Time Recursion

A science fiction novel, written by Neal Stephenson in 1992, features a hypothetical near future, taking place in the early 21st century. During this time, United States of America are no longer controlling all of their territory, but a rather small and unimportant portion of it, whether all the other land is “occupied” by various  private organizations and individuals, resulting in high crime rates, a flourishing drug market, and less effective and numerous incompatible security systems. At the same time, there exists another world, which is until now undisturbed, and a virtual paradise and replacement for the one on Earth, the Metaverse.

The Metaverse is an enhanced version of the internet, an actual visual representation of everything that happens online today and even more. Each person has his own avatar, with which he is able to interact online, walk along the Street and even own buildings.

The story of the novel concentrates around Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and world’s best sword fighter and Y.T., a fifteen year old Kourier, who try to track down the creator of the Snow Crash, a virtual drug, that is able to crash the computer and your brain system simultaneously. (continue reading…)

It’s more than one year from the official release of phpBB3 and there are still many forums running the older version, no matter the fact, that the beta versions of the third major release have been available for about three years already. And so, after a period of reasoning the pros and the cons of the upgrade, the time for switching to the new version came also for a forum I help to run, and with that a picnic basket of complications. Why a picnic basket? Because it usually looks very nice and inviting, and it holds an unimaginable quantity of various food, that is usually so different that it doesn’t go together well.

And so we strike right at the core of the issue at hand. The forum has a layout, that is optimised to work with both a joomla front-end and the phpBB2 forum itself, which is littered with php code for various modules, scripts and hacks. To sum it up, it’s not really a nice piece of code, that you can expect to work with everything you want. (continue reading…)