Unexplored Internet
With Felix's help (and large screenshots he sent me) I've made a few small changes to support other browsers.
Except IE.
Now I'm sure this looks bloody awful on Netscape 4.xx but so does everything. On the other hand, I don't know why the hell several things break in Microsoft's controversial lawsuit-inducing WWW browser, and I'm tempted not to care; use something free instead, people.
I converted the GIFs to PNGs too. But... have you noticed how few sites have background images these days?
Snow
As every other site in the UK will tell you right now, it snowed today. I looked out the window, and saw that someone had written "I LOVE COCK" in it on the front of a car parked in the street. It was hilarious! I wish I could have taken a picture of this fine example of good, honest, down-to-earth English humour, but, you know, no camera.
Besides, a car would surely prefer the cold, ribbed metal nozzle of a petrol pump.
Mathematicians in shock!
Mathematicians and allied trades were left reeling today at the discovery of multiplicative inverses in the set of integers! As a well-known authority spoke of "the field of integers", the rest of us mortals were forced to conclude that there must be an integer k such that 2k = 1 after all, only that we're all too dumb, or too busy scrawling hasty messages in overnight snowfall, to be able to work out just which integer it is.
In other news, I am a horrible pedant and do not deserve the good things in life.
I was going to write a piece about what I've learned about TCP connections, following my investigations into why so many of mine freeze. However I don't think I've researched it enough yet. I'm only doing it to try and work out whether it's my computer or some part of ntl's connection to it that's at fault. I upgraded my kernel to 2.4.20 (from 2.4.18) yesterday, that made no difference. It's too hard to diagnose a fault when you have no idea really where to start looking. Furthermore I don't see the point in just blathering on when I haven't really any information to impart that I think is actually useful. Probably some kind of irony there.
Instead I could go on about my sleeping patterns, which have gone crazy, and by crazy I mean "normal". Like many unemployed, worthless people, I am accustomed to a sleeping pattern whereby you can't fall asleep until the early hours of the morning yet you cannot wake until noon the following day. But after those two nights when I didn't go to bed a fortnight ago, I've found myself sleeping at normal hours - yesterday, I slept from 11:30pm until 5:50am, what's that about? Today, 9:30pm and already I'm getting drowsy! Wait a minute, stop right there. Who cares about some gobshite's sleeping pattern? You undoubtedly go to sleep every day, I can't tell you anything you don't already know. This is not a good use of bandwidth (but more of that irony)
Okay, this weekend I went to a party. But if you were there, then you know what happened, and if you weren't, any description of events there will be pale and colourless compared to the actual experience, so again, not worth the resources.
So it seems my rebuilding the site hasn't exactly cured my apathy towards posting on it; what I have to say is simply too dull, or too poorly researched, for a wider audience. Also, apparently the layout doesn't look right in IE on Windows or Safari on Mac OS X either, despite it passing the tests from the W3C's various online validators.
/\ picture of a triangle
/ \ I wanted one after reading the quote. I felt sorry for it. What has
/____\ it done to deserve morons who can't even count its number of sides?
Great big fucking test
Heh. Ladies, Gentlemen, Reprobates, IDIOTS who WON'T TAKE THE HINT and GO AWAY, RjY of anARCHy at The Realm of anARCHy is proud to present...
OMFG ROFL Site Of Shite Remix 2003! LOL KEKEKEKE ^__________^
11 January I had been dissatisfied with this site for some time. It was boring to post on it. I couldn't link to previous updates. Archiving was only semi-automatic and in lots of little files, the index for which looked hideous. I began to experiment with databases. Specifically, Berkeley databases. They
- don't need root permissions on the server to initially set up (and even if I had them, I didn't want to use Postgres because all the PHP postgres function names change in PHP 4.2 which isn't in Debian stable yet.. I can see why Felix switched to MySQL, heh)
- are pretty easy to access from both Perl and PHP
- can be set up so that the entries, which are key/value pairs, are returned in a sorted order when enumerated
- are normal files, however, which means if I wanted them writeable by the web server as well, I'd have to make them world-writeable, and open up the possibility of other people with server access fucking up my site... Oh well, nothing is perfect, I still have to be able to ssh in to update.
