.

The Delight of Decades

In high school, I had a particularly memorable social studies teacher named Mr. Damon.

His approach to classes was to have a monologue. This monologue lasted the entire semester and was punctuated by the ending and beginning of classes. I am not being exaggerative to say that many classes began with us sitting down, him starting where he left off and then continuing until the bell. His opinion, as far as I can tell, was that the school year was way too short and if we only had classes with him for x number of hours, then it was critical to fill 98% of those x hours with monologue. I got a lot of facts in those classes, of variant amounts, but one could not argue we weren't given enough information to work with.

He had no real notes, no overriding theme; he would start in the beginning and head on through, describing history, social trends, important figures. He was on rails, mostly, but his information was aligned ahead of time enough for him to be able to jump off these rails and then click right back in where he last left off.

One memorable exchange was when the overhead florescent lights blinked. He continued as if nothing had happened, until he hit a break point, an end of a paragraph. Then:

"Did anyone else see the lights blink?"

Kids murmured ascension or said yes or nodded.

"Good. I wasn't sure if I was having a heart attack." And then he went right back into the monologue.

Anyway, one line of his from way back then stuck in my mind. He was talking about, as I recall, perspective on history and time, and what that meant in understanding events. And he spontaneously went off about our youth.

At the age of 15, he explained, we had no perspective, no idea what decades were, what that meant; they were just words to us, time not yet something behind us, but before us. So when we were covering events and relaying years and time as measurements, we, the students, had to do our best to gain perspective on things that in many cases took multiple iterations of our lives to complete.

And then he kicked back into the monologue.

This idea has stuck with me, and now, in my late 30s, it's nice to start thinking of things that way. Being online 25 years ago. Having friends for a quarter century. Being a decade out of college, a decade and a half out of high school.

So too, I run into people who talk to me who were born in 1990. Or who didn't get online until textfiles.com had already started. Or who ask me questions that I can recall being at, that their parents hadn't even met yet. It helps me when I talk to people who feel the same way about me, this guy who wasn't even born when they did the thing I am interviewing them about, or where I was a tiny voice enjoying their work and now am asking them the questions, what will stand as their record for what they did.

It's sad, of course, to think of my life plummeting towards its end, and being years ahead towards that unwanted goal. But in the meantime, I am enjoying the view backwards. It has become wide, vast, and varied. It was once anything but, and I remember that, decades ago.

"We Can't Have Nice Things."

There are a number of pithy, quickly cliche'd statements that nest in various weblogs. Some are dead on arrival, annoying the living crap out of me in milliseconds, while others are, for a shining moment, insightful and funny before being blurred and beat down into meaninglessness.

Responding to events of spam, hacking attempts and commercialization with a variant of "This is why we can't have nice things." falls under the latter, until probably later this afternoon. I'm already in the red zone bringing it up myself.

Sometimes the statement is used to describe a dog, child or other entity ruining an actual nice thing you own; I'm not speaking to that. I'm mostly talking about where someone responds to an online community or entity taking it in the shorts. "I checked in last night and found the server had been hacked and vandalized. This is why we can't have nice things."

I like this line specifically because it belies, in itself, a number of implications.

First, that we are all in this together; that the experience of being online and transferring data bonds us in ways that, finally, all that hype from the 1980s was trying to promise us. You can now stand outside in a lot of towns, hold up a little handheld device, and send a near-instant message to someone halfway across the world. You can type in a fragment of a song you heard on the radio and get, usually, the entire lyrics of the song and who made it. And you can discover, a thousand times over, what people generally look like when they're naked. Right now.

The downside, of course, is that this abundance of "stuff" is also accompanied by an abundance of "shit". But not just a case of there being piles of stuff and piles of shit; no, no. In fact, we tend to combine the stuff and shit together, marbling it like a good cut of steak. You read someone's informative page, and they've striped it up and down with google ads. You do a search for something you're trying to track down, and you find it... or at least pieces of it, sitting on a spam weblog that is trying to lure you in to buy crap. Or kill you, I'm not sure.

The implication with "we can't have nice things" is also that there are nice things to have. This is the positive statement inside the negative one; that people constantly add new and nice things, and everyone gets a shot at the new thing, for a while anyway. And we have a huge collection of new and nice things, 24 hours a day, joining our lives assuming we don't mind the medium of the computer screen and keyboard/mouse to interact with them, as opposed to taking a walk.

So why is this at all interesting? Good question.

This weblog functions, among other things, as a collection of stop-frames in a continuum of ideas I have fermenting in a pile; things I've learned or think will become more and more critical over time. I was struck, during the BBS Documentary, from my interview with Phil Becker, who had done work for NASA, was involved with TBBS, Fidonet, Boardwatch/ONEBBS CON, and the IPAD (the IPAD deserves a bunch of history in itself). Phil, you see, has a gift for seeing the next thing to aim his skills at. He's done very well with that so far. He thinks the current critical area is in digital id, a non-exploitable (to whatever level possible) identity that allows you to take it consistently between various locations and still be verifiable. I think that's a pretty accurate way of looking at things.

So I think, personally, that the aspects of online life are now collapsing on each other, and that issues are arising that even Nicholas Negroponte in his most cranked-out Wired back page articles could not have imagined. There was once a time, after all, when people were starving, just absolutely famished, for constant incoming information that they could access easily. That's hardly the problem now, isn't it? The storm of crankiness about Google Maps putting up street photos (which was preceded by many other cases of sites like Microsoft, Amazon/A9 and Yahoo putting up street photos) outlines the dual problems of issues arising and obvious lack of preparation for those issues.

So this situation of us not being able to have nice things is going to get even more intense, and we're going to have even more situations of getting nice things, and maybe we should get on that.

Kaminsky: The Rematch!

So, the good news is that, due to a late change from the Defcon organizing staff, I am no longer worried about being scheduled opposite Dan Kaminsky.

Now I'm merely scheduled after him. Same room. I wonder if our audiences are even the same?

Just to talk a little about how I approach these presentations, especially in a space I've never spoken in before:

I make a point of always "walking the room" a couple times before my slot. Just a few pacings back and forth on the stage will help me realize where I need to look, what needs to be focused on, how the crowd will regard me. With DEFCON only in the second year in the new location, and this being the first year they've basically stretched out (there was, of all things, a dart-playing convention sharing space last year), it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

So instead of Friday at 9pm, I am speaking on Saturday at 2pm. So there we go.

And here's the DEFCON schedule with all the various speakers listed in it. Five speaking tracks... that's a lot of tracks.

As mentioned earlier, I will be at the Classic Gaming Expo this coming weekend, then I fly back to Boston to see Negativland perform, then I fly BACK for Defcon. This is crazy, but I'm a pretty big Negativland fan.

And speaking of speaking, the Black and White Ball in the UK was cancelled, meaning I composed a big historical speech on ARC vs. ZIP and have nowhere to give it. Maybe someone with a tiny conference would like it done there. Write in.

(A better set of entries for next week, I promise.)

