Things became a lot clearer today. Also a lot more complicated. Let me explain.

I got into the office, more or less on time, this morning. We're not a strictly regimented set of time keepers at the best of times, but I think that just about everybody works far more than their contracted hours in one way or another. A few people are early birds, but most prefer to work late and avoid the rush hour on the way home. I tend to work smarter rather than longer, but I do work from home on a regular basis – often logging on late at night when I get visited by the programming muse and inspiration strikes. I've had some of my best ideas at two o'clock in the morning and the boss tends to cut me a little slack when it comes to actually being in the office sat at a desk.

I was just thinking about considering the possibility of maybe heading to the coffee machine for my first hit of java of the day (there's probably a pun in there somewhere – maybe something about as opposed to my first slurp of C++, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader ...) I've cut down a lot on the amount of coffee I drink. It's very tempting when you are in an office with a decent supply of real coffee – at one stage three or four years ago I was on ten or more cups a day. I was out of the office working on a client site for a couple of days, more politics and hand holding than real work, but I realised that the splitting headache that I came down with was a bad case of caffeine withdrawal. Not good, but I weaned myself down to two cups a day – one in the morning and one just after lunch to keep me going through the afternoon. If I'm working late, I might have another one at the end of the day, but as I said before that doesn't happen very often. Oh, and before anyone says anything, I refuse to drink decaff on general principles.

As I headed towards the kitchen where the percolator is kept on permanent standby, the boss intercepted me and called me into his office, saying that he needed to talk to me in confidence about something. Uh oh. I shut the door behind me and asked what was going on.

“Do you remember the non-disclosure agreement you signed when you joined?”

“Yes, standard sort of stuff – no insider dealing, no passing on trade secrets to competitors, yeah?”

“A little more complex than that, but that's it in a nutshell. It's as much to protect you as the company. I'm about to tell you something that is commercial dynamite – please don't repeat it, or you will be in a shed load of trouble.”

“Ok, I get the picture – what's going on?”

“You've probably noticed some weird stuff going on round here recently. Well, the truth is that we are the subject of a hostile takeover. I'm out of a job, but they've paid me off very handsomely so I'm not too upset. They want you, Dev. You and your code, and they've got plenty of money to burn. If you sit tight and do as you are told your share options will be worth an awful lot of money. There's just one slight catch though - “

“And that is what, exactly?”

“They want you to fly to Tokyo to discuss the job. Look, just think about it for a while, and then ring this number “ - he handed me a business card.

To say, I was gobsmacked is something of an understatement. I turned the business card over in my hands – it was actually a piece of some sort of burnished metal, with the lettering and the phone number etched into the surface with some sort of holographic logo embossed on top. I couldn't read the kanjii script but the phone number was plain enough. A mobile number, it looked like.

I looked at the card for a long time on the way home. This was big league stuff – why were they so interested in me, and some (admittedly rather clever and revolutionary) encryption routines? I decided in principal to call the number – it couldn’t do any harm to find out some more information, could it? I’d leave it till the morning though – treat ‘em mean and keep them keen, I suppose. I wanted to have a clear head in case I needed to make any decisions.

I ate some noodles for tea – that was one area of Japanese life that I could certainly get used to, that and Sapporo beer and fresh sushi. Even if I didn’t take the job, a trip to Japan would certainly be interesting. I threw some clothes in my suitcase, and after a little thought some clean shirts and a tie as well. The rest I could pack when I’d definitely decided one way or the other.

My mind was churning at the speed that things were happening, so I fired up Castles and Caves to distract me for a while. I read the game news whilst the initial area was loading up. There was a new quest area available for mid to high level characters in the eastern provinces, protecting (or raiding) merchant caravans and it looked there were rumours of fire drakes and an ancient Red Dragon nesting up in the volcanic peaks. That sounded promising, so I headed to the market to stock up on potions and charms.

"Hail and well met!"

"Hello again – how are you, today?"

"In body I am well, but my spirit is troubled sweet princess"

"Er, why? What's wrong?"

"I must travel to the distant lands of the orient to defeat a fearsome dragon, and if the Gods be willing to return laden with gold, spices and rare artifacts"

"Sounds dangerous! Can I come with you?"

"No – my doom is travel alone. However I will give you this amulet as a token. It has an enchantment upon it that will bring us together should we both desire it."

"Awww – that's really sweet. Thanks! Hope to see you soon! Luv x x x"

"Now, I must be away. Fare well, my lady!"

I had a bit of a disturbed night.

The beer and curry worked their voodoo on my digestive system, and I was thrashing about in a half waking half sleeping state for a long time. I kept wondering what the result in the US elections was, but I resisted the temptation to go on line and start looking at the news coverage – if it’s anything like the last one they’ll still have lawyers arguing about the results by Christmas time.

