commit - /dev/null
commit + 7462d8a16a532467b8a59d762481b4ed1d3b60f4
blob - /dev/null
blob + d643372f5988860dcf45b2aa0623e902f914e5b1 (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ README.txt
+Q: Who are you?
+A: I am Alexander Arkhipov, a Unix hacker from Moscow.
+
+Q: What's your email address?
+A: See "What do you call your Unix users?" and append "@alearx.org"
+ to your findings.
+
+Q: Do you have a PGP key?
+A: Yes, it's at ftp://alearx.org/pub/pgp/ -- pick the latest one.
+ The pub directory is also mirrored on http and gopher.
+
+Q: What services does alearx.org provide?
+A: Most services are at alearx.org. There is a mail server running,
+ so you can send me mail to this server. I publish news via finger
+ (don't just finger the host itself, see instead see "What do you
+ call your Unix users?"), and you can read them via http and gopher
+ as well. I publish some files to the ftp server, and the pub
+ directory is mirrored to http and gopher. There are the http and
+ gopher sites, which are mostly identical. You can clone my git
+ repositories via anongit (see the /git/ directory on either www
+ or gopher site). I also maintain a boring site with a blog and a
+ resume at pro.alearx.org.
+
+Q: What language(s) do you speak?
+A: Russian is my native language, but I speak English fluently. I
+ generally don't read email in Russian -- English is the language
+ of computing. I also speak a little bit of German.
+
+Q: Do you maintain any "public" accounts elsewhere?
+A: I am called alearkh on github. The rest that you might be able to
+ see either exist for stupid reason, or not needed anymore.
+
+Q: What's up with your domain names?
+A: I got my first domain name, and started my first open-source
+ projects when I was finishing my university. At the time I allowed
+ another student to convince me that a good "internet identity"
+ would be a unique, easy to pronounce string (even if meaningless),
+ such as those people from reddit or whatever would use. I ended
+ up making a website at the domain mcflexy.net. In a short while,
+ however, I decided that I should instead allow my (real) name to
+ speak for itself, but still didn't want to embed my name into a
+ domain name because:
+
+ 1) I've got a pretty long name
+ 2) Most shorter versions I could think of at the time were taken
+
+ So instead I decided to register something that'd read as an
+ English word or phrase, and finally came up with mineeyes.cyou.
+ I would regret the decision almost immediately, as I discovered a
+ lot of spam filters had no trust in .cyous.
+
+ At the time I didn't have a lot of money to begin with, and
+ transferring them was becoming a huge problem (it was 2022, and my
+ "benevolent" government forbids me from naming the Ukrainian event
+ that broke out then). It wasn't too long, however, before I
+ graduated from my slave camp, and was hired into another, at which
+ point I at least managed to get my bitcoins together and start
+ thinking. I registered manpager.net (named after the environment
+ variable MANPAGER), and put a notice that mineeyes.cyou is going.
+ I also realised at later point that I transferred way too much
+ bitcoin (unless I just wanted to renew one domain for the next 20
+ years), so I registered a few I thought may be useful later.
+
+ I was happy with the situation for a while, but then I had to
+ register on github to participate in a project. Github required me
+ to give my user a name (and not just a mail address), but all my
+ favourite names for Unix users were already taken, and I didn't
+ want to name my user "manpager"! I came up with "drjfaust", as in
+ "doctor Johann Faust", but I wasn't happy with it.
+
+ Eventually the idea of catenating first X letters of my first name
+ with first Y letters of my surname occurred to me. The method also
+ has some flexibility, and can produce funny results. 3 for both X
+ and Y seemed to be a good number, so I registered alearx.org (.net
+ was a mistake -- it's a TLD for ISPs and the like), and changed my
+ github user name to alearkh. The x in alearx is substitute for
+ Greek chi.
+
+ That pretty much concludes the situation up until now.
+
+Q: What do you call your Unix users?
+A: I usually name my main user aa for my initials. I maintain users
+ for the more spammy mail called alexander (so if I were to
+ register on amazon, I'd give alexander at this domain). Most of
+ the other users, that I might maintain to drop some privileges for
+ certain tasks, are usually given short names like "tim" or "jean".
+
+Q: What do you call your hosts?
+A: I distinguish between the name(s) by which the host is known on the
+ local network, and among friends via /etc/hosts, and the
+ publicly-known FQDNs, which are set up via DNS, but also matter
+ with web and smtp servers.
+
+ The "local" names are short Unix "words", such as "manpager",
+ "cflags", "ex", &c. The FQDNs are just whatever makes sense, while
+ being short and memorable.
+
+Q: What about copying your works?
+A: When I first began programming, I was perplexed by copyright.
+ ("license my program!? it's not a book, or something, you know")
+ Then there was a period during which I was extremely confused, and
+ now I am just mildly confused.
+
+ Inspecting existing licences I stumbled upon BSD0, which removes
+ the attribution clause from the normal BSD licence. So I decided
+ to deal with the issue by just putting that into COPYING for each
+ of my projects. Many still are distributed this way.
+
+ Later I discovered that the copyright laws don't allow me to
+ reject my right to sue people who'd forgotten to attribute my work
+ to me, so from that point I decided to instead use OpenBSD's ISC
+ licence. I also discovered that further complications arise when a
+ project includes files from different sources, so instead I now
+ have a licence-comment at the top of each source file.
+
+ Now I believe that some of the text files I publish via gopher may
+ be subjects of copyright, so I now also have a small notice at the
+ bottom of such files.
blob - /dev/null
blob + bb25755e08aec6ecbe3a13f95667e04c4a8ff577 (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/battlestar.txt
+battlestar(6) is an game written by "His Lordship, Admiral David W.
+Horatio Riggle." It is an adventure game not unlike adventure(6)
+(yes, that's a pun). His Lordship claims it to be less of a puzzle
+and more of an exploration-game. Apparently he wrote it to learn C
+better (the game was written in 1979, however, so we are still
+talking about pre-ANSI C with its weird function declarations and the
+like). It also has some interesting verbs like "fuck" (unfortunately
+performing that on corpses and general population does not lead to
+results all that interesting). But that's not all! battlestar(6) is
+not "just" an adventure game: It also has what I can only describe as
+"action segments!"
+
+All that sounds pretty neat. Considering that adventure(6) has a small
+collective that managed through a lot of research and collaboration
+find every one of the game's secrets, so should battlestar(6)...
+Except it doesn't! The game is actually worse at teaching the player
+how to play than adventure(6) is, and there don't appear to be any
+walkthroughs on the internets. The only way I managed to complete the
+game was by consulting the source code. So, for the first time ever
+I am writing a walkthrough.
+
+For a bit of clarification: I started playing battlestar(6) on Void
+Linux and consulted the same sources as the ones from which the games
+are compiled on Void (which, I think, are *not* Debian's and are
+written in bronze-age (pre-ANSI) C (but I might be mis-remembering)).
+Later my life returned to normal somewhat and I continued playing on
+OpenBSD. For that purpose I downloaded the source tree via CVS and
+observed that the games have been rewritten somewhat, mostly
+stylistically, however: adventure(6)'s main.c still is written in the
+kind of style that used to infuriate Dijkstra etc.
+
+Oh, but what even is a battlestar? Well, I was wondering that as
+well. Apparently at about the same time (1978) there used to exist
+one of those very cheap, uninspired and horribly dull American
+television-space-shows called "battlestar Galactica". By "battlestar"
+the authors, of course, meant a sort of space-carrier-ship because
+the meaning is so "obvious". The premise of the series, as far as
+there is one, is that a very advanced human civilisation lives on
+some far-away planets, waging war against some robots called
+"cylons", whose dearest wish it seems to be to murder every man alive
+for no reason at all. Of course, the character I shall refer to as
+"Judas Iscariot" assists the robots in doing so on the condition that
+they spare his home-planet Guatemala (not what they called it, but I
+have bad memory for things that are somehow nonsensical, yet
+uninspired) and install him as its president. Genocide is something a
+lot of very resourceful people have failed to achieve on a lesser
+scale after decades of constant work, yet the robots desecrate 99% of
+human population in just a few hours. The other 1% is divided in
+half: 0.5% is left to starve to death, while the lucky few fly in the
+general direction of the earth, where we, their very primitive
+brethren live. Naturally, the robots at first try to execute Judas
+Iscariot after killing every single other Guatemalan, but then decide
+to instead put him in command of an entire fleet with the sole
+purpose of pursuing these space-gypsies. It's much more boring than
+it sounds like.
+
+And what does any of it has to do with the game? Well, not much. The
+player starts on a "battlestar" that features smaller spacecrafts
+called "vipers", and then goes into space where there are a bunch of
+"cylons" to kill, but that's about it.
+
+
+WALKTHROUGH
+
+So, first thing to do is to open the file words.c in the source code
+and find all the VERBS. Now actually start the game.
+
+The game starts at a LUXURIOUS STATEROOM. We check our inventory and
+see the following:
+
+ >-: i
+ You aren't carrying anything.
+
+ You are wearing:
+
+ pajamas
+
+ You are in perfect health.
+ >-:
+
+(Some time after my first session I noticed that the prompt looks a
+bit like a sad face.)
+
+Oh, and, yes, we'll be completing most of the game in a pyjama, so I
+suggest making an alias like `alias hitchhiker=battlestar'.
+
+If we go back we will discover some royal robes, which we can
+put on instead, however they don't appear to have any effect
+whatsoever (no, really, "grep 'ROBE|PIJAMA' *.c" yourself), so
+instead we shall go right.
+
+From the EXECUTIVE SUITES we can go in all six directions.
+
+Ahead is the MAID'S UTILITY ROOM. Unfortunately, the maid has
+accidentally stabbed herself to the death with a knife! We take the
+knife, leaving the body for the police, and go back.
+
+To the right is the PRESIDENTIAL SUITE. It has a laser pistol just
+lying on the floor, so we take that. If we go ahead we can discover
+that the president too has accidentally shot himself to death, so
+instead we go back.
+
+Down at the FIRST CLASS LOUNGE we discover some rubble and matches.
+There is not much to see at the back, so we go up.
+
+We could go up to get another knife and a cleaver, but we already
+have a knife! So instead we go ahead to the bridal suite.
+
+In the BRIDAL SUITE we put on a strange amulet that we found lying on
+the floor and go down.
+
+In the HALLWAY there area a bunch of coins, which we take and go
+right and ahead.
+
+From the MAIN HANGAR we can go left, up or right.
+
+The only thing of interest on the left is a nuclear warhead.
+Unfortunately, all possible interactions with it may or may not
+result in the player's death, so we won't be going left.
+
+Up and right actually lead to the same locations. We go right twice.
+There are two guards "guarding" something called "Viper," but they
+don't seem to mind us launching too much.
+
+At this point the game prints a very helpful message:
+
+ >-: launch
+ You climb into the viper and prepare for launch.
+ With a touch of your thumb the turbo engines ignite, thrusting you back into
+ your seat.
+
+ You are in space.
+
+
+ >-:
+
+So, what is "space" exactly? Well...
+
+ ...
+ /* 32 */
+ {"You are in space.",
+ {33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 1, 33, 1},
+ "****\n", {0} },
+ /* 33 */
+ {"You are in space.",
+ {38, 32, 39, 40, 41, 1, 42, 1},
+ "****\n", {0} },
+ /* 34 */
+ {"You are in space.",
+ {32, 44, 45, 46, 47, 1, 48, 1},
+ "****\n", {0} },
+ /* 35 */
+ {"You are in space.",
+ {40, 45, 49, 32, 50, 1, 51, 1},
+ "****\n", {0} },
+ ...
+
+This is all part of a struct room (two of them technically), which is
+defined in extern.h:
+
+ struct room {
+ const char *name;
+ int link[8];
+ #define north link[0]
+ #define south link[1]
+ #define east link[2]
+ #define west link[3]
+ #define up link[4]
+ #define access link[5]
+ #define down link[6]
+ #define flyhere link[7]
+ const char *desc;
+ unsigned int objects[NUMOFWORDS];
+ };
+
+So, right off, flyhere and access are useless when trying to draw
+some sort of a map. Miraculously there are north, south, east and
+west in space, but we are yet to invent a space-proof compass. But
+first of all: which point of space are we even in? Well...
+
+ $ grep ^launch\( *
+ command6.c:launch()
+ $ less command6.c
+ ...
+
+Oh, but of course, we are at location[position].up! Also known as 32.
+So, knowing that rooms 32-66 are all space, it appears that other
+options include: 67 and 68, corresponding to the orbits of a small
+blue planet and a tropical planet. The first leads to 69, and while
+it is, as the user of an internet forum would put it, "nice," I
+wouldn't go somewhere described as:
+
+ ...
+ {69, 69, 69, 69, 69, 1, 69, 1},
+ ...
+
+So instead we'll try to navigate to the tropical planet. This,
+thankfully is much more straightforward than the labyrinths of
+adventure(6) our path is 32-34-44-64-66-68, or s-s-s-s-s-s --
+basically, we just need to find that mysterious "space south."
+Throughout these space rooms there are also some objects called
+CYLON, being in one cell with a CYLON triggers the function visual(),
+which produces a visual fight with the alien. I know that on this
+path the only CYLON is in the room 64, which we can use to determine
+which direction is south (it's right because by typing `r' once and
+`a' twice I arrive at a CYLON).
