Slashdot Mirror
A High-School Hacker's Notebook
An anonymous reader writes: "Remember those high-school lunchtimes, back in the day, when you and your computer-nerd friends would hang out by the Krunch Korral, discussing that cool computer game that you were all going to write? And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."
There have to be better ways to put those pages on the web than dozens of jpegs....
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Mine was similar, but it wasn't a game, it was a business that sold pet supplies online. A friend of mine (a great puppeteer) thought of a good sock mascot. Then, we were going to spend all our money on 1 huge superbowl commercial. We were going to make millions!!!!
I also has a dream in which I would get a degree in computer science and make money!!!
I basically am about to get a degree in potato farming and the Irish Potato Famine just happened.
I know a guy that spent all his time making instruction booklets for games that didn't exist. It started getting scarey when he did one with a multi-dick hermaphrodite named 'George' who worked in a cheese factory and your goal was to cultivate a new form of yeast infection from the bacteria used to grow cheese.
There's a mirror right here
I've been out of high school for a long time and I still do that on my lunch breaks. And after work. On my coffee breaks. Before lectures. After lectures. While watching TV. Riding the bus. Walking down the street.
But not in bed. The girlfriend put the kibosh on that one early on.
Called "Dodge the Slashdotting 2002", and base it on personal experience.
if this was written in 1984 and the game consists of a big white circle being eaten by a big green circle, then I've been ripped off.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:7bbg_EjcxcEC: garote.bdmonkeys.net/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
/notebook page though
I can't find the
Im still in high school... and the only difference is that we sit around with our laptops and one person gets the 3D design, and another person does teh website, and another makes sure that we dont get sued for uninetntionally creating a game too similar to an existing one...
Well, it was created in 'klik'n'create' which was some sort of scripting language game creation tool, but hey, it was a working side scroller! Not much real programming happenned.
It's gone. Too many jpegs? No mirror, no google cache, no nada. Just gone.
funny munging
And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."
Hmmm... that doesn't look like my handwriting.
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
Then, he was weird. Now, he's probably considered a cutting edge avant-garde artist, hanging out at all the cool parties and dating a girl who looks like Laura Prepon. Or, he's still living in his parents' basement. At least he found a way to survive high school.
Freedom: "I won't!"
If you use IE don't even think about clicking on the above link. I just did and about 64 windows opened and my machine hung. I just lost some work. Thanks.
We were too busy fending off those big goons who tried to take our lunch money.
"Hey, I have an idea, but I have no skills, so I'm looking for people to do all the work and I just want all the credit! What, no takers? Open source sucks!"
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
People, the Slashdot effect is getting out of hand. We've now slashdotted a spiral-bound notebook? Someone must put an end to this madness!
I think slashdot could help everyone out by doing the following.
1. Any time an article is submitted that refers to a non-news site (such as the one in this story), slashdot should automatically pull a copy of the page/story and put it somewhere in a temporary cache. The story would automatically generate the "slashdot cache" link and content when the article is posted.
2. The temporary cache that these web pages are pulled into only exist for the stories that are on the front page (or perhaps a day). After that specified time, the cache is flushed.
This code would be VERY simple to write. All it is is a simple screen scrape! A list of sites to not cache (such as yahoo news, cnn, etc.) could be kept in a simple text file.
Despite copyright laws, I think people that have sites that can't handle a slashdot load would prefer a copy of their content on slashdot as opposed to an effective DDOS. Both readers and site owners would be MUCH HAPPIER.
Just my 2c. PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! IT IS VERY ANNOYING, ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS.
You are an evil, evil little man.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Remember when you were a kid and you had this cool idea for a video game, so you put it up on a website, but some big bully of a site came along, pushed you down in the mud, slashdotted your site and stole your lunch money?
it is not the work or the content of the notebook that is noteworthy here. it is the whole concept of what they are doing. It's something all of us have done in the past. also notice the topic it is under? it's not under the "take this seriously or die" topic, now is it?
