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The IHK Exams and Big Update Dump

Tuesday, June 5, 2018
 
 
<tl;dr>: In February of 2017 I started a training program for software development and planning, financed by the German government and administrated through the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK). I turned in my project thesis on April 14th and took four hours of exams on April 25th. Today I received the results from my exams and I have managed a passing grade. I still have my project presentation on the 28th of June. If I pull off good grades on the thesis and presentation, I will be award my career diploma as a software developer. A career diploma is something between an AA degree and a BA in America.</tl;dr>.
 
Don’t you hate it when someone posts their tl;dr at the bottom, making you leaf through the whole thing before you get to it? The point of a tl;dr is to shoot out your summary and save people time: an abstract doesn’t come at the end of white paper…So, if you want the details, keeping reading. It’s story time again from the land of Phipponia. But, I’m just as happy if you wish me well and say something nice, like “way to go, man! We knew you could do it…whatever it is.” That’s cool too. There will not be quiz at the end of this post.
 
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to put up some articles here for a while. I’ve been reading some great books and have plenty to talk about, but I’ve been really busy. Here’s why.  This whole becoming a software developer thing has been a long term plan, hatched way back in 2007. After starting my career in IT in 2004, 3 years later I realized that what I really wanted was to get into software development. And so, I hatched an extended plan. I recognized that a lot of software developer folks are good at coding, but don’t know a whole lot about the machines and systems their code runs on (e.g. TCP/IP networks or Server farms); don’t get me wrong, this isn’t across the board, but it’s a trend. You don’t have to know the finer points of routing tables, TCP ports, or server load balancing, to learn to write effective code in Java, or Javascript, or Python. All that stuff is being taken care of for you by layers and layers of abstraction; so, if you don’t need to know it in detail, why waste your time? But, what if you DID have a really good grounding in these things? That would make you an even better developer, right?
 
So, I decided to start my path toward development by getting a good foundation in network admin, sys admin, and hardware architectures first. And I worked for a long time as a sys admin/network engineer in Seattle. I got my A+, Net+, and Cisco Certified Network Associate certificates and then went on to do a year long training program at the University of Washington in Open-Source OSs. I got to point where I felt I had a good foundation with this stuff. But I had another plan too: one to move back to Europe and specifically to Berlin. I knew that in order to make my resume saleable in a European market, I would need all those certs and more. Europeans — at least the French and the Germans — won’t take you seriously unless you have lots of diplomas and certifications. I wanted to be a Software Developer that could speak multiple languages, not just the programming ones; so I got certs in French and German too, documenting my abilities with these languages.
 
In 2012 I made my decision to move to Berlin and give this plan a try. For the first four years I lived here, I struggled to find work, being forced to fall back on sys admin stuff. After my last company fell apart, I was in the unemployment office and my case worker asked me, “what do you want to do?” To which I immediately replied, “become a software developer.” “Alright then, you’ll need job retraining. Go to this Job Counseling Center and try to find a Training Center you like. We’ll have another appointment in two weeks.”
 
I did what she asked, and figured out some possible options. Due to my resume, the training provider, BBQ, said that I could do their program in 14 months instead of the required 24. I was able to quickly arrange it through the unemployment office and I got a seat at BBQ. The state paid for the whole thing and gave me unemployment benefits too while I went through the program.
 
I started in February of 2017 and my first class was Economics and Social Law. You see, it’s not enough to learn how to code in Germany, you need to learn several planning and project management methodologies as well as the basics of German civil law and economic theory — just the very basics, mind you — but still challenging when German is your third language. I should also mention, by the way, that this whole thing is in German, and German at a professional level. After seven months of classes, I went into an internship at PARIS AG and worked through a project. Finally we come to March of 2018.
 
The internship was done. I had put the project into a thesis document which was due on April 14th. Thanks to a lot of good friends, I was able to take my horrible, dumpster fire of a paper and turn it into proper German. I made the deadline. But then I had the exams…
 
For most of April I cracked the books as hard as I could. When I started taking the first practice tests, I was consistently failing. First, these exams don’t really reflect reality; they’re way more about theory and best practices and don’t have much to do with the way real tech projects are run. This means that not much of my 12 years of work experience in IT was very helpful. Second, the exams were not in my native language (duh!) and there were culture pieces missing too for Civil Law and Economics. I put everything I could into the test prep, and I saw my grades starting to improve from the practice exams. Slowly it seemed that passing was probably a given, but would I pass with a C (in the German system a 3) instead of a D? These grades, after all, would appear on the diploma itself.
 