+
+So, how about defeating the CYLON? Well, turns out that this is a
+curses game as well (of course it is!), and I don't really know how
+to use curses. Anyway, before starting the fight, I'd make sure that
+the terminal being fought on is 80x24, because that will make things
+much simpler. Right, I don't think I can put off reading fly.c any
+more because the in-game prompts are most unhelpful.
+
+So, the first thing to do is to press plus (`+'). This will draw a
+target in the middle of the screen. Our objective is to bring the
+enemy (looks like `/-\') there and press `f' or space to fire. Of
+course we can't move the enemy, but we can move ourselves by pressing
+h/r, l, j/u and k/d along with their capitalised versions for greater
+effect. This is the hardest part of the game!
+
+Save once the game says "You are orbiting a tropical planet." Go
+down, approaching an island. This is the main part of the game.
+
+At this point you are free to explore the island, which is the main
+part of the game. Completing it is very tricky, however. A sequence
+that seems to work:
+
+1. Firstly, it is very important to find the goddess. If not found,
+she will disappear after the first day. Once the goddess is found you
+need to kiss her, follow her, kiss her a few more times and finally
+love her. She will drop a medallion. DON'T take it (now at least).
+
+2. Find a woman who'll tell you that she wants to meet you in the
+gardens at midnight. Once there and then, accept a rope from her.
+
+3. Otherwise explore the island. You should at least find the potion
+before the rendezvous.
+
+4. Quickly go to the catacombs. They are only open at night, so there
+is no time to lose.
+
+5. There are mainly three points of interest here: the sepulchre, the
+room with the dark lord (a.k.a. darth vader) and a storage room. The
+latter contains a grenade, which is quite honestly not that
+interesting of an item. The sepulchre is more interesting: it
+contains a mail shirt, an armoured helmet and a sword. It is vital to
+go into the final fight wearing (not carrying) mail, the helmet, the
+rope and carrying (not wearing) the sword, the laser, the potion
+and the amulet.
+
+6. In the last room before Darth Vader make sure to sleep and eat if
+carrying food and a knife. Enter with the aforementioned items and
+smite the enemy until you deal him 34 points of damage (see below on
+the explanation of the fight mechanic). Then retreat by typing `b'.
+He'll take your amulet and retreat. Follow him. Now smite him until
+you deal him 25 points of damage and finish him off by shooting. At
+this point you will most likely have so many injuries you won't be
+able to do anything, which is why we brought the potion. Drink it to
+restore your health. There'll be some treasures lying around. We just
+want to take the amulet, the talisman and throw the rope up to
+escape. Once on the surface (you'll need to climb there with command
+`u') use amulet -- that'll teleport you outside of the canyon.
+
+7. Finally return to the nymph and give her the amulet and the
+talisman. Follow some further instructions.
+
+
+COMBAT
+
+I already touched the space-combat briefly and there is not much more
+to explain. Ground-combat is a bit stranger. There are three types of
+enemies: woodsmen, elves and Darth Vader. All that should be known
+about the first two is that carrying a laser and typing `shoot' puts
+a swift end to the affair. The dark lord is more complicated than
+that.
+
+There are several things to keep in mind when a fight starts: the
+type of enemy, his strength, your tiredness, your injuries, the sort
+of weapon carried, wearing one or several of the medallion, the
+amulet and the talisman, and wearing mail and helmet and carrying
+the shield.
+
+There are several things that can be done on each turn: smiting,
+shooting going back and managing inventory. I advise to go into
+fights with the inventory already managed.
+
+The enemy's strength determines two things: how many times will he
+have to be smitten before he dies and how many times will he have to
+be smitten before he may be killed through shooting instead of having
+your laser deflected and destroyed. It is, essentially "health
+points" and they are opposed to the value of lifeline, which
+indicates how many "damage points" has the enemy suffered. The dark
+lord starts with 100 strength the first time and 75 the second time.
+
+With each round of the fight you become more tired. If you are
+sufficiently tired, the enemy simply kills you.
+
+injuries is an array of 13, that determines what parts of your body
+are injured and how much. Each turn a number between 0 and 12 is
+generated in order to determine which part of your body the enemy
+will try to injure. The following items each reduce that number by
+1: helmet (worn), mail (worn) and shield (held). Similarly for
+each of the amulet, the medallion and the talisman being worn the
+number is increased by 1. Should the number be less than 0 it becomes
+0, equally it won't exceed 12. The injuries 10, 11 and 12 are
+particularly important: they correspond to the deep incisions,
+fractured skull and broken neck. Should these three injuries happen
+at the same time you'll die, which is why it is so important to wear
+at least some protective gear, which can make one or several of these
+injuries impossible.
+
+Aside from the laser there are three kinds of weapons in this game
+the first is the two-handed sword, the second is the normal sword and
+the broadsword, the third is everything else. The two-handed sword is
+the most damaging, however it is impossible to carry almost anything
+else together with it (laser, importantly), so I am avoiding it. A
+sword is lying not far from Darth Vader together with mail and a helmet,
+so we'll use that.
+
+The damage dealt is calculated slightly differently depending on the
+type of weapon. For sword it is:
+
+ rnd(50) % (WEIGHT - carrying) - card(injuries, NUMOFINJURIES)
+ - encumber - exhaustion.
+
+It's mostly self-explanatory. Depending on how much damage was dealt
+one of the following messages will be displayed:
+
+0:
+ You swung wide and missed.
+ He checked your blow. CLASH! CLANG!
+ His filthy tunic hangs by one less thread.
+1:
+ He's bleeding.
+ A trickle of blood runs down his face.
+ A huge purple bruise is forming on the side of his face.
+5:
+ He staggers back quavering.
+ He jumps back with his hand over the wound.
+ His shirt falls open with a swath across the chest.
+10:
+ A bloody gash opens up on his left side.
+ A bloody gash opens up on his right side.
+ The steel bites home and scrapes along his ribs.
+ You pierce him, and his breath hisses through clenched teeth.
+20:
+ You smite him to the ground.
+ The force of your blow sends him to his knees.
+ Clutching his blood-drenched shirt, he collapses, stunned.
+30:
+ His ribs crack under your powerful swing, flooding his ...
+55:
+ You shatter his upheld arm in a spray of blood. The blade ...
+ With a mighty lunge the steel slides in, and gasping, he ...
+
+Shooting the enemy will instantly kill him if his strength minus the
+damage you've dealt already is less than or equal to 50. Otherwise
+he will deflect and destroy your laser.
+
+Going back is quite interesting. Normally it prints how far you've
+got in the fight and you retreat back. Of course, the next time the
+fight starts none of the displayed stats will matter. It is, however,
+necessary to retreat during the first fight with Darth Vader. If
+you've managed to deal him 34 (or maybe 33 since it involves
+floating-point arithmetic) points of damage, while wearing or
+carrying the amulet and try to go back he will either:
+
+1. Trigger a game-over in case you also have the medallion on you.
+2. Fracture your skull and retreat with your amulet. Afterwards you
+can follow him, which is the only way to get into the room with the
+talisman.
+
+Hopefully that explains the combat system.
+
+
+FINAL BUG/FEATURE
+
+Now one would think that this plan I've outlined of defeating the
+dark lord and saving the day would be some sort of a guarantee. Well,
+no, it still relies quite heavily on random numbers being in the
+player's favour. I have, however, found a -bug- feature thanks to
+which completing this game doesn't even require a laser, or a
+two-handed sword. You see, you've got to follow the dark lord after
+he cowardly retreats and then fall back yourself. The author seems
+to have "forgotten" (actually he's probably just left cheats for
+himself!) to account for that final fight in the fight() function.
+The logic there depends somewhat on your previous position, so there
+are two ways it may go: either you and all the items remain in the
+same room, or you, the amulet and the talisman are transported
+somewhere else. Either way, all that remains to do is to navigate to
+the nymph.
+
+
+OTHER TIPS
+
+While flying, it is easy to return back to the original location on
+the island by simply following a `u' with a `d'. It is, however,
+somewhat dangerous at night, as yet another cylon will be spawned
+just above the planet.
+
+After you return to the goddess, collect the medallion and go to
+another room. You will become a wizard! (If you still have the other
+two on you.) This gives you the ability to type the magic word `su'
+and to fly without an aeroplane.
+
+
+ENDING
+
+So, I realise not all people consider such feats of exploration worth
+their time, therefore I finally leave the game's ending here.
+
+>-: give amulet to goddess
+amulet:
+Given.
+>-: give talisman to goddess
+talisman:
+Given.
+>-: give medallion to goddess
+medallion:
+Given.
+The powers of the earth are now legitimate. You have destroyed the Darkness
+and restored the goddess to her throne. The entire island celebrates with
+dancing and spring feasts. As a measure of her gratitude, the goddess weds you
+in the late summer and crowns you Prince Liverwort, Lord of Fungus.
+
+But, as the year wears on and autumn comes along, you become restless and
+yearn for adventure. The goddess, too, realises that the marriage can't last.
+She becomes bored and takes several more natives as husbands. One evening,
+after having been out drinking with the girls, she kicks the throne particularly
+hard and wakes you up. (If you want to win this game, you're going to have to
+shoot her!)
+>-: shoot goddess
+The blast catches the goddess in the stomach, knocking her to the ground.
+She writhes in the dirt as the agony of death taunts her.
+She has stopped moving.
+
+You win!
blob - /dev/null
blob + 8e1c9aa0fd1dc64df511eb681085a931d9185a6a (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/comppractice.txt
+A very sad thing about modern man is that computers are ubiquitous to
+everyone's life, yet there are very few people (even among
+programmers!), who have any idea how to use them. This text will
+contain a quick overview of several topics on the practice of
+computing from "how to set up your shell" and "how to get
+documentation" to "how to write better programs". Most of such
+subjects, of course, require much more than a quick overview, so
+when possible I'll try to describe how to get proper introduction
+and reference manual to each subject.
+
+
+FILE HIERARCHIES
+
+This document focuses on maintaining good file hierarchies under
+Unices, and so many consequent presumptions and opinions are taken.
+
+File hierarchies are hard. What makes it worse is that we've all been
+damaged from childhood with all those graphical file-managing tools
+that are both slower than the command line and promote some very bad
+habits. Natural consequences of such damage are even getting
+standardised: there are a lot of programs that create weirdly-named
+dirs like ~/Downloads and ~/Documents, and there is the XDG base dir
+specification. It is my opinion that file hierarchies should
+facilitate three things primarily:
+
+1. It should be easy to navigate to the file by typing its name.
+2. It should be easy to manipulate files via scripts.
+3. It should be easy to perform similar operations on a group of
+closely-related files, e.g. with only one or two commands all my
+configs for $program should be able to be archived, copied, change
+permissions and ownership etc.
+
+Generally I assume that the user is not an idiot and knows where
+most of his files are and can find the rest with find(1) or locate(1)
+or something.
+
+Firstly if you are reading this document, you probably aren't a
+secretary, are you? Well, don't name your files like one! Use only
+[A-Za-z0-9_.-]. Avoid minuses (dashes/whatever) as the first
+character (or at all, really): they cause all sorts of problems like
+"rm -i *" becoming "rm -i -f file1 file2", and there seems to be a
+correlation between people who put a lot of dashes in their names and
+the ones that end up unwieldily-named files. Minuses are OK for
+semantic purposes, however, such as naming files after dates
+("2013-05-05.photo.jpg" (though depending on how it will be used it
+might be fine to name it "20130505.photo.jpg")), or versioning them
+("prog-0.4.tar"). If you use them for separating "fields" in
+filenames, consider using periods instead. There are also some
+characters, which are not mandated by posix, but which are still
+commonly used by some programs: comma (,) and colon (:) are used in
+maildirs, I believe some GNU utilities like tilde (~), I think
+systemd uses at (@), Linux's filesystems like pluses (+) for special
+files/dirs and test(1) can often be invoked as `['. I'd advise
+against using those for normal files, however. Be conservative with
+numbers and underscores and only capitalise letters with VERY
+IMPROTANT files that should be sorted first like README, Makefile,
+CHANGES, INSTALL etc. That is not to name directories in your ~ so:
+they already are sorted because the "unimportant" files have a period
+as the first character.
+
+Naturally, keep the names short. Of course if you have some, e.g.,
+photo saved on your disc, but you only open it once a decade, it's
+fine to give it a longer, more descriptive name like
+"1998.tortoise_on_red_sea_beach.png" (do tortoises live on the Red
+sea?). On the other hand if you have a copy of "the brave soldier
+Schweik" on the disc, there is no need to name it
+"the_fateful_adventures_of_the_brave_soldier_schweik_during_the_world_war_by_jaroslav_hashek.pdf"
+that doesn't even fit the line! Instead, Name it "schweik.pdf" and be
+done with it.
+
+Also, unless you are serving these files with a web-server or
+something, avoid putting the `.txt' suffix there like some people
+like to do. When one sees a file without a suffix (eh, extension) one
+should ask the operating system: is this file executable? If it
+isn't, well, it's probably plain text isn't it? These extra 4 bytes
+at the end are superfluous, annoying and don't impress anyone.
+
+Another thing is don't spread your files around. The reason there is
+a separation between /etc/ and /usr/share/ is because people are
+unlikely to copy the latter between hosts. On the other hand if you
+install a, say, dictionary program, download some custom dictionaries
+for it and decide that you want this program somewhere else, well,
+you'll want to copy both your configs and the extra data files you've
+downloaded. And now with the XDG directory specification this
+operation no more as simple as `scp -r ~/.dict user@host:'! So, thank
+you, XDG!
+
+There are a several of reasons for separating closely-related files
+into several directories:
+
+1. It may help avoid naming collisions. For example, if I were to
+make a note-taking program, I'd store all the notes in their own
+directory and all the helper files in the directory above.
