The Inside R'alf for the Dummies

Welcome !

[Ici git le R'alf. Pour plus de détails, suivre le lien français ]

Here lives the R'alf.

Sommaire

A warning
Presentation : what is a R'alf ?
What about others, anyway ?
Of taste, mood and colours.

Warning

The R'alf has first been implemented in a French revision. You're reading an alpha version of the US English implementation of the R'alf. This means that the R'alf may be bugged and may crash your system at any moment.
You've been warned.

Icon When the bit bucket is empty, look at Maurice Island .

Presentation

R'alf means Registered Alien Life Form. Despite its external aspect, a R'alf has nothing human inside. A R'alf is a binary being. It has a right hand and a left hand, which it calls 0 and 1 since it is more rational to do so. A R'alf is 0-handed since it usually plays with a mouse by using its 0 hand. Never ask a R'alf to turn left at the corner, or expect it to go right. If you want it to turn left, just tell it to turn 1. Turning right is turning 0. And to go further, just put it in its tristate mode. Unfortunately, the R'alf's firmware has never been updated, letting some known bugs hanging around. The most typical of them causes an inversion of the 0-1 scheme described above -- but this can only be seen when performing CPU-intensive real live tasks such as driving.

One can note that this binary being uses a three-state logic. This functionality is an enhancement due to the very peculiar implementation of the R'alf brain which uses an uncommon memory storage technology called "the coke bubble memory" (a similar competitive technology is the pepsi bubble memory; blind test shows the later performs better but market share favors to the former one, go figure).

The history, which no ones believes yet, says that the R'alf was created by IA experts. It was the result of an unsuccessful experience to give life and intelligence to a quadword. The bad result was then thrown in the real life, in the jungle of the city where it should have never survived. Despite any expectancy, the quadword developed itself and modeled its appearance to its context. What the quadword never matched was the behavior and that's why it is so easy to find out who is the R'alf.

Here is a test to find out if there is a R'alf somewhere near to you.

Mandel

First you must find a terminal, a computer, or anything more or less attractive with a screen and a keyboard (hint : TVs and gameboys are not attractive). If you have the choice between a wonderful X-Terminal and a small but powerful VT440, just choose the later. Now you must look at the screen content and you must listen the R'alf speaker output. If the screen shows an ASCII representation of the Mandelbrot set, you got it. If it runs LSE (for the VAX implementation of the R'alf) or Emacs (for its Linux implementation), you got it. If you weren't able to find anything less attractive than a X-terminal or a PC with a good accelerated graphic card, then just have a look to see if there is some raytraced images on the screen. Now listen carefully for at least a minute. If you don't heard either "click", "beep", "blop", "arg", "zorglub", "plop" or "métavariable avant de sortir sinon tu vas prendre froid", then it is not a R'alf.

Among the funny things you must not miss is the Notes-20 pages, for historical reasons.
One of the R'alf's favourite reading is the Jargon File pages, for histerical raisins.

Les copains d'abord

The greetings part, in the French version of this file, is tell how great are those friends that I do appreciate, mostly because they are my friends and because they are great anyway. As all of them are French guys, I don't see any good reason to traduce it :-p

Taste, mood and colours

The geek way of describing one self:

Icon
Everything that is close to fractal number-crunshing is cool: Mandelbrot and Lyapunov. The ideal tasks to freeze a CPU during long and boring hours, well depends if you like this kind of images.
Everything that can be raytraced is cool. In dark ages, that meant Vivid, POV or RT handmade scripts. Some images?

Icon
My specialty? To code, of course. Everytime. What? Everything that deals with algorithms and a simple but efficient GUI. Note that the software is never finished since what maters is the core algorithm viability. That goes from the C++ raytracer to the 3D engine, including genetic algorithms and the life game, and more recently stuff harder to describe like PowerPulsar.
On what kind of machine? Any device that looks like a box, including Sun, VAX, PC (Linux, Windows or BeOS), BeBox, without mentioning Macintosh (I said without mentioning Macs).
[Note from the 1999 update : this was the original text, I slightly changed my mind recently ; the proof is that I type this on a PowerBook that has CodeWarrior installed. Actually MacOS X is OK.]