The day before the exam, I went to the testing location, making sure I had a good idea of how long it would take to get there from my apartment. And then I went home, went for a run, and tried to get some sleep. At 8AM the next day, I was sitting at the desk marked with my name in an auditorium with a couple hundred other test takers. This was it: the moment of truth, or the hour of glory…as my dad used to say.
 
The next day I went back to my internship. All the IHK communication I had received said that I wouldn’t know the results until the day of the presentation. I resigned myself to not knowing. I had a good feeling about it, but I wasn’t sure about the economics test. I spent the ride home tallying the questions in my head, trying to work out how many I was sure were right and if I had enough to make the 50 points necessary. I felt like I had done well, but you can never be sure, especially when things are in another language. I had seen this enough on the practice tests where I had gotten questions completely wrong because I thought I had understood the question when in fact, I had not. Time passed.
 
So, today, I had to go back to BBQ; we are suppose to be preparing our presentations for the entire month of June. Due to a bureaucratic screw up, the training program ends on the 8th of June for me; so, I will have to do a lot of the prep on my own, and, when I say on my own I mean with all the love and support from all the great friends I’ve made in Berlin who can give me a hand with the German and allow me to get some practice giving the presentation. It only needs to be 15 minutes after all with an additional 15 minute oral defense. Man, presenting my undergraduate thesis at Whitman to a room full of people was about 15 minutes. I’ve been making presentations for a lot of my career and I’m not scared of this…at least not too scared. But, when I got to BBQ, they told me that the exam results were available from the IHK’s online portal. I rushed home filled with jitters. What if I didn’t pass? What if I failed the Econ? I wouldn’t be totally hosed, but I WOULD need to retake whatever I failed six months from now, and you only get two tries at this. Fail twice and there won’t be a third time. As the SBahn crept along the track through Jungfernheide, Beussler Strasse, Westhafen, Wedding, Gesundbrunnen, and finally Schoenhauser Alle, I sat there desperately trying to control my breathing, desperately trying to keep my calm, preparing for success or defeat. It is moments like this that you see your measure. It is in moments like this where you meet who you really are.
 
The train finally pulled into my station and I got home and into the apartment, climbing the stairs and knowing that all of this would be imprinted on my memory for years to come. This is the day where I would learn if my effort bore fruit and what kind of fruit it was. I got into my apartment, sat down at my laptop and typed the IHK URL into my browser. After logging into the site, I found my scores:
 

You’ve got to click it to see see the results, but it says GA1 75, GA2 70 and WISO 82 for a total of 75 which comes to a 3.

 
This was the best outcome I could have hoped for; a 1 or 2 wouldn’t be realistic, but a 3 was possible. And I had achieved it. A 3 is nothing to crow about, really — It basically a C — but to go from failing to 4 to 3, and when you know that those grades are going to appear on the diploma itself, well there’s a pretty big dog in that fight to get something decent. And, somehow, I had done just that. I had gotten the grade I needed with the added bonus of a 2 (or a B) in Econ and Civil Law. That’s the thing that really gets me; I was sure that I had barely squeaked by on that one.
 
So, that’s the state of Walterdom and the noble land of Phipponia: I’m weeks away from the last piece in this puzzle and then I will have the degree that should open doors as I continue to become the best software developer I can. I start my new job on Monday the 11th of June with the company that I interned for. As my dad probably would have said to me, were he around to hear this news, “well, son! Sometimes the sun shines, even on a dog’s ass.” Amen to that!
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more soon.
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George Dyson’s “Turing’s Cathedral”

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Douglas Adams once famously observed:

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

When John von Neumann and his team invented the first stored program computer, MANIAC, and successfully ran it in March 1952, my birth was some 24 years and seven months in the future. Stored program computers — like telephones, television, and running water — were just “a natural part of the way the world works.” No biggie. It is very easy to forget that the systems we have today didn’t descend fully made from the heavens, and it’s also easy to take these large evolutionary steps for granted too. I feel that our ability to understand a complex, human made, system — like a computer — is greatly increased when we can develop a context for it: what were the people who made this thing trying to accomplish? How did they choose this particular solution? Were there other ways of doing it, and this one won out? Another word for this “context” is simply History. So, in reading Dyson’s book, I’d hope to increase my contextual knowledge of this massive step in the evolution of the computer and information theory.

What is a stored program computer? A stored program computer is a device for which the data AND the instructions that operate on that data are stored and manipulated in the same medium. Before stored program computers, machines had to be completely reconfigured in hardware to do other tasks: there was no software, just hardware. So, machines like ENIAC needed a great deal of downtime if you wanted to execute some other application. By storing the data AND the instructions in the same place with the same stuff — basically as electric charge in RAM — you suddenly had machines that could write and execute their own new instructions based on a beginning state. You suddenly had software. You suddenly had a general computer that could attack however many tasks your code could dream up. And, as we’ve seen, software is actually what makes computing devices amazing and powerful. The “killer app” is what makes you a ton of money, and not the “killer machine”. There is only a very small pool of people who know what a general purpose, stored program computer is capable of and how to take advantage of it; for the rest of us, such a machine is totally worthless without software to run on it.

