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"Oh dear, this person understands that it's cost effective to outsource work that isn't a core part of their business so that their whole operation runs more smoothly. Clearly, I don't want to do business with someone who might outclass me in business savvy. I'm steering clear of this contract, and going back to searching for anti-spam haikus in random email headers!"

Exactly my thoughts. I learned C by adding features to CircleMUD. MUDs cover a good amount of ground: complex data structures, sockets, cross-platform code, managing many separate tasks pseudo-concurrently, buffering and caching data, handling large files and databases, manipulating the filesystem, lots of different types of algorithms that have to be decently efficient, etc.

The only problems are that CircleMUD (in particular) is *very* cross-platform, so sometimes the code gets a bit hard to follow, learning your way around such a complex and diverse codebase can take a while, and there's lots of things it doesn't use at all (graphics, threads, interprocess communication, etc). It also is just a hobby project, not a summer job.

It is pretty fun learning to be able to tweak a sophisticated game to do most anything you can imagine, if you have the patience.

Other good things to study would be: MATLAB programming, Visual C++, systems programming, MySQL, perl, and PHP. They come up in many programming jobs.

tcpflow is amazingly useful. It nicely formats tcp coversations.

...with Windows, the gun blows up in your hand :)

original FOOTOS joke

One thing that always irked me about the "official" definition of "open source" found here is that they put a bunch of restrictions of what "open source" is.

In other words, contrary to what most people think, something to which the code is available and can be modified legally for your own personal needs is not necessarily "open source" by the definiton.

For example, CircleMud - a popular free MUD engine to which the code is available - is not "open source" by the official definition, even though anyone can grab the code and use it for their needs, as long as they don't make a profit from it (this is in the license). Such a clause prohibits the software from being "open source" by the official definiton, even if the source code is open - and there is no other appropriate name for such software! This is what bothers me the most - we can't just call it "open source" we must say "the code is available for download and use blah blah blah" instead of having a convenient name.

Come on, if the source code is open for anyone to download and modify, it should be "open source" - since that's what the name describes! Why attach some arbitrary hidden restrictions to the term, that are not easily apparent from the words themselves?

Povray, like circleMUD, is one of those software packages whose releases seem to come few and far-between, but are often worth it...

I, for one, welcome our new chrome-sphere-over-checkboard overlords.

You know, a friend of mine, after I installed povray on his machine, asked me, "So, where's the GUI...?" ;)

I vividly remember when Canter and Siegel spammed us on USENET. I even bought the "Green Card Lawyers - Spamming the Globe" T-Shirt from Joel Furr.

But I don't think that was actually the first widespread spam. A few months earlier -- in January 1994 -- was the similarly infamous "Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon" spam... does anyone remember that? It wasn't commercial spam per se, but still spam.

I spent the next few days collecting various funny responses to the spam from dozens of different newsgroups. A few years ago, I put my compilation on the web. Just doing my part to make sure nothing on the Internet ever dies.

TCPflow provides some very interesting stuff. It should be on your installation CDs; but if not, you can get it from here.

• Ethereal
• hping
• tcpdump
• tcpflow

...if anyone's done any work on running kernel modules with user priviledges,

If you're willing to patch Linux, the line between user & kernel space can be easily blurred.

With FUSD, a program can appear to be a kernel module, although it's running in user-space, for more safety and ease of development.

With KML, a user program can be run in kernel space, for more performance and risk of catastrophy.

Build a MUD. Look at Circlemud as an example, but don't use the Circlemud code.

This benefits you because it gives you a reason to have a box open to the outside, it gives you a very long project to work on, and it'll suck up whatever social time you might've had before.

Enjoy!

- James

Any self-respecting geek probably knows full well, but worth taking any opportunity to plug the medium. MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) are still alive and well, and MUD Connector lists about 2,000 currently active (as in, running now, have been running within the last two months).

To those unaware (for shame!), MUDs (and variations such as MUCKs, MOOs, and MUSHes) are BBS-era text-based games, the precursors to MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, Anarchy Online, and so on. There are some graphical (and freely available) MUDs out there, some listed on MUD Connector, but most are still text based. Generally, MUDs aren't completely original codebases, but derived from an open source basis, such as CircleMUD which just finally got out of 3.0 beta and released 3.1.

I administer a small MUD, passed down to me from two previous big egos, which has been up for somewhere around 1995, give or take a few months of server issues. Unfortunately, I'm too ashamed to post a link.

Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 07:01:41 GMT
Content-Length: 7286
Content-Type: text/plain
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3
Etag: "ea810-1c76-3d20f5eb"
Last-modified: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 00:38:03 GMT
Via: 1.1 netcache04 (NetCache NetApp/5.2R1D8)

1. Tcpflow - read contents of tcp traffic in real time. Great for watching browser/webserver interactions.
   
2. Netcat - connect Unix pipes to TCP sockets. Should have been part of Unix since the advent of TCP/IP. Great for rigging a temporary "server" to see if a client is connecting as advertised: nc -lp 80.
   