Fails Under Load

Analyze things long enough, and you end up with general statements that are so far from what people might be interested in that it loses meaning for everyone. That's the risk one takes with criticism that keeps looking skyward or at the "big picture". But what the hell, it's Thursday.

If, in fact, you were a kid at some point, you probably built something. I am talking less about the Lego/Erector Set/Capsela sort of pre-formed kit, but where you, you hapless little bastard, go outside to a nearby location and attempt to make something out of parts and then use it. A good example that comes to mind is a treehouse. In Kid Engineering School, you learn (innately) that a treehouse consists of a bunch of nearby trees and you grabbing some 3/4" nails and some spare wood of dubious quality/usefulness, and then you nail it all to a tree and next thing you know there's sort of a thing up there and then you sling some more wood across it and tah dah, treehouse.

Some of my fondest, wonder-filled memories are of treehouses, believe me. I have memories of ones I built that were 6 feet off the ground, and I recall, with great awe, one particular treehouse (located here) which was easily 50+ feet in the air and required careful climbing of a tree (with convenient occasional footholds) and afforded you a wonderful view of the river it hung over. Like nests built by particularly large birds, my neighborhood was riddled with treehouses. But this is critical: They were built very, very poorly.

If I think back to these things, it's amazing some of them didn't kill us. Nails driven haphazardly into boards is not how you build a treehouse you intend to stick around; bolts and drills are the order of the day, along with concrete pilings if you can build it closer to the ground and still have it look cool. Minimum engineered effort would call for at least a tiny bit of weatherproofing (most treehouses were simple platforms) to prevent your nails and the rest from rusting out.

But who cares, you're a kid, you can live forever, and if the whole thing explodes when you all step on it, it'll just mean a few silly editorials in the paper and all the parents locking the hammers in their toolsheds out of reach.

Your treehouse is cool. It is built quickly, happily and with an urge to get the job done and start having fun. But it will fail under load.

Extrapolate this into things both material and immaterial. Your high-school club, that conflagration of students who meet after school for some reason, be it journalism, acting, writing... this is assembled with some basic goals, and the school often requires an advisor of some sort for it to be official, along with some basic rules, and positions pre-defined. This helps the club in several ways, gets it funding, makes it so there's a voice of authority available to handle a bunch of possible disputes, and a clear power structure to work in. This also fails under load. But, in this case, the load capability is much better. It takes something really intense, like a controversial play or someone being an intense right asshole and being the buddy of the advisor and so on, before crap just totally falls apart and the club dissolves, or has to reform in a way to avoid ass-boy.

Organized sports, which are a club as well, are even better designed. (I'm working in generalities to prove a point; be gentle.) You have uniforms, set rules of engagement (the sport's rules), often a bunch of guidelines of how the entire enterprise must function, an advisor whose absolute job is to maintain the organized sport team, and specific from-the-school funding for this activity. It also has wide and distinct promotion of this sport, an imbued sense of pride and representation in members, and a host of other safeguards in place.

Now, obviously things can still go entirely south, but the load must be incredible: an enabling parent who is allowing their sports-going kid to host wild parties, a member dealing drugs for an extended period of time without being caught, a solid intense scandal that goes on for some time before being revealed, or a goddamn gigantic sack of mad cash being dropped on players' heads to either encourage them to cheat or to lure them into the college or professional leagues upon graduation. Whereas the poetry club can probably break up if one person's a dorkface, it would take a concerted, quality effort to really get a sports team to be completely wiped off the map at a school. Or lack of funding, whichever comes first. Both fail under load, but the loads required are radically different in nature.

In the case of the treehouse, the after-school club, and the sports team, they all can fail under load, but they can all be re-built better. Just because your club dies doesn't mean clubs are bad and shouldn't be done, just that next time you should think out the consequences of certain choices. Just because a sports team is poisoned by the fact that the quarterback's a raging alcoholic doesn't mean it isn't possible to put safeguards in place to prevent this from happening again, safeguards that don't ruin the entire experience of the sport for the sake of this safeguard. It can be done. It is sometimes difficult and a real pain, and it changes the nature of things, but it can be done; the maximum capacity of stress can be increased.

And just so we're not thinking I'm going in one direction with this, I also realize that the greater load capacity you build into a project, the more likely that problems of a great and terrible nature can therefore flourish because the organization is strong enough to withstand it. The load can be good (a lot of people want to be involved) or it can be bad (from the ground-up, the entire organization is corrupt and so the ethics framework is decorative and leads to a scandal of national proportions down the line when the issue comes to a head).

So, yes, I'm speaking here, ultimately, of a lot of web projects, a lot of websites. Certain aspects of the environment, ones in which binary measurement comes into play (is the site up? is the site down?) are very quickly handled by technological solutions. Mirror them. Get more machines. Build in load balancing. Optimize that crap-ass code. Rate-limit stuff. After a while, and this is the case in some of the biggest sites, you will successfully have a site that, when accessed via web browser by anyone on the internet, will be there. You will have properly engineered for load, and the pure mass of people will not activate this binary condition (is it down, is it up).

We were faced with this issue, web wise, within almost days of the spread of browsers and the availability of known web servers. There were so few sites, that when they got listed on the "What's New" page, they would absolutely die, like throwing a hamster into a fire. For context, here's what one of the What's New pages looked like. Imagine the entire web-browsing public finding out about the one new website on a given day, and what that website/website machine had to endure. It was ugly. But, of course, this led to better development of web server software, improvements in resource management, improvements in engineering. The goal was clear: make this bastard not crash, and so it was a matter of throwing enough programming skill to ensure that could be achieved. Huzzah. Nowadays, a fairly simple machine can sustain many hundreds of thousands of accesses in a day, thanks to over 10 years of steady, intense programming by many people.

So when I go crazy over Wikipedia and selected other sites, this is why: they fail under load. No-one who knows what they're talking about declares that a wiki, in and of itself, is an evil or wrong thing. If you don't want other people editing it, you can restrict access to as many people you want, including just yourself, or nobody. If you want people to register beforehand, you can. If you want it to only cover a small, manageable subject, you can. It's just software after all, and if you run into problems, you can take a number of precautions and energy and, through engineering, beat back the load-bearing problems, move on. It's a matter of recognizing there's a problem, and working on it.

Taking it further, nobody who knows what they're talking about declares that any "Web 2.0" application, which seems to be getting defined as "people add junk to your site for free", is itself evil or bad or beyond hope. Right now, there's a lot of noise going around because of a guy named Andrew Keen, who wrote a book called "Cult of the Amateur" where he kicked a lot of current internet technologies in the yam-bag. After spending some time reading up on his viewpoint, I can tell you that I consider some of those kicks to be properly and well-placed indeed, but they are unfortunately swarmed in an endless random cloud of nut-kicks which unfortunately diminish his arguments down into the realm of foolishness. It's one thing to observe that there's a lot of poverty in the world; it's another thing altogether to start saying that the poverty is due to over-investment in space programs or the prominence of monkeys in warm climates, or that the solution to this poverty issue is to set Belgium on fire. So, unfortunately, a person who makes some good points reveals, in his words, that he has only done so because he carpet-bombed online reality and declared victory.

