databit's page

5/24/10

wow, really, it has been that long?

 I am considering continuing Stella Star Child.

11/03/08

My kids first birthday today.

I have not had time to work on the next chapter yet.  I am trying to find some time and see if I can get out a couple of chapters this week.

10/22/08

Nearly 1500 words went into Chapter 6.  I am quite happy with the story development.  Certain aspects of it seem to be forming themselve that enhance the story line.  A couple of nights ago I was laying in bed trying to go to sleep when I thought up the concept to The and figured out how The fit into the story and that I had essentally already used The in the story.  I just needed a character introduction at this point. 

10/17/08

The novella is coming along very quickly.  I have posted up to Chapter 4 at this time.  I am pondering starting Chapter 5 or taking a break till Monday or Tuesday.

10/16/08

I have posted the first installment of my Novella: Stella Starchild.  You can find it in the blog and Wiki. Please give feedback!

10/14/08

I am starting an online novel entitled Starchild. I am basing it in the Galaxiki world and will incorporate some of information, worlds, histories, and races here.  It should be a pretty good story and if I get past the outline today, I will attempt to post the introduction of the story.

10/08/08

Yes, it is true, I HAVE been seen visiting Galaxiki.

I did a bunch of editing of different systems, pretty much just checking spelling, grammer, etc.  I am trying to get inspired for a good blog entry.  I did though create the Crutians, a spider like race capable of entering space without protective gear, but this ability will not get them far outside their own system Fullereans (which is quite unique). 

If anyone has a story request, let me know.  I will need a complete background and details of what and who you want in the story and a good idea of what happens.

07/18/08

Stopped in for a visit... Have had a LOT of stuff going on at work and have not had enough time to come and do any writing/editing. 

05/22/08

Got the arrow script working nicesly, Went on and created bubble script macro that works fairly well.  It drops paragraph seperation when it translated back from bubble, but that is minor, you can still read the message.

 If you want a copy of the bubble script macro, please send me a request for it, but the request must be made in bubble script.

05/21/08 Arrow script revisited

Got a request from someone for a macro for translating in and out of Arrow text.  Unfortunately my macro vanished when I upgraded to Office 2007.  The macro was very cclunky anyway which required a lot of preparation to the arrow text to be able to translate it.  You had to manually go in and remove all spaces, new lines, and then insert commas after every fourth character.

I spent the last couple of days recreating it.  I was trying to get it to move through the document one character at a time, but that became very clunky and none of my tests worked on it.  Finally, I went back to the old macro style, but put in to the script a routine that would prepare the text on its own.  It goes through the text and removes all the extra characters such as spaces and line feeds.  Then it counts the left over characters and puts in a pipe '|' after every fourth character.  Then it just runs through the alphabet and replaces everything from A to Z, numbers, then punctuation.  Part of the search includes replacing each pipe as it goes along, so those disappear as well.  Works quite nice and fast.

I then spent the rest of today turning this translator inside out and ended up with a VB Script that translates english into Arrow Script.

If you would like a copy of the macros, email me.  BUT you have to send me the request in arrow script so I know I am not just making things too easy for you.

The macro is tested to work in Word in a Windows environment.  We have not been able to get it to work in a Mac environment. 

05/12/08  

Bubble code first impression:  I think it is a variable length code with length markers in it, but not sure yet.  There are four characters:  o,O,',".  Each line ends in a quote " and the spacing of the quote sign makes it appear as a possible separator between characters I have come to this conclusion so far because I have been unable to locate a common multiple for the different codes, even after removing the quote marks I still cannot find a common multiple.  I am still working on it.

05/12/08 SPOOKY!

Okay, I have complained about prime numbers in other posts about codes, but here I encountered the wierdest anomoly that I would have to say would HAVE to be against all odds.  So, I started my analysis of the bubble code.  The first step I ever do on each code is find the length of the code.  So I checked the lengths of the three samples I found:  1234, 77, & 326.  Those numbers seem innocuous enough.  The next step is to break the lengths down into their multiples.  What is odd is that each of these numbers have only two multiples:  1234 = 2*617, 77 = 7*11, 326 = 163*2  Those are all prime numbers.  To have three peices of code equate out to numbers with only two multiples is just spooky.

