Aquarionics

Of the origin, location and inhabitants of Shebang we will learn more later. We begin with the opening, because that is the sensible place to begin.

It began with the posters which appeared around town, and in common rooms, and in the cafs where the people who cared about this kind of thing were known to hang out. The posters were not fancy, but were striking to the people who they were designed to attract. They featured the symbol that would become the logo of Shebang watermarking a simple sans-serif paragraph:

Saturday.

42 Trumpton Street.

Obfuscated hardware contest.

All entries welcome.

Opening 9am, Announcement at noon
—Crash@Crikey.sb

Several things stood out to the people who it was targetted at. First was the signature. Crash@Crikey.sb was the address of one of the more famous hackers, creator of a new routing protocol in 1999, he’d vanished into corporate obscurity until his much-publicised abandonment of the company who had bought his expertise two years ago. Since then he hadn’t been heard of, though it was assumed that with the money he’d made selling out he could live in happiness for an extremely long time. In this, they were correct. In the assumption that he’d changed aliases and gone underground, they were less correct.

The second was the event itself. The idea of an Obfuscated $foo contest, where $foo was just about any programming language this side of Python, was a popular one. The idea was to make an incredibly convoluted, yet fascinatingly elegant, program. Preferably one that nobody could work out the purpose of until they ran it. Previous winners of such things include car racing games in less than thirty lines, and network pong (in which the code was molded into the shape of an “I”). Variations included programming entire systems where the code was the shape of a beer-glass, or in the email-sig-block standard size of 72 columns by just 4 lines. The idea of an obfuscated hardware contest seemed difficult, though.

Saturday noon came, however, and the three-story building was – while not exactly full – buzzing with anticipation. From behind the counter, a short figure stood and picked up a microphone from behind the bar.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, more of the latter than the former, I note with less than absolute surprise” he began, to a nervous titter from his audience, “My name is Christopher J Ashdown, better known as Crash, occasionally known as Crash at Crikey, and this is my new project, Shebang. Soon to be the ultimate ‘net caf. We have – as you have noticed – Proper coffee and real tea, as well as a decent net connection, all for sale, all for reasonable prices in cool surroundings. Yes, this is something of a Geek Haven, but the rest of the world should be comfortable here too.

“So what of this competition then? This Event for which I dragged you here from your comfortable monitors. Well, it works like this. I know that there are those among you who have dreamed of the ultimate computer. Not in speed, but in elegance of concept and weirdness, and I hereby challenge you to produce your dreams onto paper. The strangest and coolest idea for a working computer device will win.

“But what of the prize? We can’t offer something like this without a prize, can we? Indeed we cannot, and the prize is as follows: The winner will get a reasonable-lifetime’s supply of coffee and or tea from this very establishment for as long as we exist. Definition of Reasonable is fairly flexible, and will be on the entry forms. But that isn’t all, The winning project will be actually created, and will run in this very room. This means, people, that your ideas have to be fantastic but possible. They have to actually work, but beyond that it’s up to you.

“Pens and paper are dotted around, take one or get some kind of writing implement ready, for the instructions on how to enter will be as follows:” Crash paused while the room either grabbed pen and paper, or withdrew notebooks or – and a significant percentage fell into this got out palm-top computers to write it down.

“Send an email to this address: Oh Bee Haitch Dee Sea At Crikey dot sb. That’s Sea Argh Eye Kay Ee Why Dot Ess Bee. That’s Oscar Bravo Hotel Disco Charlie At Charlie Romeo India Kilo Echo Yankee, or Open Berkley Hack Digital Coffee Commercial-At Coffee Random Infocom Kludge Eris Yak. If you still haven’t got the address after that, it’s on the posters in here and will be all week. You’ll get an Entry ID and further instructions. Those further instructions consist of how I’ll accept entries, namely PDF, Tarball or Zipped HTML directory, or Word doc. Anything that doesn’t pass my virus checker will be shot, as will any entry over half a meg. Comp will close in one month, extensions forbidden – you aren’t at university now. Now go forth, Think, Drink and be geeky.”

Hippo:

1) If you had a choice of living/working anywhere in the UK, where would that be?

Cambridge. Working in London, probably, but the aim is still to be living in Cambridge again one day. Deciding to leave was unpleasant, and it doesn’t seem to have helped any.

2) “1)”s/uk/world/

World? More difficult. I rather like the idea of dotting around the world (meaning I’d have to have a job where it was possible to work from anywhere) and shifting worlds every couple of months.

3) What do you regard as frequent in changing website overall design (aside from dynamic blog restyling)

Hah :-)

Okay, For a professional site I’d go for not actually changing the design unless the content exceeded the design specs. This means if the design specs change (A lot are, at the moment, as the gubbermint is due to make accessibility a legal requirement) then the design is probably due to be updated to best serve the new specs.

I’m constantly learning and trying new skills. Aquarionics is a good audience for these things, partly because I’ve got 14000 people a month passing though here and a hard-core of about a hundred-fifty people who will complain if it doesn’t work they way they are viewing the site.

Minor designs happen semi-daily, like the new comments boxes and hover-links today.

4) Who is your favourite non-fiction author?

Non fiction? I don’t tend to read non-fiction as I think of it (Computer books don’t count), and when I do there is not a particular person I’d go for.