In the reactive, twitchy way that people who have a lot of time, energy and money invested in what are called "Web 2.0"/"Internet" endeavors can always do, Keen has been set on fire and thrown into a larger, more deadly fire. All well and good, and the debate is entertaining if nothing else. But the whole issue is framed wrong, in my opinion. Instead of going "there should be no wikipedia" or "there should only be printed sources" or "there should be credentials and limitations on sources", which are all just straw men, the real argument is "Where does Wikipedia really screw the pooch? What steps should be taken to avoid unwarranted pooch-screwing?"

There's the "idea" of many websites and there's the "actual" website. I've sat in multiple panels now, where people are arguing with me, and they keep mentioning the Wikipedia in their heads, which very few people actually connect to, and I'm arguing about the Wikipedia that exists, which a massive amount of people connect to. There is a huge gap there, and it's growing wider over time. And by simply considering its problems actual problems instead of wayward background noise in a deafening and beautiful cacophony of expression, maybe some of those issues can be fixed. I've gone into many of them before; no sense in making this longer than its already excessive size.

Youtube fails under load; its comments sections are poorly designed and ruin a lot of the discussions for almost any video by coating them in profanity and chaotic viciousness. Flickr, meanwhile does not currently fail under load; an awful amount of effort has been made to contain asshattery and there are people whose jobs are contingent on ensuring this. Similarly, Amazon does not fail under load; allowing reviews and writings (and yes, the system can be gamed quite readily, but there are near-instant ways to suss out one-time PR flack accounts and often you can read the book itself for a few pages and make an informed judgement). Amazon works constantly to fix potential load-breaks, and it shows.

This is an engineering problem, as ubiquitous and critical as those first wayward-driven nails in your tree fort and branching up into the most visited online sites in the world. If you refuse to recognize its importance, if you think of people issues as minor annoyances towards a glory of a newly minted era of freedom midwifed by connectivity, your project will fail under load. And yes, it will likely be rebuilt, either from scratch or as a major upgrade, but doesn't it make sense to be a little proactive? Just a little?

Because the load is never going to get lighter.

Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 3.0

This past weekend put me on the way to Indianapolis, Indiana, where my father went to graduate school and where I'd never even been near in my life. (I shot into some part of Indiana for the BBS Documentary but that was basically a fly-by, like I did with Minnesota, Kansas and Oklahoma. I've been to these places but I've not really been to them.) The plane brought me in at around midnight, and after a hilarious interlude where I demanded a car to rent at Hertz and found out it was the manager's own car, I rented a convertible black Mustang and drove the 50 miles to West Lafayette to attend VCF Midwest.

As it turns out, West Lafayette is hopping at 3am (when I got in). The bars had people out front, as well as the coffee houses. Folks were milling around, tooling about on bikes, and I saw a place that I didn't have time to ever go to but which is on my list: The XXX Root Beer, an all-night car hop which I'd never seen the likes of. It turns out the reason for this is that there's only two left, one in Issaquah, Washington and this one. I gotta go back for that!

I had the pleasure of speaking the first day, presenting the "secret life" of computer historians. I give this speech about a 6; most of the audience didn't require any advocacy of computer history, and my searching around for amusing things to get them charged up went mostly nowhere. But I had a fun time giving it, all told.

After me came Trixter, who was the reason I was excited to come in the first place. Any time I can spend with the Eye of Doom is great time, and it turned out we got a LOT of time together.

Vintage Computer Festivals are basically county-fair like showcases, with people bringing out equipment, literature, wares for sale and whatever else they feel deserves a table. For my own bit, I brough a stack of the documentary; sold 12 copies, 10 to one person. I also got to go around and see a bunch of unique stuff I hadn't seen before, along with a lot of stuff I HAD seen before, but not since the early 1980s.

A highlight for me was Mike's Geek Museum, where he's assembling not just computers, but toys, documentation, stickers and what-have-you into a real well-rounded collection.

So, that last photo is the rental car and Trixter. What happened was, around 6pm on Saturday, We shot westward to Illinois, where I interviewed Chris Forman, who has an amazing, amazing collection of text adventures. This trip took 3 hours each way, which means, yes, six hours in the car. If you're going to spend six hours in a car, it better be a damn fine ride. And it was. It was great to have uninterrupted time with a good friend, and who could ask for more than that?

Got back to the hotel at 6am Sunday, shot off for my airport at 9am, was home at 3pm, loaded over with new footage. Life is good.

Good PDF, Bad PDF

It might come as a surprise to some that I'm such a fan of PDF (portable document format), considering I'm all into textfiles and all. But PDFs, in the abstract, are just what I like most: a way to guarantee, through onset of changes in technology, display, and interaction, to ensure the original intent of the author/creator is maintained.

The Portable Document Format, in its basest form, is a way to ensure this very thing: that what goes in is what goes out. That if you send this out to the world, the world can see, with very little variation, what you intended them to see. This has always been one of the most problematic aspects of telecommunication and information transfer; PDF helps nail a lot of the main problems. Even in text communication, you're often at the mercy of font, screen length, line breaks, weird characters. While obviously, good information doesn't need to be a picture-perfect transfer, it certainly can't hurt.

I will gladly acknowledge that the distributor/creator of PDF, Adobe, are bastards. Letting them loose on a standard is like letting a child molester loose in a kindergarden. They've added things to the PDF format that violate privacy, lock features down arbitrarily, and phone home. That's very true. But the standard is capable of ignoring all that crap, and alternate PDF clients/viewers can do 100% of the functionality any reasonable, non-sociopathic person would want from a document.

Here's a pleasant enough creation meant to be printed on card stock, cut, and dropped in the face of people who use their cell phones. It's a jaunty, full-color layout, with a clear font, pleasant look and affronting demeanor. And it clocks in at 469k, resulting in easy transfer and near-momentary rendering on most machines.

This is not as well put together a PDF. It's a manual for a Buck Rogers arcade machine. Clocking in at 8 megabytes, however, it does give you 47 pages of information, relying on effective compression of the black and white pages (most of them simply text) to shrink things down. But the ugliness of the scans (many of them at angles or not very good in the contrast department) combined with the general slap-dashedness makes for a medium effort. Naturally, to someone trying to figure out why their machine doesn't work or what various dip-switches are, this manual is more than sufficient.

And finally, this manual, at a mere 704k, is probably one of the best examples you can have of a PDF, even if the subject matter is somewhat mundane (an instruction manual for a fax machine). It is 81 pages, while being less than 12 percent the size of the Buck Rogers manual. It has an index in the PDF client (where available) with descriptions of different sections. You can do word searching within the document. And the whole thing is clean as a whistle, obviously pulled from the original source material for the manual and converted to PDF. This is where the format shines. Less than a megabyte to produce a 81 page manual perfectly. Works for me!

So here's an example of a good PDF run and a bad PDF run:

As you might expect, I spend spare time browsing around for historical stuff to acquire. Occasionally, I find I have to purchase items (CD-ROMs, disks, etc.) to be able to bring things into my collection. And some of those things, commercial products that they are, are archived and mirrored throughout my sites and collections but not world-accessible. Other items, like shareware CDs, have ended up on cd.textfiles.com and are being accessed by many, many people looking for something from their past (or maybe just screwing around; I don't know and I don't ask).