+
+2. There may be other technical reasons. For the same program may
+load different configs depending on a directory. git(1) is one
+example of that.
+
+3. You *actually* only want to have a subset of files visible at a
+time. For instance, it may be good idea to keep old mail, however,
+in the vast majority of cases one is only interested in the very
+recent mail, so there is no need to load one's mailing program and
+own brain with the old stuff, except when explicitly asked. One
+solution is to move each prior year's mail into its own directory,
+and only keep the current year's mail in the actual inbox.
+
+Another thing people seem to like to do that is even worse than
+creating those weird single-file directories is creating unreasonably
+short files. I see this manifested primarily in two ways:
+
+1. People decide that foo.conf is not enough somehow and instead
+create foo.conf.d/ putting dozens of single-line files there.
+
+2. There is this "style" of programming where people create separate
+files for each function.
+
+Now, firstly this sort of behaviour is very rude to your disc: I am
+yet to encounter one with 20-byte-long sectors. Secondly, the only
+purpose it serves is creating more busywork. Beforehand I had
+everything I needed in the place where it logically should reside.
+Now I have to jump from file to file just to figure out the meaning
+of a single line. This, by the way, also relates to programming in
+general.
+
+Another issue is symlinks. Don't use them, unless there is some
+strong reason to do so. There are several kinds of symlinks: those
+between directories, which mostly just cause confusion. Those between
+files on different filesystems, which don't even always work. And
+there are symlinks between normal files on the same filesystem. These
+should be hardlinks. The only "benefit" there is to be had from using
+symlinks instead lies in confusing some poor program once the actual
+file has been deleted, and the symlink it depended upon is no longer
+pointing to some useful location.
+
+
+For some more particular advice, here are directories in my ~:
+
+ bin/ games/ lit/ mail/ misc/ src/ sync/ tmp/ vid/
+
+~/bin/ is part of my PATH. This is where I put all my "permanent"
+scripts.
+
+~/misc/ and ~/tmp/ are both for files of varying degree of
+temporariness. The first is where I put files when I either don't
+know where else to put them yet, know where to put them, but don't
+want to do that just yet, or intend to remove them later, yet would
+like to hold on to them for now. ~/tmp/ is more temporal than that,
+yet less so than /tmp/. This is where downloaded files and
+screenshots land initially. This is also where I conduct experiments
+that for whatever reason cannot be conducted in /tmp/.
+
+The inner structure of ~/games/ is very much ad-hoc. You can guess
+the rest.
+
+~/lit/ is composed entirely of pdf files as of right now. A bit
+surprisingly, getting untranslated foreign fiction on some dead-tree
+paper is much, much simpler in Moscow, than getting untranslated
+technical literature, even though one would think the translations of
+the latter would be mostly useless. An interesting thing about
+technical literature is that it's mostly reasonably self-contained,
+and so there are hardly any book series I keep in this directory. The
+ones that are there are put into their own subdirectory and
+structured like so:
+
+ ~/lit/bookname/
+ |-- bookname1.pdf
+ |-- bookname2.pdf
+ ...
+ `-- booknameN.pdf
+
+Most of them, however, don't get their own directories, of course.
+
+~/mail/ houses two kinds of maildirs: ones named
+~/mail/{2021,2022,...}/ and ~/mail/in/. Stuff arrives into ~/mail/in/
+and moves on to a newly-created maildir once a year has passed.
+
+~/src/ is where I put the source code of various projects. Because I
+commited to some projects using github, but I don't want the site to
+expose my mail address, there is also the subdirectory ~/src/gh/,
+which is pretty much the same, except that it has its own gitconfig.
+
+~/sync/ contains files I sync between my local machine and my server.
+I might change the hierarchy there slightly if I start maintaining
+more systems on a regular basis. The internal hierarchy mostly
+corresponds to that of the server's root, though there are a lot of
+extra files in ~/sync/ itself like plan, profile, kshrc, sync.sh etc.
+Hopefully the names are revealing enough.
+
+~/vid/ contains Monty Python mostly. Somewhat similar in structure to
+~/lit/, excepting that there are more subdirectories.
+
+
+PROGRAMMING
+
+There are already a lot of good stylistic references for C (and
+probably for other languages, but we'll stick with C here). Good ones
+in particular are OpenBSD's style(9) (google it on
+http://man.openbsd.org) and the style employed by K&R in their book
+"the C programming language". A lot of good advice is offered in
+"the practice of programming" by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. Do
+read those for a more complete overview of good style. Here I shall
+instead go over some techniques that are critically underemployed
+and some mistakes that
+
+I find it very helpful to compile with flags
+`-std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -O0 -g'. Of course, this is just
+for the debugging purposes, for "real" compilation you'd probably
+remove at least the `-O0 -g'. Other than that, I don't find linters
+to be particularly helpful -- they misreport all but too often. For
+instance, I used to employ LLVM's scan-build(1) until discovering
+that it complains about such code:
+
+ void
+ err(int eval, char *fmt, ...)
+ {
+ ...
+ exit(eval);
+ }
+
+ void
+ somefunc(void)
+ {
+ char *ptr;
+ if (!(ptr = malloc(n)))
+ err(1, "bad malloc");
+ *ptr = '\0';
+ }
+
+but not with this modification of somefunc:
+
+ void
+ somefunc(void)
+ {
+ char *ptr;
+ if (!(ptr = malloc(n))) {
+ err(1, "bad malloc");
+ exit(1);
+ }
+ *ptr = '\0';
+ }
+
+So, the moral is: compile with -std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic, fix
+warnings, test thoroughly, fix bugs as soon as they are found, avoid
+common missteps, and don't rely on external linters.
+
+Portable programs tend to not only cause much less pain, but to also
+be better written in general, so try to stay within mainstream, only
+using local extensions when necessary. Definitely do not rely on a
+particular compiler's or standard library's quirk.
+
+In the vast majority of cases code alignment (except indentation) is
+a huge waste of effort that doesn't even pay off, so I avoid that.
+
+When possible I position my functions starting on their own line like
+so:
+
+ int
+ foo(void)
+ ...
+
+this makes the code very easily grep(1)pable (grep ^foo\( *.c)). And
+no need for ctags! Generally it is worth writing in a way that'll
+make moving around simpler.
+
+Side effects should generally be avoided, except for some
+well-understood idioms like *a++ = *b++.
+
+There are many programs whose portability depends upon preprocessor
+instructions like #if and #ifdef. It is easily observed that even
+in small number they can bring much confusion. Avoid such constructs
+when at all possible. Even the debug macros are often not really
+necessary. Compare the two:
+
+ #define DEBUG
+
+ #ifdef DEBUG
+ printf("this is a debug statement\n");
+ #endif /* DEBUG */
+
+and
+
+ enum = { DEBUG = 1 };
+
+ if (DEBUG)
+ printf("this is a debug statement\n");
+
+If we set DEBUG to 0 in the second case, the compiler will optimise
+the statement away in any case, but it'll warn us if we mess up the
+actual debug code.
+
+Comments are often used in silly ways. In fact some people even have
+their editors configured to make the comments dimmer. In fact they
+should have them configured to make comments brighter and/or bolder.
+Comments are very powerful and should therefore be used with much
+discretion. Good comments include the ones that go briefly over
+functions and global data, and the ones which help the reader to
+understand a complicated algorithm used in code. They should
+definitely not, state the obvious, or be seen as a compensation for
+bad code, which should be rewritten instead. Such comments have a
+tendency of eventually contradicting the code, which is the great
+danger of comments.
+
+There are many examples of not just bad, but moronic comments:
+
+ /*******************************************************
+ * *
+ * *
+ * MY HELLO WORLD ROUTINE *
+ * *
+ * *
+ *******************************************************/
+
+ do_stuff() //!!!
+
+ /**** Maybe I should draw more asterisks... ****/
+
+Don't laugh, I actually get paid for working with these!
+
+And another thing is to definitely not just leave code commented out,
+at least not after debugging. Though if you do write a debugging
+function, leave it there, for you might need it in the future.
+
+There are a lot of reasons to divide programs into multiple files. Do
+create as many as are needed, especially for portability, and when
+compilation becomes too long. Do not, however put things into new files
+just for the sake of it. Many programmers seem to think that if they put
+every single function into its own file it'll somehow make things
+better. In fact it only makes their code a navigational nightmare.
+
+Speaking of multiple files, don't include files in your included files.
+There is, of course a "protection" often employ to avoid cycles:
+
+ #ifndef THISFILE_H
+ #define THISFILE_H
+ #include "a.h"
+ #include "b.h"
+ /* file contents... */
+ #endif /* THISFILE_H */
+
+which does not, however, protect your preprocessor from processing
+this rubbish over and over again, ensuring the program doesn't
+actually finish compiling for a stupid multiplied by long amount of
+time. Instead simply comment what files should be included before that
+one and let the actual includer worry about what to include:
+
+ /*
+ * Description of what the file is for.
+ *
+ * #include "a.h"
+ * #include "b.h"
+ * #include "thisfile.h"
+ */
+
+A thing that I, thankfully, see more rarely, but still do sometimes
+is variables getting burdened with as many qualifiers as the
+programmer managed to come up with. In truth, there should be as
+*few* qualifiers as possible. In particular many people seem to make
+variables unsigned for no reason other than that they should never be
+negative. That not only encourages integer overflow errors, but can
+make the code much more complicated. Observe, for instance, this
+piece of code, which calculates the column, corresponding to nth
+character in some line:
+
+ ...
+ for (off = 0, col = -1; off <= n; off++)
+ if (s[off] == '\t')
+ col = ((col+1)/8 + 1) * 8 - 1;
+ else if (isprint(s[off]))
+ col++;
+ ...
+
+col here should never end up negative, however it is still useful to
+assign it to -1 initially to simplify the program, and possibly to
+indicate an error.
+
+For the last I'll leave you with this bit of bad code that I've seen
+too often:
+
+ if (bad)
+ return 0;
+ else {
+ /* The rest of the function's code here. */
+ }
+
+If you do that people will laugh at you. Instead write normally:
+
+ if (bad)
+ return 0;
+
+ /* The rest of the function's code here. */
blob - /dev/null
blob + 50a094291b7d1bc6568c7c1c69c3dfe227bfbc7f (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/fallout2.txt
+I am quite partial to the games "fallout" 1 and 2, as I grew up
+playing mostly those and some strategy games. So I was very happy to
+find out one day that the second game has been mostly successfully
+reverse-engineered and ported to sdl as [fallout2-ce]. Whilst the
+memories are still fresh, I will here attempt to summarise my first
+experience with the port.
+
+
+INSTALLATION
+
+So, my first question was "ok, but does it compile on OpenBSD?" Well,
+it does. Quite well in fact. The project uses cmake, for which the
+author gets -15 karma. Initially compilation failed, I suspected some
+lacking linking flags to be the culprit. Googling a bit I found how
+to force cmake to actually print commands it uses, rather than just
+uselessly report errors, and found that just as I suspected the
+command lacked -L/usr/local/lib. It took me a bit more googling after
+which I found out that I can set this flag by running cmake with
+-DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib. There weren't any
+compilation errors afterwards and the game ran quite well after I put
+the binary into the game's root directory and launched it as
+`./fallout2-ce' (so the pwd is the game's directory).
+
+There turned out to be some problems with the data files then.
+Firstly I had to change f2_res.ini a bit so that the window does as
+little damage to my system as possible: I set WINDOWED to 1, and
+later SCR_WIDTH to 640 and SCR_HEIGHT to 480. There still were some
+problems with the mouse, however, to fix which I had to restart the
+game. Also I noticed that the music sometimes would play, and
+sometimes wouldn't. To fix that I made sure that all files and
+directories mentioned in fallout2.cfg are named exactly as they are
+mentioned there and also made four copies of all files in
+sound/music: all-lowercase, all-uppercase, upper before period and
+upper after period (e.g. 01hub.acm got copied to 01HUB.ACM, 01HUM.acm
+and 01hub.ACM). The reason being, of course that somehow caseless
+fopen is not yet implemented in this program. Also it later turned
+out that one of the maps in addition to mixing case randomly has a
+typo, so I copied 13carvrn.acm to 13carvrvn.acm. I vaguely remember
+there being no music in the area in the original, but I often skip
+Redding anyway, so perhaps its just a local "feature".
+
+
+NEW CHARACTER
+
+I played a jinxed character once on normal difficulty without
+investing much into armour class and ultimately ended up not liking
+it. This time I thought "but what if I play on easy and invest as
+much as possible into AC?" Well, this way it actually turned out to
+be pretty fun up to and including New Reno, but I rushed the rest of
+the game. The character was like this:
+
+ age: 33
+ gender: male
+ name: Dr. Scar (after the lion king character)
+ attributes: 1 luck and charisma, the rest is mostly even
+ traits: jinxed, heavy bruiser
+ tags: doctor (useful), lockpick (less useful), steal (which I
+ thought to be funny)
+
+The idea is to get HtH evade and tag unarmed once it can be boosted
+to 300 thus. I decided that my character should be a somewhat chaotic
+force, neither strictly evil, nor very righteous: I'd for instance
+become a slaver, but would then help Modoc instead of slaughtering
+some innocent farmers.
+
+My disappointment was almost immediate, as I noticed that for some
+reason none of the giant ants ever seemed to crit miss, but they did
+crit hit for 0 damage quite a lot. Found the issue pretty quickly and
+spent the weekend reviewing the rest of the file. Fixed some other
+bug, sent the diff to the owner. Now my fixes are part of the engine.