Dyson’s book starts with the creation of the Institute for Advance Study (IAS) at Princeton and provides a biopic of all the players, as the team brought MANIAC into being. There a lot about John von Neumann, of course, but also other members of the team who made the thing possible, like Julian Bigelow who actually solved the physical engineering problems on the project. The technical nitty-gritty is absent, but I think that Dyson, like Jason Scott in “BBS: the Documentary”, is trying to give us the faces of this period. Who were these people? What were they like? What were they trying to accomplish? I would have enjoyed more of the tech details, but it was still a good read, and I could recommend it to anyone interested in the subject, even if they don’t have a strong tech background. You don’t have to be an engineer to enjoy this one.

If your interest is piqued, but don’t have the time to read the book, here’s a 17 minute lecture from Dyson that sums up the contents of the book nicely.

 

 

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Quick and Dirty PHP Lab:

Sunday, February 22, 2015
IBM7094

“Hey Bill, load the PHP 5 tapes on bank 4. Maybe it will be ready by tomorrow morning…”

New Employer: “How much do you know about PHP? We’re going to need you to work with PHP and Symfony.”

Me: “Give me the weekend and I’ll get back to you on Monday.”

Sometimes you need to learn things quickly and that involves setting up a lab to read documentation, execute tutorials, and experiment with ideas. The great thing about open source is that learning materials are readily available. Taking what I had on hand, I cobbled together a PHP lab over the weekend. Now, to be clear, I’m not defining π here; the lab I’m about to describe isn’t complicated for anyone with a basic understanding of networking and system administration. But I was pretty proud of getting it up and running with minimal effort. I have to admit that I felt a wave of satisfaction once I saw it working. It was one of those, “huh! I guess I’m not an idiot after all,” moments. So, let’s take a look at this thing.

Objective: develop skills with PHP

PHP, for those who don’t know, is a general purpose scripting language that can do a lot of things, but is mostly used to execute server-side tasks. So, if we are going to learn anything about it, we need to have a web server first for a web client to query content from. This server and client need to be able to get to each other across a network. With a LAN, server, and client in place, we should have a functioning PHP lab.

Requirements: web server running PHP, web client with a browser, Local Area Network

php-lab

Here are the physical components. Most important is the Vim coffee mug: a gift from a dear friend.

Running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my laptop means that getting a web server up and running isn’t difficult. In fact, the web server Apache appears to be running by default and serving content from the directory /var/www/html. Using the package manager Apt-get, I ran through a basic LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) installation guide which installed PHP 5 and MySQL. Then, I created a phpinfo() file at /var/www/html/phpinfo.php and successfully tested that PHP was working. I also downloaded the PHP manual in the form of an HTML document and placed it at /var/www/html/phpmanual on my web server. The web server is good to go.

Using my tablet as the web client doesn’t require any effort: the browser software is already installed. But, I DO need to have LAN for the client and server to talk to each other over; this is a bit trickier because I don’t have much in the way of traditional networking resources in my apartment. But I do have a cell phone, and that cell phone supports creating a wi-fi hotspot which is basically a wireless LAN. So, I turned off data to my mobile provider because once the laptop, or tablet, saw that it had a gateway to the outside world, they would try to run all kinds of update processes over the Internet—checking for email and such—and this would have clobbered my poor pre-paid data connection.

php-lab-diagram

Here’s a logical diagram of the lab, picture being worth a thousands words and all. Notice that the cell phone is acting as a wireless switch; it’s handling all traffic between web server and client.

Once the hotspot was active, I connected the laptop and tablet to the network. Then, the moment of truth, I fired up the browser and pointed it toward the laptop, using the URL http://192.168.43.203/phpmanual and…it worked! The PHP manual sprang up on my tablet. Some times a hack is satisfying, no matter how small.

The tablet is serving two purposes here: 1) it is acting as a second monitor so that I don’t have to switch between any applications on the laptop, and 2) it allows me to test PHP scripts served from the laptop. On the laptop I have two windows open: 1) a BASH shell running Vim, and 2) Anki for writing up note cards. I’ve blogged about Anki before here, if you’d like to know more.

