alaricsp

I set my colleages a challenge: write porn using only prime words.

"WIDEST WOMB WOMAN WATCHED PET PERVERT WHIP BLINDFOLDED YIDDISH BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD RUTTED BLINDFOLDED BITCH"

"BAREBACKED BARD PULVERIZED TRUCKMAN RUTTED TORRID"

"YARDMAN WHIP UNUSED WHELP, TROLLOP SUSPECTED SILKEN RUNT. PUTOUT, PARTED, LAIN. EVALUATED FETISH,EXPENDED. DISINTEREST."

Some highlights:

"Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The mothts will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows"

"When possible, refer all matters to committees, for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committees as large as large as possible - never less than five"

"Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks"

What about OneIS? It's hosted, which isn't for everyone, but it does mean one less thing to worry about. I've used it as an intranet, and it's easy to pick up: http://www.oneis.co.uk/

I couldn't watch it all the way through. It made me feel sick.

Oooh, beautiful...

That rogue-like cave generation algorithm isn't the kind of terrain I'm after, but is nonetheless quite awesome in its results. I'm now wondering if I can find an excuse to involve caverns in my game ;-)

Alas, no :-)

I'd love to find the book again... I bet it's out of print, though. It had lots of detail on modelling damage to tanks, and creating terrain, and working out things like line-of-sight in complex worlds, and I think some basic AI, but had nothing to say about snazzy graphics whatsoever; I think it made some reference to vector displays or something like that ;-)

True, I glossed over my previous research; I didn't think it'd interest people, but you're right, it's wise to show some evidence of your previous attempts before asking for tips...

My googling always just found me more and more ways of generating the height-field data - it's the roads and so on that interest me. I tried tinkering with weighted random walks (eg, given the desire to continue a road from a given point, pick an adjoining cell with a weighting that prioritises having the same altitude and being closest to continuing the existing direction), but this fails to capture things like the fact that roads tend to run along valleys and mountain passes - the hard part, it seems, is in choosing initial points. Likewise, a river can be continued by finding the most downhill adjacent cell, until you find a minimum then starting a flood-fill algorithm to create a lake, until you reach a boundary pixel that "goes downhill", whereupon you can start a new river going down from there - but this fails to realistically account for the widths of rivers (you can just make the river wider as you go down, and sum the width of rivers that meet, but that simple model looks wrong: real rivers are deeper when in narrow canyons and the like).

Perhaps I've just been unlucky ;-) This was Allied Telesyn kit IIRC.

But this is by the by! Rather than a damning indictment of STP, my real point was that having to configure all the layers of a network - physical cabling, VLANs, routing, firewalling - independently involves a load of effort that I'm not convinced is necessary. It'd be lovely to have routing functions occur in every switch, automatically routing between VLANs that are present together on the switch, and then doing MPLS-esque fast switching of frames across the network to destination switches if not - merging the switching and routing layers of the stack would just simplify things; why should we need the complex techniques we have to make networks resilient to failure?

Sorry about the bad grammar :-)

Ok, the deal with STP and VLANs is thus: STP works at the level of the actual Ethernet cables in the system, rather than the VLANs.

Imagine you have four switches, A B C and D. Say vlan 1 exists on A and B; vlan 2 on C and D, and vlan 3 on all four, and physical cables (carrying tagged VLANs) run from A-B (vlans 1 and 3), A-C (just vlan 3), B-D (just vlan 3), and C-D (vlans 2 and 3); eg, they're in a square. And you enable STP.

STP will cause the switches (ignoring VLANs) to choose one of those four cables to disable, to remove the cycle in the network. It's as likely to disable the A-B or C-D cables, which will then split vlan 1 or 3 in half.

The solution is to make all VLANs present on all switches and (tagged) on all inter-switch trunks, so that any cable can be disabled and connectivity continues; there are extensions to STP that are aware of VLANs (such as the Cisco proprietary per-VLAN spanning tree); there's the recent (2003?) Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP), but that's not supported by the switches I've been playing with, so useless to me at least :-)

This issue is dear to my heart, too, as a hobbyist programming language designer myself ;-)

I've never seen it as a route to income in itself - but it can do so indirectly. My project, ARGON (http://www.argon.org.uk/) is all about reinventing the platform we build software on - OS, programming language, libraries, file system, network protocol - purely because the current technologies we use are hampered by backward compatibility and poorly integrated; I think it'd be a good thing for the world to start again from scratch (and deal with compatibility at a higher level).

So I've thought more about how I might possibly make my hobby pay for itself. I think that an entire platform might well be successful as an embedded platform, as there's much less motivation for compatibility and a familiar programming environment in that market. In the workstation and server worlds, however, I think such a platform pretty much has to be open source, or it'll never be adopted by hackers who want something to play with. Then the usual open-source tricks will apply: selling boxed sets with manuals and 'enterprise tools' in, support contracts, commercial redistribution licenses, etc.

Getting rich by writing a book and general fame/glory leading to speaking engagements, however, is right out ;-)