3. X Resources (as seen in ~/.Xdefaults) - you can make xterms really dark, even when running colored apps like mutt, with dark Xresources like: XTerm*color9: #690000 - man xterm for meanings of color0-15.
   xrdb -merge .darkXres to use.
   
4. Xmessage - useful in crontabs to remind you of periodic things - like remembering to go home. With the right params, it can take over the whole screen, which is hard to ignore.
   
5. perl -pi.bak -e's/chocolate/vanilla/g' *.recipe - change a bunch of files, leaving backups.
   

If you're already an old hand at playing MUDs and you've decided you want to start one of your own, here's my advice: take a vailum, lie down, and hide in a dark closet until the desire goes away. Just playing MUDs is masochistic enough, isn't it? Or are you trying to shave that extra point off your GPA, jump down that one last notch on your next job evaluation, or get rid of that pesky Significant Other for good? If you think silly distractions like having friends and seeing daylight are preventing you from realizing your full potential in the MUD world, MUD Administrator is the job for you.

Don't get me wrong: running a production MUD can be great fun. It can also be overburdened by politics and plagued by spiteful players devoted to making your life difficult, and otherwise be a highly frustrating endeavour. That's why I don't do it any more.

I'll say what I said then when I was on top of it: Programming MUDs is one of the best ways to learn how to program. First you need to understand how the MUD works internally, then you add features to it until you actually have to refine it so that your feature can be implement it. And oh yeah, you don't have to be an artist or a mathematician to program it, you just need some fantasy and understand a fair amount of logic.

CircleMUD is what taught me a thing or two.

I grappled with exactly this problem for years. I wanted something that would give me superb quality Postscript/PDF, good HTML, and at least passable ASCII text. (In 1994, it was still important to distribute ASCII documentation; not everyone had a web browser.)

I went back and forth with all sorts of things: SGML based solutions, a few more "proprietary" utilities, etc. Finally, the latex-to-other-format conversion tools got to be good enough that I could use LaTeX as my primary format.

My most recent documentation is for FUSD, a Linux framework for user-space devices. The original documentation source is LaTeX. Simply running LaTeX gives you DVI, which you can convert into publication quality Postscript. Using pdflatex (NOT ps2pdf), you can also create very high quality PDF, which includes a real PDF table of contents, cross-references, and URL links. Finally, using latex2html, you can create almost native-quality HTML documentation. And, if you really need ASCII, you can get a reasonable rendering by running lynx (in its ASCII-dump mode) over the HTML.

latex2html comes with special LaTeX macros that let you specify hyperlinks inside your document. They are rendered as real hyperlinks in HTML, and footnotes in the printed versions.

I grappled with exactly this problem for years. I wanted something that would give me superb quality Postscript/PDF, good HTML, and at least passable ASCII text. (In 1994, it was still important to distribute ASCII documentation; not everyone had a web browser.)

I went back and forth with all sorts of things: SGML based solutions, a few more "proprietary" utilities, etc. Finally, the latex-to-other-format conversion tools got to be good enough that I could use LaTeX as my primary format.

My most recent documentation is for FUSD, a Linux framework for user-space devices. The original documentation source is LaTeX. Simply running LaTeX gives you DVI, which you can convert into publication quality Postscript. Using pdflatex (NOT ps2pdf), you can also create very high quality PDF, which includes a real PDF table of contents, cross-references, and URL links. Finally, using latex2html, you can create almost native-quality HTML documentation. And, if you really need ASCII, you can get a reasonable rendering by running lynx (in its ASCII-dump mode) over the HTML.

latex2html comes with special LaTeX macros that let you specify hyperlinks inside your document. They are rendered as real hyperlinks in HTML, and footnotes in the printed versions.

I grappled with exactly this problem for years. I wanted something that would give me superb quality Postscript/PDF, good HTML, and at least passable ASCII text. (In 1994, it was still important to distribute ASCII documentation; not everyone had a web browser.)

I went back and forth with all sorts of things: SGML based solutions, a few more "proprietary" utilities, etc. Finally, the latex-to-other-format conversion tools got to be good enough that I could use LaTeX as my primary format.

My most recent documentation is for FUSD, a Linux framework for user-space devices. The original documentation source is LaTeX. Simply running LaTeX gives you DVI, which you can convert into publication quality Postscript. Using pdflatex (NOT ps2pdf), you can also create very high quality PDF, which includes a real PDF table of contents, cross-references, and URL links. Finally, using latex2html, you can create almost native-quality HTML documentation. And, if you really need ASCII, you can get a reasonable rendering by running lynx (in its ASCII-dump mode) over the HTML.

latex2html comes with special LaTeX macros that let you specify hyperlinks inside your document. They are rendered as real hyperlinks in HTML, and footnotes in the printed versions.

I grappled with exactly this problem for years. I wanted something that would give me superb quality Postscript/PDF, good HTML, and at least passable ASCII text. (In 1994, it was still important to distribute ASCII documentation; not everyone had a web browser.)