A brief defense of Vim: Okay, I’m not one of those people that defends my text editor with religious fervor. “Always use the right tool for the right job”, is what I say. If Notepad does what you need, cool. If you really like Emacs, knock yourself out. I like to use Vim for one simple reason: if you want to keep your Sys Admin skills sharp, you should be using Vim. The Vim learning curve is steep…really steep; it goes far beyond user unfriendly. For anyone who doesn’t know that I’m talking about, Vim is a text editor that allows you to create a plain text document. Pretty basic stuff. The thing about Vim, though, is that it was written back in the bad old days before the Graphical User Interface(GUI). Vim doesn’t know what a mouse is, and it doesn’t care. So, this means that in order to use it with any proficiency, you have to master a whole load of cryptic key commands to move the cursor around the screen or execute operations. So, why use it? Well, when you’re a Sys Admin, you’re going to have to log into all kinds of servers, of all ages and OSs, and most of the time you won’t have a GUI available. Because Vim is so old and standard, you can be sure it will be available on any Unix or Linux system you happen upon, no matter how old, big, or small. So, I like to keep my Vim skills sharp and use it whenever I can. Even if it makes life a little harder.

Praxis: The proof is in the puffing, as they say. With the lab in place, I fire up the browser on the tablet and navigate to the PHP manual. While reading through the manual, I can write up note cards in Anki for later review. When I get to the point of actually trying out PHP scripts, I create a directory for the test scripts on the web server at /var/www/html/phptest. Suppose I want to write your typical PHP, “Hello World”, script—not sure why, but every tutorial out there kicks things off with a “Hello World” script; at this point, it’s tradition—first, I fire up my text editor and write the script in the phptest directory; after I’ve saved the script, I open a new tab of Firefox on the tablet, navigate to http://192.168.43.203/phptest/helloworld.php, and see if it worked; I can then continue to modify the script on the laptop, save again, and refresh the page on the tablet to immediately see the results.

Conclusion: In less time than it took me to write this article, I was able to build a great learning resource with freely available software and technology that I already had. This is what I love about tech in general and open source projects in particular: everything you need to learn it and use it is just sitting there, waiting to be uncovered. PHP first came into the world in 1994, at the dawn of the web and browsers; Rasmus Lerdorf, the original author, cobbled together some tools to help him track the statistics of his on-line resume. And, when Mr. Lerdorf decided to publish the code to the world, the world ran with it. 19 years later, a guy like me can access tons of great documentation, painlessly install the software, and start learning the language in a weekend with no outside help, without having to pay a dime. All I need is patience and the motivation to learn.

We usually focus on the negative aspects of the Internet: trolling, cyberbulling, criminals with their scams; we don’t often talk about this amazing global community of people who work hard and then give their work away because they want knowledge to be free. Just think about that for a minute.

 

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The Hacker Crackdown: Bruce Sterling’s 1992 book from a 2015 perspective

Saturday, February 7, 2015
Hackcrackcov

Cover of the 1993 edition

Bruce Sterling wrote, “The Hacker Crackdown”, in 1992 and published it as an ebook; let’s remember that this was before there were browsers and the Internet was mostly an academic domain. In order to read this ebook, you would have to find it available on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) and downloaded it as a file to your local machine, then read it through the text editor of your choice, and not on your tablet or phone…because those didn’t exist yet. Maybe if you were really cutting edge, you might have read it on your DD8 Data Diskman that you had picked up for a steal for 900 bucks…in 92 dollars. The central event explored in “Hacker Crackdown” consists of a nation wide AT&T phone outage that occurred on January 15th, 1990 and the subsequent action taken by AT&T and the American government, culminating in Operation Sundevil which was basically a witch hunt.

 

Last night, due to a bought of insomnia, I pulled up this historical document on my tablet and read the first 200 pages. I’ve never really cared for Sterling’s science fiction, but this piece of journalism is amazing. As I was reading through it, I kept wondering who his audience was: how did he imagine his reader. He is obviously biased toward the young “hackers” who were being targeted, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned by the US government, and refers to the tech unsavy, politically conservative adversaries of these young people as “straights”. So why do we get explanations of basic concepts: what “cyberspace” is; history of the word “hacker”; the basic concept of how a telephone exchange routes calls, and why a fully computerized switching system would be superior to a human operated one; what a BBS is and how it works, etc.? One would assume that his audience would know these things, and that the “straights” wouldn’t be part of his audience. Who was buying this book when it came out, or downloading it and reading it on their computer? Wouldn’t they know what a BBS was since they just used one to get access to the book?

