(YES, IT'S BACK AGAIN!)

This is Mwuki, the simple, minuscule single-user wiki-like thingy whose code I knocked together mostly in a few hours and then added to as the need arose. Mwuki exists because I've found over the years that wikis are quite a pleasant way for me to get my thoughts down in large quantities, and other wiki systems didn't really suit my needs right then. See Mwuki for general info about the program itself, but note that the software isn't currently available. As this is the only installation so far, I use "Mwuki" to refer to both the software, and this instance of it and all its pages.

For technical reasons and those of my sanity, it can only be edited by me, and originally it was just for my own notes and project plans etc, and a collection of bits of info I'd found handy. However I soon concluded that I might as well use it for general content for the site, as it's there and a long-term content management approach hasn't been decided on yet.

So, it now contains some public pages, since I added access control code, but because of its history, a couple of the earlier pages are a bit crappy (originally having been written just for me) and some remain private, meaning you can't view them, but those shouldn't be linked from here (generally nothing exciting anyway); also the page source and "Submit changes" button remain at the bottom even though the access control only accepts my edits (this may change when I get the time).

Some other pages are tagged "draft" until I finish them, ironically including some that are overall better quality than some of those early pages. Draft pages aren't publicly viewable either to avoid confusion due to paragraphs being left out in the middle etc.

One last warning, a good few of the pages are written not just from the perspective of a geek, but of a Linux-using programming+electronics geek. If you're none of those things this may be of somewhat limited interest. Also I have been known to use naughty words. Still here? Right then...

Contents (in no particular order)

Coolish/fun stuff
Well, in relative terms- it's mostly quite geeky because I'm a geek. Duh!

• rendering, is still being drafted ATM (must make ready v.soon)
• SNES stuff, currently covers making Snes9x work nicer.
• MegaTen, a smattering of info on the cult Japanese game franchise thingy
• playing import games, a bit limited in scope so far, and ... eh, still being drafted :P
• modtracking, page still being drafted.
• roguelike games, a type of heavily retro turn-based "dungeon crawl" style RPG, often fantasy-based, almost always difficult. Like many others before me and since, I even started one of my own.
• Grandstand console thingies from the late 70s/early 80s? We got a pair of these very cheap when I was tiny, and we sometimes played on them even though they were flaky and old and incomplete (ISTR the cartridge on one of them didn't quite work, or something?). Got the urge to look them up today, and found some stuff out about them, but there wasn't a huge amount online. So maybe I'll have another poke at them some time soon and write something about them myself. Possibly.
• More general Games page, really very empty ATM...

Knowledge base+much geekier stuff

• electronics stuffs, finally starting this page up now- it'd been completely unfeasible without thumbnailed images, for one. Probably won't be much to see there for a while though.
• Unpicking XCom .cat files, a little adventure in reverse-engineering, to be concluded when the extractor utility has been finished and the data can be got at.
• XCom catfile extractor, a little utility to extract the contents (sound+music) of .cat files found in the early X-Com games (UFO, and Terror From The Deep), based on the info found above. Program still being written, but going ok so far.
• Project Wonderful, cool advertising system
• GTK2-based hex-converter app, now under the name "Hex Combobulator". Primitive so far but functional. Compiles and runs on Linux, could probably be compiled for Windows but not tried yet.
• ALSA midi+sequencer stuff, might belong in the "coolish/fun stuff" as making music is involved... but a lot of the info is rather low-level. Will probably get split into multiple parts.
• Ming stuff, covers my travails with getting some sense out of the Ming library/PHP module for generating Flash movies. If you've had as much trouble with it as I have, you may find something of use here.
• Flash stuff (re generating Flash/SWF files in general)
• font sources may be of interest to some
• alternate DBs; something probably much fewer people will want to use, yet I managed to write much more about it than about the SQL DBs. Damn.
• bookmarklets and keymarks, the fancy bookmark thingies, useful for various purposes.
• Investigations into the idea of a small system for doing local CGI for a webapp server. Page is ever-so-slightly a mess. See also lcgid implementation re more lower-level implementation notes, if interested.
• demonstration of the behaviour of the switch+case construct in C and related languages
• saline solution, I keep having to look up the details from old chat logs, which takes ages. Sod that!
• One of the quirks of running a dinky little website like mine is checking the logs and spotting the various robot visitors, coming from search engines big and small plus some other ventures (not all of them honourable). A few observations and discoveries.
• grepping process memory, covers frustrating investigations into something that ought to have been a lot easier.
• Fairly long page about configuring my Wyse-120 terminal (a serial text terminal I sometimes use with Linux, mostly for emergency stuff or geeking about). There didn't seem to be that much info out there, much of it I had to figure out for myself.

Older Knowledge-base stuff
Still here just for completeness

• php stuff, not very good I'm afraid
• SQLite, bit waffly, was written more as notes for myself at the time.
• MySQL, as with the previous page, except it's fewer notes and more links.

There's quite a few other pages, some meant for public consumption may've been left unlinked or not tagged "public", by accident. Those not linked here are generally linked from one of the other pages though.