So I wrote some code to pull out all the previous 156 site updates from their files, and put them into a database which I imaginatively named omfg.db. Then I wrote a very simple PHP fragment that enumerated the keys, looked up their values and dumped them onto a page. It was proof of concept.
12 January I had been dissatisfied with the people I know for some time. Deliberate attempts to wind me up. Constant reminders of how crap in bed I am. Barely-concealed hatred. 8,000,000 mile lies. Hypocritical accusations of being "obsessively bonkers". Chronic, concentrated, whining smug pedanticism. Having every one of my humourous remarks taken badly and with offence, and being returned with gusto; or simple accusations of insanity from those who didn't get the joke.
I felt the amount of crap I was getting was growing and becoming intolerable. I was becoming dangerously angry. Then something in my head snapped. "I don't have to put up with this; I can, and I must, lose these morons entirely"
(Unfortunately this realisation occurred, as they do, at a highly inconvenient point. I'd somehow agreed to get involved in someone else's shitty idea and had only a few seconds before the chance to escape was gone. Drastic action had to be taken! I hadn't pulled a stunt like that in years and it showed because I didn't get away cleanly... but fortunately I can sprint and the suburb where I live is sufficiently mazelike to lose pursuers.)
I realised that any announcement of this intention would result in even more of the crap I was trying to avoid, like scorn, sneering, derision, ridicule, or worst of all, idiots going "oh what's wrong Rob" and pretending like they give a damn. So I decided to simply quit IRC/usenet/etc, silently.
Unfortunately though the phone's still there, and later, that's exactly what happened. Some people are too stubborn, or in my view, just plain dumb, to take a hint. Go away.
14 January I had spent a day and a half largely being incredibly frustrated by a lack of knowledge of various programming and markup languages, library interfaces, and so forth. For example I'd tried to write an X clock program using GTK. See, I've always wanted a Unix clone of RISC OS's !Alarm, but I couldn't work out how to do it... It was around 3pm, and I fell asleep. During the following two and a half hours I had a nightmare that was horrible even by my standards, and I decided I wasn't going to bed again for a long time...
I forced myself to continue experimenting with CSS. A lot of hours and thousands of reloads later I had a page that looked, well, identical to the previous design, but using CSS, instead of tables, and I had learned a lot... During the time I needed some text with which to fill a page so I could format it; having no lorem ipsum generator to hand I had to write it myself. Now, imagine the results of an angry, sleep-deprived brain's automatic writing. Not pleasant. In fact, unprintable...
15 January It's difficult to say where this day started and the previous finished, but at some point I felt there was no more CSS that could be done. However, a brain deprived of sleep tends to wander a little, and sitting there for a moment I suddenly saw in my mind a very clear image; an elevated view of the interior of a cave. In the middle, a glowing pool of water, and on the opposite side, a door, brightly lit.
And it was textured in ASHWALL3...
Yes, I had imagined a Doom map. The more I thought about it, the more ideas popped into my mind. A whole story built up quickly. I feverishly loaded Yadex, the map editor, and spent the rest of the day making a start on the map.
I loved how having quit IRC, I'd actually got some shit done for once, instead of spending hours being irritated by idiots, manipulated by morons, wound up by wankers, annoyed by... alliteration... "Dump your friends!" I thought. "If people can split up with their boy/girlfriends, they can do the same with the other people they know!" Unfortunately at least in my case most of those people know each other, so it's too hard to be selective; you have to nuke the lot. Oh well. Small price to pay for stability and lack of rage, I guess. At last, I felt good enough to sleep...
16 January
- I took the CSS-formatted page I had made previously, and incorporated the database-dumping PHP script into it. The old updates looked good in their new home.
- I converted the routine that added the update time at the start of an entry into PHP, so the entries had their time heading.
- I made it write out only those entries between the start of the current month, or the start of the previous month, if it was before the fifteenth of the current month. Hence, automatic archiving.
- I put in a menu to access the archived material in the same way.
- I was pleased with it. It worked. It was good.
An invitation to a party turned up in the email. I am known for being the guy who turns up to parties, usually in stupid hats. But of course I don't want to go... What to do, what to do... Not only that, but another retarded phone call. "I'm in a good mood!" "so bloody what? go away!" "No! Come over and have dinner." "No now go away!" I hung up.
