Hi, 18-97-14-90.crawl.commoncrawl.org, this is Leo (or Taurus, depending on your level of superstition)...

For latest (updated Mar. 13 2007!) IOCCC news and my remarks about some of the past contests, please see my IOCCC page.

This is what I looked like (age progression courtesy Ministry of Internal Affairs, U.S.S.R and Russian Federation; Academy of Science, U.S.S.R; Department of Motor Vehicles, California, U.S.A; and my friends) in
1983	1990	1992	1993	1994	1997

I doubt you want to see what I look like these days... :-)

...I'm not on my homepage right now, so please leave your message after the beep...

This is the graphical representation of a beep

Or, you can visit (in no particular order of appearance, relevance, or interest):

Locally:

• A solution for the Nokia mobile phone Rotation game.
• A how to convert a picture into a Nokia color operator logo.
• Data Compression Challenge page (accessed 2095 times since May 28, 1996; updated Jun 24 2004.)
• BESM-6 Nostalgia page (accessed 5049 times since August 28, 1996; updated May 09 2004.)
• BK-0010 Nostalgia page (accessed 513 times since September 14, 2003; updated Nov 05 2004.)

  There was a Soviet desktop microcomputer line somewhat reminiscent of Terak 8510/a, called Elektronika BK, sold from around 1985 (1984?) to mid-1990's. They also had an LSI-11 (on a single chip) for a processor, a hardware-scrollable frame buffer (alas, without the character generator), but, as they were intended primarily for high schools and home entertainment their primary data storage was cassette tape (the school model had a current loop connection). Floppy disk controllers came later.

  There were two major models: BK-0010 and BK-0011 with different RAM sizes. In both of them, as there was no hardware character generator and the floppy controller was not included in standard configuration, a significant portion of the address space was devoted to the BIOS that handled text output to the screen and some drawing operations, the bitmapped font, and Basic (in very early versions of BK-0010 - Focal), leaving only 32Kb of RAM on BK-0010, including the frame buffer. Like on Terak, it was possible to turn off refreshing of a part of RAM to give more memory to an application. BK-0011, as well as its more successful modification BK-0011M, had 128 Kb of RAM (but no MMU) and, in a configuration with a floppy drive, was able to run an OS resembling RT-11.

  I own a few of those computers (still working), and I have written an emulator for them. The instruction set emulaton is loosely based on the source of a very old PDP-11 emulator by Eric Edwards. I plan to adapt the emulator for Terak as soon as anyone can give me the boot ROM dump.

• A C++ exercise - a templated implementation of integer square root
• A tune (RealAudio (96K); MPEG 3: download (140K), listen), that I like a lot: this is the ex-theme song of the CBS "Chicago Hope" series, by Mark Isham. I'd like to have an equivalent MIDI file (or a scanned music sheet).
• One more tune (MPEG3 (33K); RealAudio (33K)), that was used as the theme song for a popular Russian TV show, but few people know its real origin. Would you guess? Send your answers to qleobq@xmailcomx.com (omit obvious extra characters before sending).
• A joke (MPEG Layer 3 135K download, listen). If you know the author of the joke, please let me know (you know what to do with the address).
• Borromean rings made of paper clips. Can you do it without bending the clips?
• A script that tells you if speeding is useful.

  I have contributed to:

  
• The Unicode Consortium. On the right - the character I've sponsored.
  
• The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Look for my name among the People who have won. Starting from the Contest held in 1998, I'm also one of the judges.
• An article by Mark Nelson on Burrows-Wheeler Transform, published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, that I have some relation to (see Acknowledgements).
• The On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
• MathWorld. The result was achieved using an engineering calculator when I was approx. 15 years old.
• The Card Games site.

My favorite quote of the period:
...one is not to have the exercise of his liberty of expression in appropriate places abridged on the plea that it may be exercised in some other place.

This page has had its 2,266th call.