Dragon Dave's New Writeups

Rule 7 (idea)

2006-04-01T01:24:01Z

Rule 7: Do not take the piss -- Rules and Regulations, Profound Decisions

http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/misc/rulesandregulations.asp

There's no legislating for stupidity or immaturity. Or is there?

Within UK Live Roleplay, Rule 7 has become one of those rules that usually goes unwritten - do not be a moron; act within the spirit of the game, rather than the letter; do not be an anti-social idiot. Only, this time, it has been written down, the quote above is taken directly from the small print of the booking form for Maelstrom (a game run by Profound Decisions), and is also a rule for the Pagga message boards.

Harry 'H.' Harrold states that he was the first to call it "Rule 7", in reference to use on the internet (possibly the Lorien Trust's Ley Nexus), and had previously used it as a first rule in a homespun game in the 1990's.

It's also been used…

win.ini (thing)

2004-06-08T02:24:56Z

win.ini is an .ini file which stored Microsoft Windows configuration data under Windows 3.1 through to current versions of Windows like Windows XP, although its use is now deprecated due to the creation of the Windows Registry, and is pretty much just a stub file. It exists in the root directory of the Windows installation (by default, C:\WINDOWS\).

Some other applications (such as calc.exe, the calculator shipped with Windows, and Cumberland Family Tree for Windows) use (or used) this file for storing their own data. The advantage of this for Calc is that a single byte of data (is the calculator in scientific mode?) does not take up an entire cluster of the hard disk; the advantage for Cumberland is that the settings (including expiry date of the free trial) are persistent across reinstallation of the software.

Thanks to C-Dawg for informing me that I should be using the word deprecated, not depreciated.

May (idea)

2004-05-31T02:10:06Z

The word 'may', in the sense that good old Webster uses first, has been clarified by RFC 2119, "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", along with 'should' and 'must' to ensure that specifications for interoperability. RFC 2119 refers to these words in capitals, and also states the meanings of 'should not' and 'must not'.

MAY:
This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item because a particular marketplace requires it or because the vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor may omit the same item.
An implementation which does not include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does include the option, though perhaps with reduced functionality. In the same vein an implementation which does include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which

…

Billie Piper (person)

2004-05-24T23:14:04Z

Billie Piper

Born: September 22, 1982 (Virgo); Swindon, UK¹

Notable Achievements: Four back-to-back #1 Pop Songs in 1998, marrying Chris Evans,

Known, primarily, for looking like a pop tartlet² prancing around on the street at age 16 for her Number One one-hit wonder "Because We Want To"³, to which the lyrics went something like:

Why d'you always [insert generic teenage girl thing to do here]?
Because we want to! Because we want to!

repeat ad nauseam

Admittedly, she was signed up with Innocent (Virgin) Records ⁴, which was never a clever way of promoting her except potentially to closet paedophiles.

She later went on to marry Chris Evans in 2001, probably the most famous redhead of British TV at the time, who also had issues with Virgin after being sacked from their radio station⁵. They're presumably still married;…

autoexec.bat (place)

2004-05-23T14:01:39Z

Autoexec.bat and config.sys were the initial startup files for all versions of MS-DOS; if autoexec.bat did not exist, then the computer would prompt for the time and date, a hang-on from the days before non-battery backed CMOS.

Autoexec.bat was just as any normal MS-DOS batch file, and was the last step in the boot sequence. Some drivers required loading both in config.sys and autoexec.bat, often with matching parameters in both - CD-ROM drivers were notable for this. It was also the easiest place to use the internal set command, to configure how dir displayed directories: I preferred ,set dircmd=/p /w /o:gne, which sorted the files and displayed just their names, splayed across the screen, and pausing every time the screen filled. Other settings included 'blaster' which allowed the SoundBlaster to be configured with the correct IRQ and other settings. Prompts could be configured in the same way. External programs (Windows, menuing programs) could be started up at the…

Mozilla Firefox (thing)

2004-05-21T19:27:06Z

One particularly nice feature of Mozilla Firefox is the way in which you can now search almost any search-enabled website by typing in the name and the search terms.

It works through specially crafted bookmarks. Let's take e2 as an example. It's common knowledge that a link like http://www.everything2.org/?node=banana will take you to a node named 'banana', if one should exist. What Firefox allows you to do is to take this bookmark, give it a keyword, like e2, swap out banana for %s - "%s" acts as a placeholder - and save it. In fact, go to %s and bookmark it right now!

Lets take you though the process one step at a time. Firstly, you need to get a URL with the search term in. Some sites might mung the address bar, and the original search string might not be present - or if present, might not have the desired effect if changed! Streetmap.co.uk does this, but looking at the HTML source of the page and working out what the name of the various form entries are, the URL…