+
+
+THE BEGINNING
+
+After that I decided to actually do Arroyo for once, instead of
+immediately wondering in the general direction of the GECK.
+Slaughtered a more-than-reasonable amount of the templar fauna and
+actually kicked Cameron's butt instead of stealing the key from him.
+I think I might have ended up poisoned with 1 health, however, so my
+next stop was Hakunin's tent. Attempted refusing the main quest, had
+to take it anyway, didn't respect the shaman, completed all local
+quests available to me, went east to Klamath.
+
+At Klamath I talked to Ardin: told her how sad I am about Smiley, but
+didn't offer to help. Instead went straight to "whisky" Bob, agreeing
+to refuel his still; immediately decided it was not worth it and sold
+him out to Sajag. Satisfied with myself I told Torr that I'll help
+him guard his cows. As soon as two suspicious-looking men offered me
+some cash to betray Torr as well, did that. Returning found out that
+Torr ran in the least convenient of directions (for him), so I
+decided to help him for more money; did just that. With my newfound
+wealth I exchanged some of that and half the junk from around the
+town for a suit of leather armour. Well-protected I went straight to
+the rat-infested part of town to one-hit-kill the rat king. I did, of
+course, take the fuel-thingy from the car, but later I decided to
+stash it in a container until I can actually use it. I quickly forgot
+which one, however, and never managed to install it.
+
+With that I went south to reach the Den. Immediately kicked all the
+local children's arses. Took Rebecca's and Lara's quests; tried to
+see what the traders have, but wasn't interested. "Got" Rebecca's
+money out of Fred, by having him promise to make me a rich man
+sometime in the future, but later I had so much money and so little
+to spend it on that I forgot about that completely. Found Rebecca's
+book. Tyler didn't to believe that I come from Metzger, so I put that
+quest off for now. Agreed to destroy Rebecca's still for Frankie. His
+whore demanded 1000$ from me, so instead I took "Mom's" quest and
+listened to Karl's story. In the slaver's guild I delivered the radio
+to Vic. After Metzger still demanded from me as much as that whore at
+the Hole, joined the guild instead. After completing the slave runs I
+bought Vic's freedom only to have the ungrateful bastard refuse to
+follow me. In-between the runs I returned Rebecca her book,
+immediately afterwards destroyed her still, delivered his (rather
+cold now, I think) dinner to Smitty, completed Lara's quests by
+getting Tyler so drunk he told me about his stupid party, and put a
+woman's ghost to rest by beating Joey the local punk to the death.
+With that I headed in the direction of the Vault City, skipping
+Modoc.
+
+I found very few bugs in this section; everything went quite
+smoothly.
+
+
+THE MIDDLE
+
+This is my favourite part of the game. There is quite a lot to do,
+usually with many possible solutions, but unlike some late-game
+locations these feel much more like real places, rather than game
+locations.
+
+Right, so, here is a very deep question to the writers: Valerie the
+mechanic of Vault City is a product of Vic fornicating with one of
+the female citizens of the city. Contrary to that fact, Phylis the
+nurse (or whatever she is) tells us that while the decades
+underground after a nuclear war have indeed made the people of the
+vault 8 devoid of marital morality, it may very well be due to the
+fact that radiation and incest have made them so sterile they are
+only able to procreate artificially. Now which one is it?
+
+Arriving to the city I immediately went to the greetings office in
+order to be very rude to both officers. After they no longer wished
+to talk with me I found a local child's stupid doll so he would tell
+me where I can find a wrench. I let my character internally curse Vic
+after he'd found out how unhelpful Ed is and proceeded to purchase
+advanced leather armour from the trader. I tried to fix the auto-doc,
+but failed.
+
+At the front gate I had attempted to get a day pass as a slaver,
+found out that I need to actually carry some "slaves" around for them
+to believe that, and instead bought a fake citizenship and, extorting
+my money back from the seller immediately after the purchase.
+Entering the city proper I immediately turned to the bar to get
+disappointed that they don't actually sell booze; sold the 20 bottles
+I just so happened to be carrying upon my person. At the repair
+"shop" I told Valerie to shut up because I already have the tools
+she needs. At the library I got some free books, read the declaration
+of the human rights, thought to myself "what sort of nonsense is it",
+told so to "Thomas Moore" (right, and then the king of Vault City
+becomes the head of the church and executes him as part of religious
+genocide) and took some quests from the city's military captain. At
+the council building I told Lynette that she was stupid for refusing
+to inspect my pyjamas, but agreed to do her dirty work so that I can
+get into the vault.
+
+Circling Gecko to complete the quest, I entered the town. At Gecko I
+discussed humour and games with the local tavern owner and spoke to
+Harold, Percy and Skeeter to take their quests. Went back to Vault
+City, took my repair kit from Valerie, reported to the security man
+and went back to Gecko with a hydroelectric magnetosphere regulator.
+Back at Gecko I simply exchanged the repair kit for the car fuel
+thingy and repaired the atomic station using the robot. Returning to
+the city I looted as much as I could from the vault (one of the doors
+got jammed and I decided not to reload) and found out about the vault
+15.
+
+It was somewhere during the previous two paragraphs that I discovered
+my horrible miscalculation. In the original you can delay picking a
+perk for as long as you care: if you don't take one at levels 3, 4
+and 5, you'll have 2 perks to pick at level 6. My plan has been to
+pick both tag and hth evade somewhere at levels 12-15. Well, it turns
+out that the feature got fixed in fallout2-ce: now if you keep
+adamantly refusing to pick a perk for 3 levels, you'll end up not
+receiving an extra pick. Later I also lost 1 perk by accident: I must
+have exited the character menu via the escape key rather than the
+"done" button and never noticed it because I decided to stockpile
+skill points for the next 3 levels.
+
+I turned west for the Den and decided to actually visit Modoc. I took
+Jo's quest, healed Bess' leg, had all of Grisham's cows saved, sold
+Bess to Grisham (of course, I never returned for the actual jerky),
+went down the well to steal a very minor amount of money. I broke
+down all of Rose's doors, bought an over-priced cookie from her, had
+her force-feed me with some cows' bollocks. In retaliation for that
+abuse I killed her "chicken". I told Cornelius I'll find his watch
+and proceeded to descend into the latrine-cave. There I found my
+first major bug: I can't remember ever dropping active dynamite in
+this cave at it not exploding immediately as I exit (in the original).
+Here, however, it would sometimes do the thing, and other times just
+keep being "active" in the unexploded cave. I had to reload several
+times. Finally I was able to tell Cornelius that Farrell stole his
+clock.
+
+At the ghost farm I immediately noticed that the "corpses" are
+dummies; after I have fallen through his floor, Vegeir confirmed the
+peaceful ways of the mole people. I went back to Jo, telling him how
+much of an idiot he and his fellow villagers (the game calls Modoc a
+"town", but I am not Yankee enough to call every settlement with 3
+families in it a "town") are. There was peace between the starving
+people and the mole people. I brought Jonny back to Balthas and
+continued towards the Den. There I found Woody, told Karl his
+compatriots decided to stop bullying him, got the car and got out. I
+must have been planning on returning to Gecko on my way back to
+Arroyo to complete the last quests there, but I never did.
+
+Instead for now I rode in the direction of Broken Hills. I actually
+thought of going to New Reno initially, but decided to actually get a
+power fist in Broken Hills first. It proved to be a prudent decision
+later. I thanked God when the zombie under my car told me that he
+isn't hurt, and just broken a few limbs. A horrible catastrophe
+avoided! I went straight to Eric to tell him the good news. Instead
+of rejoicing for my new friend, Eric kept complaining about cooling.
+I helped in exchange for some pills. According to his advice went to
+Francis. Used my skills acquired during my days as a slaver to offer
+him some "free" amphetamines, waited 10 minutes for the mutant to
+become weak and sluggish from withdrawal and ate doping myself. I
+must have paid the Olympic committee more bribes than Francis because
+they allowed me to walk away with a power fist. Talked to Marcus and
+Jacob, took all their quests, wondering in the meantime what to do
+with all these idiots. Brought a talking plant to the house of the
+old ghouls, did some tasks for Typhon, while outsmarting a very smart
+scorpion. Eventually found Typhon's stash of bottle caps, stole the
+porn mag back from him as a punishment and went into yet another set
+of lavatory-caves. There I discovered corpses of the missing people,
+described the scene in detail to a grieving husband, told Zaius that
+he is a terrible person and ordered Francis to leave the town. With
+my newfound knowledge that mutants *are* a thread of society I
+adopted racialism, rescued Mason and Franc from prison, told Zaius
+that I am going to fix his air purifier, actually blew it up. With
+the knowledge that now free of the international mutantry Broken
+Hills will grow into a great and powerful Broken Reich, colonising
+all the lands to the east, I left the town.
+
+As I arrived to New Reno I initiated dialogue with Jules just to tell
+him to shut up and instead looted Jesus Mordino's casino before
+taking a job from him. Now, here's another question: why does taking
+this job takes the player character straight to the "stables"? Can't
+it just mark those on the map? Anyway, the stables are pretty boring
+this time around. I just told Ramirez what a buffoon he is before
+delivering his poison and stole a few things from Myron. Back at New
+Reno I discovered that somebody stole my car. I'd verbally abused
+Jules until he showed me the place. I solved the situation by buying
+my own car back and getting it upgraded. After I reported back to
+Mordino he told me to get his tribute from the pornographers. The
+issue here is that for some reason those guys refuse to talk to
+slavers, who aren't also adopted by one of the bosses, or have kicked
+enough people at the boxing ring, so instead I took a quest from
+Mordino's rival Salvatore, stole batteries from him and his goons and
+started working on getting a more powerful unarmed weapon. The thing
+about it is that the "mega power" fist is not actually that much
+better than a normal one, but it is very tricky to get normally. So
+instead I decided to do what I don't do normally and get my weapons
+upgraded for free by the madmad beneath the New Reno arms. Once that
+was done I became a boxer, beat up all the other boxers, got the
+tribute from pornographers, delivered it to Mordino, completed all
+the Salvatore's quests, poisoned his air, killed all his goons,
+reported to Mordino and made him choke on nuka cola. After that I was
+still lacking one porn mag for miss Kitty, so I fornicated with mr.
+Bishop's wife, and robbed the family of their possessions.
+Unfortunately I was unable to disarm the trap on mr. Bishop's own
+safe, so I had to hide under his bed. I also wanted to plant my own
+trap on it, but found myself unable to do that either. In the end I
+just walked by Bishop back to his casino.
+
+This is another bug, actually. Walking two tiles past the door is
+supposed to trigger dialogue, out of which there'll be no escape
+other than through dozens of corpses or chickening out of the
+building. Well, it didn't. Another bug that I first noticed at New
+Reno, and which would become more and more annoying as the game
+progressed is that sometimes performing attacks or interacting with
+items would segfault the game (but not the other times, so it
+probably has to do with faulty (re)allocation, or randomness).
+
+At NCR I first and foremost talk to the local punk, who offered me to
+guard my car, in exchange for which I offered him a rude gesture. NCR
+is pretty weird. Entrance to NCR is a bit weird: it seems to be the
+only place in the world with a newly-build parking slot for cars.
+Just one. Actually some dialogue in fallout 2 would suggest that
+there are at least a few car-drivers in the area. How come it's not
+explored further? Anyway, what I gave the local bum 1000$ to work on
+my car, took quests from the slavers and the mafia and entered the
+city in the morning. Entering the city I was a bit surprised that the
+sheriff offered me a job for Westin. Instead of doing this right now,
+I stole some papers from a local researcher, stole maps from the
+rangers, killed a suicidal policeman, killed a cultist (while
+sneaking) and kicked the president's son a few times in the eyes,
+breaking his nose thus, took the quest from the president and
+completed the one for Westin. I didn't invest into outdoorsmanship,
+so failed to discover the vault 13. Returning to NCR I handed the
+papers I acquired earlier to Merk and bought a disc with the fake
+13's location, discovered it's a fake, killed Merk for refusing to
+give me a refund.
+
+I went to the vault 15, one of my least favourite locations (I've
+actually been thinking about just buying the map from the doctor, but
+ended up a little short on money). Rescued a local woman's daughter
+from raiders and went underground. There I sneaked past the guards on
+the first level, which turned out to be pretty useless, as the
+computer room's guards noticed me anyway. I thus learned of the vault
+13's location and retrieved computer parts, but was forced to fight
+my way back through the raiders. I didn't kill Darion because both I
+and probably my character considered him to be too tough.
+
+After giving Tandi her parts (and not exposing the spy because I
+didn't know that there was one) I was finally able to arrive to the
+actual vault 13. I attacked the deathclaws on sight, retrieving the
+GECK at the end, thus proving genocide to be viable solution to any
+problem.
+
+
+THE END
+
+I went back to Arroyo in an almost straight line after the village
+-idiot- shaman called me. Then I realised that I still don't have
+HtH evade, so instead of going to San Francisco rode to the
+Experience Town of Redding. This is where I ran out of Salvatore's
+batteries, so my adventures ended rather abruptly after I crashed
+a dozen times fighting Frog Morton's goons, so instead I just
+killed Frog himself and ran away with, like, four batteries left.