At first glance, it might seem like Sterling made the mistake of shooting too wide, trying to please everyone with his piece of reportage. But we live in a time now where a lot people don’t know what a BBS is, let alone ever used one. (side note: check out the BBS documentary to learn more about that). The focus of the tech-biosphere has switched away from telephones and telephony: these technologies still exist, but they are no longer the focus. Our view and praxis of how we communicate with each other is radically different. And THAT is exactly what makes this such a great historical perspective: an in-depth discussion that assumes you have little to no context for the events on the table. Just check out this description of what cyberspace is:

Cyberspace

This is what cyberspace looks like, right?

“A science fiction writer [William Gibson in “Neuromancer”] coined the useful term “cyberspace” in 1982, but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the “place” where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, in some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.”

 

information-super-highway-1-728

Oh, the 90’s

Now, “Cyberspace” pretty much went to the same place as “the Information Super-highway”: people who didn’t really understand what they were talking about kept throwing it around until the people who DID know what they were talking about stopped using for fear of sounding like the former. But I love this definition, and I think it’s still relevant. In fact, I would say that we have shifted from spending a rather limited amount of time in cyberspace to spending the majority of our time in cyberspace. Every time you take your cell phone out of your pocket to check email, social media, text messages, or just launch a mobile browser to google something, you are transported from the place you are physically into cyberspace. The physical space has switched from mandatory to optional. Bored with standing in line at the grocery store? Off to cyberspace. No longer the part of a conversation at a dinner party? Off to cyberspace. As a guess, I bet we collectively spend more time in cyberspace, than we do in meat space. In “The Hacker Crackdown” we get a great exploration into what people were thinking about cyberspace in 1992, but from our 2015 perspective. Just for that, it’s worth your time. I’m not sure were media scholars, or the academic people who think about things like this, have gone with this theme, but it seems like the public discussion has become quieter as the novelty of the technology has worn off, and the Internet is increasingly seen like running water, or electricity: technologies that few people understand, and that require massive amounts of engineering expertise to build and maintain, but that most take for granted. In Sterling’s work we get a glimpse of what this connectivity looked like at the beginning.

As a collective society, we no longer see hackers as hyper-intellegent adolescents bent on anarchy and destruction. The day of putting a 16 year old kid in solitary confinement for 6 months because the judge has been convinced that said kid could start world war III from a payphone are, thankfully, behind us. The idea of hacker has morphed more into the Nigerian scammer, or the off-shore identity thief. Internet technologies are no longer as difficult to use or operate as BBSs. The “global voice for everyone” that Sterling talks about in reference to BBSs is here with the web and in a way that Sterling only got a glimmer of. Look! I’m using it right now! It IS a little humorous to hear him gushing about the BBS as a publishing platform when I can publish content from my phone that is far easier to consume than BBS text files; and I’m sure that Sterling would be the first to laugh. He loves dead media. But, if you’re interested in that weird boundary period–that twilight between the pre-connected, mass media, one-way-push from producer to consumer world, and the one we currently inhabit of constant connectivity and a flood of content from everyone who has access to a computer and network connection–then I suggest you take the time to read this gem. You can find it on Project Gutenberg here. If you would like to learn more about the term “hacker” and how it was co-opted to represent a certain sub-set of society, check out Jason Scott’s page about the subject here.

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“Digital: a love story”–more an “experience” than a “game”

Friday, September 12, 2014
digital-welcome

When you start “Digital: a love story” you are greeted with this welcome screen for the “Amie Workbench” which was inspired be the original Amiga GUI.

“Digital: a love story” is one of those pieces of media that was a long time in coming; it now has a whole personal story wrapped up in its discovery, initial experience, dormant phase, and subsequent completion. If you’ll indulge me, let me tell you a tale that spans 4 years. I’ll try to keep it short…I promise.

In 2010, Cory Doctorow posted a very short review on BoingBoing about “Digital”; Dan Kaminsky brought the experience, or visual novel, or game, or whatever you want to call it, to his attention. Having had a little taste of the BBS world in the early 90s, it piqued my interest. I downloaded it and played around for about ten minutes, thought it was neat, and then went on to do something else. As Jason Scott says about text adventures in his tech talk for “Get Lamp”, “a lot of people start the game up and say, ‘this is awesome!’; and then, fifteen minutes later, ‘look at this youtube video!’ And the story’s over.” And so it was with my first encounter with “Digital”.

