Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Desert Island Business card CD

One game people like to play is the "Desert Island Discs" game; basically, if you were stuck on a desert island and could only bring a limited number of discs or video games, which video games would you bring. For example, here is a "only one video game" version of this game

My version of the "Desert Island Discs" game is the "Desert Island Business Card CD" game; the rules of the game are:
  • I am on a desert island that has electricity (must be a bank of solar panels), air conditioning, and an unlimited food and fresh water supply
  • On said island, I have a computer with 3d video acceleration, but no software installed except a basic install of Microsoft Windows (without games)
  • I am allowed to bring one CD-R with me, but the CD-R must be a 50 megabyte "business card CD" (to be exact, said CD has 26099 2048-byte sectors, or 53,450,753 bytes, the size of some batches of Ritek Business Card CDs)
  • The desert island disk must be formatted as an ISO-9660 filesystem
  • All music and audio must be encoded as fixed-rate MP3 files (the reason for this is because I sometimes put my business card CD-R in friends' MP3 stereos, which can only play MP3s and can't play variable bitrate MP3s)
This is a project I've been doing for a couple of years. Just yesterday I burned my latest incarnation of this desert island disk. Here is what I put on it:
  • A modified version of the World English Bible
  • A memory tester and Windows password reset tool
  • A Cartomancy guide
  • The TrueType version of my Chortle font (derived from Carter's Bitstream Charter), and two of Jos Buvivenga's excellent fonts
  • The Ultimate Doom data file, using version 1.8.6 of Doomsday to play the game, and ObHack to make random maps
  • David Teach's Gin Rummy program (I removed the installer since the installed files compressed are about about 5% the size of the full installer)
  • 7-zip, to make other files smaller
  • Deadwood 2.3.02, a DNS non-recursive cache I wrote
  • MaraDNS 1.3.07.09
  • MSys 1.0.10, which gives me a good subset of *NIX in a Windows environment
  • A portable version of TextMaker from the free Soft Maker 2006 office suite; by getting rid of everything but the word processor, the 7zip compressed file is about 5 megs in size, and includes Spanish-language and English-language spelling dictionaries
  • The songs Glyder and Muroc by Jonn Serrie from his album Flightpath (Glyder encoded at 192kbps, Muroc at 160kbps)
  • A song I wrote in 1995 called Distant Vision, encoded at 160 kbps
  • Some pictures of myself and my life, including a picture of me with my girlfriend
  • A version of Radio Gatun and RG32 sums (sums generated using the 32-bit form of RadioGatun) of all files to verify the integrity of the CD