+
+The Shi merchants turned out to be on the other level than myself:
+selling all those tiny nuclear reactors and gauss rifles. Well,
+what about small batteries? This is my least favourite location in
+the game anyway. I took the quest from the brotherhood of steel guy,
+arrived to Navarro, killed the guy in the front, went into the
+facility via the tunnel, grabbed all the equipment I could find,
+did the usual, got the commander's guard drunk, killed the commander,
+looted his office, ran away.
+
+Back south I saved a damsel in distress on a tanker, fixed the ship's
+navigation while at it, got the damsel's boyfriend to get the fuel
+from the Shi for me and went for the final dungeon.
+
+Again during this section game seemed commited to not letting me win,
+instead segfaulting on every 5th attack I made. Also the aliens and
+floaters would often fail to initiate combat when I was walking right
+by them.
+
+There I encountered what I am pretty sure was a bug. I first tried to
+get the people around the president drunk, get my sneak skill up and
+kill him silently. I think it should have worked, but it didn't.
+Somewhat disappointed I tried to blow him up: then I discovered that
+somehow neither he, nor I take damage from explosions in our pants.
+At last I was forced to commit murder by superstimpaks. Finished the
+game by stuffing dynamite down the trousers of a researcher near the
+reactor and having the turrets shoot Frank Horrigan to the death.
+Once more the turrets didn't attack Horrigan immediately, though I am
+quite sure they are supposed to.
+
+
+FINAL BUGS?
+
+I am pretty sure I didn't get all the ending slides I was supposed
+to.
+
+
+REFERENCES
+
+[fallout2-ce] https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce
blob - /dev/null
blob + 910198be383063638589fe320439434acadc1355 (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/freegames.txt
+Even if I didn't know how to vocalise it, I considered the human
+civilisation to be in a great decline since I was in the middle
+school. Barbarians are very much at the gates, except this time
+we who consider ourselves civilised are the barbarians.
+
+There are quite a few things so important to the civilised society
+that they precede even the formation of formal hierarchies. Chief
+among them is, of course, agriculture. I don't think I am very well
+qualified to judge the state of that, I will just say that only Islam
+preserved that relatively intact in some places for the Moslems have
+a need of the halal food. Then on his road to civilisation man also
+needs to form a spirituality, for how else is he do be guided in his
+decisions? In spite of that, the fact that we somehow managed to kill
+Him within ourselves has been noted a couple of centuries before, and
+things are even worse now. Civilised man also has a need for science,
+as a civilisation without knowledge ceases to be civilised. The fact
+that science is dead should be obvious to any graduate of a
+university: we killed it with patents, standards and so-called
+"antiplagiarism." Finally, a civilised man has a need for culture:
+art and games, that which makes him satisfied intellectually. I am
+very much convinced that we are on the road of replacing all art with
+commerce and politics.
+
+If we are to somehow slow down, or even reverse that process, I
+believe that we need more art unburdened by propriety, licences and
+cheap political messages. In particular that concerns computer games,
+which at first weren't really considered an object of culture and
+received instead the same terrible treatment that software
+development did outside of the very few places, and which later
+largely transformed into a monster similar to the BBC and Hollywood.
+(Or Netflix and HBO, or whoever produces that rubbish nowadays.)
+
+Unfortunately, even the people who understand the importance of being
+free to have a culture usually concentrate so much on the
+software-related aspects (DRM, freedom to inspect/modify the code,
+etc.) that they forget completely that this artificial legalese
+surrounds all other aspects of art as well. In computer games it is
+now common to refer to all the more "traditional" (not programming)
+art involved as mere "assets." In fact, it is somewhat common even to
+allow the copying of the code, yet forbid that of the "assets." I
+say, however that the assets are equally as important! There already
+are countless programs we've lost due to the human greed and
+commercialisation of art (yes, the art of computer programming), I do
+not think that anyone reading this will need much convincing to
+accept that statement. Yet there are also countless of "assets" we've
+already lost due to the same stubbornness and vanity. Just look up
+what happened to the early episodes of Doctor Who!
+
+With my philosophy clearly stated I will proceed to list the games I
+managed to play that were free completely -- i.e. neither the code,
+nor the "assets" were burdened too much. Expect many more to appear
+in the future.
+
+
+ENDLESS SKY
+
+https://endless-sky.github.io/
+
+This must have been the first completely libre game that I have ever
+played. At the time I was writing my baccalaurean diploma, and
+whenever I do such projects I find it to be a good practice to take
+short breaks and do something that is neither very mentally taxing
+instead, nor allows my brain to retreat into the automatic state
+completely. So far, nothing has been able to fit this description
+entirely, but Endless Sky did come closer than some other things I'd
+tried.
+
+The game is pretty typical of the other top-down exploration/trading/
+combating games. For the most part it consists of going to planets
+and taking missions, considering one's travel route against the time
+it'd take in order to maximise the profits. It also has quite a few
+special missions, which make it all much more interesting. Overall,
+the game really is quite impressive, however it is also not hard to
+notice that many things in it are unfinished. In particular that
+relates to these campaign-missions and the areas of the map that
+become explorable afterwards. The former, it feels like, should have
+much more branchings that should have a much bigger impact, while the
+latter feels a bit too empty.
+
+In conclusion, Endless Sky is a fantastic game that I can recommend
+to anyone, and I wish the people working on it the best of luck.
+
+
+BSD GAMES
+
+Historically there've been a lot of games written for BSD that are
+now usually available on most modern BSDs in /usr/games/, and can be
+installed on Linuces from packages like bsd-games and similar. Most
+famous of these games is probably rogue(6), which had many
+descendants. I managed to play most that come with OpenBSD.
+
+- adventure(6) is a bit of a classic. The later "adventure games" get
+this label from it. The manual is very brief stating that part of the
+game is figuring out the rules, and only stating that "quit" is for
+quitting and "suspend" is for quitting but saving. Thankfully, when
+launched, the game does provide a little bit of help and says that
+further help is provided by commands "help" and "info." Otherwise the
+game is played very much like the latter text-based adventures it
+inspired: the player types one, or two words per command, consisting
+of a verb and a noun, though one of the two can be omitted if it can
+be inferred from the other. In order to play this game I also had to
+draw the map on paper, which I wish more games would have forced me
+to do. Another interesting feature of adventure(6) is that saving the
+game involves quitting it, and then waiting at least 45 minutes
+before continuing. It probably made quite a lot of sense when it was
+originally written, and many people would connect to the same
+mainframe from a terminal for a limited time, and even now I wish the
+games would do that so that the player may also spend his free time
+doing other things. Oh, well, at least most new games aren't as
+insistent on the player not quitting as Id's games.
+
+Unfortunately, adventure(6) would also lead to the issues that still
+trouble similar games, namely that they are impossible to complete
+while playing in any other way than through the players' collective
+wisdom: really, how on Earth was I supposed to know that spooking a
+giant snake is a matter as simple as releasing a small bird onto it
+for some reason? Somehow I did manage to complete the thing through a
+combination of my own wits, googling and backing up my saves, but in
+the end I only received 330 out of 350 points, becoming an annoying
+single point short of achieving the next rank.
+
+- arithmetic(6) prints rather simple expressions like "6 + 5" and
+"14 - 9" and waits for the user to input the answer. Occasionally it
+also prints out the score. Not the most challenging, or creative
+game.
+
+- atc(6) is a brutal game. The man page states: Suspending a game is
+not permitted. If you get a talk message, tough. When was the last
+time an Air Traffic Controller got called away to the phone? Neither
+the rest of the man page, nor the game's UI were very telling: just
+like a certain Monty Python character the only thing I know about
+planes is that I flew some (and that the only worse travelling
+experience I've had was in cars -- even metro at peak hours is
+somehow better.) The controls are also quite hostile except for the
+majority that types on QWERTY. Even for a player that managed to get
+through all these things nothing but stress awaits -- and no wonder,
+it puts the player into control of air traffic. Personally, I gained
+a new appreciation of just how relaxed Doom is through atc(6).
+
+- backgammon(6) is what it sounds like. It also includes the tutorial
+invoked as teachgammon. Unfortunately, I have never had the pleasure
+of playing actual backgammon, but I can recall trying to play nards,
+which is a very similar games of Persian (I think) origin, mostly
+known among the various Caucasian and Russian (and maybe Iranian, but
+I wouldn't know) peoples. I've heard it's particularly popular among
+the Armenians. Like most users of Unix I don't have a single friend
+that understands a single sentence coming from my mouth even when I
+merely quote, so in I went against the computer. I was, however,
+rather worried. Strangely enough it was when I was writing my
+diploma, which ended up having nothing to do with backgammon anyway,
+that I discovered that backgammond is among those games, which
+computers can't play effectively using only classical game theory.
+Rather the only known more-or-less efficient backgammon-playing
+programs so far have used some learning algorithm, or as they are
+known among the proogers, the neural networks.
+
+In any case, in I went typing "teachgammon" into my terminal. A bit
+of surprise was that a lone piece (called "man" in this version) does
+not deny the opponent's moves to the same position, but rather
+becomes vulnerable, as the opposing man can land on him (it?),
+sending the unfortunate man to the bar (position 0). On the next
+turn the player will first have to bring all his men from the bar
+before he or she is able to perform any other moves. I *think* this
+is not the case in nards, where a piece cannot land on another, no
+matter how many are there. Also, I think that in nards all pieces
+start at the first position, rather than begin somewhat scattered
+already.
+
+Moments later I played a couple of parties as red because additions
+are easier that subtractions. As I discovered, however, either this
+is one of the good AIs, or I am completely, or I am completely
+untrained myself.
+
+- banner(6) and banner(1) are actually two different programs, though
+their purpose is identical -- the printing of huge letters out of
+number signs (#). Example output:
+
+ $ /usr/games/banner ..
+ ######
+ ##########
+ ############
+ ##############
+ ##############
+ ##############
+ ############
+ ##########
+ ######
+
+
+ ######
+ ##########
+ ############
+ ##############
+ ##############
+ ##############
+ ############
+ ##########
+ ######
+
+
+ $ /usr/bin/banner Unix
+ # #
+ # # # # # # #
+ # # ## # # # #
+ # # # # # # ##
+ # # # # # # ##
+ # # # ## # # #
+ ##### # # # # #
+
+- bcd(6) transforms input into an ASCII art representation of punched
+cards and back. Sorry, but I am born too recently to know what it
+means.
+
+- boggle(6) -- I don't even know.
+
+- bs(6) means "battleship". In real life the game is only slightly
+better than naughts-and-crosses and is thus only played on the
+especially boring occasions. Here it's not even multiplayer.
+
+- caesar(6) also invoked as rot13 attempts to decypher Caesar's
+cypher. There is probably a reason for this utility to exist...
+
+- canfield(6) & cfscores(6). Although I am often critical of windows,
+I don't think it's a completely terrible operating system. No OS that
+features minesweeper can be such. Solitaire, however, is most
+definitely a mistake. What even is solitaire? And you know what
+canfield(6) is? Solitaire for Unix!
+
+- cribbage(6) -- another card game.
+
+- factor(6) and primes(6) work with the prime numbers. factor(6)
+prints all prime factors of a number and primes(6) lists all primes in
+a range.
+
+- fortune(6) prints silly messages.
+
+- gomoku(6) is a sort of naughts-and-crosses-on-19x19 board. The AI
+is terribly slow as well: it may take dozens of seconds to think its
+move.
+
+- grdc(6) turns the terminal screen into a huge clock. Better than
+xclock(1)! (which doesn't even seem to ever find an appropriate font
+to use).
+
+- hack(6) is like rogue(6) but full of bugs...
+
+- hangman(6) is pretty much what one would have expected.
+
+- hunt(6) is among the multiplayer BSD games that work on OpenBSD.
+Unfortunately, I don't really know a lot of people that'd be willing
+to try that out with me.
+
+- mille(6) -- yet another product of Ken Arnold's overactiveness.
+Seems to be a multi-player clone of some existing board game. I
+did't go too much into details.
+
+- monop(6) -- ah, yes, monopoly on my terminal.
+
+- morse(6). Let me demonstrate:
+
+ $ echo morse | morse
+ dow daw
+ daw daw daw
+ dit daw dit
+ dit dit dit
+ dit
+
+ dit dit dit daw dit daw
+
+- number(6) reads number and converts it to English like so:
+
+ $ number 129
+ one hundred twenty-nine.
+
+Of course, 129 as read as "one hundred *and* twenty nine," but oh
+well...
+
+- phantasia(6) unfortunately requires some other human beings to play
+with and doesn't work on OpenBSD anyway.
+
+- pig(6) translates sentences from English to pig Latin. Shame
+bsdgames are usually not installed by default with most Linuces,
+otherwise it'd be useful at work...
+
+- pom(6) displays the phase of the moon similarly to how date(1)
+does something useful.
+
+- ppt(6) is a close relative of bcd(6), so I don't know what it means
+either.
+
+- quiz(6) the player some questions on a topic. Funnily there have
+been quite a few very simple women that tried to convince me that the
+quiz TV programmes are somehow educational. Well, sorry, but both the
+quiz programmes and programs are the opposite of educational.
+
+- rain(6) plays a nice animation.
+
+- random(6) can either print random lines from input, or random
+numbers, e.g.:
+
+ $ man random | random
+ RANDOM(6) Games Manual RANDOM(6)
+
+ NAME
+ random – random lines from a file or random numbers
+ SYNOPSIS
+ random [-er] [denominator]
+
+ DESCRIPTION
+ must be at least 1, its default value is 2.
+ The options are as follows:
+ -r The -r option guarantees that the output is unbuffered.
