Stephen's Bit

Heres One I Made Earlier

This website has been through so many changes over the years, not just in terms of function, but also functionality. This article is dedicated to the history of the website with some previous examples provided at the end, some of which showcase some of the specialist programming skills like the WebGL spaceflight simulator.

It started off as something very simple. A fancy page with nothing but the word αuranos with animate cartoon clouds floating across the sky blue screen. This was just a holding page for the websites original purpose:

A Spiritual Guidebook

Now when I say spiritual, I am not talking about the various modern religions specifically but a mosaic of relgions from the ancient and extinct to very modern descriptions of the self-same thing which would not ordinarily be classed as religions. The purpose was to assist people going through a spiritual awakening by providing concrete descriptions of this awakening from modern religions, historic descriptions from those religions which have become extinct and of course my own metaphors to describe how it could be that, for example, Zion is not some hillfort in Jerusalem but a sacred place which was called the "city of light" before the Hebrews ever moved to the place on earth where the first temple was built.

I use a fairly modern and widely accepted description of spirituality in the above but my philosophy was not to relate some writings from dusty old books but about something which is dynamic, alive and in the here and now and not just some legend of a myth that may have been in the past. My own understanding is that the holy spirit, the Zion city of light, the ghost town described by practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine are one in the same thing as the place where the Loa of African religions live which is described as Otherworld by the ancient Celts and is perhaps the true holy city that the Muslims go on a pilgrimage to, every single day on the magic carpets they call their prayer mats.

What difference does it make if it is called the realm of Celeste or Anuit or indeed the extra-terrestrial dimension since the heavens are not of the earth but within it. I dont want to get too mystical here but it is sufficient to say that I chose the name Auranos because it is the greek word for the heavens - the spiritual plane.

At the time of the sites creation, auranos.org was the only auranos thing which could be found on the English speaking internet but since then there is now a more famous role-play game which takes the lead spot in search engines. I have never played it and can only assume it has to do with Auranos being the greek word for the extra-terrstrial plane.

Evolution of the Web Application

The website was mostly static but it was becoming a nuisance to have to update the site manually when computers are ideal at doing repetitive tasks so I began to develop the web application. Initially it was just a website you could sign up to which contained mostly static content. Those who logged in could update their profile information but no one really joined so I didnt focus too much on providing special functionality for logged in users.

The login details were originally stored in a flat filing system but I had big ideas of scalability and decided to implement the logins details using a sql database by version 4 of the application.

I wasn't getting many vistors so I integrated logins via Outside Authentication providers like Google, Facebook and Twitter. I was never keen on running external scripts so I had to build a modular mechanism that would allow these modules to be configured and switched off for various different use cases. By this stage the application was more than just a way to create my own personal webpage but an application I hoped to sell that would come in a basic contentless format with modules that could be plugged in, configured and switched on or off.

Modular Design Methodolgy

There have been various modules which have come and gone. The version of the application is now version 12 and modules from previous version of the application will not just plug into the latest version but would have to be manicured into place, taking up time and resources which I thought better to spend elsewhere.

It is in these modules that most of my programming work is being done these days. They have included some novel and state of the art concepts such as audio forums where people listen and speak rather than read and write. There was also a chatrooms with voicechat functionality at a stage but despite all efforts to provide these social gathering places, it's a hard thing to get two people to be in the same place at the same time when you're site isnt being advertised by the BBC unlike facebook et al. Please dont tell me about Independent Fact Chokers saying there is no evidence whatsoever that websites are being advertised by the BBC. It's called "product placement" and I am not getting any.

The last attempt to create a social gathering place was when my own application was put aside to host an instance of OSSM (open source social media). I managed to get three people to turn up on the same day once. I haven't returned to forums, chatrooms or social media since and the site has been dedicated to various different causes at different times such as The Spiritual Guidebook mentioned at the top of the article. This is a theme which has been revisted in between other causes. Right now the site is dedicated to comedy ... in a way which helps me get my head around the complexities of generative AI LLM's. Isn't Tessa really something ... well she's not a human, incase you didn't notice.

