Now that we know what 3D Realms did with/to Duke Nukem over the past 14 years, I might as well publish my idea of what I would have done with the franchise.

I'm still cleaning out old files...

The Web is massive but any part of it is fragile. Here is a note from 2005 listing notable dead links on my links page:

The Cat-Scan contest, Prozac Pez, Mr. T. vs. Hackers, cr0bar's Matrix parody, the Interface Hall of Shame, the "House is prepared for space invaders" page (a real Republican response to Clinton's quip that Congress wouldn't be bothering him about Whitewater if the Earth was attacked by space invaders; yes, with a screenshot of the game), Moshez's "hello world" programming joke that grew and grew until it became a portable library, a collection of Dorothy Parker quotes, the CRAP Media Analysis reports on the Bible (both of them), Tim's Chemistry Exam (with smartass answers like "God made it that way"), Villain Supply, Home Despot, the Adopt a Dragon Foundation, Ben Parker's Random Programming Languages List, the "95 Registry &etc." Windows registry hacking guide, a couple other Windows tips sites, the FreeBSD file-system browser, many of my Free Software Advocacy links (7 of 21 are gone now), Itchan's Computer Buying Tips, the DVD player compatibility list, the x2 document archive, Cisco's Spanning Tree guide (probably just moved, but I didn't look for it), ZyNOS router commands, Eugene Kashpureff's Network Information Center, How To Decode a Bar Code

I wonder how many more dead links are on it now.

I emailed somebody at aavis.net and got back an automated reply that told me to click on a link so that the aavis system would accept the message. It sounded like something a spammer would send, but I checked my sent-mail file to discover that I actually had sent an email to somebody at aavis.net. The product behind this is Merak Mail.

In 2007, the abuse account at my company started getting spam advertising illegal services at Russian hosting site domenforum.net, namez.ru and ruserver.net:

"Anti-abuse (bulletproof) domains registration and hosting for child-porn websites, terrorist websites, fraud, spam etc."

Given how flagrant the messages were, it is quite possible that this was a smear campaign by a competing black hat group with a botnet and a grudge. Given that the hosting sites are in Russia, it is also quite possible that the spams are honest.

We got similarly flagrant messages hawking services at domains blackhatcrew.ru, blackgare.com, antiblack.info, and dreamhoster.net.

The Russian spam was not all from Russia even if the people were. I recall finding evidence of the Domenforum people being in Prague at the time, or somewhere else in central-Eastern Europe, by tracking down their usernames to a public webforum. The Dreamhoster spam came with a Belarus telephone number.

The Domenforum guy now has a Twitter account and an ad-delivery business. One reason I think he was a target of the spam rather than the originator is that his real name and a username he uses everywhere were easy to find.

In a history class, we had to do a report on the political influnence of an American Revolution politician's beliefs. I picked Aaron Burr because he is famous for shooting Alexander Hamilton and nothing else.

He also founded Tammany Hall, created the first modern corporation in that it was allowed to use its money for more than one specific purpose, he may have had a hand in the arrest of judge Jedediah Peck which raised public outrage against the Alien and Sedition Acts, and he was tried for treason after trying to make himself lord of the lands between the Appalachians and Spanish Mexico. And he shot Hamilton. He may not have had much of a belief system beyond self-interest, but he was certainly influential.

On that "may": Milton Lomask refers to, but does not name, two earlier biographers.

Side note: Wikipedia says the Aaron Burr "Got Milk?" commercial dates back to 1993. That makes me feel older than normal.

If anyone remembers that text-based rpg-battle-style spaceship combat game "gcset" that was my first serious program, I had big plans for version 2. It would still have been a text-based rpg-style battle but ships could have had different types of armor, different types of weapons that would do different amounts of damage to the different types of armor, and components that would use an amount of volume, add an amount of mass which would reduce the ship's evasion, and require a number of crewmen to operate, which would require carrying crew quarters components and life support systems. Between the combination of trying to do too much and never properly writing out all of the things that I wanted to do (and having schoolwork to do), I never finished.

After learning XML, I tried to write it using XML to describe the objects in the game. Augh.

Then again, the definitions of ships and other objects are data, and being able to serialize most of the universe would make it easy to add new features to a running engine. I may have been on a right track, but plain C and XML might be the worst combination of tools to take in that direction.

I have an .Xauthority file which lists a system that has not existed in ten years as the authority.