So recently I was informed about the fact that Nibble Magazine, a journal of Apple II articles and related material, had made the entire run of the magazine available. Books published under the Nibble banner, some indexes, the disk images that used to come with the magazines, and the magazines themselves, all scanned/transferred to DVDs. You could even buy the whole shebang as a package for the low low price of $239. Wooo boy, all that saved time.

So I bought it. Here's what $239 gets you these days:

In case you're wondering, yes, those are DVD-Rs with a sticker label on them. This is acceptable, I suppose, although I should also point that you're looking at the entire contents of the package; there wasn't anything else that came in the envelope. Two DVD-Rs. Printed label. $239.

Yes, yes, the guy selling it is the founder/editor and yes, yes, he is free to charge what the market will bear and yes, yes, I did actually buy it of my own free will (unless you debate the level of my OCD and how it affects my decisions). But just as he's free to sell a very crappily-put together package for an exorbitant rate, I am free to say that I consider it as such and tell people generally what quality they're into.

But it goes a little farther than that. You see, just like that Buck Rogers scan I referenced, these Nibble scans are black and white, poorly contrasted, off-kilter (the shadow of the magazine pages is very visible). Bear in mind, by the way, that the pages are black and white even if they were originally in color. Naturally, there's no indexing, no OCR utilized for searches, or anything else like that. This is, in short, what I would expect of a ghoulish get-rich bottom feeder trying to sell old magazines before he is caught, than the work of someone who poured over a decade of his life into a project. The .doc file on one of the DVDs (the sole documentation) says that he might rescan some of the pages in the future back into the original color form, and he'll get an update to the world.

Now, let us turn our attention to a work done right. I've raved about these before, but a fellow spent years scanning in issues of Computer Gaming World, and then in a fit of wonder, the original publishers decided to make these issues available for free. Here is the site. The PDFs, all done absolutely exquisitely, completely indexed and OCRed where feasible, all clock in at very reasonable sizes, considering the data within them. The contrast is top notch, the pages line up, and 99% of what anyone could want from one of these issues is there within easy reach.

How, then, is one for free and the other not? How is it that the free one is vastly, vastly superior?

This isn't "wisdom of crowds" or "web 2.0" or "crowdsourcing" or a billion other buzzwords.

This is someone giving a shit versus someone not giving a shit.

And PDF is just the container for it all. Let's hope for more of the former out there.

Outdated

Textfiles.com is apparently outdated. I'll be closing up shop later this week.

Maybe it's just the rough-hewn do-it-yourselfer in me, but as soon as I find a site is at *.blogspot.com, I'm automatically dropping points off the final score. There's something about it which says "built with stock parts", especially when the majority of the stylistic changes are a switch to black-and-white and a massive image at the top of the page. The weblog itself was started this year as a "discovery channel for hacks", but apparently has fallen into the same trap many such weblogs do: reprinting of stories and youtube videos sandwiched in between radio silence.

Lex Talionis has a number of links from this page to his other projects (and one to textfiles.com itself, which is always appreciated). A quick visit to his Radio Soapbox Podcast page belies his project management style: start a big idea, dribble along for four weeks, and then give up. This works in some contingencies, but probably not archival document acquisition. I've gone ahead and archived whatever copies of his show are available, but of course he used a for-free hosting facility (fileden) which has gone ahead and merrily deleted the first few shows of his massive run of seven.

So, here's the total text of his entry, which I am putting here because I assume he will likely delete the weblog entry from the unwanted attention or run out of bandwidth from the unstoppable kilobytes of transfer I drive his way.

"Textfiles.com has become outdated. Though it still consist of very good compiled files, none of them are updated. I would like for anyone who has information they would like to share with others about any hacks or electrical engineering, DIY projects, any ideas you have written in some .txt file, hidden inside your documents folder just being forgotten about, to share with the world. I would like to recreate what Jason Scott created. He put together the history of hacking and phreaking, and other various forms of literature. But I would like to start the history of all of that. To start a library of compiled files of information, for the future to read and not forget. But hurry, because the future is tomorrow. If you have information you would like to share with others, please send it to newworlduserinfo (at) yahoo (dot) com."

While it's perfectly fun to punch this kid in the face a few times, I mostly bring this up because he has a few misunderstandings in there that I occasionally encounter.

When the site was started in 1998, it was primarily "outdated" to begin with; the files in question were my own personal collection, dating from about 1983 through to 1989. A smattering of 1991-3 era files were in there as well, but the 3,000 or so files were, surely, many years in the past by computer standards. Relics, really. Artifacts. You know, not the most up-to-date things in the world. But they were never meant to be; they were meant to be saved, archived copies containing snapshots of a BBS era long past and quickly fading. The light, in fact, has basically gone out on this era, with it being a harder and harder effort to explain what the hell is being talked about.

Over time, a "newer files" section was added (uploads) and I started adding post 1995 textfiles (web). These were successful in their own right.

Somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd year, I had an ill-advised inspiration to create SCENE.TEXTFILES.COM, which would keep track of the absolute newest in textfiles. This way I could archive them, keep track of what was going on out there, and generally serve as a library function for all the "new" stuff.

Unmitigated disaster. Two problems became extant: first of all, I didn't have the time to endlessly search and browse for "e-zines" all over the internet, and second, I didn't get along with some of the tykes writing the e-zines. And all it takes, in a concentrated socially inbred subculture, is to not "get along" with a number of members before the drama-resistant strains stop dealing with you and all the little dodgeball-side-picking crap ends in me not getting informed of new things coming out. So, it died a long painful death. It was fun to write the scripts that generated it, though.

That people get useful information out of the site in terms of actual instructional material is tangential to the mission. I mean, sure, it's great when someone gets some ideas on basic assembler programming or enlightened about networking protocol terms still in use. But conversely, there should be absolutely no surprise to find that a lot of files describing how phone systems "worked" or passing along nuggets of interest about hacking into "unix systems" would have less accuracy than rolling dice. It's truly the luck of the draw on that level.

Sites like Make Magazine or Sourceforge or dozens of others of that ilk are where you get the up to date information, the immediate tracking down of verifiable facts and dismissal of unverifiable ones. I do my best to keep up with what's out there, but textfiles.com doesn't function as a on-the-minute news site, and never has. Trying to shove it into that role fails miserably.

That it is now to the point that it is being browsed by people who have not been alive as long as the site has been around is another recent innovation that I'm not sure I would ever expected, but mostly because I was trying to save files that I was worried were lost forever. And now they are not, and in fact are saved enough that clueless pontificators consider my site an institution, badly in need of revolution, or maybe just a version of the site starring themselves.

Outdated? Maybe. But I prefer "Classic".

Blockparty Dates!

Blockparty already has the dates for next year, thanks to the forward-thinking efforts and planning of the Notacon crew: April 4-6, 2008. I've already gotten general commitment from 4-5 speakers or workshop presenters, pending a number of factors.

