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POTD on IRC. You can now get the Password of the Day (see detailed description below) on IRC by /msg vert bolo potd and he will send you back the password automatically.

Indy 2.02 source code. For many years, Indy was the main bot that people used, but it has pretty much died off and been replaced by the much more powerful aIndy (version 2.5 is public, beta tests are underway for a new version). The last Indy version 2.02 source code has always been publicly available in Think C which is quite antiquated. Steve Kaiser <skaiser@pacbell.net> aka ee recently created a CodeWarrior 11 port such that it compiles for PPC.

POTD - Password of the Day. By now you may have heard about the POTD. This is a daily rotating password which is openly available to anybody. Here's the tale of how the POTD came to be. This has already generated a fair share of controversy, so please just keep an open mind and read on.

The Problem: Many vets have expressed frustration at the recent onslaught of modem/lagging/rude newbies who consistently violate the rules of Bolo netiquette. While it is best for Bolo if we encourage new players and teach them both game skills and netiquette as much as possible instead of shunning them, on some days you just can't seem to start a pickup game without some modemer repeatedly joining your "need-a-fourth" game who then refuses to leave when asked.

Some extreme solutions. While we can blacklist the worst violators from the tracker, that costs the tracker gods (nix and BL) time and effort, and really those guys are busy enough keeping the trackers running without having to play netiquette cops too. Another highly controversial alternative is to make an "elite" tracker with access control, where modem IPs are filtered out or people have to pass a qualification process to demonstrate that they will observe netiquette, but we were loathe to split the relatively low number of games available into multiple trackers, and such elitism may discriminate unfairly against modemers and newbies who are after all our life blood.

The Final Solution. So vert volunteered to make a web page that generates a password that is randomly rotated every day. The idea is that people should still start normal unpassworded games whenever possible, but if lamers are ruining your day, start a game with the password of the day and add "POTD" to the map name. Then only people who know the POTD will join you. This is not a secret, members-only club; the POTD URL is listed right in the bolo.usu.edu tracker header, and anybody can access the site. The URL will also be publicized on the OBHP, rec.games.bolo, and all the usual places. We're hoping that people who bother to load the POTD page will take the time to read the rules of Bolo netiquette quoted there and follow them.

Some thoughts. If lamers insist on crashing games using the POTD, then we will either have to resort to one of the more extreme solutions described above. There will always be non-POTD games if you don't like to use it. In the unlikely event that the POTD becomes wildly popular and most vets play only POTD games, at least the POTD is openly available, so it isn't going to decrease the number of games played or segregate newbies into a lower class. The only people who will be inconvenienced will be raw newbies who just downloaded Bolo Buddy and indiscriminately click on the first games they see, and are too immature to listen when they are told about netiquette. While the POTD is one extra step for newbies to learn, IMHO that is a reasonable step - all serious players should know netiquette anyway, and the POTD becomes a good way to teach them without any overtones of secrecy or tracker nazis.

Stuart just had his oral defense for his phd thesis. It was a little bit of a calamity - I got there 10 minutes late and some chairman or some such hadn't even showed up yet. But all in all it went pretty well and he passed and stuff, so he's that much closer to getting his PhD. He hopes to get the dissertation done this summer. Remembering the un-nice fiasco that happened regarding someone posting about stu and his phd stuff a while back, I asked him if he minded if I dropped a little note to the net. He said that was fine as long as I promised I wouldn't say anything like finishing up his PhD might free up some time to work on bolo or something dumb like that. Cuz then people would start expecting something and he sure as hell doesn't want another "new version by Xavmas" fiasco to happen.

So I promised I wouldn't.

Work sux. I'm extremely busy until July 1 with several grant deadlines, trips, and settling into my new house that I just bought. Rest assured that although I won't be updating the Bolo News quite as often, I am not abandoning the project. I'll be back. :) I anticipate being able to update the Bolo News every 7-10 days for the rest of this month.

