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Miscellaneous hacks

Here are some odd bits of software that probably won't be of much use to anybody.

Game of Life for SQL Server

This stored procedure implements John Conway's Game of Life (a famous cellular automaton) in the rather limited programming environment of Transact-SQL. The grid is represented by a set of fixed-width rows in a database table.

The Game of Life is Turing-complete, so theoretically somebody could do the opposite and implement SQL Server in Game of Life. Don't hold your breath, though!

Image Resizer

My sister bemoaned her inability to resize a bunch of image files at once, so I came up with Image Resizer (requires .NET Framework 2.0). Here is a screenshot, and here's the C# source code.

June 2008: Fixed an embarrassing bug where resized images were always saved in PNG format, regardless of the original format.

Mnemo

Mnemo is an IRC bot (written in Perl, using the POE::Component::IRC library) that sits in an IRC trivia channel, learns questions and answers, writes them to a file, and (optionally) spews back any answers it already knows at high speed. Expect it to be banned pretty swiftly.

This works in the channels that use the Blitzed trivia bot (as of approximately 2003, and still in 2005); I used to mess about with it in #chataholics on DALnet. There are certain commands you can use to take ownership of the bot and to make it join channels, etc. These commands should be obvious from the source code, though it isn't very nicely written.

Robot control file parser

org.CL4.Robots is a free open-source .NET library for use by Internet robots.

Playlisette

Playlisette generates a simple list of MP3 music tracks (artist and title, from either ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags) in HTML format, suitable for uploading as a Web page. I made it for Elizabeth, who couldn't get Winamp to do it at the time. Playlisette requires the .NET Framework 2.0 and includes BASS.NET. Here is a screenshot, and here's the C# source code.

Lucretia

Lucretia was a "scriptable passage generator" used for generating random texts, such as poetry, from simple scripts made up of wordgroups and functions.

Although Lucretia is no longer supported and there's no documentation beyond the Windows help file, you can download the final Lucretia 1.1.0 for Windows (from 2001) or a more recent multi-platform Lucretia command-line interpreter for .NET (2007) with C# source code.

Here are the differences in the .NET version: integer variables are 32-bit with overflow instead of 16-bit without; function and wordgroup recursion is permitted; and function and wordgroup names can contain any combination of alphanumerics and underscores, as long as they start with a letter.

St Crispin's School for Doom II

School.wad is a Doom II multi-player map based on St Crispin's School (circa 1997). Daniel Hawthorne made this, but he doesn't have a Web site and it deserves to be online somewhere.

Parts of the school, such as the main car park and the playing field, are missing due to memory constraints. There is a teleport halfway up the stairs to the Art block: this is because the Doom II engine does not support one room being directly above another.