My high school lunchtimes were either spent eating lunch, joking around with friends, doing homework or going off-campus to smoke pot with friends. Incidentally, none of my friends were computer nerds; I was pretty much the only computer nerd in my class (it was a small school, about 100 people per class). I never let computers define me... it was a hobby. Had I let my life revolve around computer (games|systems|hacking|programming), I probably would have found I had nothing in common with anyone at my school.
On the other hand, I think it would have been cool to have a couple geek friends in high school.
This was obviously a little off-topic, but I have tons of karma and that quip from the story topic made me think about it.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
A mate and myself talked about writing a couple of really cool games (well, we thought they were cool at the time).
One wouldn't have sold at all well outside Northern Ireland as nobody would understand the humour.
The other was based on the actions of an estranged young man around the time(1989) by the name of Michael. I can't remember the details of the incident but he decided to take pot shots at people in his town then turned his rifle on himself. We were going to call it Michaels Shoot-out Challenge.
Good job we didn't go through with it, we'd have been sued to b*ggery...
From my Autobiography - "Lifestyles of the Sad and Desperate"...
Am I the only one here who wondered more about what party to go to at the weekend and chatting up the girls ? And going to practice explicitly because it seemed to make you more attractive to women. Was I strange that as a 14 year old I was obsessed by breasts ?
:-)
Damn didn't realise I should have been worrying about other things
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Only we were going to make one of those uber special graphics demos that ran in 386 Protected Mode! oooooh, aaaah!
My friend who did the music was the only one with talent, so he eventually realized the rest of us weren't going to be mastering vector based 3D graphics engines in the middle of grade 11. However, I did end up learning how to write an assembly library and link it into a QuickBASIC program... that's something!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Nintendo Power sponsored a contest around 12 or so years ago challenging its readers to come up with spiffy game concepts and submit them. They got some pretty incredible submissions that were incredibly detailed and highly original. The winner was a neat design by budding 14 year old artist Jeffrey Scott Campbell, who I believe went on to a career as a comic book artist. Some dedicated Nintendo junkie out there might still have the issue in question to verify.
We did something from high school notebooks to fruition. It was a wonderful Mac RPG called Atlas: The Gift of Aramai (Freeverse.com). Some times I would recommend keeping it all to paper. Especially if you and your unexperieced friends want to create something as content intensive as an RPG (go for a clever puzzle or something else that is repeatable.) :). I had to get new friends to do it though :(.
But after five years and 8 people cycled through the team I am proud to say that we did it. And what can I say we got from it? I learned that making games is tough and in the end pretty unrewarding. That is why I am starting a new one
Now my 14 year old son has one. Hell, he may end up like me. Jeez.. I better talk to that kid!
My buddy's kid is still in High School. He not only had these same dreams - he actually sat down with his buddy and hacked out about 50K lines of C++ to produce a playable 3D shooter. From scratch, no less. (Krikes - and I thought the 1000 line poker game I wrote in High School was somethin...)
I keep a notebook with all the cool toys I'm going to get when I graduate from the university. I made my perfect pc, my ultimate car stereo, and pimp home theater. Problem is, since I'm graduating in Computer Science, they'll be on paper for a while.
This code would be VERY simple to write.
It sounds like you're assuming the problem is technical. I think it is not. Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over. (Rob says very few people read comments. So instead of loading one front page, the readers now load one front page plus four cached articles. Bandwidth consumption has just pentupled!)
The other issue here, obviously, is copyright infringement. Sure, you and I know that it's benign, even helpful to the site creator, but not everyone is going to see it that way. I can't imagine the slashdot editors want to deal with the legal headaches that could arise here.
I have an idea, though... maybe Google would be willing to set up a "streamlined" URL submission page for "trusted" submitters - I bet quite a few Google employees read slashdot. It would allow the trusted users to submit URL's that would be immediately cached and indexed, instead of the usual several week lag time. Google can afford the bandwidth, and their cache is already a generally accepted part of the net landscape. Of course, this doesn't help with image-intensive pages, but those stories are usually lame anyway (woahhhh, dude, check out that case mod! it's got a big hole chopped in the side and it's filled with strawberry Jell-O.)