17 January Continued to tweak the site design (and my Doom map) neither with particularly noteworthy results. However, at one point I was rsyncing files when suddenly the server stopped responding. ping and traceroute still worked. Using netcat to scan ports known to blocked by the firewall produced an expected "Connection refused". However, the open and forwarded ones were reporting "No route to host". I hoped fervently that my hundreds of ssh/scp/rsyncs, page reloads, and generally hammering the server, hadn't taken it out...
18 January Sometime around 1pm I noticed the server had come back up. The evidence suggested it hadn't actually gone down last night; it had been rebooted but its uptime had carried on into the following day. It looked more like it had had its wire pulled out and lost its connection, but I really don't know. I don't think it was my fault though.
Inspired by part of a thread on Doomworld I rewrote Sandbox, my "shove a load of random monsters or whatever into a circle" map-generating script. The code actually looks pretty good now. The thread was about various esoteric bits of monster behaviour, and in particular, the effect (or lack of it) of barrel explosions on cyberdemons. People were talking about surrounding them with hundreds of barrels as an experiment. I used Sandbox to put a cyberdemon and nearly 8000 barrels into an area smaller than Doom2 map1's exit room. I knew full well it wouldn't have any effect; I knew exactly where Doom's source code blatantly says they won't have an effect. I simply thought that density of barrels was hilarious...
19 January While fiddling around with the CSS again I flipped the navigation bar thing (you know, the bit with "here's some stuff" at the top) from the left to the right. It makes the CSS simpler - I could combine it with the signature picture - and requiring less use of absolute positioning, which isn't so well supported by browsers.
20 January It's all very well having a nice new site engine, but if you can't update it, it's pretty useless. At last I made the script to add new entries into the database. There is still great room for improvement here but it works.
21 January Made a version of the tracklist to fit into the new site layout
22 January Converted other pages to fit in to the new layout
- Rewrote the about page, calling it a "FAQ"
- Converted the contact page. I have plans for the contact page...
- Finally, converted webnewsstats. Since that was already based on PHP I had to do a little bit more work but it seems to be functioning.
Yet another shitty phone conversation. "How are you doing" "shut up. take the hint. go away." Also I noticed "On a pretty much totally unrelated topic, has Rob a reason for dissappearing(sic) himself (and would he care to venture it?)?" on the mailing list. I wrote a reply, but I never sent it. However, rather than waste the material, I edited it into this update... heh.
23 January I noticed ntl's DHCP server failing to respond to dhclient's requests to have my system's lease renewed. About to lose my connection, I tried to fool dhclient into thinking the lease had another 24 hours, but it didn't work. I think I know what I did wrong though. So anyway, I switched this computer off... and turned on one of the others, and played a bunch of old Doom maps.
24 January It seems that last week's forced disturbances of my sleeping patterns (and, I'd like to believe, quitting #warwick) have actually fixed them. I slept from 12:30am to 6:30am. It's like a normal person! Christ!
I didn't really work on the site. Instead I made another attempt to learn how transmission control protocol (TCP) works, while running lots of tests with tcpdump, to try to find out why the hell so many of my downloads freeze and my connection seems so unreliable...
I happened to visit Pete's site, to find a new design. It gets worse, he writes later that he's redone his site in CSS, no tables. Oh fucking great. Now it looks like I've copied him or something and that everything I've typed up there is a lie. I mean, it's not like you can see any evidence that I wrote some shitty database thing.
Well, rest assured! You can think that if you want. I won't think any less of you than I already do, assbutt.
25 January ...
So we reach the present time. I think this new system is ready to put in. Yet more tweaks - I realised I could simplify my CSS a lot, remove half the <div>s on the page... but resulted in a layout that is weirdly similar to the host's main page, with the floated box in the corner like that. Oh well. I might yet still fuck about with it, there are things with which I'm not happy.
For example, the floated box repels text surrounding it. Good, it's supposed to. But why doesn't it do the same with background? I had the white date heading boxes going underneath the navigation bar, it looked horrible, they should have only gone up to its edge. Stupid. I had to fake it by putting "width: 0;" so the content (which now cannot contain whitespace, on pain of unwanted linewrapping) forces the box's width open only as far as necessary. This was not the effect I wanted, I want the white box to go as far over as possible, to the edge of the navigation bar or the edge of the page. Stupid.