BL: The first Bolo game finding utility was for AppleTalk
    games. When it found a new game, it played a submarine-style
    "ping" and displayed an alert with the info
Jolo: is that the Distant Early Warning thing?
BL: Yep, DEW
Jolo: kewl i remember dew
Jolo: did the dew
BL: After that, I wrote "BoloTracker". It was the little
    window with a list of Bolo games on the AppleTalk network
Jolo: how long ago u think that was, when u wrote 1st ver
BL: heh, the first and only version is still up on Sumex.
Jolo: ok, that was created 15-Apr-93. That's more recent
    than i thought, that's barely over 4 yrs
BL: After Internet Bolo came out, we thrashed around
    using Email, etc for setting up games
Jolo: god i can imagine
BL: A guy at Ohio state set up a "BoloServer" -- a game
    which he just left running. You could join, find some
    others, and start a new game.
Jolo: i'm surprised stu didn't build in some sort of tracker
    facility
Jolo: i guess he didn't think it thru
BL: I actually don't know what Stu had intended for tracking
Jolo: it'd b interesting, cuz he built the client but not
    the server, so to speak
BL: But when he pointed out the "tracker" sample code
    that came with Internet Bolo -- so I wrote an "Internet
    BoloTracker" for the Mac
Jolo: so he sorta laid out some guidelines for u?
BL: Stu's system required a list of subnets to "ping" and
    try to find a game.... You would run it, it would blast lots
    of popular Bolo places on the Internet, and hope to find a
    game. it was very chatty, and several network admins called
    up UMich to bitch.
BL: This wasnt a server, it was just a utility program
BL: Meanwhile, MikeE had written a UNIX BoloTracker which
    could be notified of new Bolo games and list them.
Jolo: This tracker at George Washington University was
    the first tracker "server" in the modern sense.
BL: Yep, MikeE's was
BL: So, after Stu pointed his out... and after I got alot
    of complaints, we just let MikeE's do the work
BL: However, he graduated/got fired/moved on, and the
    tracker was only sporadically maintained
Jolo: heh yeah i remember those dark days
Jolo: so now mikee's thing is dying
BL: Anyway, I was interested in writing a new tracker and
    so I learned to do serious UNIX coding with my first UNIX
    Internet BOloTracker.
Jolo: were u still a student?
BL: Yah
BL: So, I wrote up a tracker and ran it locally for a
    while. It was poor, because people could only register with
    one tracker or the other... so you only got a partial list
    of games
BL: So, I added the ability to "scam" a gamelist from
    another tracker -- when your game registered with MikeE's
    tracker, it would migrate to other trackers silently
Jolo: esp. w/ no official status accorded yet
BL: Anyway, MegaWatt volunteered noproblem.uchicago.edu
    at the University of Chicago, and MikeE's tracker slowly
    went silent
BL: Meanwhile, I wrote up first the FastTracker FKEY and
    then the BoloMenu, a utility that automatically updated the
    game list by accessing the tracker every minute.
BL: After the BoloMenu was released, noproblem got
    SMASHED hard by lots of people automatically getting game
    lists every minute. We eventually yanked BoloMenu for
    safety's sake
Jolo: how bad was it? nix said it was getting 10,000
    hits/day. That doesn't sound like a smashing load, nothing
    to be sneezed at, but not smashing.
BL: Like ~20 connections a minute
Jolo: hmm that's 28.8k/day. What was noproblem again? a mac?
BL: Well, it really is, in addition to all the Bolo
    packets the tracker deals with -- it really hurts network
    performance, and noproblem was a MacSE/30
Jolo: i guess that is a lot for an se/30. Nevermind,
    that's twice what i get for my busiest web site which is a
    tremendously more powerful SPARC 20.
BL: After Megawatt left UIC, Nix took over the tracker at USU
BL: It was the same code, but it was never intended for
    that kind of UNIX, and nix had to do lots of voodoo to make
    it work on his system
Jolo: oh yeah right, the noproblem server ran on mac unix,
    shudder
BL: Anyway, Nix has heavily modified my original source
    to clean it up, add new features, etc.
BL: The current server at bolo.usu.edu is a DECstation
    running ULTRIX.
Jolo: u went dormant for a while
BL: Yah, I was working for a company that wasn't
    conducive to Bolo
Jolo: so u graduated at this point
BL: Yep, my full retirement coincided with my new job in
    June 95.
BL: So, last summer, I met Andrew on IRC and he was
    looking for someone to write an AvaraTracker. I took the
    opportunity to rewrite the BoloTracker from the ground up
BL: So, the tracker running on Avara.com is entirely new.
    It has the stats feature that never worked in the first
    version.
Jolo: right, nix implemented stats in a roundabout way,
    which i use now
Jolo: your version seems much more integrated and powerful
BL: Its much more portable, and has been used on both
    little and big endian. The BoloTracker source is available
    to anyone who wants it, by sending me an email
BL: Someone in Australia recently asked for a copy... so I
understand that they are running a tracker down there
Jolo: ah so that's yer new vers there
Jolo: yes there is a new one out there
BL: cliffa wrote his Euro tracker from scratch -- prolly cuz
mine was so nasty
Jolo: so what is it running on at avara?
BL: A Pentium Pro running FreeBSD
BL: <end of story>
Jolo: sob
Jolo: nice story
BL: heh
Jolo: So back to the top, why did you bother to write a tracker?
BL: the reason we made a tracker in the first place was
    so that we (the UMich crew) could get into a game within
    seconds of it starting, and dominate
Jolo: u mean in open game days?
BL: At least in the AppleTalk days
Jolo: that's interesting motivatioin
BL: When we heard the "ping", we chorused "I'm in" -- and
    the 4 of us (Red, Lux, Whyte, and I) would join in
Jolo: ally & conquer?
BL: heh, mostly, yah
Jolo: heh that's funny, so unlike the image of u guys as godly beings
BL: heheh
Jolo: well this has been very educational
Jolo: i appreciate your time
BL: np
BL: Thx for the chat

