6ixStringJack's Software Project

POSTED BY: second
UPDATED: Tuesday, March 4, 2025 21:38
VIEWED: 501
PAGE 1 of 1

SECOND

Sunday, March 2, 2025 5:43 PM

6ix’s obscure software project status reports:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12081
10#1208110
Tuesday, December 17, 2024 9:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

. . . I told you about how I accidentally changed the language of my dad's first big TV. What was different there was when you scrolled through the language and picked one it didn't ask you to confirm the change and it just did it. That panic was probably the first event in my life that got me to where I am on computers today, even though outside of 2-color Apple computers at school, I didn't have a computer of my own to work on until I was in high school.

My mom paid a stupid $2,000 for that back in early 90's money. I never looked into what computers cost back then and compared what she got for her money, but she got it off HSN on a whim and I think they probably made a lot of money off of those.

It was always slow and it was a chore to get the good games to play, or when you could get them to play they wouldn't want to play the sound effects and music. Some guy gave me a "secret code" to open a game called DOOM and it worked. What I didn't know was that was just a keyboard shortcut to bypass Windows and I was typing out commands to run the game without all the memory being taken up by Windows first.

Back then computers were so slow and the hard drives were so small I was always learning new tricks to optimize the performance to get good games to play. I learned so much just because I wanted to play the games. I knew how to edit the system startup to do all sorts of things. But when I was running out of space I borked the whole thing by trying out a program in DOS called "DoubleSpace". It basically compressed all the data on your hard drive and gave you twice the space that you should have, but the problem was that everything you tried to use needed to be decompressed on the fly, and since my computer was already slow as hell, this made it basically unusable for anything. And it was IRREVERSIBLE.

Crap.

That's when I first learned how to reinstall Windows... On my own, with a little advice of a friend in real life since I'd never even been on the internet yet. My mom was going to kick my ass if I didn't get that thing running again.

And that was before Microsoft used the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up in their ad campaign for Windows 95. This was Windows 3.1 installed over DOS off of a few floppy disks.

It's crazy thinking back about all of that and realizing how difficult everything was when it was new and super expensive. That's why only us nerds were messing with them back then.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12106
37#1210637
Wednesday, January 22, 2025 5:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Surrounded by a wall of things to do and not knowing where to start.

I feel you.

When I finally wrap up my project and get back to real life I don't even want to think about the large pile of crap that needs being done.

Getting really close to the state I want to leave it in. It will never be completed in my lifetime, but I do believe that I'm leaving it in such a way that it will entice people to want to work on it more when they see it presented in a light it's never been seen in before, and just how useful and beautiful it is in this state. Not only that.... but because I'm not a coder, I don't suffer from the coder's biggest downfall... bad documentation. I'm leaving behind a very easy to follow roadmap for the next people, so they don't have to spend years figuring out much of that on their own. Not that it's simple or easy, but at least there's guide now.

The amount of work that I've done leading up to this, is only a small fragment of what could be elevated to this level. And I think with good coding skills that are beyond my level, people could see what I've done so far and come

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, March 2, 2025 9:10 PM

Wow. What a creep.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

SECOND

Sunday, March 2, 2025 9:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. What a creep.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix wrote:
I think I'll probably stick around part-time for a while, at least to check in from time to time and answer any questions and offer advice, but not doing any more project work myself.

You don't seem to realize that you are writing a suicide note. You're abandoning the project at the point where you should be continuing on. You gave birth to this child and then the baby has to depend on the charity of others to survive because you are going away to follow your bliss.

Almost all the Trumptards at work are having child support payments deduced from their paychecks because they abandoned their wives and children. I have had a part in reconnected women with their disappearing exes so that the women could go to court and collect from the sneaky bum who won't look after his previous family. My detective discovers things about employees they want forgotten.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

SIGNYM

Sunday, March 2, 2025 11:34 PM

You say the weirdest things, SECOND.

Hubby was a top- notch coder, he even wrote his own operating system for a lab-based PC that he built before such PCs were available. He could write in everything from direct binary instructions and assembly up thru command lines in various versions of DOS, and for compilers like C, C++, LISP, and other advanced languages. His favorite OS was IBM's fully object-oriented OS/2, but he was fully onboard with Linux after IBM killed OS/2.

Point is, I've seen a lot of development in my day. What SIX is doing is what every contributor does to free ("free as in freedom, not beer") software:

Collaborate.
Release your beta versions for testing and improvement.

Apparently, you don't know how things work in the real world of computing.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

6IXSTRINGJACK

Monday, March 3, 2025 2:03 AM

I don't even understand the point of his last post, or this thread in general.

