My Old Computer Projects and History

This page describes my early computer history and the project I have worked on back then.

I have primary decided to create this page because I want to look back at it in 10 years from and remember and laugh about all the fun and stupid things I have did or worked on when I didn’t really know what I was doing :-)

Personal projects here cover a lot of different areas. From many website I have built and online communities I helped to run to working on Soldier of Fortune Platinum and Counter Strike maps and mods where I learned a lot about computer graphics and game development.

Keep in mind that most of the projects listed here are now long dead or not relevant anymore, but I still learned a lot of things while working on them.

This was a quick brain dump so the content here might seem a big unstructured and in a weird order. Sadly the quality of most of the screenshots is also really bad, but this was all I could find.

1999 - First computer

In 1999 I have received my first personal computer. It was an Intel Pentium with 8 MB of ram running at 133Mhz.

During my early years I spent a lot of time on the computer, but I didn’t do any programming at that time. I spent most of my time tinkering with Windows (at that time this was Windows 95). This usually meant deleting stuff in System/ directory which required me to reinstall Windows and that is how I learned a lot about Windows.

2002 - First Internet connection

In 2002 I have received my first internet connection. I was lucky enough (or unlucky, depends how you look at it) that I never had to deal with dial up or DSL. My first internet connection was a cable connection capped at 128Kbs/64Kbs.

2002, 2003 - IRC, Eggdrop and my first programming / scripting language

Not long after receiving my first internet connection I have discovered a thing called “IRC” and IRCNet IRC network. This was probably one of the best things which have happened to me, because I have obtained most of my early knowledge by spending a lot of time on IRC and tinkering with anything related to it.

During those days there was no such thing as NickServer or ChanServ which meant there was a lot of abuse. Abuse from mild things such as channel take-overs to large scale DDoS attacks.

IRC also got me interested programming and around that time I learned my first programming / scripting language. This language was called mIRC scripting language. At that time mIRC was the most popular IRC client for Windows and it was a base platform for a lot of mIRC scripts.

Soon after I also discovered a think called Eggdrop - an IRC bot written in C which allowed you to write simple plugins / extensions in TCL scripting language. After discovering Eggdrop I became fascinated with TCL. One of the reasons was that back then only other programming / scripting / markup language I knew was mIRC scripting language and HTML.

Some projects I have worked on during that time:

Read a book about HTML and launched my first personal website. At that time my personal website only contains a bunch of Dragon Ball and Pokemon images :P
Launched a website for my first bigger personal project - a so called “Slovenian Eggdrop website”. The website contained a partially translated documentation from egghelp.org and a support forum. This website had many iterations. First version was a static website hosted on a free hosting provider and one of the later versions was running on a custom PHP CMS I wrote back then.
Developed multiple popular TCL scripts for Eggdrop.
Set up multiple IRC servers and networks. Most of the servers were running unrealIRCd server daemon.
Got my hands on multiple DDoS bot executables, disassembled them and obtained details about multiple command and control servers. Whenever possible I forwarded those details to corresponding abuse@ email addresses. At that time most of the DDoS bot software was really primitive and had no way to spread itself by exploiting known security holes in operating systems. This meant that the bad guys needed to manually distribute this software. Usually this meant manually linking to those executable on popular websites, and tricking not-so savy users on the IRC into clicking those links.
Inspired by AversE and Evangeline (IRC bots developed by a great developer from Poland which were faster than Eggdrop and better at protecting your channels from take overs) I started working on my own bot called “EvolutionX”. Similar to AversE and Evangeline the core was based on Eggdrop and written in C and most of the business logic lived in modules written in TCL. I have made quite a lot of progress on the bot, but I never managed to fully finish it and release it publicly. Primary reason for this was that at that time I didn’t really have a lot of experience with C or understand it that well so this was slowing me down significantly.