Icon I often throw away my keyboard to use non-HTML conforming, paper-based, book! When I was young I was fond of Arthur C. Clark, then I evolved with Isaac Asimov, Dune, Tolkien, Van Vogt, without forgetting the unforgettable Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts). Also some Edgard Poe. And to change my mind, do not forget Tintin, Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston Lagaffe as well as La Caste des Méta Barons or l'Incal. Lastly I've been dealing with psychology books (Freud, Jung).

Icon Music? I don't think that Accept, Metallica, Iron Maiden, XYZ, Noir Désir, Black Maria or Suicidal Tendencies help me to meditate. Maybe Dead Can Dance, Enigma, or The Orb as well as The Beattles or Glenn Miller could help. Nope, it should definitively be the aim of Saint Saens concerts or King's College chorals, eventually Rave and Trance. Are only missing pure techno, dance and rap, but these are not music of course!

Icon Video? Blade Runner, Tron, Akira, Ghost In The Shell, Twelve Monkeys, Mars Attacks ("Do not run, we are your friends!"), La Haine (a French movie : "Ce qui compte ce n'est pas la chute, c'est l'atterrisage. Jusqu'ici tout va bien..."), La Cité Des Enfants Perdus, Delicatessen, and Alien I with the Starwars trilogy.

Icon Television, what does that strange work means exactly? Oh sure in France I would watch scientific shows. Here I'm more engaged in Voyager and other StarTrek stuff, or old shows like NewsRadio.

More questions?
It looks so easy to write good English when I only use the words if, else, while, switch, case, default, for, break and continue. :-) If you encounter any language scratch, grammar problems, inconsistencies in the sentences or offending war-like declarations, please notify me.

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Last update : November 25, 1999
Fixed some broken English: July 6, 2004

	Everything that is close to fractal number-crunshing is cool: Mandelbrot and Lyapunov. The ideal tasks to freeze a CPU during long and boring hours, well depends if you like this kind of images. Everything that can be raytraced is cool. In dark ages, that meant Vivid, POV or RT handmade scripts. Some images?
	My specialty? To code, of course. Everytime. What? Everything that deals with algorithms and a simple but efficient GUI. Note that the software is never finished since what maters is the core algorithm viability. That goes from the C++ raytracer to the 3D engine, including genetic algorithms and the life game, and more recently stuff harder to describe like PowerPulsar. On what kind of machine? Any device that looks like a box, including Sun, VAX, PC (Linux, Windows or BeOS), BeBox, without mentioning Macintosh (I said without mentioning Macs). [Note from the 1999 update : this was the original text, I slightly changed my mind recently ; the proof is that I type this on a PowerBook that has CodeWarrior installed. Actually MacOS X is OK.]
	I often throw away my keyboard to use non-HTML conforming, paper-based, book! When I was young I was fond of Arthur C. Clark, then I evolved with Isaac Asimov, Dune, Tolkien, Van Vogt, without forgetting the unforgettable Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts). Also some Edgard Poe. And to change my mind, do not forget Tintin, Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston Lagaffe as well as La Caste des Méta Barons or l'Incal. Lastly I've been dealing with psychology books (Freud, Jung).
	Music? I don't think that Accept, Metallica, Iron Maiden, XYZ, Noir Désir, Black Maria or Suicidal Tendencies help me to meditate. Maybe Dead Can Dance, Enigma, or The Orb as well as The Beattles or Glenn Miller could help. Nope, it should definitively be the aim of Saint Saens concerts or King's College chorals, eventually Rave and Trance. Are only missing pure techno, dance and rap, but these are not music of course!
	Video? Blade Runner, Tron, Akira, Ghost In The Shell, Twelve Monkeys, Mars Attacks ("Do not run, we are your friends!"), La Haine (a French movie : "Ce qui compte ce n'est pas la chute, c'est l'atterrisage. Jusqu'ici tout va bien..."), La Cité Des Enfants Perdus, Delicatessen, and Alien I with the Starwars trilogy.
	Television, what does that strange work means exactly? Oh sure in France I would watch scientific shows. Here I'm more engaged in Voyager and other StarTrek stuff, or old shows like NewsRadio.