05/12/08 Much can happen over a weekend.  I was asked if the Minspecs could be at war with the San, and then next thing I hear is that they already are at war.  The Minspecs are not and have not ever been at war.  See my note in the forum.  

It has also been stated that the Minspecs stole thier technology.  Again read the note in the forum.  Minspecs existing without their technology would be impossible so thus they could not have stolen it.

I received some clues on the Glencoe code over the weekend.  I have not taken a fresh look at it yet today as I have been busy writing.  I also read though from Danasan that Glencoe has told him that if he does not decode the script, the San will go to war against the Minspecs.  I am not real keen on having a task forced like that and thus may put translating Glencoe's code on the back burner.

 I have picked up 3 samples now of the bubble code and I am starting to work on that.  I will post my analysis. 

05/09/08 Continued.  Glencoe's code, continued.

Just received an email from Glencoe.  The text for the code shows incorrectly on the site and in the email I received from him.  He advised going into edit mode on the site and view it that way.  When I do that, there are big gaps in the code.  This is from the code being illegible.  It makes more sense this way.  This would be why I cannot calculate the correct code length.  I should be able to work from this, but will have to start over.

The spaces that were present earlier do not appear to be part of the code except as separators for the gaps missing from the code.

The lengths of the code between the gaps is the same as with the spaces before:

32-27-19-9-54-34-20-27

Again we are dealing with prime numbers, but since we have thrown spaces out, it is possible there may be a separator character in the code that would designate a space.  Most likely again, because of the spacing, is the colon.  But replacing the colons with spaces created irregular lengths of code that cannot translate into usable code because they have no common multiples.  Some are prime numbers.

Then there is the line of code from the text that showed up after the test:  /-/-/"_/-:-/_"_-/-_"_/-:-/_"/-/-/"-/_"_--_"_/-

This is 46 characters long, and since it just appeared, I am guessing that it is complete and without gaps.  46 characters go against the whole 3 digit idea.  Multiples of 46 = 2 * 23

Ouch.  There are only two multiples, 2 and a prime number.

I have to guess that this code contains variable length code for each letter.  In attempting to try all the different characters as possible junk or separator characters, I could not find any common multiple to evolve out of the line of characters.

Again I am still at a blank on resolving this code.

5/9/08

Glencoe makes a code.

Initial analysis:  Looks very alien, good choice of character combinations to make it alien

There are five different characters:  _ - / " :

This would make it a base five code.  There are also spaces, but the spaces seem appropriate to where spaces would be in a message.

There are two separate lines in here, one is 18 Characters long.  Factors of 18 = 2*3*3 The second is 222 characters long.  Factors of 222 = 3*2*37.  The most common multiple between the two is 3.  This would mean that most likely it is a three digit code.

Five bit code (quinary) with a three digit length would then lend itself to the values 000 to 444.  The highest value of that in base ten is 124.  This gives 125 possible values.  More than enough for an entire alphabet.  Actually, if you drop one digit, you get a two digit length which would give you 25 values.  That is nearly enough for an entire alphabet in of itself. This would leave free one digit as a qualifier.  These is merely conjecture at this point after analyzing the arrow code a while back.  I have to keep the idea available so I don't over look any possibilities.

Because spaces are included in the code, then we should be able to prove the digit length by counting the number of characters between each space. Each grouping of characters should be evenly divisible by 3.

32-27-19-9-54-34-20-27

The first number is not divisible by 3, but the second is.  The third number is not evenly divisible by three and is in fact a prime number.  There are several possibilities for this.  The first would be that there are errors in the code.  But that is less likely than I have made a mistake in looking at the code.

A possibility is that one of the characters is not part of the code.  The Colons are the common character and there are 15 of them.  If they were removed, it would still be divisible by three and it would be a 4 bit code with three digits which would mean 64 different values.  I have a problem with removing the colons though because of the way they are spaced through the message.  In the second word, the colon is the first character.

