August

Lately, I’ve been playing classic arcade games over the Internet using the MAME emulator and Kaillera. There’s nothing quite like crushing your friends or co-workers at a game of Joust, Bust A Move, or Gauntlet.

First, download the MAME32/Kaillera client for Windows. Install it, download some game ROMs into the appropriate directory, and you’re all set. If you want to set up a server, you’ll also need the Kaillera server.

The public servers are dominated by fighting games like the Street Fighter and King of Fighters series, but we’ve found that Kaillera is much more fun with classic games.

My list of recommended titles is below, and you can find all of these ROMs on Vega’s MAME site. If you can’t find a particular ROM, try looking up the ROM filename in Mame.dk (e.g. “pbobble.zip”) and searching for it in Google. If you have any other multiplayer arcade recommendations, please post them.

George W. Bush’s “grassroots action site” launched today, though it’s about as grassroots as the Avril Lavigne street team. No RSS feeds or campaign weblog yet, but they offer news feeds for your “personal Web site or blog.” (And dig those crazy backwards breadcrumbs.)

Unsurprisingly, the website runs on Windows 2000/IIS. I noticed that Microsoft Exchange’s Webmail seems to be running on the box, too. Guess the password and win a first class ticket to federal prison!

Google’s new calculator is a fun diversion, with several undocumented new features. Here’s a few. (Kottke has some more impractical uses. Please post more as you find them.)

– How long can you play a 30GB iPod without repeating a song? Answer: 18.2 days

– How much hard drive space does one hour of 128kbps MP3s consume? Answer: 56.25 megabytes

– How many seconds in a decade? Answer: 315,569,260

– 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius? Answer: 37 degrees

– How many feet in a smoot? Answer: 5.58 (via Ryan)

– What’s the answer to life, the universe and everything? Answer: 42

– What’s the answer to life, the universe and everything multiplied by the speed of light divided by three teaspoons? Answer: 8.51523871 × 10¹⁴ m^-2 s^-1

– What’s the speed of a Delorean going back in time? Answer: 47,600,819,200 m³ kg/s⁴ (via Cam)

Apparently, the RIAA wasn’t impressed with the friendly “do it for the little guy” approach taken by the MPAA’s anti-piracy campaign. Their new Public Service Announcement takes a much more aggressive approach… Download the 9MB MPEG (direct link) or 5MB Quicktime (direct link).

I wish I could claim credit for this, but it was created by an anonymous and very talented friend.

Curious about what synonyms Google is using for its new synonym operator? Try searching for your synonym keyword and then exclude the same keyword from results, like so:

~help -help = guide, manual, faq, support, tutorial, helping, tips, problems

~search -search = finder, listings, searcher, database

~blog -blog = log, weblog, blogger

~rss -rss = xml, rdf

~tivo -tivo = directv, replaytv, replay, pvr, video recorder

~idiot -idiot = stupid

~happy -happy = fun, happiness, lucky

~loser -loser = Beck

Find any other interesting ones? Post a comment.

In January of 1975, John Walker discovered a new way of distributing his Univac game files and inadvertently wrote the world’s first computer virus.

The game was called ANIMAL, a self-learning variation of 20 questions which asked you to “think of an animal.” Tired of mailing several copies of the game on magnetic disks out to curious geeks, he started work on a clever way to distribute the ANIMAL executable to every Univac system in the world. He coded a subroutine called PERVADE, which could be called by any program and quietly copied itself into every directory that the current user had access to. It eventually made its way into software distribution tapes from Univac themselves. The entire story, with assembly source code for ANIMAL and PERVADE, is available from Walker’s homepage.

Written in 1982 for the Apple II, the first microcomputer virus was also (mostly) benign. In 9th grade, Richard Skrenta, Jr. wrote a program called Elk Cloner that stayed resident in system memory after its disk was removed, but would later copy itself to any new disk inserted into the drive. Elk Cloner counted the number of times the infected disk was booted from, and on the fiftieth boot, the screen would display a little poem. The source code for Elk Cloner is available from Rich’s website.

You might know Rich from his later work; he went on to co-found NewHoo, later renamed to DMOZ (aka the Open Directory Project).