this ol’ town

Posted on 14 June 2021 by snail

Bankstown. Oh where oh where do I begin. I grew up in Bankstown. Mostly. Actually I grew in Concord West initially, up the road from Concord Hospital – dad had been the minister at the local Baptist church. Parents split up when I was young, 6ish I think, then lived with mum elsewhere in Concord West, before moving into mum’s old house in Bankstown when her mum (my granny) died. Mum’s parents had bought the then weatherboard house in the late 30s, converted to fibro around the 50s/60s.

We moved to Bankstown when I was 14 and had completed two years at Meadowbank Boys’ high (now a TAFE). I was very shy and hated the move. I had a love/hate relationship with Bankstown for a long time and my feelings are still occasionally mixed. Growing up, my tastes were very western, meat and veg for dinner and a roast on the weekend. I used to hang out at Bankstown Square (these days I think it’s Bankstown Central and was Bankstown Centro at some point) playing on the gaming consoles in DJs, skating at Rollarena Bankstown on the weekends.

Later on post uni (still somewhat shocked that I have a post-uni life) I became a librarian and joined the reference team at Bankstown Library, in what is now the old building. We walked past the new building today though as it’s a public holiday it was shut. I worked there for a few years before heading off to my first stint at the State Library.

My partner had mentioned visiting last year, pre lockdown I think and liking the little shops in the plaza. Today we went for a proper wander, down through the old town plaza and what is now Saigon Plaza though the entry statue didn’t exist in my day. Sadly the corner restaurant next to it is long gone though it used to be one of the best places to get phở in Sydney. Not that I had any growing up. I was too shy to ask and wasn’t game to try foods from other cultures…my loss really and thankfully I’m not like that now. The area seemed busier than I remember, greater vibrancy, a mix of ages and generations.

Today walking through the streets, it was one fascinating outlet after another, full of interesting foods, some I know, some I don’t know. Full of interesting corridors, nooks and crannies. At times I felt like a tourist, at times a local. We eventually stopped for lunch at a vietnamese place and the guy at the next table started chatting and suggesting food. At his suggestion, I tried what sounded like a tasty soup, Bún bò Huế, and asked for the spicy version. The spice was mild but just enough to integrate with the other flavours. It was a massive bowl and the vermicelli noodles were divine.

bits of online history

Posted on 22 January 2021 by snail

I discovered today that tucows is retiring/disappearing/perhaps mostly gone. Admittedly I don’t think I’ve used it since my windows XP days. Was a fab source for shareware/freeware utilities to enhance XP. There used to be another site, now long gone, called DownloadSquad that would have regular reviews/announcements of new software and I’d usually try out something new every other week. Over time, some of those things have been incorporated into operating systems.

I remember there used to be a tool so that I’d hit the space and start typing to launch documents and software. These days, that’s built into windows via the windows key and windows indexing has improved lots. There are still things I like to install on new systems like cygwin and text adventure interpreters but a lot less than I used to.

Meanwhile I came across a timeline of web browsers dating back to the early 90s and of course my old favourite text only browser, lynx, is still kicking about – I usually have it installed as part of my cygwin setup. The downside of using a text viewer to browse webpages is that you usually have to scroll through a bunch of pages to get to the content as per below:

There’s been a European case around geoblocking game purchases ie forcing folk to buy games in their country rather than from whatever country they can get it from cheaper. It’s an interesting result as gaming isn’t the only area that’s done this sort of thing, books being another good case. I remember when I started buying via amazon how much cheaper the same edition of a book was that way than locally. These days, I don’t buy much from Amazon tending to either buy from local distributors like Booktopia or direct from publishers.

In other news, the Alta-Vista URL still works but redirects to Yahoo…which still works.

knuth

Posted on 1 November 2017 by snail

I often say professionally that I did a compsci major (though can never claim it officially) yonks ago but decided against becoming a programmer. That’s not a decision I regret mostly, though it must be said I continue to have strong leanings that direction. Scarily, it’s been over 25 years since those compsci days. Still, I learnt good stuff.

