pseudorandom has been updated considerably. No, really, it has :-)

Following the wisdom of Tim B-L, nearly all content pages now have permanent date-stamped URLs like /2001/paradox/ams/. Anyone linking to me shouldn't notice much, since the old URLs redirect to the new ones (Apache .htaccess files are useful like that).

The appearance of the pages hasn't actually changed much, apart from the games bit just using the global stylesheet now, although I've been through about a dozen different styles since the last update (and some of them did look significantly different).

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrated it, and happy new year.

New Unreal Tournament mod: a tiny server-side mutator for server admins who've set up Gotham and UDS's Recon Force and Desert Ops models and wonder why they don't work properly.

Answer: the models weren't set up right. Solution: hack their properties when they're loaded into the level and change the appropriate flag to make them work.

Recon Force/Desert Ops fix (now with buzzword-compliant future-proof URL)

I'll contact the authors shortly in case they want to fix the models properly.

Notice to AMS model authors: be careful with names. Recon != ReconAgent.

(and on that cryptic note I'll upload this :-)

Yay, finally got working site maps out of Webmake, thanks to Constant Dupuis on the mailing list spotting which bug it was. The maintainer appears to be inactive, so I'll have to start a Webmake patches list if I keep using it. On the other hand, if I stare at it long enough to come up with a decent design spec, I might just rewrite Pseudosite (again) to get Webmake's functionality. If so, I've had Java (unreleased) and Perl (v0.1), so I'll try implementing it in Python this time ;-)

Marginally Enhanced UT is now out.

Marginally Enhanced UT is a free modification for Unreal Tournament; it provides marginally enhanced replacements for the Player Setup and Configure Individual Bots windows, which fix some bugs.

Among other things, it increases the limit on bot models (previously 32) and the limit on player models (previously 64) to 1000, which should be sufficient; if not, you can increase the limit even further by editing a .ini file. Get it while it's hot.

Despite the lack of updates since May, I'm alive.

Why no updates? Because I was revising for my end-of-first-year exams, then doing the exams (which were excessively hard, thanks a lot Cambridge University Maths Faculty), then working as a full-time Perl programmer for Cambridge Positioning Systems for 3 months.

I've been posting in the Identity Crisis forum at Gamerforums, but a real website is somewhat higher maintenance, so pseudorandom tends to go dormant when I don't have any new game mods out.

Anyway, I've just rebuilt pseudorandom using Justin Mason's Webmake, and it seems to work and stuff. Once I've got the "architectural" bits sorted, that might get this site updated more often, or not.

The Paradox Productions bit is now a bit more complex and game-site-ish; this also means it's somewhat broken for people with old or minimal browsers (I needed the table-with-empty-cells trick to get the layout right), but it should still be usable, and my guess is that 90% of my traffic is from MS Internet Exploiter™ anyway. It's still pure XHTML 1.1, and the non-Paradox Productions areas of the site still don't use layout tables, so I think I get to keep my W3C buzzword compliance :-)

Autoskin (very beta-ish UT skin tutorial CGI) is down for the moment; I probably won't bother bringing it back online unless someone asks, since UT 2003 has gone gold. Many people seem to find the demo too Quake-ish, but I think it's fun (for the record, I hated Quake 3). It also looks to be insanely moddable, and has Linux support out of the box (initially for nVidia cards only due to patent issues in the open-source ATI/PowerVR drivers, and the framerate's not wonderful in OpenGL since UT2003 is very much a Direct3D game, but that'll probably improve with later patches). Many thanks to Daniel Vogel, Ryan "icculus" Gordon and everyone at Epic and Digital Extremes.

The web design area is officially dead, try w3.org instead. I'm not exactly a great HTML teacher.

Removed all e-mail (mailto:) links and obfuscated all remaining e-mail addresses (me@example.com to me at example dot com), partly in response to spam, but mostly in response to the Klez worm's e-mail-address-scraping tactics. (Klez is commonly known as a computer virus, although apparently "viruses" that behave like Klez are technically called worms).

People still using Outlook Express, please either switch to something safer, or be very, very paranoid; I've posted more information and a couple of rants about why you shouldn't be using Out-of-order Express in this thread on Gamerforums.

People who have Klez: now would be a good time to do something about it, because some variants will delete your documents on Monday (13th of May - some variants trigger on the 13th of odd-numbered months).

If you received a large e-mail (usually 120-140KB, often around 135KB) which appeared to be blank, that was probably Klez.

If you think you received an infected e-mail from <insert name here>, you're probably wrong - Klez fakes its From: e-mail address by picking a random address from somewhere on the victim's computer. If you get Klez "from me", for instance, it didn't come from me - that just means whoever sent it has my e-mail address, and Klez happened to pick that address as its fake sender address. The Return-Path address (not normally visible) might be reliable, though, since it's usually added by the Internet service provider rather than the sender.

Webmasters: If you have my e-mail address (psychic_313 @ anything or anything @ pseudorandom) on your site, even just as a mailto: link (i.e. not normally visible in the page), please delete it. If you want to list contact details for me, replace it with a link to http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2003/contact/.

updated 2004-05-11: revised URL (the old one should still work indefinitely)

OK, enough on viruses and worms. On a lighter note, I'm working on an improved version of Pseudosite which will be generally better, and should be usable as a CGI script.

I'm alive. Hmm, no updates for 2 months... oh well.

Released Pseudosite v0.1, an alpha-quality website construction utility (I use it to maintain this site).

This site is now generated by Pseudosite v0.1pre, which is getting close to alpha quality. There might be a few bugs left in the code used for this site, so please report any broken links, titles etc.

Renamed the readme files, UMOD file and zip files for the War Machine skin packs (Dark Iron and Hardened Steel) to fit in the 31 character MacOS filename limit, so Mac users can install them. The game files are unchanged, so if you already have version 100 and you use Windows or Linux, you do not need to update it.

Also updated Autoskin to version 0.2, which uses some newly official extensions to UT Skin Maker format (Antonio Cordero will be using the same extensions in UTSM).

[Link-rot removal update, late 2002: Autoskin is no longer available]