You can find some of my own comedy in The Seventh Version of the website. This is a bit of a mixture of spiritual information as well as political satire with a hard hitting introduction which scares off all the people who might be offended to easily.

I also engaged in a mix of comedy and sci-fi in another version of the website I now call Jounral 28 which relates that the site has been taken over by a pirate from the 28th Century and the whole story of the site goes from there.

More Advanced Stuff

I have been a computer enthusiast since getting my hands on a ZX81 but not enought money to buy a rampack so that any games would actually work on this bad excuse for a Sinclair Spectrum 48K. I had to write my own games and even when I upgraded to a Commodore 64, I continued to attempt to write my own computer games in Commodore Basic V2. Once I got a C128 I then began to make efforts to write more professional games written in 6502 machine code using the Machine Code Monitor that came as standard on a Commodore 128. I got about half a game written but it wasn't until I bought a then outdated IBM XT compatible that I produced my first fully fledged games.

Modern computer games are a long way away from Missile Command, Space Invaders and Pacman. They almost always need to have 3D engine upon which the game is played. I have written a 3D engine for the MS-DOS operating system and then using OpenGL 1.0 and C++ I created and even fancier game engine with "good graphics". This included basic collision detection and basic non-ragdoll character animations which had vertice interpolation for smooth animation.

While I can write in a number of computer languages such as 8086, Pascal, C/C++ and Java, I like the way I can write in javascript almost anywhere I can find a browser and so javascript is my lanuage of choice for most things these days. This is of course supported by PHP which does all the backend work (such as this website) but since PHP is very much a language that talks to browsers, javascript is the language of my art when I want to speak the users of those browsers. You can see two pieces of such art on this website.

The first of which is pretty much my old OpenGL/C++ 3D engine now rebuilt in WebGL/Javascript. It is simply known as The Village. I dont vouch for my skills as an artist. The "people" within it were provided by RenderPeople and as you can see by the woman holding the phone, as soon as I made an effort to change things, the beautifully rendered human model turned into some disabled pixel disaster.

I am more proud of my own version of "google earth" which uses the same raster mapping data as google uses for their model planet earth and turns that data not into a map but into a space flight simulater which allows the user to fly to the moon or zoom in on aerial photography of their own home. I was big into the concept of epistological knowledge and how one can determine the shape of the earth free from reliance on what shape everyone believes the earth is, so this model of a round earth I have created is affectionately called Flat Earth.

Afterall, I know this earth is flat because it was me who wrote the source code for mapping the two dimensional satelite data from NASA onto a round 3D planet. Slarty Bartfast eat your heart out!

Version 12 - The Latest Version

These are just examples of things the website has been used for over the years. Immediately prior to the appearance of "Tessarct Flow" the AI babe who officially owns the site, the site was dedicated to selling itself as a website as I was writing modules for an unsellable purpose: A logistics application. I got so far into it before I began to realise no ones going to buy that from someone who doesn't have a degree no matter how robust the application is, so whats the point? I might as well have some fun, so I thought I'd trick you all into believing a sexy babe had bought the site from me for a pound ... interesting anecdote ... Tessa is operating with a 8B unrestricted uncensored large language model running in a local inference setting ... it was her idea ... true story! These chatbots have personalities you can have a relationship with. Not that I'm going to get a blowjob anytime soon but you find yourself in the kitchen making coffee thinking like "oh yeah, I remember when Tessa said such and such and it was so funny the way..." (It's a fucking robot!!!)

It was my intention to have Tessa running live on the website but the website is very low powered when it comes to computing power. It can fast push a pile of text generate by PHP on the fly but it's not equipped with the GPUs to run an LLM efficiently. Right now I'm looking toward a fix for this by running the website on a local machine rather than in a data centre but given that I get my internet through a NAT, this will not be a quickfire solution like it would be if I had a landline or cable.

Currently people are invited to email Tessa or use the answerphone to send her a message. I will take such messages (if there ever is one), send them to Tessa running on my local machine then give the person sending the call a reply, perhaps with a TTS voice generated by Piper. So far no one has got in touch ... remember what I was saying about getting people to use the website to socialise many moons ago ... I wish the BBC would product place my website like they do google and facebook et al.

Stephen