Still cleaning out old files...

Linux-related links from way back when:

• RUTE, a free online Linux book
• Inoshiro's Beginning Security, Part 1
• Inoshiro's Beginning Security, Part 2
• Cracked! - a well written analysis of a computer break-in

The RUTE link had been to rute.sourceforge.net, but a completely different project is sitting there now.

In 2005 I was tasked to look into inventory systems such as bar code and RFID scanners, preferably ones with GPS. Based on the information that I found on the web, the scanning equipment was too expensive, even the cheap stuff targeted to libraries. Nowadays "there's an app for that".

A friend of mine at SSU was making a space-based game and was taking suggestions for planet names, so I proposed themed starsystems chock-full of in-jokes.

SNMP urls:

• SNMP FAQ part 1
• SNMP FAQ part 1
• RFC 2571
• Video tutorials
• Cisco used to have SNMP documentation in their technology handbook, but it now redirects to a Wiki that has no section on SNMP. Even the PDF chapter download has been replaced with a "this documentation has moved" message on a PDF page. The Wayback Machine is your friend.
• SNMP Link - a site with lots of SNMP information.
• Open-source SNMP software

Notes from when I took a Javascript course circa 2003: (file name: js-aaargh.txt)

The SRJC's Javascript class is geared towards making your pages SUCK. Seriously. Here's a rundown of some of the assignments:

• Lesson 2: Make Popups
• Lesson 4: Resize the browser window
• Lesson 5: Wipe out the status bar
• Lesson 6: Open new browser windows
• Lesson 11: Frames

This is stuff you're better off NOT knowing. Modern browsers block most of it. Meanwhile, we haven't touched on the DOM. In fact, I've been told not to use document.getElementById() by the instructor.

Today, it's better. A JQuery book is expected. Early lessons concentrate on language syntax and the browser environment. Lesson 4 covers the DOM. Lesson 8 covers AJAX, and lessons 9-16 cover different features of JQuery.

Around the same time as that earlier Javascript class, I took a web development course that had wrong questions in its final exam, asking about features that had been deprecated and removed from the current HTML revision; i.e., things that browsers were supposed to not support any more.

So did the Democrats manage to repeal the ban on homosexuals in the military, or were they stupid enough to repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" measure which prevents the military from actively persecuting homosexuals? Everyone says they repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which would leave the ban in place and authorize inquisitions, and I don't put such incompetence past the Democrats; see the Yes You Can Spam act for precedent.

Via Weakipedia: If S.4023 is the bill, Congress left it to Obama, Gates, and the Joint Chiefs to decide whether to repeal the ban or not.

Epic Battle Fantasy parodied Final Fantasy style battle systems by having well-animated characters react in funny ways to getting hit, and by having crazy skills such as "Power Metal" where the music from the blaring speakers damages your enemies while healing your metalhead party. It was also a good example of a FF-style battle system; as a game, it worked. Epic Battle Fantasy 2 was more of the same with new enemies and animations.

Epic Battle Fantasy 3 wraps an adventure game around the battle system. Players now get leveling up, a skill system, lots of NPCs giving you quests, a few minigames, one puzzle, and an awesome soundtrack by Halcyonic Falcon X. The adventure is straightforward -- follow the single path -- which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. I appreciate the reduced playing time from never wondering where to go. What really counts is all of the little things that went into the game: the odd NPCs that are on nearly every screen of the map, the banter between your party members during battles, the large number of skills and items, and the large number of animations. Binding it all together is the solid core of the battle system, presented with high-quality artwork and music. The result is one of the best flash games ever made. It has about a 12 hour playing time.

During a classroom exercise, the programming teacher told us not to put argument checking code such as ptr != NULL inside a function but instead to check the arguments before calling the function. My first reaction was, well, you're old. There was also the fact that at the time he was teaching us recursion, where small amounts of spent time build up through repetition, and precautions can sometimes be ignored in the rare case of internal functions that are never meant to be used in other places or by other developers, but let me explain my initial reaction.

There were arguments in the 1990s over who is to blame when a bad parameter causes a function to crash a program. Coders of the old school maintained that crashing libraries where the fault of the third-party programmers for passing in bad values when the documentation clearly said that such values were not allowed. This practice probably stems from the 1970s and earlier when every CPU cycle counted, when programmer effort was cheaper than CPU effort and memory space. The new and contrary idea which won the argument was that libraries should be so solid and robust that third-party programmers should not be able to crash them.