+
+ SEE ALSO
+ OpenBSD 7.2 August 23, 2022 OpenBSD 7.2
+
+- robots(6) is quite a lot of fun, actually! It's very simple as
+well, so I'll finish that at that.
+
+- sail(6) is currently same as phantasia(6), unfortunately.
+
+- snake(6) is pretty similar to robots(6).
+
+- I'd probably be more surprised were I to not find tetris(6).
+
+- trek(6) is in somewhere between adventrue(6) and hack(6). It is
+pretty complex, but pretty fun nonetheless and can be played without
+first having to find anyone interested. Unfortunately the
+documentation is rather weird. The man page only gives a brief
+overview explanation of some commands, while the actual doc is not
+distributed with OpenBSD. Oh, well, I do have the sources:
+
+ $ tbl /usr/src/games/trek/USD.doc/trek.me | groff -Tascii |
+ less -r
+
+Basically, the player is given a space-ship that responds to a number
+of commands. A limited space is shared with several enemies friendly
+planets etc. All enemies have to be destroyed before time runs out.
+Personally I found the game to be very well-made and would argue that
+it is a great example of how games should me made.
+
+- wargames(6) is a very strange game indeed. My version is
+implemented as a small shell script. Here is the code:
+
+ echo -n "Would you like to play a game? "
+ read x a
+ x=`/usr/bin/basename $x`
+
+ if [ -f /usr/games/$x ] ; then
+ tput cl
+ exec /usr/games/$x $a
+ else
+ echo "A strange game."
+ echo "The only winning move is not to play."
+ fi
+ exit 0
+
+- worm(6) is of the variety where apples make the worm bigger, not
+the one where worms from the team A drown the ones from the team B
+by exploding the ground they stand on.
+
+- worms(6) is another nice animation.
+
+- wump(6) is mostly a luck-based game. Like adventure(6) it features
+a non-Euclidian cave. One room in this cave contains an evil wumpus
+that has to be killed by guessing, which cave he is in, while some
+others contain bottomless pits and bats. Fortunately, the player is
+told which room he's in, which rooms are nearby and if there are any
+bats/wumpuses/pits closely. Unfortunately, the player is never told
+which ones are the dangerous rooms before it is too late, so really
+there is no way to win other than by guessing.
+
+
+ANARCH
+
+https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/anarch
+
+The game's made by one Miroslav Chizh of Moravia, quite an
+interesting man (though personally I disagree with a lot that he
+claims to believe). It mostly plays like a generic Doom clone. The
+achievement here is mostly technical. Being a programmer myself I am
+at a disadvantage when actually trying to describe any code. It is
+also further complicated by the fact that Miroslav is one of those
+annoying people who think that placing two extra spaces at the start
+of a line indents it by one extra level. An interesting part here is
+that the game has quite clearly defined back- and front-end, which is
+most unlike other games, which rather only divide data, state and
+logic.
blob - /dev/null
blob + 182dd4ddc594a4e6d13b410879e26226fdd64e5b (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/git.txt
+Using git
+
+Most tutorials are pretty bad because they can only attempt to give
+you some surface-level overview, and scarcely any give you leads on
+further research. Git seems to be one of the worst examples of the
+trend, and yet the irony is that git is very simple. All you really
+have to do to understand git is type `man gittutorial'. The command
+is very deceptively named: by the time I started using Unix, and so
+have learned of the great blessing that is actually having your
+operating system, and most software under it come with a manual, I
+already knew a bit of git, so I thought "I don't need yet another
+tutorial, I need a manual!" Well, more than a year later it turned
+out that although gittutorial(7) indeed is a tutorial, not very
+useful by itself, manuals it references are. Particularly,
+gittutorial-2(7) and gitcore-tutorial(7) contain an actual
+explanation of how git works.
+
+So, my biggest suggestion is to read gittutorial(7), and some of the
+further pages it reference. Do it now, and return if you want to
+read the rest of the article for some reason later.
+
+OK, you should have read or skimmed through at least gittutorial(7),
+gittutorial-2(7), gitcore-tutorial(7), gitglossary(7) and
+giteveryday(7). You should be able to say what things like "HEAD^^^",
+"refs", "objects", "branches" and "tags" are (and not merely what
+they might mean). In the next section I will tell why I think git
+(both porcelain and plumbing) is quite good, actually, and how to
+really appreciate the system.
+
+
+BACKEND (PLUMBING)
+
+Git's backend is awesome! This should be obvious to anyone who've
+read gitcore-tutorial(7), and to whom Unix is more than just "that
+server OS I have to deal with at work".
+
+The git repository is just a dumb filesystem. It stores two things:
+
+1. Every bit of content ever to be recorded as an object (a blob or a
+ tree). The objects' format accounts for the deficiencies of some
+ filesystem, so you may even store your git repository on a
+ FAT32-formatted flash drive (though why would one do that I am
+ uncertain)
+2. A bunch of references so that you don't have to memorise each
+ object's hash. In lieu of not all filesystems supporting actual
+ links, these are just text files.
+
+Unfortunately, the objects' binary format makes them less immediately
+useful because you can't use normal Unix commands with them (though
+you can with references). Instead git repositories should be treated
+somewhat like an archive, except instead of tar/cpio/whatever you
+type `git'. With that in mind it becomes simple (if not exactly
+convenient -- that's what the frontend is for) to, e.g., print each
+"file" (object) "below", e.g. master:
+
+$ git ls-tree .git/refs/heads/master
+100644 blob <hash1> file1
+100644 blob <hash2> file2
+040000 tree <hash3> dir
+...
+$ echo "here's file1:"; git cat-file blob <hash1>
+...
+$ echo "here's file2:"; git cat-file blob <hash2>
+...
+$ git ls-tree <hash3>
+...
+# repeat with each object
+
+With commands like these it becomes very much possible to implement
+some convenient frontend via scripts. In fact, that's how git used
+to be, but now they have the entire front-end in C as well (for
+speed, presumably).
+
+
+FRONTEND (PORCELAIN)
+
+Git's frontend is, perhaps, its most chided part. Some of the
+criticism is true. Personally I dislike how many commands use such
+long and hard-to-type options. When I complain people often answer
+that I should use tab-completion. My counter is usually that
+tab-completion should not be needed in the first place, and instead
+we ought to do better more when designing interfaces.
+
+A lot of complaints, however, comes from the people who never took
+their time to understand the system, and now don't understand what is
+it they are interfacing. Such is often the way.
+
+The important points for ergonomic use of git are:
+
+1. Understand the backend -- much in the frontend's man pages is
+ written from the backend's point of view
+2. Read git-rev-parse(1), which will allow you to type things like
+ "@^" instead of "HEAD^"
+3. Use branches and, perhaps, tags to mark the immediately important
+ commits -- you can then type "git diff master mybranch" instead
+ of first scanning "git log" and then "git diff <hash> <hash>"
+
+Once you've got that, read giteveryday(7), and whatever frontend
+man pages you are likely to need. Some of them are quite a bit longer
+than they should be, but only some of that is of immediate
+importance. The rest can be referenced as needed.
blob - /dev/null
blob + 323441044ae604a346c3404fb64fe0ccf9d2090a (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/isolated_wwwbrowser.txt
+Nowadays it is often necessary to use either firefox, or chromium for
+tasks that you'd think to be basic enough not to require anything
+special. These programs are so huge that they tower over the Linux
+kernel like Goliath did over David, and even worse they are meant to
+do the stupidest thing since the dawn of networks -- connect to
+untrusted hosts and interpret arbitrary scripts supplied by them.
+Truly we live in a dark time!
+
+Anyway, it is actually pretty simple to isolate this great evil from
+the parts of your system that you probably don't want it to touch, or
+even see. The method consists of launching the offender inside a
+nested X session under a different user. There are particular
+benefits to doing that on OpenBSD because both browsers are further
+limited with unveil(2) and pledge(2), meaning that their visibility
+of the file system is limited even further, and the amount of
+available syscalls is much less crazy too.
+
+Nevertheless, it should work on other Unices, just as long as X is
+available. There you might, however, have to do your own research on:
+
+- setting up sudo;
+- setting up disc quotas;
+- setting up other limits (CPU time, memory, &c.);
+
+On OpenBSD read at least the following man pages: Xephyr(1),
+xauth(1), useradd(1), doas.conf(5); and the FAQ 14:
+https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html .
+
+For the basic set-up we change permissions for our own home directory
+to 750 because we are paranoid and create a new user:
+
+# chmod 750 /home/mainuser
+# useradd -m anotheruser
+
+A nice thing about OpenBSD is that the resources that any process, or
+user may employ are already pretty limited, with some allowances made
+for the staff login class (naturally, we'll be keeping anotheruser
+outside of staff). For setting up a disc quota, consult the FAQ,
+however. You may also put some other restrictions, for instance
+limiting printer access to users inside the printer group:
+
+lp|someprinter:\
+ ...\
+ :rg=printer
+
+Of course, if you do stuff like this, it only makes sense to
+have your firewall limit anotheruser's access to either most of the
+local network, or at least some addresses. And you don't have to stop
+there, but I will just for the moment.
+
+As for giving anotheruser an environment, where he may be *allowed*
+to do some things, you can use a simple script:
+
+#!/bin/sh
+
+umask 077
+
+[ $# -lt 1 ] && set -- :10 -screen 1280x720 -no-host-grab
+Xephyr "$@" &
+xephyrp=$!
+ps -p$xephyrp >/dev/null || exit 1
+while ps o stat -p$! | grep -Fq R; do :; done
+ps -p$xephyrp >/dev/null || exit 1
+trap 'rm -f $tmpfile; kill $xephyrp 2>/dev/null' EXIT INT HUP
+
+for e in $(export); do unset $e; done
+export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
+export DISPLAY="$1"
+
+tmpfile=/tmp/$$
+[ -f $tmpfile ] && {
+ echo "ERROR: temporary file $tmpfile already exists" >&2
+ exit 1
+}
+: >$tmpfile
+xauth -qf $tmpfile generate $DISPLAY . trusted
+nlist=$(xauth -f $tmpfile nlist $DISPLAY)
+rm -f $tmpfile
+
+doas -u anotheruser /bin/sh -l <<x
+ cd $HOME
+ xauth -q remove $DISPLAY
+ echo $nlist | xauth -q nmerge -
+ exec fvwm
+x
+
+If you don't want to type the password each time, add the line
+
+permit nopass mainuser as anotheruser cmd /bin/sh args -l
+
+to doas.conf.
+
+Once you successfully execute this script, you'll get an Xephyr (or
+is it an American program, and X is meant to be pronounced as Z? If
+it is, then it's too stupid, I'll just have to keep pronouncing X as
+a letter-name) window with fvwm inside. You can use fvwm to launch
+xterm, and you can use xterm to launch firefox. To see how well
+things are isolated, try copying some text in one X session (either
+the normal one, or the one inside Xephyr), and pasting it in the
+other -- you should fail!
blob - /dev/null
blob + 1a2e00348a7af5b87953828c15f226b457f54283 (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/lit.txt
+There used to be two larger lists: one programming books and the
+second for other literature, where I put pretty much anything that'd
+come to mind, while trying to avoid things that people would have
+read anyway. I have since merged the two lists, and rewritten them to
+list the books that left their mark on my brain: the sort of books I
+sometimes re-read, or at least consider doing so.
+
+
+PROGRAMMING
+
+- The C programming language, 2nd ed. -
+
+*The* book to learn C.
+
+- The AWK programming language -
+
+The name is very deceptive. awk(1) is known for being a very solid
+tool for working with strings. There's a lot of that in the book. And
+then there are implementations of some more known programs,
+algorithms and little languages, including an assembly for a
+fictional computer.
+
+- The practice of programming -
+
+Advice on programming pragmatically and effectively.
+
+- Learning Perl -
+
+It is what it says it is -- a decent introduction to Perl.
+
+- Programming in Haskell, 2nd ed. -
+
+Introductory Haskell book. Clear, concise and has good exercises.
+
+
+FICTION
+
+- H.P. Lovecraft -
+
+Somehow everyone I recommend Lovecraft to seems to dislike his work.
+I blame the translations. Lovecraft's use of the Engilsh language is,
+perhaps, the most unique I've seen or heard. To anyone who, like me,
+desperately looks for exactly that sort of things in his fiction, I
+recommend Lovecraft wholeheartedly.
+
+- The Flashman papers -
+
+I think the book series is popular in Great Britain (at least), but
+no one I've spoken to has ever heard of it. The series follows the
+misadventures of an "anti-Arthurian" British cavalryman through some
+significant (and some made-up) events of the Victorian era, German
+unification, American civil war and other events of the period.
+Probably only of much interest to people at least mildly interested
+in history.
+
+- The divine comedy -
+
+On one hand, the divine comedy could be viewed as the worst kind of
+political satire -- one written by members of one party to slander
+the members of the other. On the other hand, there is genuine
+religious concern for the health of one's soul: sin is condemned for
+what it is, while virtue is rewarded. The divine comedy is a book of
+great historic and philosophical significance.
+
+- 1984 -
+
+1984 is a "satire without humour". If Ingsoc satirises
+social/political movements, Winston satirises such
+"counter-movements". Orwell brings the us to hold contempt to
+everyone involved: the party for its senseless totalitarianism,
+Winston for his hatefulness, the proles for their ignorance. The
+book reminds us of what we become when we accept madness as normalcy.
+
+
+MISC
+
+- Bible -
+
+People who haven't read at least the Gospels are doing themselves a
+huge disfavour. Especially those that identify themselves as
+"atheists".
