soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Warning: if you haven't seem this movie don't keep reading - lots of spoilers below!

Don't remember how, but I ended up in the page of the manufacturers of the computer which Mathew Broderick used on the mighty War Games, called IMSAI 8080. That page has plenty of trivia and funny facts about the equipment, specially the tricks they did for making the computers stand out more - like adding more leds and indicators (obviously useless), or how did they cheat to make the computer type a complete sentence instead of having to type it by themselves each time (if you pay attention you realise they never mispell a single letter while typing in the movie, and there's a lot of typing in that non-mouses movie!).

So I decided that it was time to revisit one of my child classics. If I recall properly is almost 20 years since I saw the movie so there are lots of details that I missed or forgot. But when watching it again - oh now I understand how I ended up studying Computer Science! that big 8" floppy disk, the synthetiser, all the BIG switches there, and the "Yeah whenever I build I system, I always leave a backdoor". It was so suggestive even then, when I didn't understand the whole meaning of things and didn't know almost nothing of english… Now it has been quite interesting since an important joke was lost in the spanish translation, and it is the name of the super computer. What in spanish was simply W,O,P,R, in the english version is pronounced quite similarly to whopper, which is quite funny.
I remember it was also when I started to learn some programming, with LOGO. I used to write programs which output a "Logon:" (even if I didn't know what it meant) and just didn't work until we entered "Joshua". All with that green screen computer… aaah, those were the times, deffinitely…

It was very funny because my school mates were worrying about He-Man and Barbies and I was trying to figure out how to do the kind of pixelated abstract graphics which used to accompany every computer magazine article. But my most important worry was: if we built programs with Logo, and Logo was built with CP/M, which tool was used for creating CP/M?

That was also the time that I learnt how to play chess, so it was all like a converging movie. As I saw later, it had impacted more people than what I thought: first day in the uni, first lecturer's warning: "this is not a war games school - we do not teach how to hack here". You can't imagine our sadness faces…!

The WOPR - aka the Whopper!

I received one of those stupid lastminute emails in the new address that I tried to enter even if the system didn't allow me to do that.

So that it means that it worked.

I am so good! - yeah, I'm not even going to wait for your appreciation, thanks anyway.

Update:

Oh-my-god, I'm still laughing out loud x'D X'D =))

Why? I just received this email:

[...]

We are currently retained to find one/two Web Developers for a leading North American Technology company.  (Full time / permanent)

This leading ASP hosts and supports store fronts for large corporations including British Airways, Comet and lastminute.com.  The company also has partnerships with companies such as ebay.
[...]

I wonder if they would accept a couple of suggestions… x'D HA HA HA!

I was planning on writing this but trace was faster and posted some details on the wrong place - i.e. pouet's bbs, which has generated a lot of sceptic comments to say the least! Anyway here's a brief summary of what Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Ubuntu, suggested past Saturday at Sundown 2006:

He basically offered the demoscene a new exposure channel so that we can get more people interested about it; this new channel would consist in replacing the usual boring boot screens with something a bit more funnier: a little intro!

While it looked quite cool it also was somehow vague and imprecise, as it happens always that someone gets such kind of ideas in new fields. But Mark explained that they weren't going to let developers/demosceners go in the wild, but instead work with them to define and provide a basic framework for exposing the available functionalities during boot. That framework may be extended and improved in the future, using the experience gained in previous versions, as any people with common sense can expect. So first versions would maybe just allow for software rendering but future ones could take care of any available hardware for accelerated graphics, for example.

On the other hand, he obviously agreed that there would be official intros, which would have the look and feel of the pertinent ubuntu distribution, but there would be open room for including lots of other contributions so that every person which installs ubuntu can choose which one does he like more. Even have a random one each time they boot… As he said, it means millions of people are booting ubuntu everyday. That's millions of hits for the demoscene. If this is not a way of promoting it in real geeky environments - and not the usual art & design environments which most coders feel annoyed at the mere thinking of, just stop reading this, go away.

There was also some more talk about how to implement it; the model that I understood they were proposing was simply to ask developers to create something which would get passed from time to time the current loading percentage, so that they could update the demo accordingly, just in case they wanted to show a "timeline" and not only a single nice effect, etc.

And there was also some discussion on how to add more scener content to places like the login screen - like some scenerish effect running in background while the computer is awaiting for a user to log in.

After Mark's presentation, Navis, Smash and xWize were talking for a good while with Mark but I don't know why I felt a sudden shyness attack and preferred to watch them and wonder what were they talking about :D
So maybe if they read this, they can provide us with the ultimate details.

In any case Mark said if anybody is interested, just drop him an email, I think he said mark at ubuntu.com.

I hope this helps a bit on the confusion which has been generated because of not having a record of the chat. I personally find this idea quite interesting, although I am not sure of being able to contribute until some kind of framework is there, but I'll try to keep updated on this topic.

Foyles is a big independent bookshop. It is in Charing Cross Road, quite near the St. Martins Art School which I mentioned before when talking about their funky displays. So maybe because of that, or not, they try to have original displays as well. The current ones can be viewed until 15 october and feature lots of skeletons in the most original situations. While it can look a bit morbid for spanish people it is funny for me and trust me, they caught my eye instantly. Delirious, take a look (and sorry about the mirror effect but I did my best):

An skeleton riding a bike, dressed like a doctor

The Skeleton Judge

And finally the studying skeleton. Somehow it's the one that I like more, it reminds me to myself when I got stuck in a couple of subjects in the uni and thought that I would be old and still wouldn't have passed those subjects. See its desperation face, holding its head with the left hand, poor it!

That's exactly what I am!

My page domain expired two days ago and I was completely unaware of that. Mainly because I hadn't updated my contact details in the registrar - maybe they tried to send me the renewal email to my old uni address; no wonder it didn't make it to my inbox. And I also forgot the birthday of one of my best friends! Memory where are you!!!???
If it hadn't been by miguev, maybe at this very moment I would be pulling my hair because some evil hijacker had just bought it and filled it with pr0n and more pr0n.

But miguev was faster than them :)

Thanks!

Also I must thank trace for helping me in this crisis moment :)

More thanks!

And by the way, picture by shahcrew