Eventually I drifted into a deeper sleep, and started to dream that the house was being attacked by Martian tripods from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, or perhaps more disturbingly from the artwork on the 1980s concept album version of the story. I had rescued the cat from the advancing war machines, and was hiding by the window peeking out to see what was happening. A large tripod, its vaguely insect like cabin ports glowing a sickly green colour, rounded the end of the street. It strode towards us, the hydraulic muscles in its limbs hissing malevolently with each step. It stopped by the house and the funnel of the heat ray swivelled round and pointed at the window glowing a hellish red. It sounded some sort of klaxon and prepared to unleash fiery death upon me and the hapless moggy. I was preparing to run to escape my doom when I woke up, realizing in an instant that the unearthly klaxon was actually my alarm going off, and the glow of the heat ray was the early morning sun shining through the curtains. What’s the proverb again? Red sky at night is good, and red sky in the morning is a warning? I can’t really remember how it goes, but it certainly felt like an ominous portent.

I got into work and the boss wasn’t in. The other guys from last night all looked a bit the worse for wear, and nobody seemed to be doing much work. I finished up some notes that I had been working on and then started googling to find out what had happened to the software company that I had sold my program to, all of those years ago. Eventually I turned up a news story that told me that they had sold the distribution rights for Canada, Mexico and the U.S. to a paper company called Reiko Holdings who didn’t actually appear to have any registered offices or any listings that I find a trace of, and the trail looked to have gone cold. Why was I being hassled by a theoretically non-existent company over the copyright of a program that hadn’t even been made commercially available in America as far as I could tell?

I was getting increasingly frustrated by the whole business, so I logged off and went to get a sandwich from the shop on the corner. I went for my usual combination of Swiss cheese, whole grain mustard and mayonnaise on a crusty baguette. I knew that I’d get crumbs all over my desk, but I reckoned that it would give the cleaners something to do. I also picked up a can of diet coke and a packet of crisps in the interests of getting a balanced diet, paid and headed back to the office.

I couldn’t concentrate on anything and ended up leaving early for a change. I went home via the supermarket and stocked up on beans and noodles, purely for something to do. I filled up my basket and headed for the ten items or less aisle (muttering ‘fewer’ under my breath as I did so). As I unpacked my rather sad and lonely collection of food stuffs the girl on the till looked up at me. It was the stick insect from last night, but her eyes merely looked vacantly through me and she said in a monotone “D’ya wannany cash back?”. I asked for twenty quid to tide me over, but it was a deeply unsettling experience – there was no recognition at all, and to be honest I didn’t feel any need to introduce myself. Perhaps I’ll just have to get eleven items in future and avoid her checkout?

I got home and had some beans on toast with cheese, a cup of coffee and then I logged on to my computer to see what was going on. I read through my usual news pages and email digests, and then on a whim logged onto Castles and Caves, an online game that I have been playing off and on for a while. It’s a fairly simple role playing game, but it’s got quite a good community behind it and most people play it for socialising rather than for levelling up or monster bashing.

I guided my character ‘Sir Dev of the Southern Marches’ into town where the weekly market and guild fair was in full swing. I noticed some newbie players being fleeced by some of the guild lords and I was going to intervene when a name by an avatar I hadn’t seen before caught my eye – Princess Reiko. It took me a little while to remember where I had seen the name earlier today, and although it is a fairly common Japanese word, it seemed an odd co-incidence so I went over to introduce myself.

Sir Dev : Hail and well met, fair Princess Reiko. I am Sir Dev of the Southern Marches and I am at your service.

Princess Reiko : Ummm, hello?

Princess Reiko : I’m not really sure what I’m doing in this game. I keep hitting the wrong buttons.

Sir Dev : Art thou a newcomer to this land?

Princess Reiko : Yes – I’ve only just started. I followed the link that was on the browser and downloaded the game. Sorry if I’m getting this wrong!

Sir Dev :

Sir Dev : Just accede to the request by clicking with thy mouse in the affirmative.

Sir Dev : That’s better – I’ll drop the cod medieval dialogue for a moment. It’s really easy to play, just click where you want to go, right click on somebody (or something) and you’ll get a list of things that you can do, like attack, steal, talk, whisper and so on. You’ll probably need to join the Adventurer’s Guild – they’ll give you some cheap armour and a sword, but don’t let them bilk you out of more than a hundred gold pieces.

Princess Reiko : I really should read the manual I suppose. I wouldn’t normally play things like this but I just fancied having a go. I always used to play at being a Princess when I was little, but I always wanted to fight the dragons and rescue the handsome Prince rather than the other way round!

Sir Dev : No problems! I like a feisty maiden … :-)

Princess Reiko : Charmed, I’m sure!