+
+- gittutorial(7), gittutorial-2(7) & gitcore-tutorial(7) -
+
+For years I couldn't understand Git, and somewhat hated it for that.
+I tried to learn from the git(1) man page, man pages for individual
+utilities, the official Web site, some books, even the
+Internet-tutorials -- to no avail. Then I read gittutorial(7) and
+some other pages it suggested, and it all "clicked" immediately.
+
+- /usr/share/doc directory in 4.4BSD-lite2 (and earlier) -
+
+Important things modern Unices fail to mention.
blob - /dev/null
blob + a3617d5a95fc8154930884ceec77de1b8c24fedc (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/mail.txt
+Over what must have been more than a year I've read a lot of RFCs,
+had a lot of experience and put a lot of thought into mailing. This
+is the third version of this article. Most articles on setting up a
+mail system have their readers do a lot of work with the latter
+ending up with a complex monstrosity they do not understand. My
+system is dead-simple and easy to extend within limitations of a
+small server.
+
+The entire mailing system of ours shall consist of the following:
+OpenBSD (though we only *really* need OpenSMTPD, which I hear has
+been ported), ssh and your favourite mail client & operating system.
+That's it! Not even a POP server!
+
+One thing I didn't bother doing this time is dkim. At the bottom are
+my old instructions on setting dkim up (section DKIM): they shall not
+be maintained too much.
+
+
+BLACKLISTS
+
+In the world of email, and spam, and housewife-targeting
+bitcoin-miners there are a lot of blacklists that many servers adhere
+to. Most of those are run by crooks, however it is still important to
+check if your IP address is in one. So, before anything else, paste
+it into a [blacklist checker], and request a different address should
+that one be spoiled.
+
+
+DNS
+
+We are interested in the following: A, AAAA, MX, PTR (i.e. rDNS), and
+a couple of TXT ones (spf and dmarc). PTR is set up by the network
+block owner (usually same as ISP) and should be the same as HELO that
+the server will send (the server's FQDN). Virtual host providers
+usually have a web-form for setting up PTR. Otherwise you'll have to
+actually request it being changed by talking to people.
+
+Others are set up as usual. In the end something like this should
+suffice:
+
+ example.com. 600 IN A 1.2.3.4
+ example.com. 600 IN MX 0 example.com
+ example.com. 600 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ip4:1.2.3.4 ~all"
+ _dmarc.example.com. 600 IN TXT "v=DMARC1; p=none"
+
+Add ipv6 if you can as well.
+
+
+SMTPD
+
+Firstly we shall get a key and a cert (which will be self-signed):
+
+ openssl genrsa -out /etc/ssl/private/example.com.key 4096
+ openssl req -new -x509 -key /etc/ssl/private/example.com.key \
+ -out /etc/ssl/example.com.crt -days 365
+ chmod 600 /etc/ssl/example.com.crt
+ chmod 600 /etc/ssl/private/example.com.key
+
+And automatically renew it with the following crontab:
+
+ 0 0 1 */6 * opnssl x509 -in /etc/ssl/example.com.crt -signkey /etc/ssl/private/example.com.key -out /etc/ssl/example.com.crt -days 365 && chmod 600 /etc/ssl/manpager.com.crt
+
+And, yes, the certificate is 600, please refer to smtpd.conf(5) for
+actual docs, this is just a small example.
+
+Some people might also say that I should here use a CA-signed cert.
+Well, no, not really, there are unlikely to be any problems: I
+haven't experienced any and I force tls. Funny thing about mail is
+that there are all sorts of crazy set-ups, where it bounces between
+ten different not-really-trusted servers in-between the sender and
+the actual target. In the end who knows if there'll be an appropriate
+cert at the penultimate hop? So, we are lucky to have any encryption
+at all! This is why the validity of the certs is usually only checked
+in the purely-internal scenarios by the vast majority of SMTP servers
+out there (and the ones that are more strict are probably
+misconfigured!).
+
+Speaking of which, here's /etc/mail/smtpd.conf itself:
+
+ pki example.com cert "/etc/ssl/example.com.crt"
+ pki example.com key "/etc/ssl/private/example.com.key"
+
+ table aliases file:/etc/mail/aliases
+
+ smtp sub-addr-delim "_"
+
+ listen on lo
+ listen on egress tls-require pki example.com
+
+ action "local" maildir "%{user.directory}/mail" alias <aliases>
+ action "in" maildir "%{user.directory}/mail"
+ action "out" relay tls no-verify pki example.com
+
+ match from local for local action "local"
+ match from any for domain example.com ! rcpt-to root action "in"
+ match from local for any action "out"
+
+Do, by the way take a look at aliases: you might, for instance, want
+local mail to root to arrive to another user instead.
+
+Set up thus, our server will refuse to talk with others over
+plain-text, meaning less spam. If that bothers you, read the mans (or
+just remove "tls-require"). And no, the server doesn't handle
+authentication: that is done with ssh below.
+
+
+SPAM?
+
+You might have noticed that we are not running any spam-filters on
+the server itself (other that denying external mail to root). You
+might have also noticed that I introduced the mysterious line
+`smtp sub-addr-delim "_"'. This line is responsible for the vast
+majority of spam-filtering anyone will ever need. With this mail to
+alexander@example.com, alexander_smith@example.com and
+alexander_alexander@example.com arrive to the same user alexander,
+while the assholes of the internets are none the wiser because
+underscore is a character commonly used for actual usernames, but not
+subaddresses. Now, simply use different subaddresses for different
+purposes, and perhaps employ some subaddress-based whitelist with
+procmail or something like that.
+
+Beyond that, however, there is spamd and rspamd, which also contain
+interesting stuff like spam traps, or denying mail with bad helo &c.
+Just don't use those horrible blacklists, please!
+
+
+CLIENT
+
+This section used to contain my set-up for the set of maildir
+utilities mblaze, but that proved to be too much of a moving target.
+I therefore leave most of the MUA set-up up to the reader, and only
+describe the way of emulating an MDA and MTA with ssh.
+
+To get mail, create a script, say, "msync":
+
+ #!/bin/sh
+
+ while :; do
+ cd $HOME &&
+ scp -r user@example.com:mail/new/ mail/ 2>/dev/null &&
+ find mail/new -type f -exec \
+ ssh user@example.com rm {} + 2>/dev/null
+ sleep 3600
+ done
+
+It may be called automatically from, e.g., ~/.profile:
+
+ while :; do
+ ps xo args | grep -q msync$ || msync
+ sleep 10
+ done >/dev/null 2>&1 &
+
+Some shells know what a maildir is, and if you set the variable $MAIL
+to the path to you maildir, they will notify of your mail. Otherwise
+you may put something like this in you, e.g., ~/.kshrc:
+
+ ls $HOME/mail/new/* >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo You have mail.
+
+And sending mail is as simple as creating this script:
+
+ #!/bin/sh
+
+ ssh user@example.com sendmail "$@"
+
+Now either call it "sendmail" and put it in your $PATH so that it is
+found before the actual sendmail (if any), or configure your MUA to
+use this script instead of sendmail.
+
+
+DKIM
+
+If you take this set-up and go to mail-tester.com, you are likely to
+get 9/10 with -1 being for DKIM. It means that the absolute vast
+majority of mail servers in the entire world will accept you mail. If
+you still want dkim, do the following on your server:
+
+ pkg_add opensmtpd-filter-dkimsign
+ mkdir -p /etc/mail/dkim
+ doas -u _dkimsign openssl genrsa -out /etc/mail/dkim/private.rsa.key 1024
+ openssl rsa -in /etc/mail/dkim/private.rsa.key -pubout
+
+Add the following DNS record:
+
+ <selector>._domainkey.example.com. 680 IN TXT "v=DKIM1;p=<pub>"
+
+<selector> can be any string and <pub> is the one that we just
+printed printed (it'll be over several lines, make sure to paste
+it all without whitespace).
+
+Finally, add this to /etc/smtpd.conf
+
+ filter "dkimsign_rsa" proc-exec "filter-dkimsign -d example.com -s <selector> \
+ -k /etc/mail/dkim/private.rsa.key" user _dkimsign group _dkimsign
+ listen on socket filter "dkimsign_rsa"
+
+Of, course, make <selector> same here as it is in the records.
+
+This *should* do it, but I give no promises. If you want the key to
+have more than 1024 bits, you'll also need to spread the selector
+across several strings in the DNS records. And even with 1024 you
+might have to do it. I don't even know.
+
+
+REFERENCES
+
+[blacklist checker] https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
blob - /dev/null
blob + 11f01c7c951e7c5575572c5d6fe004071d055e4c (mode 644)
--- /dev/null
+++ art/oldgames.txt
+I can name a few modern games that I thought were quite good. Most of
+them, however, aren't. I have, however, played of quite a lot of
+older games that are way better than anything that's being spat out
+into Steam nowadays. The best way to play most of these games would
+be by getting them from GOG, or sailing the Seven Seas should that
+option no longer be available, as it is in some cases. Note that this
+list will only contain games that I still regard to be commercial.
+For the free games see my other article [free].
+
+Just as the [free] list, this one will most likely be expanded in
+the future, as I find that I play a lot less games now than I used
+to, but when I do, it is usually something classical or libre.
+
+
+FALLOUT 1 & 2
+
+Once my sole two favourite games. They still hold a very special
+place for me.
+
+Before we go further, I should note that I am far from the only
+person that noticed the two games' genius, which in the world of
+commercial games unfortunately means that the thing became a
+"franchise." "Franchise" is one of these strange words like
+"commerce," whose literal definitions are completely neutral, but
+whose responsibility for the sorry state of the world we live in
+becomes apparent, once we examine how it is used in the context of
+pseudo-propriety -- one that is immaterial, and only exists due to
+the spread of some silly legal notions from Victorian Britain. And
+in the context the meaning is following: a great many of
+barely-related mediocre products are being inhumanly overprice
+through the tactic of putting the word "Fallout" in the name and
+changing the font.
+
+As far as Fallout goes, I however, am interested mostly in the real
+thing -- the first and second games. Of course, that is not to say
+that there weren't any other games unfortunate enough to find
+themselves part of a franchise that weren't all that bad. I actually
+quite enjoyed Tactics and 3 the first time through, and completed
+New Vegas many times, as it does constitute a bit more that some
+surface relation with the thing it's named after combined with the
+desire to sell. However, even the latter fails to bring the same
+feelings as I have about the originals.
+
+Now to my mind, Fallout is one of the few games that I became
+attached to for reasons other than interesting gameplay. Rather I
+have to say that the gameplay is not marvellous safe for one or two
+qualities. Rather it is unique because every time I play I find
+myself sucked into the illusion of controlling a character living in
+a real world. That's not to say it at all makes sense! the plots for
+both the main quest and the side-quests are rather basic, even the
+most well-understood areas of physics are constantly contradicted and
+there is quite a bit of paranormal along with the fourth wall breaks.
+(and no, the second game is not the only one that suffers from it!)
+However, once those things are dismissed, one does begin to
+appreciate how this world functions: visiting each settlement, the
+player discovers that just like the human settlements it does have
+an economy, law, crime, science, culture, infrastructure and all the
+other features of human settlements, however brutal and primitive at
+times. The player further discovers that all those settlements are
+interconnected: in the first game there is already a lot of trade and
+some warfare going on, and in the second many settlements form
+polities, and so often establish the more political relationships.
+In all that, the player's character is not a mere observant, but a
+participant: the fate of many such societies depends on the player's
+actions, and sometimes the same decision alters the history of
+several.
+
+The gameplay, as I alluded, is not crazy, but it's not all that
+terrible either. It all starts with building the character. When I
+first played I was probably very impressed by the amount of different
+specialisations my character could take. Now, however, I know that
+there is a large part of these choices that is completely useless and
+never comes up. Still, what does come up does so frequently and
+allows the player to solve the quests he or she is given in many new
+ways, usually the expected ones. There are also some things that
+don't require any special input of in-game experience points, but
+rather that of the player's attention. There are many options for
+instance where wearing different clothes might result in different
+reactions from the characters, or there are quite a few things that
+can be solved with explosives.
+
+And then there is also combat, which many people seem to not enjoy
+that much, but in spite of it being clunky on the surface, I do think
+that it is a bit more nuanced than people give it due. Largely this
+is because Fallout might be the only game I've played where missing
+is made fun. Misfired shots have a great possibility of landing on
+another target. Allies are often killed by accident. There are the
+critical misses where the unfortunate character may drop his weapon,
+hit himself (to the death, possibly), or maim one of his limbs.
+Overall, combat in Fallout is not very technically impressive, but
+it is definitely not boring.
+
+
+DEUS EX
+
+Deus Ex is yet another game that had the misfortune of becoming a
+franchise. I think only of the first two games to be much enjoyable
+(even though many will disagree with me on the second), and only the
+original to be worth returning to.
+
+I consider Deus Ex to be one of the best designed games I've ever
+played. It differs from most games -- even the other "immersive sims"
+I've played in that instead of presenting the player with a set of
+options on how to solve a particular problem, but instead presents
+him or her with a set of instruments and asks the player to instead
+figure just it out, whichever way seems to be the best. What's even
+more interesting is that each time this set of tools will be
+different not only because the player will find different general
+items and invest into different skills, but also because unlike with
+most such games, levelling is not done entirely through the experience
+points. That is, in addition to the more traditional skills, there
+are also nano-augmentations (i.e. with nanites), which are much more
+interesting than normal skills, as they essentially give the
+protagonist super-powers. There is, however, a catch: the set of
+augmentations that the player will be able to take depends entirely
+on the augmentation-canisters that he will be able to find. Many such
+canisters are also applied to the same part of body, limiting the set
+still further. All of it makes each playthrough actually unique even
+in spite the seemingly linear plot and set of missions.