The magic number is 4; there have never been 4 successive iterations of a demo party in North America. But that doesn't mean that one should be emptily heading through a ticked-off list of successively numbered, boring parties. Each one should have a character, each one should be exquisitely planned, and each should be the best they can be.

The website doesn't reflect these new dates (the notacon site, however, does) and won't until we get a few other things in order. But now you know. Consider making the effort to come on out to it; the last one was well worth it.

And you can't say I didn't give you enough warning!

120,000 MODs

So some time ago I acquired 120,000 mods.

MODs, in this context, are music files. Created in the 1980s as a brilliant way to save space while giving you good music, they're basically collections of music samples paired with sequencing data, all inside one file. Like a lot of very brilliant things, it either makes you go 'well, of course', or 'huh'. Either works for me, but I can definitely make clear the benefit of this approach: hundred-kilobyte files that yielded 5-10 minute songs.

There have been variations in the format over the years, and different extensions as a result: .MOD, .IT, .S3M, .XM and so on. All do the same thing: describe how to do something instead of presenting a recording of it being done. Postscript and PDF and Flash and a bunch of other stuff does this. And the result can be really good.

On the other hand, like ANY format (and people sometimes forget this), it is also possible to totally misuse the format. Fill it with massive samples, inefficiently record such samples, use the format like a poor man's mp3 and these 45k-300k pieces of brilliant bloat out into multi-megabyte fiascoes. The same things happen with PDF files too: instead of using OCR functions to incorporate the redundant data in, some people will do a massive-ass image scan of text, and leave it at that. Then people blame PDF! Code is what you make of it; that's its power and its downfall.

Anyway, people have been doing these MOD files for about two decades. There are so, so many, and there have been a number of people who have tried to keep a grip on them. Among these were the original Hornet Archive, where Trixter and the guys from Hornet camped on Walnut Creek CD-ROMs servers and provided an upload/rating/discussion system for music. You could make some music, upload it, and get rated (if you were lucky). I was lucky! And so were hundreds of others. Reputations rose and fell, and everyone got some great music.

The Hornet Archive eventually closed (leaving behind a great collection) and it fell to other entities to pick up the slack, most notably The Mod Archive, which not only subsumed the Hornet collection but grew to enormous, enormous size. It also has reviews, discussions, and all the attendant requirements of metadata exploration one would like to see.

Recently, they put their entire collection up on bittorrent. This made me happy, and I downloaded it. It's 29 gigabytes.

29 gigabytes compressed.

So, what do I do with all that? I could sit there and try to recreate the modarchive work, and integrate the stuff into artscene over time. Artscene has a music section, you see, and it would make sense to drop this stuff here.

So I added it. Specifically, I added it in a special directory: http://artscene.textfiles.com/mirrors/modarchive/.

You will note, if you browse this anytime soon, that it's not complete. This would be because rsync'ing 29 gigabytes across the net to my hosted machines takes a hell of a long time. Eventually, it'll be there and I'll link to it more generally.

The way it's archived is by first two letters of the mod. So if it's called "BARNABY.MOD", it's in B/BA.ZIP. I could unpack it to its 120,000 components now, but I am uncomfortable doing so. Since I will not have the time to properly describe these, or even to write code to pretty it up, this is how I compromise. It's up, but with a minimal amount of my own effort, currently.

Meanwhile, I spent some of time I'd have spent describing MODs to work on these three directories. They look MUCH better now! (And utilize already-extant data, in case you think I described each by listening to them.)

Prioritization often becomes the most complicated and difficult choice to make; which task do I go to first? By at least dumping these archives onto the site, I make a move towards increasing the total archiving of data I'm going for, so I'll be happy with that.

By the way... this is years. YEARS. Of music. Amazing, how creative people are. There's a lot of great stories, shout-outs, jokes and technical brilliance too. And it's got a great beat!

Enjoy.

Nailing It

Quag7, one of my contemporaries and collaborators, absolutely nails how to put up an informative webpage about a technically geeky and nostalgic subject. (Archive) I thought I'd spend a little time describing what about this page I like so much that makes me think of it as an absolute nailing, so it might explain other choices I make in what interests me.

It is as much about what it is not than what it is. What it IS is vastly informative layout of the requirements and procedures to turn an Apple II into a serial console for a Linux box. What it IS is a collection of informed, carefully-written steps of what was necessary to pull this off, with links galore to other locations to get context or parts. It is generous in its attribution of other sites, and is heavily, heavily illustrated all along the way.

What it is NOT is caked with ads, brimming with "AdSense", sprayed with Javascript or dingy with poor formatting to make way for banners, heavy "site brand" graphics and worthless popups. It is so easy to forget, especially if you've had to load your browser software with a myriad of plugins to remove these things, that there aren't any on this page in the first place. You begin with a declaration of making an Apple IIe into a serial terminal, and you end with that. It is what it says it is. It is not trying to sell you parts or give you sex bomb abilities or damage your retina with flash-based advertisements. It is merely trying to inform.

On the actual level of the content, I am even more delighted. This is how to revitalize an Apple II, give it powers and meaning for a contemporary usage, while still maintaining the scope, feel and meaning of what the box was built for. It is providing information, it is giving you a clean and clear ability to input information, and it is benefiting from the good aspects of the Internet. You can write mail here, browse aspects of the world wide web, telnet or ssh to parts unknown or even play games. It is the promise of what it was always meant to be, updated to not be left behind by the modern aspects of the world.

This is gold, this is what I search for, and reward. Bravo.

HVX-200, A Year and a Half In

So, I've had this HVX-200 camera, this monstrosity that I and 50 really great people paid for, and perhaps it's time to just give some overview/insight/thoughts on the thing, since I've been living with it through over 60 interviews of various types (as well as a lot of recreational/test footage and one music video).

A quip I occasionally give off when talking to people is that when I finished the BBS Documentary, I was absolutely delighted with it except for the sound and the video. In fact, this is mostly the case; the editing was solid, the subject matter solid, a bunch of really tough-to-film subjects got some halfway-decent coverage, and a lot of people who have only been words on a page or text on a screen to thousands got some rare glimpses into their voices and faces. So except for that sound and video thing...

Therefore, I resolved to fix both with the new film. I wanted a camera with on-body phantom power/XLR microphones (the previous camera had an expensive and badly-engineered hack to achieve XLR compatibility) and I knew I wanted to shoot in hi-def, be it HDV or something else.

I was going to go with a Sony HDV camera, but then I remembered I despise Sony and looked at a Panasonic instead. I was also, sort of, looking at a Canon HD camera, but that sucker was beyond expensive. So Panasonic was looking good to me, and the HVX-200, which was to be the big new Panasonic HD Prosumer camera, was just coming out.

Only problem is that it was six grand.

I'd never owned anything that was six grand that didn't have a steering wheel or a mailbox out front, so that was just an enormous amount of money to invest. And as it was, with the help of the aforementioned Adventurer's Club, I was able to afford the camera.