2004 - Playing with my first desktop Linux distribution (RedHat)

Linux was a pretty common platform for hosting IRC servers and bots at that time, but I never really used it besides SSHing to a couple of servers, so I decided to install my first Linux distribution (RedHat) on my desktop. The whole Linux experience was really fun and I loved it so a year or so later when I got my second PC I decided to install Slackware on it and uses it as my personal “server”.

Having a personal server was great, because I have spent a lot of time tinkering with it and I learned how to set up all of the basic services (Apache, MySQL, pureftpd, proftpd, icecast, … ) and how they work.

2003, 2004, 2004 - Online Gaming era (Soldier of Fortune 1, Counter Strike, etc.)

Not long after I received my first internet connection one of the friends borrowed me a game called Soldier of Fortune platinum. After launching the game for the first time I some how managed to get myself in multilayer mode. Soon after I realized how much fun it was to play with other people online I became kinda addicted to the game and spent next two years playing it many hours every week.

After looking back at this this era 10 years, I kinda miss it because no other game later on gave me the same amount of fun or satisfaction as SoF 1 did. In fact, in the last 5 years or so I played almost no computer or Xbox games.

Some projects I have worked on during that time:

Developed multiple scripts & mods for Soldier of Fortune Platinum.
Developed multiple maps for Soldier of Fortune Platinum.
Developed multiple clan websites for my clans usually powered by either phpNuke, vwar.de or a custom CMS written by me.
Helped with organizing and maintaining the website for multiple Soldier of Fortune 1 competitions and leagues.
Set up multiple TeamSpeak servers and Counter Strike servers running on Linux.
Launched an online graphical community (cooldown.vze.com) with a couple of online friends where people could request free so called “sigs” (forum signature images). Community received a lot of traction early on, but sadly because some of some issues with the hosting provider and no backups site died a couple of months in. I still feel bad about this site, because it had a lot of potential. If the site wouldn’t die I believe that it could even be bigger and better than DeviantArt is these days.

2005, 2006 - Slovenian Ubuntu and FreeBSD communities

I was one of the founding members and people who have launched first Slovenian Ubuntu Community (ubuntu.si) website. I helped with setting up the website and forum and later on I wrote a custom CMS which integrated with the forum and powered the website.
Launched first Slovenian FreeBSD community (freebsd.si). I developed a custom CMS for the website written in PHP and wrote most of the articles on the website.
Developed multiple popular TBDev.net mods (“free leech” mod, request for free leech mod, etc.) TBDev was at that time the most popular open-source PHP application for running your own torrent tracker. It was also the software which powered most of the big torrent websites back than.
Developed a dynamic website for my class (1-br.com, 2-br.com) using Xoops CMS project as a core. The website included a lot of custom scripts written by me, such as a script which would notify you over MSN a couple of days before the example or when someone uploaded a file to the website

2007, 2008, 2009, 2010

Developed a Slovenian website and started an online community for the Need For Speed PC game franchise (nfs-slo.net).
Developed a web control panel written in PHP and Bash for managing FreeBSD servers
Developed a Slovenian version of “nutrition data” website (zivila.net).
Operated and ran multiple Soldat servers and stats websites
Ran Slovenian Stargate Wiki website and project
Helped with running the websites and development of multiple Stargate related mods for different PC games (Counter Strike 1.6, Counter Strike Source, Crysis).
Developed an open-source blog engine written in PHP called OpenBlog
Developed a website (isdnscacheflushed.net) which people could use the query multiple DNS servers at the same time and compare the results in real time. The website itself was written in Python and powered by Django and the backend services which performed DNS resolutions were using Twisted Python.
Founded and developed a website for a Slovenian Erepublik community (erepublik.si). This site also went through many iterations and besides the CMS which is powering the website I also developed a bunch of mods for the phpBB forum software).
Developed a simple Android 1.5 application for displaying weather forecast.
Tried to get back into SoF 1 so I developed a website for my new SoF 1 clan and SoF 1 community.
Reverse engineered a protocol for Stargate Resistance PC game and developed a website which tracked and displayed players statistics such as number of kills, etc.