Sir Dev : I’ve got a small castle just to the south of town on the edge of the forest. Just call by when you’ve got kitted out, and I’ll take you hunting for giant spiders and wolves. You can dump any loot back at my place and sell it for experience points which should give you a good start.

Princess Reiko : That would be fantastic – this game sounds like fun!

Sir Dev : May I just ask where you got the name ‘Reiko’ from?

Princess Reiko : I saw it written down in a report, or something, it was an odd thing but

Princess Reiko :

Princess Reiko :

Sir Dev : Hello? You still there?

Princess Reiko : Got to go – someone at the door – see you soon x x x

Sir Dev : Why do I always have this effect on women?

Last night was strange, for quite a few reasons, and it's all a bit of a blur in some places so I'll try and get everything down before my brain melts. As I said, I’d arranged to go out with some of the guys from work – Trev, Gary, Michael, Steve and Steve’s friend Craig – and I thought we were just going for a few beers at The Engineer (good guest beers on there, and not too studenty) and then maybe a curry at the Kashmir on the High Street. That was the plan, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

For starters, Michael was late. He texted Gary and left a weirdly cryptic message about meeting him in Scandals where it was a bit noisier. The reason that Scandals is noisier is because it is the dive of choice for the teeny bopper alcopop crowd and it really isn’t the place to go for a quiet drink. So, we all necked our beers and headed off for the walk back towards the precinct. No sign of Michael, so we ended up standing around looking foolish for an hour drinking fizzy overpriced beer. I had the toe curlingly embarrassing experience of being approached some eighteen year old bit of totty in a miniscule denim micro skirt. She was alright, in a ‘girl next door on the supermarket checkout with a bit too much makeup’ sort of way, but not the sort I would ever dream of approaching. However, it wasn’t her, it was “me mate, who fancies you, innit”, and the mate turned out to be a monosyllabic stick insect with the personality of, to be brutally honest, a stick insect.

“Where do you work?”

“Supermarket”

“What do you do exactly?”

“Checkout”

“Errm, that must be interesting?”

“Naah, s’boring”

I was looking over her shoulder, watching the guys laughing at my predicament, and trying to think of a reason to get away when I saw Michael coming in through the other door, so in the words of the tabloid journalist in a brothel I made my excuses and left.

Michael looked worried, so I asked him what was going on. He said that he had been working late, finishing up some documentation on the source code, when he had seen some strange characters coming into the office. Dark grey suits, identical brief cases, serious expressions and they had gone straight into a meeting with the boss. It was his opinion they were either old bill, or some major league financial types, but either way it looked like trouble. Perhaps there was some fraud going on, or maybe the company had a cash crisis and we were all going to get made redundant? Hmmm, what a great way to make the evening go with a swing.

We stayed in there for one more drink, and then we couldn’t find Craig who it transpired was busy throwing up outside. We left Steve to clean him up and put him in a taxi, and made a break for the side door, avoiding all of the stick insect clones hanging round the main entrance. From there it wasn’t too much further to the curry house, where we able to grab a table without any problems.

While eating we discussed the situation at work. We write low level software for communications and digital encoding – telecoms, networks and stuff – and I’m the specialist for on-the-fly quantum encryption techniques. It’s challenging cutting edge stuff, and in theory there should be a huge market for it, but thinking about it we all realized that new projects have practically dried up in the last couple of months. One of our big clients had cancelled a big contract for no obvious reason and gone with one of our rivals who were offering an inferior product (he said modestly) at a hugely inflated price. The general consensus was that it was time to start brushing up cvs and working on interview techniques just in case. I think that everybody there had been through at least one or two redundancies during the dot com crash, so nobody was too concerned about their chances of picking up a new job fairly quickly.

By the time we’d finished with the food (the baltis there are excellent, and pretty cheap I reckon, the lime pickle is evil though – very tasty, but put the bog roll in the freezer in advance), I had sobered up and was starting to think about what I was going to do. I’d thought about going freelance before, but I knew I’d have to do something about that legal trouble I mentioned yesterday.

It was late by the time I got home, and I noticed that the light on the top floor flat was still on. Guess I’m not the only night owl. When I let myself in through the kitchen door, I noticed a new cat prowling round by the bins so I said hello and gave it a stroke. It had a collar on, and it didn’t look like a stray, but judging by some of rubbish on the ground by the bins it had been scavenging for food. It followed me into the house and I got a look at the name tag – Wesley – and a mobile number which was engaged. I made myself a coffee and tried the number again, and strangely enough it turned out to belong to the girl upstairs.

I returned the cat to its grateful owner – apparently it wasn’t supposed to be let out, but he’d escaped through the window onto the fire escape earlier in the day whilst she’d been out at work. I didn’t out stay my welcome and came back down to get some sleep whilst there was still some of the night left.

Hello, good evening and welcome

Hello, and welcome to the blog.