Seldom known fact: BL often teamed up with Red and Whyte, so people came to think of them in terms of colors. In reality, Black Lightning got his muoy macho nickname from his car, a cute little black Ford Escort. BL now works for Berserkir at Ambrosia Software, where they both seem to spend all day and night playing Bolo.

This is me on Skew Toy 2 or 3 (don't remeber which), demonstrating a method for taking 4 pills with only 15 shots. In a real game with lag and all it's not all that practical, but it showcases two of my favorite doubles, the so-called "massage" and a take that I developed myself (although it's probably already been "discovered"). This take allows a pair of hostiles to be taken without damage to the tank, and without having to send the builder out. It is somewhat vulnerable to vulturing, but since your tank is left with full armor, any reasonable player can probably get the pills.

New OBHP? I've partially cloned deckard's Official Bolo Home Page to fly, the SPARC 5 that is running the FTP archive, to see if it's possible to transfer the web server there as well. While deckard is a SPARC 20 with 256 MB of memory, fly is a puny SPARC 5 with only 64 MB of memory. I would appreciate any feedback on how fast fly is, especially for loading big files like the pill taming movie or the map guide. (use super reload to check out deckard's pill taming movie and map guide). CGI scripts won't work yet, and don't freak if some other things are broken, I'm just testing speed and stability right now.

History of the Tracker, Part 1. Here are some interesting facts about the Internet Bolo tracker which people new to the game may not know. The current official tracker is run by Don Thompson aka nix who is a research scientist for the Center for Atmospheric and Space Science at Utah State University. It is a free service that he provides as a hobby, and was deemed 'official' by a consensus of players, not because it was endorsed by Stuart Cheshire (Bolo's author) or anybody else. As of right now, it has been 17 days since the tracker was last restarted (from a crash or routine reboot) and it has served up about 41,000 game lists, which is about 2,400 hits per day or 1.67 hits per minute on average. That doesn't include another 1,400 hits daily from avara.com, the alternate tracker, to compare and synchronize their respective game lists. That's just incoming traffic. In addition, the tracker sends out pings every 30 seconds or so to every machine in its current game list, to make sure that machine is still out there. Nix also generated some graphs depicting other interesting tracker statistics.

Viva Black Lightning! Coming in a few days, the contents of a long interview with BL, the guy who wrote the modern tracker code.

Old News. If you are looking for news of the reorganized map archive or brain archive, or anything else from before mid-May, use the links at the top and bottom of this page to read the old news entries.

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