rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

Moving this to Merveilles.town:

#introduction

I'm a NY-born Oakland resident who programs for game companies to survive. I teach Scratch to kids at our town's video game museum.

In my free time I used #Flash a lot, then #Haxe, and now a lot of modern #JavaScript. I port things as a way to preserve ideas. I have a loving wife and 2 cats.

uh.

#webgl #threejs #pasta #halloween #science #wordplay #gpl #matrix #macintosh #darkwave , uuuuh, #antifa #kielbasa #netneutrality #humanity #flan #pasta

I've already spoken about the startling joy of extracting resources from the memory of a running process.

Aside from that, the hardest and most fulfilling part of this port was figuring out through trial and error how they implemented the lighting of the terrain. I couldn't extract that from the easter egg, so I had to figure it out with the ol' thought potato 🧠. I'll write all about it after doing a bit more research. Hopefully I can interview a programmer of the original.

#theWorkshop

My threejs implementation of the Excel 97 easter egg is basically done. It could use some music, I dunno.

Come fly with me, come fly, come fly away:

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/

Code's here. I'll flesh out the repo soon to be more like my other projects:

https://www.github.com/rezmason/excel_97_egg

A patron of the arts.

#theWorkshop

This was an adventure and a hassle.

I've just written a tiny C program for Win32 that reports the current 256-color system palette. This is useful for extracting the color palettes of old palette-based programs.

I'm so far out of my wheelhouse it's eerie. I feel like I'm standing in a bog at midnight with a radio receiver, recording the signal of a numbers station. Real what-the-hell-am-I-doing-out-here energy.

Anyway here's the terrain of the Excel 97 easter egg rendered as a surface chart in Excel for Mac 2011.

This moonscape does not exist.

What? No, of course I'm not done. This is destined for the browser, like every other zombie I resurrect from the nostalgia bin. I'll keep you posted.

What? Yes, I'm still planning on live-streaming the #WireworldPlayer project, it just doesn't make sense to try that until my cold's vanquished and I tackle some work stuff.

I'll keep you posted! I will! Jeez!

Fun fact: this flight sim was the work of Excel 97's charting team, including the intern Hank Chien, who went on to become a Donkey Kong world champion and also a plastic surgeon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Chien

For those who don't know, I grew up with Macs in a very Windows-dominated community who can go to hell. My one concession in the platform wars back then was this flight simulator easter egg hidden in Microsoft Excel 97.

Sick with a cold and hardly able to think, I had enough basal drive to cram Excel 97 into a VirtualBox image, reproduce the easter egg and then start reverse engineering it.

Turns out you can glean a lot from memory dumps!

#theWorkshop

"Where's Rez?"

One answer: I had a guest over, and then we got colds, during a pandemic, which in hindsight is so unwise I'm hesitant to mention it in case someone gets the wrong idea.

Another answer: I've been flying over Microsoft Excel 97.

I just tried soba for the first time, pretty tasty! I still prefer warm noodles over cold, but there buckwheat flavor is my kind of yum. I imagine it being very refreshing on s hot day 😋

Hey folks, just coming up for air. I'm not avoiding masto, I'm just working my tail off 😁

Just today, I did dishes, refreshed the litter pans, drilled and hammered roller casters into the legs of the craft table, did two loads of laundry and turned thirty-four. I got irons in the fire.

But I'm keen on getting back to Wireworld and all that, and I'm keeping an eye on Merveilles just in case you set off the Singularity or invent a seitan cordons bleus or some other typical shit 😆 Miss you!

SCOTUS has ruled that Google's copying of Java SE APIs was fair use. Hashtag let's go, I'm curious what this means for software freedom and preservation.

Sorry for a PDF link:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

My favorite part so far: "Computer programs differ to some extent from many other copyrightable works because computer programs always serve a functional purpose."

🤣🤣🤣 It's all purposeful, folks! Reading this <24hrs after Revision 2021 is icing on the cake 🍰

To be clear, I have tons of other disks that I *have* gone through. These just evaded my give-a-damn.

I can't just leave them around forever, so I'll try and get through these one by one, and maybe share a tiny review. Maybe I can stream some down the road on Twitch, as an activity to do while working on my streaming setup.

Step one is admitting you have a problem.

Here are all the CDs I've collected over the years but haven't experienced yet. On the right is music, in the middle is old software, and on the left are three comedy albums I bought at a Todd Barry gig in 2011.