I should state that the camera requires accessories. Like, some really expensive accessories. First, it records on what are called P2 cards, which are plug-in cards that have SD inside them and which cost me about $600 apiece, and I needed two. Next, it is MUCH easier to use this camera if you bend over, paint your ass blue with a big arrow pointing at it, and buy the Panasonic AJ-PCS060G, which is a hard drive that accepts this P2 cards, and which cost, I am not kidding you, Sixteen Hundred Dollars. $1600. For a hard drive and a card reader. Man, that hurt.

All told, between all the accessories, I spent basically $9500 on the camera and all its attendant crap. That was an enormous amount of money even with the help. And that's enough to drive most people away from spending money on a camera like that. This was part of why I started work on ARCADE immediately; sticker shock. It was like buying an expensive car and going "Well, I'm going to drive that bastard everywhere!"

So how is life under the camera?

Video

When all the planets are in alignment, the shots are amazing. Check out some of these winners, all shot using the HVX and either one or two of my lights, plus ambient:

I occasionally have people go "good photos, now where's the video" when they see these screengrabs. Now, for comparison, here's one of my best shots from the BBS Documentary:

Unlike the previous shots, this is the full-resolution, exactly-as-it-appeared-on-screen screengrab, with no "larger" one for you to click on. So you can see the quantum leap in the resolution I have to work with.

That said, this camera (and the DV camera family in general) blows under low light. Really blows. And best of all, you might not know you're working under low light. Several of my shots are severely low-lit and will have to have intense trickery and sleight of hand to look good (or, look like they're supposed to look like "that"). This was a small percentage, because you can be damned sure I was quick on the draw to fix that crap ASAP when I saw it come out in final form. But still, it hurt me to interview someone cool, have it appear to look good on the LCD, and realize that it may be only their voice in the final movie.

Sound

But the voice will be really clean and clear. My interviews are recorded with sound a dozen times better than previously; the hacked equipment I had for the previous camera introduced a low-level hum that I had to filter out manually from all the clips, depending on how it functioned. As a result, people listening to my previous film, especially the blind, can hear that "something" is being done to the voices. While I'm sure I'll be cleaning up sound on this one, it sounds a thousand times better.

Here's a clip of raw audio from the BBS Documentary. And here's a clip of raw audio from a GET LAMP interview. If you jam your speakers or headphones up, you can really hear the difference. Is the second one studio quality? Well, no, it's not in a studio. But the sound in the background will be handled and not in a way that will make the people who have great ears freak out. So that's a winner. Also, I am using the exact same microphone and cords in both.

What Blows

Well, great. I fixed the sound and the video. But what blows?

Well, as mentioned earlier, low light freaks it out, and adds a bunch of noise. Actually, noise is everywhere on this camera. A lot of cameras based on chips can potentially introduce this sort of dotty noise all over the image, where if you look for it, it's quite clearly there. I have software which will fix a little of this, but it's a fact of life and I have to live with it. In another 5-10 years people won't know we ever had this problem, but that'll be a little while.

The controls on the side, when I put the camera in its bag, get clicked all around. I almost got screwed on this twice. It changes audio, video, and focus settings. So, every time I do a setup, I have to double-triple check all the settings on the camera to make sure it doesn't suddenly autofocus or add video gain or any of a few other things that would suck if the shot was done that way. Booooo.

P2 cards, you either love or hate. I have to swap them out every 10 minutes. I own 4gb cards, which record 10 minutes, and Panasonic makes 8gb and 16gb cards, which give you 20 and 40 minutes. I prefer 4gb because I can do additional drop-dead backups on DVD-Rs and I don't have to go for dual-layer. But during interviews, I have to be swapping a lot. It's kind of weird, and likely some shots shake as a result. I try to time them for when I'm asking a question but life isn't always that simple when you're a one-man crew.

And finally, this camera seems to be doing nothing for making me look like anything but a freaky whack-job. I need a plug-in to fix this.

So Hooray

Am I glad I bought this camera? Yes. I made the right choice and the films I'm doing will look beautiful. Will editing be a pain? Yes, it is, but advances in assistive software have lessened the blow, even as I'm well past the terabyte mark in terms of raw data; likely I'm hitting two terabytes already, even with 25% of the footage shot for the BBS Documentary. I can handle it, but damn, this is a lot of data to track.

I think, however, past the weird cards and the weird switches and unusual settings and occasionally dark interviews, I got a real nice piece of work coming. Six grand was a lot, but that investment's looking smarter and smarter every day. Or maybe I'm just getting dumber.

Referrers, or, The Ever-Present Jason

I was reminded recently of the joy and hazards of following referrers.

Referrers are one of those things that, if it hadn't already been extant at the starting gun of the world wide web, would have been decried as a privacy-killing who-sis, but which, because it existed as part of the initial technology, an awful lot of people suck up just fine.

When you browse a website, unless you specifically use technology to avoid it, any site you browse to will be told what site you came from. So if you were at, say, waxy.org and clicked on a link to me, my webserver software would log the last place you came from (waxy). This all gets shoved away in all my logs, which I generally never delete, and which are archived.

I then have two pieces of software that go through the logs and generate stuff for me to see. One is Webalizer, which is a pretty friggin' mature project, and ASCIICHECK, which is anything but.

ASCIICHECK is a little shell script I wrote some time ago to tell me the last day or so's worth of referring links. In a fit of loving community huggles, here is that script. You will note several things. First of all, it's pretty simple. Second of all, it's somewhat inefficient compared to some perl blooziz. Third, it mostly makes sense.

In case you don't read shell script, here is some sample output.

From this, I can see trends: maybe a website spontaneously starts showing up with dozens of referrers. Maybe I see some deep weblog posting with a single hit. Maybe, and this happens a lot, the website is just spamming my referrer logs with crap. Unfortunately, even something as gentle and subtle as weblog files are not free of spam. As spam referrers show up, they end up on a kill list not handled by this script.

The result of this script is that there's a page I have that I can browse that shows me, generally, what's all "hot" with the ascii weblog. Normally, nothing is "hot", but occasionally I see a URL stick out as an obvious "worth checking out" and I copy and paste the URL into the browser. Why not make it a link? Well, no need to get into OTHER referrer logs, right?

This process, as you can see, takes basically none of my time and mostly consists of checking a webpage occasionally for an interesting link or new site. Total time of my day: less than a minute.

The side-effect of this is that I often see a posting about me of the most obscure sort, where maybe a dozen regulars would normally show up, and I get right to the entry which mentions my projects or my weblog, or what have you. And then I always make the big mistake.

I post.

See, it's one thing to declare a whole thing about a person, or a person's work, or a site. It's another thing for that person to spontaneously show up on your site, minutes or an hour or two after you post, and then have them respond. It's a tad jarring, maybe a little too weird.

Occasionally, I get my favorite: "Wow! Jason Scott reads my weblog!!!!". Hey, I made your day.

Other times, I get "wow, you have no life to be posting in my weblog". This one makes slightly less sense. Why post something about a person and then be displeased the person would be responding? I've certainly experienced the situation of the subject-being-discussed showing up in the ASCII blog to tell me off or egg me on; the response you won't see from me is "Gee, don't you have a life?"