Then four years and five months went by. In that time, I discovered Jason Scott’s BBS documentary and, to be honest, watched it many times. I became very interested in this chunk of history and learned who all the players were: from Ward Christensen, the co-inventor of the BBS, to the leaders of the ANSI art groups ACiD and iCE, to Fidonet and its founder Tom Jennings. Basically, I accumulated all the background info I need to appreciate “Digital”. As I mentioned, I did get a taste back in the day–I knew people who ran boards, played around a little with ANSI, and played some of the games like “Legend of the Red Dragon” or “Ursurper”–but it was all pretty limited. I never did anything with Fidonet, nor was I sysop myself. Last week, I was hanging out in my local coffee shop and chatting with my friend Holden about Inform7 and text adventures. He mentioned his interest in visual novels and brought up “Digital”. The memory came back across time; “oh yeah! I played around with that and it was pretty neat. Maybe I should finish it.” A quick Google search later, and I had the Linux version on my hard drive. Last night, I finally fired up “Digital” with the intention of playing it to the end, and proceeded to have my mind blown.

digital-ansi

The ANSI home screen of “The Matrix” BBS. Notice the baud rates, sysop name, and other nice touches. Click on the picture to get a better look.

So, the basic plot of “Digital” presents the player as a new user who has just received an Amie computer with a modem. On the desktop, you find a message program with an entry from Mr. Wong waiting for you; Mr. Wong has helpfully provided you with a dialer program and the number of a local BBS. You dial up the first number, hear the nostalgic modem mating call, and dive into the message boards. The experience unfolds as you read through messages and uncover the trail of bread crumbs that lead you to the next chunk of narrative. There are only a few points in which you have to combine a couple pieces of information to determine a third piece of information that will allow the story to progress; the bulk of the game is reading the messages that tell an advancing story. This is why I call it an experience, and less a game; unlike an adventure game, text or otherwise, where you have to find the key to a series of locked doors that provides access to the next thing, this experience’s narrative unfolds more like a book which requires the reader to cross-reference different sources (i.e. the different BBSs you can dial into). There are a few puzzles, but puzzles are not the center of this thing, the heart of “Digital” is spinning a  tale and providing the BBS experience of 1988.

sector001

Described in “Digtial” as “the fastest node in the Fidonet”, Sector 001 is pretty old-school for a game that is supposed to be set in old-school. Notice, though, the Fidonet address in the bottom right hand corner: 1:255/32.0

“20 Minutes into the Future” was the title of the “Max Headroom” pilot: it presented a cyberpunk inspired future that is so familiar for the 80s: giant corporations creating dystopias and the street finding uses for discarding technologies. The idea of “20 minutes into the future” has even become a defined TV Trope regarding fiction set in a near future (follow this link at your own risk…TV Tropes can eat whole days of your life). When Doctorow described “Digital” as a game set “10 minutes into the future” he correctly places it into what is now future-of-the-past near future cyberpunk aesthetic. Love makes several references to cyberpunk through the game. But, it’s all the little things from the BBS era that get me. These are all safe to reveal because they aren’t really important to the story: there’s a character named Ward which is a reference to Ward Christensen whom I’ve already mentioned; dialing into BBSs using the old style local numbers with exchange and end point–i.e. 555-1212–which is long gone in the North American dial plan; references to “Hackers” which, though technically not 80’s, did take a lot from the late 80’s hacking scene; the tone of some of the flame nonsense is also perfect; having to use stolen calling card codes to make long distance calls which I may, or may not, have done as a youth; and, finally, the mention of Fidonet as well as a real Fidonet address, tucked in there. As the end credits rolled and a thanks to www.textfiles.com, ,which is run by Jason Scott, flashed up, I let out a squeaky cry at 12:04 in the morning; “sad”, or “cool”, I’ll let you decided…but the answer is “cool”.

To sum it all up, if you’re interested in living through a simulation of a time that you didn’t get to experience and you like reading narratives, check it out; if you lived through the BBS era and would like a trip down memory lane, check it out. If neither of those statements describe you, then, as Mr. Scott says, “check out this youtube video!”

Here’s a link to Christine Love’s website where you can get “Digital: a love story” as well as read about the author in her own words or check out other stuff she’s done: Link.

Filed in Allgemein, Future of the Past, heros, Interactive Fiction, Neat Systems, science-fiction | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Presenting Mr. Reed

Sunday, August 31, 2014
aaronareed_biopic

Aaron Reed’s pic from his website

I’ve already written a few posts about Inform 7: it’s a powerful tool for creating interactive fiction that has a very low cost to entry. But, it’s also very complex and DOES have a learning curve. Yes, you can make a playable game by compiling the single line of source text: “The Kitchen is a room;” it would be a boring game with one room and nothing to do, but it would be a game. Inform comes with great documentation that’s pretty friendly, but still kind of hard to plow through.  Enter Aaron Reed from stage left: deus ex ludico!