That said, it would be very nice if there was some standard machine readable mechanism to indicate, "yes, you may cache this to avoid slashdotting this site" that the site could serve. Of course, then it gets complex: the caching parameters have to be specified, you ight want allow/deny lists for cachers, etc. Finally, if someone does cache such a site, they'd want to have legal proof that permission was granted, and that brings us to the use of PKI and certified digital signatures.
Great idea, but the overhead of a practical implementation with legal safeguards is probably too high. Hmm, perhaps such caching could be construed as a "fair use" of copyright material?
You could've hired me.
It would be very nice if there was some standard machine readable mechanism to indicate, "yes, you may cache this to avoid slashdotting this site" that the site could serve
It's called robots.txt and that's what Google and archive.org use.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am getting really sick of Slashdot wrecklessly posting links to webservers that they KNOW cannot withstand more than 5 minutes of slashdotters. These people have to pay for bandwidth most of the time, and one linking can cost the web sites several hundred dollars.
Posting a link on slashdot is very much like a DOS attack. Slashdot knows how many users visit its site, and knows that most of the sites that they link to cannot handle the load. This is wreckless and negligent, and one day Slashdot is going to get into trouble over it.
so does anyone have a mirror of the /.ed mirror? :-)
http://kered.org
Furthermore, how do you defend against people changing their robots.txt configurations after the fact that their site has been scraped and claiming that scraping was not permitted in the first place?
You could've hired me.
In high school, I had one of those TI graphing calculators. You could write programs on it, although they were fairly limited (the whole thing only had 32K memory!) and you had access to a total of 26 variables and six lists. Still, I wrote two games for it - a side-scroller spaceship-shooting-aliens game (complete with upgradeable guns when you shot x enemies down) and a vertical scrolling pole-position game. Everybody in my school with a TI-82 had a copy of those games. Sadly, though, I lost them on the day of the AP exam, and the backup I made turned out to be corrupted.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I run a small home server over ADSL, but I also get 20mb of web space at my ISP that can handle the bandwidth.
A sensible self promothing poster would move there content to a high bandwidth site before posting.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I didn't plan for many games in high school... I mostly played them. Ok I did try to make some simple basketball game I believe... and I made a few games on my calculator. But I do have some notes left where I was trying to make plans for a self learning AI(!) Ofcourse nothing came out of that... Oh yeah in high school I also started this bold project of making an Othello ("Reversi" for some of you) game with an AI. I still have the code, and the most you can do is to move a cursor around and place those discs on the board. However just recently I've been planning and making notes for a Civilization like game. Ofcourse, I haven't done anything more than that.
Will work for bandwidth
heh, we had delusions allright... 3-5 DnD freaks, all had computers.
It started even before highschool, like sometime in middle school.
Problem is that 3 of the 5 knew basic and 1 of the 5 knew C (I was still learning). So the C guy made a couple dozen games (Starquest? Galaxyquest? it was certainly his best, and had 3-4 different versions, including a 3d prototype during out Junior year).
These days I'm spending time compiling a huge classic ff-based world and refining the idea of using Java reflection & some of my own code validation schemes to have a programmer's RPG. I.E. your sword is a Java class that must follow certain pre & post condition & statistical rules or it's either rejected or breaks.
Perhaps the webmaster is clever - knowing this is a page that might interest the slashdot crowd, he wrote a little script to check the /. front page frequently (say, once every minute or two) and if his domain ever shows up the site is immediately taken down and some sort of klaxon / alarm goes off.
Hmm... maybe somebody could make a new product out of this concept - McAfee Slashdot Protector or Symantec Anti-Slashdot or some such. If they do, and patent it, I officially declare this post to be prior art.