Can't have it both ways, kids. Can't post it to the world and then be indignant that the world responds.

In my newsreader, I also have this feed and this feed, but they're not quite as helpful, although sometimes they do chum up a weblog posting that mentions me that has never been read by anyone. Responses to THOSE are even more uneven.

Is there ego involved here? Well, fuckin' duhhhhh. But beyond that, there's another bunch of reasons to take a little time to do this. Sometimes people complain or comment on something that could really improve my site, or my work, or my goals, and they don't think I want to hear it. Or I won't listen. But by reading these posts on their site, even a little "didn't he try this" or "why doesn't he have this", I've made changes to my layout, topics of discussion, documentary descriptions/features, you name it. All because someone quietly murmured my name, somewhere. And I'm better for it.

And trust me, telling me I don't have a life for talking to you doesn't get shuffled into the "watertight arguments" folder all that quickly. I got a life.

It glows on my desk, in a little jar. Red if it's angry.

Oh shit, it's angry.

Hirschberg, Again

Peter Hirschberg, who I raved about some time ago, did a bunch of animation and graphics and design work for a documentary called Chasing Ghosts, about arcades. (Don't worry, my film's on a somewhat different trajectory.) Besides being a great programmer and nostalgia engineer, he's also a really, really good design/graphics guy.

I was struck by this anew when he dropped on his website a movie of some renders of a pair of arcade games, TRON and BATTLEZONE. These are not just the work of someone who is able to slap a few photo scans on a modified set of box/angle primitives in Blender and call it a day.

No, if you watch this film (all 140mb of it), you see a level of craftsmanship that far exceeds what most anyone would do. You can see the shine of the textured plastic, the glow of blacklight, the clear and distinct decals, and even the fully-running attract mode in the screen. Every time I watch this movie, I am blown away by a new tiny detail he slipped in there. If you have the time, it's worth watching.

I consider it poor form to link to someone's 140mb movie without sharing the pain, so here's a link on my dime to the movie:

http://www.welcometointernet.org/animation_tron_bz.avi

I know this is part of a much larger project, the Time-Out Tunnel project, where Peter is building a full computer graphics rendered arcade. If this film I linked you to is incredible, this larger project is miraculous. The stuff is here.

Isn't life great.

Kaminsky!!!

I got the DEFCON Schedule and browsed it for my location. Point of fact, I got an excellent time-frame: 9pm, Friday. People will have arrived in droves, Dinner will potentially be had, and folks will be open to hearing my stories and suggestions around computer history.

But then my eyes drift to the left, and I see.... Kaminsky!

Dan Kaminsky is a pundit and security researcher, who is a staple of computer security conferences, and who packs the room wherever he goes. And therein is my problem; the potential is that my room will be an anaemic scattering of folks, big fans (which I appreciate) and the occasional drunkard. Kaminsky, meanwhile, will face a room busting at the seams with listeners.

People who attend the DEFCON conferences occasionally get employers to pay for it. (I don't.) And in doing so, they have to return with useful information other than how many Warpcore Breaches they went through at Quark's Bar at the Las Vegas Hilton. To that end, Kaminsky's speech fits the bill perfectly; it covers his latest delves into computer security, is funny, accessible, and looks good on the expense report. So people attend like crazy, and whoever is paired opposite him is screwed.

Now, let me be clear; I mean screwed in the most pleasant sense; Kaminsky is sucking up audience based on reputation and output, not through some sort of flim-flammery or distasteful action. It's just that this will be the second time this has happened.

Back at Shmoocon the year before last, I gave a talk about the history of hacker conferences. It was a double whammy; Kaminsky in one track, Renderman and the Church of Wi-Fi in the second track, and then little ol' me. Well, guess what; I had 9 attendees. VERY FRIENDLY ATTENDEES, but still, 9. That and I totally screwed up the recording of my speech, so between everything, not a shining moment.

I actually met Kaminsky under the weirdest of circumstances. I had no idea who he was at all, and didn't for a long time afterwards. Basically, I was trolling (in the old sense) through DEFCON looking for potential BBS Documentary interviewees. I walked through the convention floor with a sign saying "Ever used a BBS?" This got me about 7 people over two days, who I would have NEVER met or thought to ask. It was a good way to shake things up.

Well, one of the attendees walked up and went "A BBS? WOW!" and we went upstairs to the press room and I interviewed him. It was a year later, while culling through footage, that I heard myself ask what his name was, and him going "Dan Kaminsky!"

Photos from that momentous meeting are here.

I ended up using Kaminsky in the final product; he appears in SYSOPS AND USERS, talking about how far we've gotten.

So at 9pm on the first night of DEFCON, it'll be me vs. Kaminsky again. I actually feel bad for David Gustin, the guy sandwiched between me and Kaminsky, who doesn't have Kaminsky's cachet or my Geek Q Score. Someone buy him a Warpcore Breach, please.

When They Started Hating You

I've tried to figure out when a portion of software and application development started to truly hate its users.

First, we need to go back in time a bit, to 1983. IBM PCs are still sparkling new. Time magazine has made the personal computer "machine of the year" because of the effect it's having. Comparatively, not a ton of people have personal computers but those who do are doing their best to work with them, and that includes bulletin boards. On the IBM PC, there's a limited number of telecommunications programs. One of them is PC-TALK III, by Andrew Fluegelman. This program was a lifesaver if you were looking for top-notch terminal software for your IBM PC. And it was free.

It was not just free, it had very specific, very idealistic documentation about how and where it was free. The style is preceded by Ted Nelson's Computer Lib and other sources, but for a bunch of people using personal computers for the first time, it must have seemed pretty weird but delightful. Here's what was in the documentation:

Like a breath of fresh air. Just soak up that historical, open-ended, loving text.

Certainly, it's a shame that he trademarked "Freeware" but on the other hand the ability of just any company to then call its non-free software "freeware" is avoided. This was Amazon's claim when they started taking software patents, and is also the thinking of the trademarking of "Linux". There was even a situation like this with MAME, the arcade emulator, where a US company trademarked "MAME" to "protect" the name.

This blemish aside, Fluegelman is a pioneer in terms of framing the debate. He indicates not only that the software should be distributed freely (with attribution), but provides a way for people lacking access to modem programs (like PC-TALK!) could send him a disk and some postage and get the program for free.

Ironically, people afraid of Fluegelman's trademark come up with an alternate name for their own versions of this approach: they call it "Share-ware". The idea being that you share the files around, and if you want to, you can send payment in the form of a check or some cash through to the creator.

Inevitably, this leads to the usual problem: people download, use, and don't pay. Depending on what you write, maybe the vast, vast majority do not pay. In some cases this is because your stuff is just so popular and ubiquitous that people don't consider it a "product", or sometimes your program is about 3 minor steps between someone doing it themselves and downloading your code. A lot of amateur/small-range software is this way: a program that goes through and finds all the undescribed files and lets you describe them. A program that lets you concatenate two files together. And so on.