I recall in the second half of first year compsci, we had an older lecturer at the time who was actually a maths lecturer who seemed to have come across into computers. I can say “older” as I’ve just found this bio which sums up very briefly a rather fascinating career. He may even have been one of my favourite lecturers as he liked to play with new ideas and introduced stuff he knew about from maths into computing. I was a very rare beast in compsci in that I was enrolled under BA and not directly in Compsci and I did no math. I had done first year math but it wasn’t quite my bag. Doherty was very big on mathematical ideas and assessing efficiencies of algorithms.

I recall him talking some weird algorithm for encrypting data and he worked through the basic idea in a lecture, I think it was based on some sort of fractional encoding model. At the end of the lecture, he said the next assignment would be to implement it. I found the idea of it fascinating. The next assignment came out and sure enough it was on encryption so I implemented the algorithm in Pascal that he’d talked about based on my lecture notes. The idea was you’d write code to encrypt a paragraph of text, and code to decrypt the text. I was mostly successful but because it relied on decimal conversion of larger numbers, it rapidly lost accuracy on the 8 bit macs we were using at the time. Out of a sentence of 10 words, it started losing letters by the end of the first word.

Turns out, I should have read the back page of the assignment. Doherty had decided that the technique was a little too experimental for first year compsci and had instead instructed everyone to use a hashing technique. I handed my assignment in and discussed with the class tutor what I’d done. He wasn’t familiar with the algorithm at all but was impressed that it worked and understood why it failed where it did. I got full marks and first year compsci was one of my few high distinctions at uni.

Anyway, Doherty would often quote Knuth as the foundation of modern computing. Knuth was all about the development of algorithms and understanding their efficiencies. Algorithms are really important as they represent techniques for solving particular sorts of problems eg what is the best way to sort a random string of numbers? The answer varies depending on how many numbers are in the string, or even whether you can know the number of numbers. For very small sets, a bubble sort is sufficient, and from there you move on to binary searches, binary trees, and so on. I wasn’t always across the math but really appreciated the underlying thinking around assessing approaches to problem solving. Plus Doherty was a fab lecturer with a bit of character.

So Knuth. He is best known for his series, The Art of Computer Programming, which has gone through a few editions and I wonder if it will ever be actually finished; the fourth volume is actually labeled 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms Part 1. Volume 4 is eventually expected to cover 4 volumes: 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D. 4B has been partially released across several fascicles of which 6 have been released. Volume 3 seems to be the most relevant for where I’m at today and where I’m looking to play; #3 is around 750 pages devoted specifically to sorting and searching. So much of what we do online is reliant on being able to find stuff and to find stuff well, it helps if the data has been ordered.

Knuth has this been this name in my head though my life has gone in other directions. A few years ago, I did a google and found that not only were his books on Amazon, there was even a box set of Volumes 1-4A. I bit the bullet about 3 years ago and bought the set, cost around US$180 at the time and looks really, bloody good on the shelf. I haven’t read a great deal yet but dipped in a few times and planning to get into volume 3 properly at some point. I’ve recently being moving stuff around at home and don’t have a lot of space for books next to where my computer gear is these days. However, it turns out, the mac mini sits nicely on top of the set, and my newest computer, the VivoMini sits nicely on top of the mac. I sorta like the idea of these small computers sitting on Knuth’s foundation.

random mutterings

Posted on 24 October 2017 by snail

Following a tweet this morning:

Today is a bonus day off, so naturally I’ve wound up reading about dead online worlds, and feeling sad for universes I’ll never encounter

— Alissa M. (@lissertations) October 23, 2017

I’ve fallen down something of a rabbit hole. I made references in my response to that tweet to usenet and newsgroup creation groups. Of course, I popped into google groups and found usenet posts of my own from the early 1990s in aus.net.news and aus.sf, some of which are a wee bit cringeworthy. Oh well, it’s all about the learning…I tell myself.