I went back and forth with all sorts of things: SGML based solutions, a few more "proprietary" utilities, etc. Finally, the latex-to-other-format conversion tools got to be good enough that I could use LaTeX as my primary format.

My most recent documentation is for FUSD, a Linux framework for user-space devices. The original documentation source is LaTeX. Simply running LaTeX gives you DVI, which you can convert into publication quality Postscript. Using pdflatex (NOT ps2pdf), you can also create very high quality PDF, which includes a real PDF table of contents, cross-references, and URL links. Finally, using latex2html, you can create almost native-quality HTML documentation. And, if you really need ASCII, you can get a reasonable rendering by running lynx (in its ASCII-dump mode) over the HTML.

latex2html comes with special LaTeX macros that let you specify hyperlinks inside your document. They are rendered as real hyperlinks in HTML, and footnotes in the printed versions.

BlueLava CGI Interface for X-10

Linux Home Automation Page

Considering the server is right there on the tree, controlling it via the parallel port might be the way to go.

On the parallel port software interface side, I have successfully used the parapin library in my pc-to-breadboard experiments. This way you can spend more time on the hardware and the imaging and less on the hardware interface.

"parapin makes it easy to write C code under Linux that controls individual pins on a PC parallel port. This kind of control is very useful for electronics projects that use the PC's parallel port as a generic digital I/O interface. Parapin goes to great lengths to insulate the programmer from the somewhat complex parallel port programming interface provided by the PC hardware, making it easy to use the parallel port for digital I/O."

- James

Device drivers can either be colocated in the kernel (Which they generally are now, similar to Linux), or can be emulated in user space

tcpflow home page

Back in my mudding days (ok, 2 years ago), a few friends of mine and i were gods, or had higher level characters, or both. A few people saw us playing, got interested, and joined us. Some we invited, some we didn't. One idiot decided it'd be cool to join, and watched a friend of mine sign on, thus figured out how to get in. We let him, after all, it was an open mud and all...
btw, if you don't know what a mud is, go to circlemud.org.
back to the story... well, he was a nuisance... he died a lot, so we rescued him/his stuff... then he started to cheat, and we repremanded him a few times. After about 2 months of putting up with his cheating (we were fucking LENIENT), he watches my password (not hard, it was "enter"). Mind you, i'm a god. i can go anywhere, kill anything, make anything... if he knew how to wield a god, he'da been able to do a LOT more than he did... anyway, he went around to all the hardest monsters, killed them, and put on the equipment. then i tried to log on, and couldn't, because he was already on. so i got on with a mortal, to see what was up. he sees me, and changes my god's password. lucky me, i know how to snoop passwords too. so i use his password, and change it back to an old favorite of mine that nobody knows... (22 characters and bitchy)
i email the implementors (the people that own the server, thus the game, and make all decisions), and tell them what happened. they post on the god's bulletin board that the guy is a "god target". see him, hill him, sack his shit.
So i do this. every time you die, you lose experience. i killed him until he had zero experience... he was 2 levels from the top... that's about 3 months of good, solid play.
he begs and pleads, and begs, and pleads to get his stuff back... he acts like he worked really hard for it... of course i don't give it to him.
two days later, he comes into one of my classes, and says "lets go out onto Alder" (alder street is where lotsa people hang out). i look down, and he's got a gun in his pocket pointing at me. This is not an overactive imagination seeing a finger as a gun... that was a gun. i grew up in the ghetto, i know a gun when i see one. being the cocky bastard i am, i call his bluff, turn around, and walk to my seat and sit down... fortunately, i gambled right.

you think people spending money on these games is taking it too far? nay, i hardly think so... if you are wondering, yes, this IS a true story... if this sounds like a story that'd hit the news, it wouldn't, because the only people that i told for 6 months were a friend of mine in the class (about an hour later), and my girlfriend (2 weeks later)... i'm a paranoid bastard, but i'm alive.

The second reason is that being nice simply doesn't suffice. There's two aspects to defending a trademark: defending it whenever there's an abuse of it and defending it loudly. The first aspect is necessary for trademarks which have to, unlike a patent and copyright (I think?!), be defended or otherwise they're considered invalid. Arbitrary defense of a trademark doesn't work. The second is to deter others from abusing the trademark -- after all, you have to pay your pack of lawyers for their services, but as long as you're willing to use them, you might as well make the fact very well known. That way Joe Blow from Indiana thinks twice about abusing your trademark.

The second reason is that being nice simply doesn't suffice. There's two aspects to defending a trademark: defending it whenever there's an abuse of it and defending it loudly. The first aspect is necessary for trademarks which have to, unlike a patent and copyright (I think?!), be defended or otherwise they're considered invalid. Arbitrary defense of a trademark doesn't work. The second is to deter others from abusing the trademark -- after all, you have to pay your pack of lawyers for their services, but as long as you're willing to use them, you might as well make the fact very well known. That way Joe Blow from Indiana thinks twice about abusing your trademark.