I suppose that I had better get the introductions over with first. As you might gather from the title of this blog, I go by the soubriquet of ‘dev’ because that is the name I usually use online. Short and sweet, and it also gives you an idea as to what I do and the sort of person I am.

Do I need to elaborate?

Well, I will. I’m a software developer by trade, mainly working on linux/unix systems simply because of the number of tools that are available although my work does get ported to embedded systems and even (shock, horror) windows somewhere down the line. When I was putting together my cv, I put my job title down as ‘software dev’, which almost inevitably got shortened to ‘dev’. It’s the name I use for my login ids, email addresses and also my on-screen avatar in chat rooms. It’s also short for ‘device’ and in unix parlance ‘/dev/null’ is a sort of black hole where all of the rubbish ends up, so that’s sort of appropriate as well. Finally, it’s an obscure pun on my real name, but I’ll not go into that yet for fear of divulging my secret (mwah, hah, hah) superhero identity.

Actually, the software and the anonymity is the reason for this blog. Let me explain.

Last week, I helped the new girl (woman?) upstairs move some of her stuff in and set up her computer. The clueless berks at the big PC shop down on the retail park had misconfigured it rather badly, so I cleaned it up and did the obvious things like making sure that it had a secure browser on (Firefox was the best option, I think) and was properly firewalled and protected against viruses and spyware and the like. It took me a while, but I think she was chatting to the guy in the middle flat so I don’t think she even realised I was still there and I ended up letting myself out. Story of my life.

So, after setting somebody else’s computer up to be nice and secure, I came downstairs to find my machine acting weird. I’ve been running a small web server (which I know I shouldn’t really do, according to the rather draconian small print that my ISP includes in the contract for cable modem service), but it hardly ever gets any hits, at least that is until that point. The page counter had gone ballistic, and my router had crashed from the amount of traffic. I reset everything, and then watched the traffic when it came back up. In a nutshell, the whole thing was being hammered like crazy from all over the place, so I shut down the web server and locked down every port that was open, just in case.

A little while later, I re-enabled email and web browsing and everything seemed to be ok, so I left the web server down, to be on the safe side. Looking at my email, two new messages jumped out. One from my ISP, warning me that my bandwidth was through the roof, and would I like to pay extra to increase my allowance, and the other one was an official looking ‘cease and desist’ notice from a law firm based in the Cayman Islands (I googled them, and they seemed to be real, and fairly scary).

I should perhaps tell you what was on my website. There was the usual fairly lame home page, with some pictures from my holiday and the last office party, my cv (just in case somebody wanted to offer me a highly paid job), a small message board/forum application and a game that I wrote about ten years ago. It was a nifty little shoot-em-up-in-space, nothing special I suppose, but it got a couple of reasonable write ups in one or two magazines and had modest sales for the time. It was mainly notable for a rather clever bit of encryption code in the copy protection routines, than for any super duper graphics or anything. Anyway, I sold it to a small software company for an advance that came in very handy just before I went to university – it paid for a new computer, and a few rounds of drinks – and I signed a contract that I thought gave me some protection. As it turned out, the company went bust six months later, and all I ever heard from them was a letter from the official receivers saying that I was an unsecured creditor owed a few hundred quid in unpaid royalties that I was unlikely ever to see. I chalked it up to experience, and forgot all about it.

When I was putting together my website, I assumed that the copyright on my game had reverted to me and that no-one would be particularly interested in something like that anyway, so I stuck a copy up as an example of my early work. I had quite a few nostalgic emails from ‘old skool’ gamers who had stumbled across the site, and I must admit that it was a nice buzz having my own mini fan club. Somebody told me that there was a group working on a remake for one of the modern emulators, and asking nicely if they could borrow some bits of my code. I told them it was fine, as long as they kept my name in there somewhere with an acknowledgement of some kind. I didn’t hear anything more from them, so I guessed that the project had floundered from lack of interest.

Anyway, the ‘cease and desist’ email tells me that I am in violation of US copyright law, and some directive on the export of weapons grade encryption in the code that I had made available for download, and threatening dire consequences using all sorts of legal jargon that I didn’t really understand. I replied saying that I had taken the code down, and could they please explain in plain English what I was supposed to have done wrong.

In the meantime, I thought that I better sign up for an anonymous blog, and keep a record of what’s been going on, just to be on the safe side. It’s been a bit of strange experience, and it has left me feeling a little bit worried, and also angry, to say the least. Still, I imagine it will all blow over – after all, I don’t exactly have much money so it wouldn’t be worth anybodies while suing me or anything. I’ll do a bit more digging around to find out what happened to the original software company, and see if this can be resolved without any more hassle.

Anyway, I’m off out for a drink tonight with some of the guys from work, so I’m going to leave it there.