So what do you do? Well, you could quit altogether and go pay. Or, your clever programming mind thinks: How about if I release a non-functional version of the program and tell people they can't use it completely until they pay me?

This approach got an appropriate name very quickly: Crippleware. You download a program; heck, you waste credits or assigned daily time on most BBSes downloading a program, and guess what. It's a word processor that won't save, a telecom program that times out, a file sorter that won't entirely sort. Broken. But the idea is that you're temped enough by what you see, enthralled enough by what you get, that you'll go ahead and mail the check that day and get activated, eventually, a week or two down the road when the floppies arrive. The best part of this is how everyone pays: the user pays in long distance and time, the sysop pays in electricity and disk space, the creator pays... wait, no, the creator doesn't pay anything. He makes bank. He also, of course, changes his relationship with the users as well. They're no longer really people they're sharing information with; they're suckers, people downloading what they think is a good program, only to find out it's 1/3rd of a possibly good program.

Some BBSes hated this, and would delete this stuff on sight, and then advertise themselves as "Crippleware Free". Here's an example of a programmer having to make it clear they won't be doing this to you:

SSSPCB15.ZIP: Shuttle Software Suite v1.5 for PCBoard. Contains 5 seperate PPE applications to enhance your PCBoard BBS. The programs in the package are: Internet Site List v1.7, Time Banker v1.4, Liners v1.4, User Alias Lister v1.1, and Numbers v1.1. All of these apps are fast, good looking, feature rich, and fully functional! Not Crippleware! Quality Shareware from Shuttle Software.

The disease is there, but not quite where one would have noticed it; the world was now a place where, when you downloaded software, you weren't guaranteed to get software at the end. Your ZMODEM might have worked, your connection might have held, you would not have run out of disk space, but at the end of your efforts you had an advertisement and some broken code. In other words, you lost, with a clear decision, the inherent trust you had previously in downloaded programs. The result was a place a little more mercenary, a connection a little more distant.

This got worse quickly. As programs became network aware, and connectivity was a given, negative innovation began to rule the day. The best example of this period I can give were programs that had buttons for "Register", "Later", and "Exit". Naturally, a person would be inclined not to click on "Register" anytime soon, so you would build a habit of clicking on the "Later" button. The solution was clear: Make the program switch the "Register" and "Later" buttons randomly. In other words, the interface was now being designed to hoodwink the user. If giving you a non-functioning version of a program wasn't heinous enough, the expectation that the buttons would continue to be in the same consistent locations has been removed as well. The thinking, the poisonous conclusion, is that the users will purchase the program if they're confounded into pressing a button that was somewhere else the last time they looked.

But this is all kid stuff, playground battles, compared to what happens next and what has continued to happen.

I want to say the real granddaddy of fuckery is Real, Inc., whose Realplayer programs (which allowed easier-to-stream access to video and sound) were masterpieces of deception. The goal would be to make you sign up for any of a range of aggressive sales and advertising. I recall checkmarks left checked and hidden away in tiny scroll windows, carefullly-worded selections meant to make you concerned for the viability of the environment without allowing Real to send you newsletters and spam. This was bastardry at a high level. You were now not just a hapless user being fed crippled software or misleading buttons: you were specifically being tricked into "falling for" whatever sleaze was being sold to you. This was considered acceptable, right, and positive. Winamp does it. Instant messaging clients do this. They indicate it would be in your best interest to give the companies that have made them a peek into your actions, interests, and choices. They promise you, as a sleazy salesman would, about what's the right choice for you, which is really the right choice for them.

We let them into our homes this way, and now they think they belong there.

But I think the real crime against humanity, the actual bottom of the barrel which itself has an even more horrible bottom, is reserved for peer-to-peer programs and the insidious idea of "adware". The only justification I can possibly see in this situation for what they do to you is this: you are a thief, so you deserve what you get. Like putting poison in your peanut butter that your roommate keeps swiping, or stringing up a gun to fire at whatever comes in through your window, the thinking is flawed, the potential for things to go wrong flung off the scale for its excessiveness.

Who thought Adware was appropriate? How could any developer, in his right mind, be it Kazaa or Bearshare or what have you, possibly imagine that it would be good to quietly install software that forces ads on the end user in areas outside of the program? What manner of thinking makes you think you are doing any good in the world, or treating your customers like something this side of dogshit?

You hate your users when you do this; you truly do. And they hate you for it. The fact that the software would go so far as to change the function of your computer to satisfy the requirements of charlatans, to jam open in the face of security and honesty any ports necessary to allow an endless channel of ads.... that's not software any more. You're not a developer, the users aren't users. It is a place where the sociopath, having determined he can lift a wallet while ostensibly inside a home to do a service, determines it's even more efficient to rape and kill the occupants. And maybe eat them.

We suck it up because a lot of people have a lot of tolerance for a lot of things. It's the nature of people. The savvy among us will download programs dedicated to yanking these pony nuggets out of their system, while others do no such thing and wonder why their machines have slowed to a crawl.

I am reminded of this each time I interact with Limewire. If you hit the "close" menu on the item, the program does not end. In fact it shoves itself into the taskbar, hiding itself away, using your resources and network connection long after you made it clear you were done with it.

How deep we've gone. How dark it has gotten.

Not Interested

Another day, another person telling me I wouldn't be interested in them and they're not interested in being interviewed.

In this case, it was a coin-op and electronics business somewhat near my home. They put the whole shebang up for sale on Craigslist ($175k, firm!) and included some numbers to call. What the heck's to lose, so I call the numbers.

It is basically impossible to explain to someone like this who you are and what you're up to. They want to know why I'm interested in them; surely this is a scam! They want to know who I'm "with"; surely this is a scam! In this case, I kept saying I was doing a documentary on arcades and she kept telling me "We're NOT AN ARCADE!" Well no, but her business maintained machines that went in arcades, and the whole point of my documentary is to talk about the people who work on machines that people have fun with.

I am not easy to explain. I am not an easy sell. Sometimes people jump at the chance to be interviewed. Many times they don't know what to make of me. Also, of the people in the world to be distrustful, coin-op distributors are way up there. So I didn't make my case and she told me to get lost.

I'm sad about this because nobody will hear the story. I'm also sad because I couldn't convince them that I was real. I could hear the skepticism in her voice. All she wants to do is retire, and here's some firm or sleazebag who wants to make a buck. How could I easily convince her otherwise? URLs aren't always a great argument.

I'll continue my efforts, of course, but I always hate these days.

Slow Down

I spent a good portion of the weekend not doing much of anything.

While at an interview on Friday, I called my buddy Chris and asked if he had some time and a couch. And he did.

So instead of running around, instead of doing a bunch of technical stuff, and instead of touching computers, I hung out and ate fantastic grilled sausages, watched a TV show or two, and drove around a bit through one of my childhood towns with a friend of 25 years and his wife.

While I like having my days full and my life hectic, it pays a little to remember who your friends are; your objects are not your friends. Your friends are your friends. And thanks to a little generosity on my buddy's part, I got two more days with him. So here's to you, Chris.

Well, OK, I also drove 600 miles in three days. But still, I was relaxed!