+
+
+ARCANUM: OF STEAMWORKS AND MAGICK OBSCURA
+
+After the first Fallout was released, some of the main people that
+worked on it had some disagreements on what Fallout 2 should be like,
+so they left to create their own studio named "Troika Games," and
+quite aptly proceeded to make three games before running out of
+money. The other two are somewhat interesting as well, but their
+first project Arcanum is what really impressed me. If I were to
+describe the game in one sentence, I'd say something along the lines
+of "A bigger Fallout in a different setting and without the
+misfortune of becoming a franchise."
+
+So, the first point is that the game is much bigger than Fallout. By
+that I mean that the world-map is huge and has more than a few
+locations that are never pointed out, which the player can only find
+by randomly coming across them. Another thing that I mean is that the
+local maps are now so great that there is even a special mechanic that
+allows the player to place waypoints and allow the character to
+automatically follow them. I should say that normally I would
+consider this to be a sign of bad things to come, as such huge maps
+are usually only so huge because they are filled with void. Somehow,
+however, Troika has managed to avoid this trap, and instead make the
+world both grand and interesting at the same time.
+
+Then there is the setting. I usually don't talk much about settings
+in anything, as there is mostly not much to talk about. And I
+specifically dislike that vile notion of "lores." I mean, supposedly
+the word used to mean something, and if one opens a dictionary, one
+could probably still find a sensible definition, but at this point
+the mere utterance of the word makes my brain go into the automatic
+mode for half an hour. In spite of that, I do think that what Arcanum
+presents is a rather unique setting, not found elsewhere, and is
+worth at least mentioning. Like the name suggests, the game is set in
+a Tolkienite world during an industrial revolution. Even in real life
+the industrial revolution was a strange time: technological marvels
+and definite improvements in some areas of life went side-by-side
+with pseudoscience, destruction and radicalism that plague mankind
+to this very day. Strangely enough, a fantasy setting seems to be
+ideal for highlighting those issues: our pseudoscience actually has
+some backing in Arcanum, but is it right to act on it? Entire
+civilisations are being destroyed in pursuit of questionable goals.
+Senseless bickering between the traditional magicians and the more
+progressive technologist leaves no room for cooperation and
+co-existence.
+
+Finally there is the gameplay. It's mostly fine. The
+character-building shows that the game is made by the same people
+that made Fallout, and it works very well. Combat on the other hand
+is pretty terrible. And there are also a lot of things that can only
+be done through some badly-thought-out keyboard shortcuts that cannot
+be reassigned to something more sensible.
+
+
+THE WITCHER 1
+
+When people talk about the witcher games, it's usually about the
+second or the third game (or the fourth one, which I hear is being
+developed). Neither of those, however ever interested me too much.
+The Witcher 1 on the other hand seems to be a game that people have
+to "force" themselves to play. I never experienced such problems, but
+my idea of a good game is quite different.
+
+And the game really is very strange. I've heard once it being
+described as a game that can be completed with one toe on the
+keyboard, and that is not too far from the truth either. Gameplay,
+however, is not what attracted me to this game so much. Strangely
+enough, it was the writing. I do say that it is strange, and that is
+because I found that most people who spend their time "seriously"
+discussing the quality of writing in games are mostly the sort of
+ignoramuses that don't ever take time to read a book. Thus in most
+cases when I discuss writing in a game, I merely say that it is good
+for a game, and proceed to the more important parts. The Witcher 1,
+however, is the only game about which I can say that I found the
+writing to be pretty solid in the general sense -- definitely more
+solid than 90% of film-writing, and people are somehow enjoying that!
+Indeed, the writing was so more than passable that it was much thanks
+to the game that I actually looked into the books, which were to this
+day the only piece of literature that I didn't regret reading in
+translation.
+
+
+TOMB RAIDER 1-5
+
+Tomb Raider is another game I liked mostly due to the very good
+gameplay. And it did manage to produce 5 good games, which is pretty
+impressive. Unfortunately, the games beyond that are barely at all
+related and aren't very much worth playing.
+
+The games' gameplay consists primarily of the three activities:
+solving puzzles, jumping around places and shooting things. I'll
+start with the jumping around because platforming is not what I
+generally enjoy in games: usually the activity is either very
+RNG-dependant, which makes it very frustrating, or very automated
+to the point where it feels that the player's input almost doesn't
+matter at all. Tomb Raiders avoid that by making every move Lara (the
+protagonist is one lady Lara Croft for those that lived in the woods
+for the past several decades) makes extremely predictable.
+Platforming in Tomb Raider does require careful planning, attention,
+precision and timing, but no luck, which is how I grew to like it.
+
+Puzzles are, I'd say, mostly pretty decent. There were a few that
+were simpler to brute-force than to come up with a "real" solution,
+a few whose logic didn't make much sense, and a few rather
+frustrating ones where Lara has to escape some labyrinth by pushing
+blocks, while being completely blind to the maze's general structure,
+but those were in the minority.
+
+Shooting is quite honestly pretty bad. For me at least most of the
+shooting involved holding down control (shoot) and alt (jump), while
+pressing left and right alternatively so that Lara would sideflip
+instead of jumping vertically, still facing the enemy, but avoiding
+some of the attacks. There were, however, some improvements in the
+fourth and fifth games, as they presented both some weapons and some
+enemies with the more unique behaviour that required a different
+approach.
+
+Of all the five the first was probably the best game: just the right
+amount of platforming and puzzling with being assaulted by
+(near-)extinct animals in-between. Unfortunately, of the remaining
+only the fourth once again capitalised on that idea with the fifth
+consisting of rather diverse "mini-campaigns," which are also very
+enjoyable. My opinion on the second and third is a bit more mixed:
+both are very well made, but still shift the focus away from puzzling
+and platforming in the direction of shooting various mafiosos and the
+like. And shooting is by far the worst of the three chief activities!
+
+
+REFERENCES
+
+[free] gopher://manpager.net/0/art/free.txt
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+++ art/passwd.txt
+Most of this document is a long version of the
+"correct horse battery staple" [comic]. There are some more
+interesting observations towards the end.
+
+The strength of a passphrase does not derive from it having at least
+one letter, one digit and one special character, but from something
+called "entropy". "Entropy" is this mysterious concept that my
+professors kept telling me about, all the while I would wonder "what
+is an entropy?". In our case we are dealing with "more is better" and
+the formula
+
+ E = log_2(R^L)
+
+where E is entropy, R is the size of the dictionary (a rather
+offputting term, see below) and L is the length of the password. I
+won't be telling how much entropy is needed for a good password:
+calculate that yourself. That formula works if passphrases are
+generated by taking random words from the dictionary. If your
+password is your birthday, the entropy is 1 because the passphrase is
+cracked by answering the question "is it the owner's birthday?".
+
+"Word" here is simply the smallest unit we are dealing with, while a
+dictionary is a list of unique words. English alphabet is a
+dictionary of single-byte words.
+
+There are several ways the vast majority of people make passwords in
+practice: they either use something very simple like their birthday,
+or they use something very hard to remember, yet easy to crack. This
+is further promoted by many sites refusing to take passwords with
+more than e.g. 20 characters &c. The readers may be surprised to read
+from me that the issue lies not with the fact of using such weak
+passwords on its own: unless the attacker has physical access to a
+device, he is usually limited to "n tries per t time". The real
+issues begin with man's faulty memory. Firstly such lack of
+methodology leads to passwords being easily forgotten, which is just
+horrible; secondly, people like this tend to use the same password
+for everything. This means that should one service's security turn
+out to be less-than-optimal (it usually is), all of the other
+accounts become compromised as well.
+
+And quite simply because I am quite tired of hearing stuff like "They
+wouldn't get anything important anyway": no, "they" bloody will,
+unless you consider your bank information, personal information and
+the ability to be the only one to write messages from your name to be
+unimportant.
+
+The solution is to randomly generate passwords, and then store and
+retrieve them using a password manager. There are generally two kinds
+of such passwords: strings of randomly-generated bytes from something
+like [A-Za-z0-9] and sequences of randomly-generated words. I
+strongly prefer the latter, as they may be typed by looking at them
+even when clipboard is unavailable.
+
+Then there is of course the issue of setting up one or more "master"
+passwords. Generally the following _have_ to be memorised: password
+to a normal user on the system, password to the root user, the
+password to the password-manager and passphrases to ssh &c. Since it
+all really ought to be done entirely locally on a single-user system
+(if it isn't, start panicking), there is not much danger in setting
+them to be the same thing. It does, however, have to be something
+strong, memorable and not too complicated to type. One option is to
+generate a passphrase via a normal method and simply memorise it (or
+write it down, unless you live with people you don't trust
+unconditionally). Another method is to make up a few words, not tell
+anyone about the fact and use those.
+
+And now since I mentioned the ssh passphrases, I'd like to also state
+that yes, ssh keys should have passphrases. A possible exception are
+the keys used for things like backups. This should instead be
+restricted to certain users and/or commands. A concern some people
+might have is that it could hurt automation. I say not nearly as much
+as people think. Executing ssh-agent and ssh-add at every login does
+mean typing password twice, but it also means that all those scripts
+could still be run, provided they are started afterwards in the same
+session. OpenBSD's xenodm is already set to run the necessary. On
+platforms that use startx, a wrapper would be simple to write. Other
+DMs should have such functionality (or they should be avoided
+otherwise). If not starting X at all, then executing it from
+~/.profile or similar file is even simpler.
+
+[comic] https://xkcd.com/936/
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+++ art/revolution.txt
+Revolution Software has made a few interesting games, some of which
+I played. I think I might have played Broken Sword once as a child,
+but more thoroughly I familiarised myself with them only much later
+beginning a bit before I started writing my bachelor's diploma and
+ending some time later (I think at least). My recollections of them
+are a bit hazy now that some months have passed, but I'll try to give
+at least a brief overview of my thoughts about the games.
+
+So, what's so interesting about these games? Well, not they
+themselves: I found them to be rather forgettable, actually. What's
+more interesting is that four of them: Lure of the Temptress, Beneath
+a Steel Sky & Broken Sword 1 & 2 can be played via ScummVM, which is
+an open-source engine for many adventure games. More interestingly,
+the first two (not "Swords" unfortunately) have their data files
+distributed gratis for non-commercial purposes as well. It's a shame
+the original engines never got open-sourced, but from the other angle
+this can be viewed as "better than Doom", which still can't be played
+without either buying the necessary data, or sharing it.
+
+As for the reason why they are so forgettable, consider that there
+are generally two types of games: the more classical ones not unlike
+adventure(6) itself, which give the player some game rules and set
+him loose to figure it all out for himself, and the games which try
+to be films. Most of the latter adventure-games, including the ones
+by Revolution are in the latter category. I very rarely watch films,
+and when I do it's mostly Monty Python or something. The reason is
+that unlike books or any "interactive" activities films do not
+require intellectual involvement, instead they promote staleness of
+the mind: they are very much like sleeping without actually getting
+the benefits of doing so. The "game-films" are slightly better in
+this aspect, as they do require at least some involvement from the
+player. Furthermore the "adventure-games" are even better off in this
+aspect, as the player is usually required to perform some creative
+thinking in order to solve the game's puzzles, rather than to do
+something mechanical. Still, the majority of it has been arranged by
+the "director" and the player is the "audience".
+
+Oh, well, here go the games themselves.
+
+
+LURE OF THE TEMPTRESS
+
+I don't really think much of this game and the reasons I dislike it
+seem to align exactly with the features it was marketed for, which is
+hilarious.
+
+So, firstly, almost none of the characters ever remain in a
+predictable position, instead they go around the entire map in a
+randomised manner. This makes it an unnecessarily hard job to find
+the one, which has to be talked to in order to progress the
+storyline. This is worsened further by the fact that at times the
+player is not given so much as a clue on what to do next, and so he
+has to talk to every character in the game in order to find out. That
+last deficiency is also combined with the fact several times
+throughout the game things simply happen without the player being
+given a hint, like a door that was closed the majority of the time
+suddenly opening for no reason in particular.
+
+My last grudge is the UI. "Temptress" was one of the earliest games
+to use an entirely mouse-based interface, yet just like all those
+graphical file-managers it did so relying on the textual idioms.
+Basically the player often has to find-and-click a single verb from
+a couple dozen and then do the same with nouns. The vast majority are
+quite simply unused.
+
+Oh, well, I suppose the characters and graphics are charming.
+
+
+BENEATH A STEEL SKY
+
+Now, this is a much better game. I'll say as much: of all the
+adventure games I've played only this one made any sense. Clues are
+simple enough to come by and the solution that follows mostly makes
+sense. Things don't just happen off-screen and there aren't many
+one-off mechanics. Very solid.
+
+
+BROKEN SWORD 1 & 2
+
+These games people are probably more familiar with than the other
+two. Personally, I liked "Sky" more. It seems that people generally
+find more problems with the game's puzzles than I did, which is as
+much as can be said for the gameplay. They did make some good work on
+the animations, so well done there. Other than that, however, I found
+the games to be pretty average.
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+++ index.gph
+I am Alexander, the insane Unix hacker and owner of alearx.org. To
+know more, please see the README file.
+
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+
+[1|articles|/art/|server|port]
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+[0|feed|/feed.ass|server|port]
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