Aaron Reed is an accomplished IF author. You can check out his website here. He’s added several titles to the IF canon, and written some extensions for Inform 7. He also appears in “Get Lamp” by Jason Scott (see previous post). But, for me, Reed’s great contribution to IF is writing “Creating Interactive Fiction for Inform 7”. This book is completely amazing.

creating_interactive_fiction_with_inform_7-coverReed assumes that his audience are pure beginners and may not know what IF is, let alone Inform 7. He starts right from the beginning and gives the reader an objective: “okay, we’re going to write a game from scratch using Inform 7; you’re going to see how it works from beginning principles to increasingly complex ideas and concepts and I’m going to provide you with best practices along the way.” The game is called “Sand-Dancer” and tells the story of a protagonist on a voyage of self-discovery through a landscape of Native American inspired myth. I should point out that, being Native American myself, it’s always mildly weird when authors try to use “Native American” tropes. “Native American” is a really vague term that encompasses so many distinct peoples, languages, and cultures. But that’s a screed for a different day, and I haven’t found the tropes here offensive; in fact, I think they are very well handled. The story itself deals with very real problems I’ve seen on reservations first hand.

At this point, I’m 148 pages in and have just gotten to the good part where he gets into puzzle construction and allowing the player to really interact with the world. I’m totally hooked. If you are trying to learn Inform 7, I can’t recommend this book enough. Here’s where you can get it on Amazon: Link. If you’d like to play some of Mr. Reed’s games here’s a bunch of them on the IFDB: Link. You will need an interpreter, of course.

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Jason Scott: a man you should know…if you don’t already

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

jason-scottI initially found out about Jason Scott from Jimmy Maher’s blog The Digital Antiquarian–another guy who will get his own post shortly. Maher mentioned Scott’s text adventure documentary, “Get Lamp.” I found it on Youtube, and was immediately hooked. When you have 2 hours to invest in something cool, you can find it here. Jason Scott considers himself a computer historian and is involved in making documentaries about recent computing history, as well as various efforts to archive what we have today with things like Archive Team, and the Internet Archive. He’s incredibly passionate and smart about what he does and really well spoken. At this point, I’ve listened to hours of his talks which you can find on his blog. Everything he does is creative commons; so, it tends to be widely available. It’s so rare to meet people who are genuinely into what they do; but, when you do find those people, they provide such a breath of fresh air. It’s so easy to get cynical and think that everything is just a cash grab; it’s good to know that people like Scott are out there, driven to make cool stuff and with little regard for reward.

I highly recommend checking out his blog here, or taking a look at his BBS era collection of text files here. He put together a mini series about BBSs over the course of four years, and you can find it on Youtube, here’s the first episode. He also did a great film about Defcon itself which you can find here. One of my favorite talks he gave at Defcon deals with making tech documentaries: it’s pretty inspiring stuff and you can find it here. The highest point for me is when he says, “Perfect is impossible! Something IS possible! Do something!” So right! I often get trapped in the quest for perfect. If you’re reading this Mr. Scott, thank you for all your efforts; you have provided hours of education and inspiration.

 

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“Rick and Morty”

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

rick-and-mortyI was watching the Philosophy Tube’s channel on youtube the other day, and saw his episode on “Rick and Morty” as an argument against Scientism: Link

The media landscape that I live in is a little constrained: I don’t have a TV or access to cable, and tend to avoid mainstream programming. This is not to say  that I don’t have guilty pleasures: there are more than enough bad sci-fi films on youtube to keep me entertained– “Mutant Hunt” anyone? But, I hadn’t run into “Rick and Morty” before seeing this piece. It got me interested.

“Rick and Morty” is very much for adults: it’s dark, violent, and often handles sexual themes. But it’s also incredibly funny, or at least I think so. It follows a standard straight man formula–Rick Sanchez, a scientific genius–who is surrounded by people of limited intelligence. It’s kind of like “Blackadder” where the titular character is the only sane and intelligent character in the story. But, to call Rick Sanchez “sane” would be to use that word in a way not normally accepted: he is a functioning alcoholic and capable of profound acts of cruelty.

The story-lines are incredibly creative and engaging: take the episode where Rick makes Morty a love potion that proceeds to destroy the world. The jokes are infectious; I find myself quoting the series in everyday interactions…often to blank stares. And there’s an arc that goes through the whole series that deals with trauma and healing. Through the series we see Morty becoming increasingly traumatized, but, in the last episode, we discover that there’s a depth to Rick that we may not have suspected.

If you like dark humour, wacky sci-fi, with a well thought-out  narrative under current, I highly recommend you give “Rick and Morty” a go. For those of you in the states, you can watch the first season on the main website–check it here–and for those of you outside the USA, you can find it here.