Tonight, I revisited one of my earlier blogs, 2002 this time, and found an entry that I could turn into a tweet:

The annual interactive fiction comp is currently running. Voting closes 15 November with lots of entries https://t.co/s4q2Lkuqln

— snail (@snailx) October 24, 2017

as sure enough, it’s still running and is in its 23rd year. I am saddened, but unsurprised at how many links no longer work. Yet shocked to discover that my link to mutt, an unix based email program, not only works but is still being updated in 2017. The link still works for pine, another email program, but development ceased in 2008. Even slrn still exists (last update in 2016) and can be grabbed in linux via apt-get.

Speaking of apt-get, a tool for installing software on linux, I am liking having linux running as its own machine. Been a long time since I’ve had it on a dedicated device. I’ve set up my new box as dual mode with windows but I’m barely touching the windows side and I’m already musing on wiping it altogether. Running it in a virtualbox always had an edge of frustration, it was slower, a little clunky, and some things just never worked as you were dealing with linux and virtualbox. Now it’s just linux and stuff mostly works; muscle memory in my fingers seems to guide me through.

In other news, I am conscious I should blog more on whisky stuff. I’ve been learning lots in the last year and have a good sense of what I like. The most important lesson however is to keep trying new things and being open to things that you might otherwise expect not to like. I’m very fond of whisky matured in sherry casks, but port casks not so much. Yet I am currently sipping a delicious drop from McHenry’s in Tasmania, matured in ex bourbon barrels and finished in a port cask. So utterly delish. Also I think I need to dedicate a post to Highland Park as I’ve had so many of their releases, yet know there’s so many I haven’t had. Have also been enjoying their new 10 year old Viking Scars which is a relatively cheap whisky at $75.

Here’s my blog entry from October 2003 that I suspect includes my first mention of eating seahorse. I had a busy month in December 2003 with much to think about including the dreaded digital divide and longevity of URLs ironically. A year later, my final post noted that of the then top 100 movies screened in Australia (by box office takings), I’d seen 92. I know now that it’s not 93 as I have definitely not seen Ghost. Whereas December 2004 is full of thoughts regarding my first NLS, and my first attempts at live blogging. I think I live blogged using a psion 5mx (which I still have) connected via infrared to my mobile phone which in turn handled a dial up connection to my ISP. Also thoughts regarding how to set up some sort of group blogging thang for the following NLS though I think we ended up using ALIA’s forum for discussion in the end. December 2004 was also when I finally registered my own domain that now points here.

I continue to enjoy browsing the casualness of my blogging in those early days; blogging was about random bits and pieces, content in response to links I stumbled upon. A sentence here, a paragraph there; mutterings on this and that. Was fun. Is still fun.

rabbit holes of adventure

Posted on 2 August 2017 by snail

Dinner table conversation tonight ended up chatting about Mystery House, that my partner played occasionally when she was younger. Mystery House is known as the first graphical adventure game. That of course led the conversation into interactive fiction, referencing the top shelf of my bookcase which contains pretty much all of Infocom‘s text adventures. I remember Zork II was my first text adventure and fiendish it was. I relied on adventure columns in computer game magazines of the time for clues on how to solve difficult puzzles including the horrible baseball diamond puzzle, also known as the Oddly Angled Room.

In those days, I couldn’t google answers and would spend months stuck on a problem. Sometimes that could be a good thing but mostly it was bloody frustrating. While there was a certain sense of achievement in solving puzzles, it meant I couldn’t advance the story. Solving puzzles was essential to accessing further parts of the game. These days I think I prefer story telling and plot development though solving puzzles is nice too. Happily most games provide decent hint mechanisms and if I get desperate I can google for answers.

Much to the shock of my partner, I commented that I usually have my text adventure collection stored on all my active machines as they are part of my central core of files that migrate across my various computing environments. This sounds substantial until you realise that text adventures, having little graphics and don’t take up a lot of space. My entire interactive fiction archive is a little over 100MB, of which the complete works of infocom account for 95%. Come to think of it, they were the only ones I was able to buy as a box set later, the Lost Treasures of Infocom, and load in a system independent format.