I'm trying to mirror the site but it's going slow. Only 2 of the images so far.
http://razor.hemmet.chalmers.se/garote.bdmonkeys.n et/notebook/
Help you? Gosh, I'd be pretty proud if I had a child that age wanting to actually figure that stuff out. Too many kids today think they are talented b/c they can make doom levels or whatever instead of actually building something on their own from scratch. Let him create, dad!
Well, I never kept a notebook. That's just more evidence they can use against you at the trial.
this was me .. i'd be all about making new puzzles and trees and things fFor "Below the Root". cool ol' C=64 game :)
But you have to understand that the "editors" don't give a flying fuck about this and they are not going to do anything about it.
I can almost hear them giggling hysterically: let them buy more banwith!!!1! ... hey..,. we got urselves some and we paide for it!!1!!
There are about a dozen links on the homepage
for browsing through folders. Try "Recent Gallery Uploads".
New uploads are held for moderation (unfortunate but necessary). Once moderated, any visitor can
browse the folder. Even when not yet moderated,
the files are viewable to the owner, and deep-linking works all the time (moderated or not).
It is a spinoff of Brickshelf. Brickshelf has a LEGO only gallery. On Geekshelf, anything "geeky" is on-topic.
http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/robocode
heard of it... but haven't played with it much.
the principle is simmilar, but I'm working on a greater range of complex interactions (think final fantasy tactics calculator on crack)
No, I wondered about that too, just didn't get invited to any of the parties. And I was obsesses with all of the female anatomy, not just the breasts.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
What kind of person are you, anyway? ;) /. ! That's sort of like sending out a hit squad.. his poor 100Mhz server feels the pain...
:D"
Submitting a link to a kid's site on
Here's from his site: "Thank god for my slow upload speed, or my poor little 100mhz linux server would be getting owned. I guess our site got posted in a slashdot comment, and now im getting quite a few hits (alot more then my 256k upload can handle). So, i guess if you are reading this, you are lucky to get through
Alright... this makes me an old fogey... but there were no computers available when I was in high school. The only computer I had even SEEN in person was MANIAC, because it lived across the street from me (at UNM) when I was in Junior High School.
:-) in life.
So us high school nerds played chess instead.
My first year out of high school (1965), OTOH, got me hooked on computers - Fortran programming on a 7094 at the University.... and life has been nerd-dom ever since!
Me thinks the slashdot folks are a bit, shall we say, less experienced (all right... younger
The only good weather is bad weather.
Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over.
Judging from all the editors' comments that "people don't come here to read the comments", by process of elimination they come here to read the front page and visit neat links. And if they want to keep shoving ads down our throat and bitching about [donations|subscriptions|/. pity parties], they'd better deliver the fucking content. And if the content is on a DSL line with a P2 as a webserver, it's their responsibility to ensure that i'm getting some value in exchange for that annoying banner ad at top.
Just like the elitist fucks that review 7 inch singles that nobody can find in indie magazines and then bitch about why nobody cares about their reviews.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Hey, everyone. This is the guy that runs bdmonkeys.net.
:-)
:-)
You might be entertained to know that Slashdot managed to completely annihilate my firewall in just about 2 1/2 hours!
The firewall box was a little 486-66 with 24 megs running Linux out of a RAMdisk.
The data on the hard drive (The boot media) has somehow been corrupted. I can mount it on another machine, but I can't boot from it at all. Interesting, considering that the drive wasn't even mounted at the time it died...
Also, the machine is totally flaky now. Memory errors out the wazoo. I can boot from a floppy, but it'll only stay up 5--30 minutes. I think you guys actually managed to completely trash this machine!
When I first found it, it was just spewing a bunch of hex numbers to the screen. Probably BIOS error codes or something, I don't know.
No big deal. It completely cracked me up yesterday when I saw that my machine was actually *physically damaged* by the Slashdot Effect.
So, I picked up a P-150 with 64 MB today for $20. I finally got it configured about 20 minutes ago.
The instant I brought it up, the "ACTIVITY" light went solid.
Anyone wanna make any guesses how long this one will last?
My hovercraft is full of eels!