If I remove the colons, here is the word lengths again:

31-25-16-8-53-31-18-25

This will not do at all.  There are several prime numbers listed now and a prime number cannot be part of this cipher.

There are several reasons this may be happening:

•1.      The code has variable length code (too difficult to decode without a key)

•2.     The space is a character in the code and not a separator

•3.     One of the other characters might be a separator

•4.     One of the characters might be a junk character

It is slightly more complicated to consider number 2 of the list.  The code has spaces at the end of the lines.  These spaces may or may not be there intentionally.  My guess though is that the space is not part of the code and is used as a separator: Occam's Razor and all.

Here is another possibility involving the spaces.  The spaces at the end of the lines may have messed up my word spacing.  If this is the fact, then I need to join the lines together into single lines.

32-27-19...

No, that cannot be, the spaces at the end of the lines do not interfere till after the first prime number.

At this point, I don't know of another direction to go on it.  I will wait and see if any other code shows up.

05/01/08 (Yes I do use American date notation, so sue me  )

No, I do not see myself as the Galaxiki Police.  I am trying to keep away from interfering too often.  I usually just jump in when things look like they are getting way out of hand, and mainly because I want to get back to enjoying the site instead of each forum update being public hate mail.

For those who are curious, it is my nephew.  I took the picture a while back and decided to put it in as my avatar.  It is greatly zoomed in, but the look of it is one of innocent curiosity which I particularly enjoyed.  I originally wanted to post one of myself and my son, but for some reason I could not get it to post and I ended up posting the digitized super low res picture out of frustration.

The war writing competition seems to be supported well.  I look forward to reading them.  I will be looking for creativity and writing style.  I will not be looking at spelling and grammar except where it makes it too difficult to read.

I am constantly correcting spelling and grammar in systems, occasionally, I re-write something on a system, but I try to leave all the concept intact.  I am not going to go editing out your storyline because I don't like it.  Trust me, I have been tested on this a couple of times where the information on a planet seemed quite "out there."  If I mess up your planet, let me know to leave your stuff alone.

   "Thank you for calling the service desk, my name is Eric, how can I help you."

            "No ma'am, you have to contact the telephony support line for that."

            "Yes ma'am."

            "Have a good day!"

            Click.

            The computer support technician closes out the empty ticket and resets his ticket system back to the client look up page.  After a few moments waiting, he ALT-TABS over into MS Word.  A document is already up on the screen, a short story about some ancient race of beings and how they once ruled the galaxy.  A little polish editing and he captures it into the clipboard.

            A manager walks past behind him and without even looking up, or showing that he has noticed, Eric has brought the ticket system back up on the screen.  The manager might have just caught a flash on the screen as the windows changed, but otherwise, he is clueless.

            When the coast is clear again, the window switches again, this time to Internet Explorer.  He types ‘Gala' into the address bar.  The machine is so used to him visiting this site that it fills in the rest of the address for him.  He presses enter.

            The Galaxiki website comes up and he clicks the login button in the top right corner.  He enters in Databit for the username and then types his password.  Now he has become a part of a virtual world.  His mind is awash in exploration and technology as he explores the galaxy looking for just the right system to land his short story.  A short search of community stars later and he has made his choice, a red dwarf.

He takes a few moments to name the sun and planets.  There are far too many moons for him to work on right now, he leaves them with their generic names for the time being.

Picking his planet carefully as one that most likely would have had life on it millions of years ago, he pastes in his short story.  This story not only includes a little bit of history of the race, but includes a small coded message at the bottom of the message that furthers the storyline.

He smiles to himself thinking of some explorer's discovery of the planet and the ensuing work to decode the ancient alien text.

He clicks the save button and before leaving the system makes a couple of quick adjustments to planet names and as a last minute thing releases some fusion bugs into one of the gas giants there.

RING!

He ALT-TABS back into the ticket system quickly, grabs his headphones, and stabs the answer button before the phone can ring again.

"Thank you for calling the service desk, my name is Eric, how can I help you?

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