The other key adventure game company of the time was Level 9. Infocom were American based, while Level 9 were from the UK and I had several of their games. Regrettably, while I still have the boxes, I no longer have the equipment to read the discs. Later on, graphic adventures developed further with Magnetic Scrolls commencing with their first game, the fantastic The Pawn. I have several titles of their titles on my shelf too. Methinks I need to investigate further as to whether I can get these on my current machines. Come to think of it, I’ve barely mentioned Sierra Online who were responsible for Mystery House and later developed the King’s Quest and SpaceQuest series. Oh, and then there was Ultima…yet another rabbit hole…

five in a while

Posted on 2 November 2016 by snail

It’s a been a long, long while since I last blogged five things:

another 5

Posted on 19 May 2016 by snail

The downside of leaving it too long is that I end up with too many to cull to get it down to 5. No particular pattern to my selection, other than vague interest and curiosity.

5 bits

Posted on 9 May 2016 by snail

Having started with 5 articles a week or so back, I thought it might be worth aiming for 5 articles each time. Was tempted to go with 7 but whittled it down to 5. This is a bunch of articles I’ve read and tweeted in the last week.

That’ll do.

all the lolz

Posted on 2 June 2015 by snail

So like, I’ve discovered recently that people actually say “lolz” and not spell out the acronym…and they’ve been doing it for years. I joked about this on twitter and immediately thought of a counter example as I’ve always worded BOFH (as in “bof” with a silent “h”) myself. Other acronyms are difficult to word eg HTH or RTFM. At the same time, I continue to be amused that acronym speak is still a thing.

Acronym speak was really common back in the earlier days of the internetz (pre webz – all the zzzz) and usenet. I have little doubt that was because the early net was largely IT type folk who loved using, and abusing, acronyms. You could craft entire sentences with acronyms. Then SMS happened, then twitter happened and there continues to be a need for character economy ie reducing everything to as few characters as possible, while remaining vaguely readable.

Even ASCII art has staged a minor comeback!

BTW. HTH. HAND.

what’s in a name?

Posted on 3 June 2011 by snail

I’ve become very fond of my moniker over the years. “snail” has been my self chosen nickname for over 20 years. Initially, it was online only in those days, these days I tend to wear it as my name everywhere and more folk know me face to face as snail than by my real name. I have occasionally considered changing my name officially however that would get a little expensive as I would need to get a bunch of legal documents changed including my mortgage contract. Perhaps I can revisit if I ever pay off my mortgage. The other issue with name changes, is that I would have to retain my surname as too many online forms require both a first name and a second. I think having a single name would simply create too many headaches for too many people.

One of the reasons I chose the moniker initially was to distinguish myself in online forums, such as usenet, by having a name that was unique and that others were unlikely to use. This was fine for many years, though these days it’s a different story. I’m generally finding it hard to get “snail” as a username on many systems. Sometimes, it’s because others have beaten me to it, occasionally there’s a 6 character minimum. I am reluctant however, to sign up to every system that comes along simply to preserve access to my preferred name. I have a few backups including vvsnail (some email) and snailx (twitter, wordpress). I have a personal domain, snail.ws, and even then I had to go through several domains before finding one with “snail” available.

With much thanks to a good friend, I do at least have a unique avatar which has proven useful for some folk who find me in other forums. Though it must be said that I have a lot less hair these days, nor do I dress entirely in black anymore. The glasses and coffee cup remain constant.

As to why I chose “snail” – when I first got online via electronic bulletin boards in 1984, I’d just read Lord of The Rings and chose the nickname, Gandalf the Grey. Needless to say, as many folk online in those days were ITish and into SF, it was a rather common nickname. A few years later, when I got to uni and discovered usenet, I decided to start again with a new name. I have a vague recollection from school days of doodling snails in the margins of my school exercise books. I doodled snails because they were easy and my drawing skills were, and remain, poor.