Cecil Adam’s Straight Dope stuff is fascinating (I was introduced to it via pTerry) but the closest thing to Non-Fiction I read at the moment is Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, mixed with my current ‘professional obsession’ with Fairy-tales.

5) What is the last book you borrowed from a university/college library?

Interesting. Last actual book was – as I recall – Sun’s dead-tree version of their Java tutorial, which I got, kept, and was fined for and yet have still never written a line of compiling Java in my life.

Cathy Young:

1) Do you have any irrational fears or phobias?

Sadly, no. I’m boring :-)

2) What one thing would you like to be remembered or recognised for the world over?

Oh crikey. Um.

I’m going to break this down, because I have three things that are important to me, and in an ideal world I want to be a world famous megastar for all of them. The three areas are computing, writing, and performing.

My ultimate aim in computing was to create a widely used standard, or at least father one. Since then, I’ve decided that this is a bad thing and that a standard should be created by a group of people, this is why the ESF thing interests me. I decided to create it, did so in about two hours, published it, and now it’s the thing I’m most known for in the Geekblog circle.
Now, it’s just to be good at whatever I eventually do. I currently do design, web, PHP, content-management, databases, XML and Linux on roughly equal pegging. What I eventually concentrate on (which will be multiples of the above) is going to depend on what I eventually end up being employed doing.

But that’s still not the ultimate thing I want to be known for.

I do not find it easy to write. That is, when I’m writing, the words will flow from brain to prose like a sparkling stream of text – something that began when I found I could touch type. (I found I could. That is that I realised one day whilst typing a blog entry that I was actually doing the thing I spent a year trying to learn with little success. Then I started not being able to anymore. It’s one of those breathing things, you do it naturally right up until you think about it. I’ve made more mistakes in this paragraph than I have in the previous six (I’m not doing the questions in order). I’d better close those brackets now). Douglas Adams didn’t find it easy to write either. What I want to do is to find out exactly what will make me able to write easily.

Actually, what I want to do is to find a place where I can write that has a plug-socket nearby, because the riverbank is perfect right up until I need to type something.

So, what I would like to be remembered as is a writer. It’ll happen one day.

3) If, under pain of pain, you had to pare down your blogroll to leave just one blog which you could read daily (and the rest you could read, say, once per month) which blog would remain?

Deity that’s hard.

I tend to divide my blogroll into sections (Something that will be reflected in the actual blogroll some point soon) of GeekBlog, WriteBlog and UKBlog with a lot of vagueness (Vaughan is WriteBlog and UKBlog, Mark is WriteBlog and GeekBlog, Neil Gaiman is WriteBlog) and on top of everything in the blogroll are the AFP Diary Circle and the various people (like Kamion, Melissa & Andrew who keep diaries rather than weblogs and I use them to stay up to date with them. On top of those are the people like Language Hat, Halley, Shannon, Mike and Mike upon whom I check up with on a month-by-month basis.

So, assuming I can’t create a weblog out of my RSS reader and say “I’ll use that” it’s would probably be – of the blogroll as published – Dive Into Mark for GeekBlog (mostly because via Mark I get a distilled version of everyone else’s thoughts as well), CavLec for WriteBlog and Karen for UKBlogs.

If it was only one weblog from all the list? Probably Rise again, because I’d need an awful lot of tea to get over the lack of new things to read…

4) If you could have your memory of a particular book/film/TV show or episode erased so that you could read or watch again it as if for the first time (not knowing the twists, etc.), which would it be?

Aha. Aha ha ha. Stephen Donaldson, “Mirror of her Dreams” purely so I never have to read the sodding book ever again. Hates it, we do.

I’d quite like to see The Usual Suspects for the first time again, though.

5) Is there a question or area of questioning you hoped someone would hit upon?

Not really, I was just wondering what people would ask :-)

Stuart Langridge:

1) Why will you vote for who you vote for (or no-one) in the next general election?

No idea. I have a complete lack of faith in the democratic system in this country, and belive that more accountability is needed. I shall probably vote for whoever sounds more convincing when say they’ll do what they want.

2) If you had to distil your philosophy on life down into one paragraph, what would that paragraph be?

“Savour the ups for the downs, and beware the karma police”

3) How’s life going, generally?

It’s failing to get any worse, at least not for two weeks. In a few days I’ll tell the Saga Of The Bank Account, which is Fun.

4) (Damn Cathy and her q5 for getting in first, I was going to ask that). Which question do you want people to not ask?

“Where do you see yourself in two years?”

5) What’s the future for Aquarionics?

I recently posted a huge thing on the technical aspects of this to Blogite, but the mailing list software appears to be constipated, so it didn’t appear. Epistula 3 will be a three part system, and the main server part will generate nothing but XML, which will be turned into a web-page by a client using XSLT. This will enable me to do PDF, RSS, SVG, Flash and WML outputs, as well as the standard HTML4, HTML4+ (Stylesheet based, default) and XHTML outputs.

Content-wise, Aquarionics is about to become less about me and more about what I’m doing, at least until my life gets some more interest. More writings will appear, as well as more technological things. I doubt it’s going to go though another paradigm shift – at least not until next year – but I’m going to try and bias it away from the journal.

Thanks for the questions, all of you. Anyone else who wants to ask things, comment here and they will be replied, unless I refuse to answer them :-)