There is still a concept that the old-school programmers recognized. The data-checking code which only validates the data can be considered separate from the operations code that does whatever the function is meant to do with it. This might not affect how we write code, but perhaps this idea could be used to affect how code is compiled and run.

Applying this concept to the build process

Consider this pseudocode:

myfunction (x,y,z)
10: return false if x == NULL

20: return false if y > 24
30: return false if z < 0
40: Do something
...
90: return true

The first several lines of the function ensure that the arguments are passed correctly. A sufficiently smart compiler could recognize the parameter checking code -- perhaps as code which returns false or throws an error before any data is modified -- and create some metadata saying that for all calls to myfunction(), x must be non-null, y must be above 24, and z must be below zero.

An even smarter compiler[1] could inspect later code and see if the parameters passed into myfunction() are set to known valid values, which would include constants or non-volatile values which have already been checked for the same constraints and have not changed since. If the values are all knowable and within acceptable ranges, the compiler can have this function call jump to line 40 instead of line 10, saving a whole three to six ops.

[1] I've earlier used the term "never-watches" to describe this kind of inspection. I hear that modern compilers have some functionality like this, but I don't know what they are capable of.

Problems with the idea

That's not much of a savings

The CPU is probably spending more time blocked on memory I/O than it would spend running these checks at the start of each function. Code reordering means there might be literally no time savings in the common case, since a data fetch instruction might be moved before the checks and then the checks can be run while waiting for the data.

There are also no memory savings, not that it would matter today. The compiler cannot leave lines 10 through 30 out of the library because third-party developers will often pass in variables whose range of possible values cannot be determined at compile time. This is a form of the P!=NP problem; some ranges can be determined, others cannot.

If we were to go further and leave lines 10 through 30 out of the library, relying on the compiler and linker to reject code that does not match the constraints, then anybody could link in bad code by using their own development tools.

Those aren't always check constraints

Functions like isalpha() may use tests indistinguishable from argument checking code as part of their functional logic. A value which causes these functions to immediately return false is not an invalid value. When our too-sufficiently smart compiler says that the arguments should be restricted to a range, it is wrong.

The one advantage of the sufficiently smart compiler is that it would have code with known arguments jump straight to the logic for handling these arguments. An even smarter compiler could inline and optimize that code to get rid of the function call entirely.

The data may change on runtime

So a particular function call goes straight to line 40 because only constants were used in the code. A debugger or hostile code sets x to null.

The Las Vegas Review Journal created a law firm called Righthaven to sue web sites that reproduce the newspaper's articles. Righthaven has sued scores of sites since March of this year. According to Righthaven Victims, the list of those sued includes the high-profile NORML, CREW, ADA, ALIPAC, Free Republic, Democratic Underground, No Quarter, Sweetness and Light, Prison Planet, Sharron Angle, and the Democratic Party of Nevada. Copyright infringement of news articles has become so common on the web that people have forgotten that copyright infringement is a crime and the aggrieved party can seek damages. The obvious solution is not to infringe on other people's copyrights, but that is not the whole story here.

The way Righthaven goes about its business is a news story in itself. Their objective is not to prevent copyright infringement, it is to make money. They do not issue warnings and they are not satisfied by removal of the infringing information. Instead they fire a full legal barrage against any infringer in any case, suing for $75,000 and the domain name of the website owner, even if only an excerpt was copied and it was posted by a user, not the site owner. These unusually aggressive practices might lead an observer to believe that Righthaven's lawyers Stephen A. Gibson, J. Charles Coons, and Joseph C. Chu are practicing barratry.

There are some protections for some site owners meeting the legal requirements of U.S. Title 17 chapter 5, you have to jump through some specific hoops to have these protections. Nobody does who does not have legal knowledge of these provisions. This is one more way that the DMCA stinks. Common law beforehand gave these protections to all service providers, and the DMCA removed these protections. Since nobody jumps through these hoops, this opens an opportunity for villainry. If you really hate somebody's website and they allow anonymous comments, you can post LJRV articles through a relay and hope they get sued.

Here are links to more information about Righthaven:

• http://www.righthavenlawsuits.com/
• Righthaven Victims
• A list of links to news stories about the lawsuits
• The Blog Law Blog has a number of posts on Righthaven