I might have waited until the 14th of next month, when the site is a year old, but that's because I thought this thing would take longer to build. Oh well. Instead it's being published on the day that my stupid d:c/p/y date notation turned 10 years old, heh.
And that stupid party I mentioned is probably starting like now. I still haven't decided whether or not to go. I don't want to, I think it would be a disaster. However, I sort of said I might; and thinking about it, it might be good if it were a disaster. I mean, I can leave when they piss me off. Or, I could turn up and be really abusive - after all, they were damn fool enough to invite me... Heh.
I thought I was just yet another bored fuckwit with a pointless website full of crappy e/n updates of interest to no-one. I thought it was visited only by the six or seven people who I've met in real life yet despite my best efforts still think, or pretend to think I'm worth talking to. But no.
Hello #zdoom. It seems the last time I posted quotes from there (November), somebody noticed...
05/01 02:22 - 05/01 02:30
<gatewatcher> do you think julian will give you the ralphis account
back
<RjY> for which the world and his wife knows the password
<slowmotionhobo> i wait 20 minutes just to download a damn winamp skin
<slowmotionhobo> =/
<Ralphis> hey
<Ralphis> rjy
<RjY> heh it's true
<Ralphis> I'm usually in #zdoom which is currently the busiest
channel, I occasionally say something but mostly I'm
idling. On this occasion I've been doing that, saying
"heh" every so often, etc. Anyway so I switch back from
web browsing and I see some highlighted lines! Someone's
mentioned my name, okay, what's going on...
<Ralphis> ...at which point my jaw hits the keyboard. What? This
guy thinks I'm John Carmack..? Okay I can knock up
stupid scripts to process IRC logs in a few minutes, but
ultra-advanced 3d game engines... dear lord... I made
the predictable response.
<Ralphis> Look familiar RjY?
<RjY> haha you found my site :)
<Ralphis> we all did
<Ralphis> Do you really think we thought you were carmack?
<RjY> of course not
<Ralphis> Just wondering
<Linguica> hey its carmack
<lament> heh
<lament> yes
<lament> he tricked us all
<lament> he made a fake page
<RjY> but sometimes i think people can be very dumb
<lament> so we think he's not carmack
<lament> but he actually is
<Ralphis> lament: the page makes it look like we thought he really
was carmack
<Ralphis> oh oh
<Ralphis> I understand
<Ralphis> thought you were cracking on me
<Ralphis> fool
<lament> yes you see it now
<Ralphis> IT IS CARMACK
<lament> it's so obvious once you see it
<Ralphis> man
<lament> RjY: YOU'RE CARMACK!
<slowmotionhobo> url?
<Ralphis> How could I look right past it?
<Bloodshedder> wow carmack was right under our noses!
<Ralphis> http://www.triv.org.uk/~rjy/
<aca> insane.
<Ralphis> So carmack, how's the engine coming?
<RjY> you're all nuts :P
<gatewatcher> it's dead now
<Bloodshedder> <carmack> doom3 is canceled
<-- Sultani has quit ()
<Ralphis> oh gn0
<slowmotionhobo> bloodshedder:heh
<lament> It wasn't all good... Here's the bit where a few of the
more seasoned denizens let slip with a bit of
information, and I find out again what they think of
noobs... However, I love this because this is what I do
best. Idle. Eavedrop. Pick stuff up that I'm not
supposed to know. Fantastic. (Then post it, but censor
it, because if they ever found this page, I'd get banned
for sure...)
<lament> RjY: prepare to get banned FOR SURE!
<RjY> heh
I'm sorry. I didn't know what more to say and I still don't. I think it was a misunderstanding. I didn't think anyone actually believed I was Carmack, I was merely astounded that anyone might say that I was. It's a subtle difference and the fault is mine for not making it clearer. Furthermore I was astonished anyone was talking to me at all.
I'm also aware that by posting more quotes I'm taking the risk of the same thing happening again, but I feel this was necessary to say. Once again, my apologies.