I think we may have finally split second's brain open like a coconut.

And yes. I want all of this to be free for everyone. I know that there are places where it will be put behind their existing paywalls, and I will let it be known within the product that I don't mind and that I want it everywhere, but I will also let it be known in the project that the product was free for everyone and if they paid and joined a site just to get it that it was made available for free at other places and they should quit the group and try to cancel that transaction.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

SIGNYM

Monday, March 3, 2025 2:25 AM

Quote:
I don't even understand the point of his last post

Advert for your project when it becomes widely available?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

6IXSTRINGJACK

Monday, March 3, 2025 2:33 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
I don't even understand the point of his last post
Advert for your project when it becomes widely available?

Geez... let's hope not.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6IXSTRINGJACK

Monday, March 3, 2025 2:40 AM

Man... Just thinking about that creeps me out because I know how these people operate.

Some of the people I'm collaborating with leave themselves wide open, not only communicating with email addresses with their actual names, but they've got pictures of their faces on 'em too.

Retired Leftist Billionaires with a grotch spend all their free time online trying to destroy other people's lives.

Even if somebody like that was never able to find out who I am through my project after it got released, they could go back through my drunken post history here and try to destroy those other Known people just for associating with me. At the very least in that case, I'd probably have a lot of explaining to do if I wanted to keep up those relationships after somebody pulled something like that.

Maybe, maybe not. I have no idea. I have zero clue what anybody's politics are because we never talk about anything related to politics. I never bring it up, and if somebody else did I would tell them it's the last time I want to hear anything political out of anyone. Refusal to not abide that rule would mean that I don't need their help anymore.

Giving everyone the freedom to go around talking politics while on the job even at a "company" that doesn't make any money and won't make any money is just bad business. Best case scenario it's a complete time waster. Worst case scenario, it would just devolve into another RWED cesspool.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

SECOND

Tuesday, March 4, 2025 5:54 PM

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12133
23#1213323
Sunday, March 2, 2025 4:25 PM
6IXSTRINGJACK

I don't exactly get to pick and choose anything, really. Help online just isn't like it was back in the late 2000's. That's actually pretty interesting to me because it makes me wonder how many things have changed in the last 20 years socially that would make it so hard to find help now when I almost felt like I was getting too much help and just managing all the help started turning into a full-time job in and of itself back then. I know the generation of people I grew up with working on this are now all in the middle of raising kids or possibly even seeing them off to college by now, but this isn't a generational project specific to my generation.

I think probably the biggest issue is that younger people with the most free time (as we all once were) use the internet entirely differently than we did and still do. Some of the people I've been working with now even talk about their tiktok accounts or joining together on Discord to talk about stuff in real time. I'm old school and prefer my communications in forums like these. I also prefer to keep my commentary out in the open, and I only communicate in PM if I'm dealing with somebody who just flat out refuses to talk out in the open and only wants to communicate in the shadows.

I think there's probably a lot of younger people out there with free time and talent that would love to help out if they knew it existed. Except for a few old dogs who were there to answer some questions I forgot the answer to years ago, or to whip up some code for me, my only REAL help this time around is by people at least 10-15 years younger than I am.

My one guy though, he's amazing. Not only has he helped me get in touch with two people from Japan who really had some great stuff and insight to share, but he's remained diligent about completing a huge part of this for me on a time crunch, despite the fact he's working full time and he's still young enough to go out partying with his girlfriend and his friends. (Every time he apologizes to me for not getting something done on a weekend I have to tell him to have as much of that fun while he's young while he still can, and that I'm the one who is sorry for the time crunch).

I'm going to do my best to keep up communication with them. I didn't do that the last time around very well, but truth be told I was in the middle of my alcoholism breakdown when that finally ended the first time after about 7 years of online collabrative work. You saw me here. You can probably imagine how all of that went down.

Quote:
So, when do we get to see the video?

Never, unless you luck into it, unfortunately. And even if you saw it, you wouldn't know that it was me, since Jack isn't my real name and I've used a different name everywhere I've ever posted.

I'll be sure to send it to you if Haken ever fixes our PM system here though.

I'm sure you understand, especially when one of the reasons just created another stalking thread in homage of me this morning.

I don't know about you... but if I was a retired billionaire I'm sure I could find more interesting things to do with my time than stalking me.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, March 4, 2025 9:38 PM

Yeah.

You are one creepy son of a bitch.

You don't lounge around your house wearing your mom's skin while you're masturbating furiously with thoughts about me, do you?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon