ASCII by Jason Scott

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.

1 Comment

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”.

14 Comments

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!

Comments Off on Blockparty Dates!

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.

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

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.

Comments Off on Hirschberg, Again

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.

1 Comment

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.

9 Comments