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Berlin Mini Game Jam, July 2014

Sunday, July 27, 2014

berlin-game-jam-logo Once a month three guys throw the Mini Game Jam; it’s basically an 8 hour workshop with the purpose of creating a game from scratch. It starts with a get-to-know-you exercise: every participant is given five pieces of paper with the same number printed on each; the goal is to talk to five different people and exchange numbers. Theme’s are proposed before hand through Meetup, and then voted on by all the participants through a dedicated website. You can vote three ways: like, dislike, indifferent. Here’s what came to the top yesterday:

– local multi player!
– crossing the desert
– Games with procedural created stages. In general, games that aren’t the same if you play them again.

Coming in at fourth was the theme I suggested, “Alone in the Dark”. So close, and yet so far…I really wanted to do some kind of Lovecrafty story.

silenced-voices-notes

Anyone who has ever played a text adventure knows what this is: the standard mapping system of players everywhere.

Per my last post, I wanted to try to do a text adventure with Inform. I selected “crossing the desert” and decided to place my story in a post-apocalyptic setting. I brain stormed for about an hour by myself and had come up with some rough ideas for a couple of puzzles and story line in an environment of some 14 locations. I was sitting by myself in a corner and had most of the design dialed in, when one of the participants walked up to me and explained that he was late in showing up and hadn’t found a team yet. I told him that I was working on a text adventure and that it probably wouldn’t be very interesting, but I’d be more than happy to show him what I had come up with so far and show him the tools I was using. As I explained the story and showed him Inform, he got into it and wanted to work with me. We started exchanging ideas and the game design got better and more focused.

Then we sat down and started coding. I set up a repo on github for the game, so that we could each work on parts and merge them. We broke down the task into smaller parts with the first objective to get all the rooms in place and make sure that they were connected properly. By the end of the game jam, we had a working environment that you could move through as designed and a few objects that you could interact with.

At 21:00, the Jam was declared over and the teams gave presentations of what they’ve done. It was pretty amazing what people were able to do with a typical work day. Some of the titles were just as good as anything that came out in the 80’s: titles that people paid money for. A lot of the participants used a platform called Unity to build their projects. I’ll have to learn more about that. It was really cool to see the creativity and skill.

ye-dungeon

“And you just have to imagine why on Earth you can’t get ye flask…”

Lessons learned: a lot of time was wasted fighting with Github and Inform7 due to simple beginner mistakes. We were struggling to bring the story to life because we didn’t know enough about our tools. I really need to sit down and learn Inform better so that the technical side becomes more of an aid than a hindrance. Next time, I’d like to be able to come up with a design, implement it, and then publish it as a browser playable game. Then I could pitch the game in the presentation and, if anyone is interested in playing it, they can do so. Presenting a text adventure is a little challenging: there are no pretty graphics to look at.

So, here’s what would be on the back of the box if my text adventure was finished and on store shelves in the 80’s.

 

“Silenced Voices”post-apocalypse

In the ashes of the aftermath, every man does what he must to survive. Slowly, settlements have come back from the brink and opened trade routes across the desolate waste land, bringing needed goods across the dangerous landscape. As a caravan guard, you knew the dangers. But danger means money, and the need for the one out weighed the fear of the other.

They came out of nowhere on the 13th day. Ambush! In the middle of the fight, your gun jammed and, when you took cover to try and fix it, an explosion went off, taking away consciousness. You don’t know how much time has passed, but, when you finally woke up, you find yourself alone in the ruins of a battle field. Nothing of value remains. You have no food and no water. Can you find your way to provisions and make it back home?

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Inform 7 and Text Adventures

Sunday, July 20, 2014

inform7-logoI’m actually a little to young to have experienced the full wonder that was the Text Adventure era; being born in 1976, I could kind of understand what was happening in any given text adventure, but I didn’t really have the patience required to really interact with them. As Don Woods says in Jason Scott’s brilliant documentary, “Get Lamp”:

“You didn’t go into “Zork” to play; you went into “Zork” to do battle.”

Those early games were very unforgiving: they tended to kill the player a lot, and size limitations meant that a typical Infocom title would equal about a 30 page novella. We were standing at the beginning of the question of narrative in video games: what kind of stories can you tell with this medium? What were the advantages and limitations? If you’re interested in history, check out “Get Lamp“; it’s worth your time.

Last month, I went to the Berlin Mini Game Jam where people interested in making any kind of game–video games, board games, card games, they are all represented–meet up and try to make a game prototype in 8 hours. I knew that there were developer platforms out there to make text adventure authorship easy. I didn’t know which one to use; so, I went to Andrew Plotkin’s website to try and find out what he was using. If it’s good enough for Plotkin, it’s good enough for me. Due to some technical issues, I wasn’t able to complete the single room I was trying to do; but I got enough exposure to know that I want to work with this more.

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