Computing

As much as my family, friends, and several recruiters from the United States Navy want me to major in computer science, I still can’t bring myself to do it. Computers isn’t something I’d like to be my career; the best jobs I’ll get are as a sysadmin for Macrohard Winblow$, or maybe a programmer at a shitty start-up social media service if I’m lucky.

With that out of the way, here’s all my crap.

Retrocomputing

Box fan atop an open vintage PC

I’ve lately gotten into fooling around with my family’s vintage computers, particularly the mid-90s PCs which are still accessible in the current day and age without having to acquire über-special equipment. Everything else is early- to mid-1980s Apple, and I have yet to acquire software that isn’t just a word processor.

In either case, I’m starting to well-document my escapades, and that’s all on my separate retrocomputing portal. The web design is a blast to the past, lemme tell ya.

Programs & code

My primary, go-to languages are ANSI C and Perl—typical UNIX fare, I know. Ones I know decently otherwise are Java, FORTRAN and assembly. (Bizarrely enough, I learned assembly on a PDP-11/70 emulator.) As for anything else: I can generally pick up on the basics of a given language in a short amount of time, though not exactly proficiently; I’m a jack of all trades and master of maybe like half of one.

If you want to see some other programming contributions, check me out on GitLab.

mla.cls

class for composing essays in proper MLA format. Supports images, tables, automatic citations, running headers and most anything else you’d want.

pdpapl

A program which draws Anira’s Bad Apple‼ shadow art PV on a video terminal connected to a PDP-11. Ties in with pdpaplas, which compiles instructions in an assembler-style language into a compact crumb-based code that pdpapl understands.

varlpenis

My magnum opus: a program which prints out an ASCII penis (8===D) of arbitrary length, even in colour.

Seth’s Server-Side Preprocessor

I write the HTML and CSS for this website completely from scratch. The headers, OpenGraph info, metadata and so-on are all generated by a custom CGI script for this website called “Seth’s Server-Side Preprocessor”, or “S3P” for short. The body HTML (as well as some basic metadata) is stored in a .s3p file, and upon being requested is run through the script before being piped back to the client. It’s about four times faster than PHP, at least in my usage case.

I won’t divulge too much as I’m not particularly confident in my ability to program web applications securely, so I think keeping the S3P stuff closed-source will help me to some extent.

Various Bukkit/Spigot resources

I quite enjoy Minecraft, and even run my own server. I’ve created a few resources for Bukkit and Spigot, programs which run servers capable of running plugins. Things I’ve released publicly are listed below.

BukkitGreentext

Adds >greentext to a Bukkit/Spigot Minecraft server. Supports permissions, custom exceptions and global and local enable/disable.

BukkitVersion

Utilities for handling Minecraft server version information.

Spigot Update Checker

Checks for updates to a Spigot plugin. Can be included as part of a plugin to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

Other miscellany