Peter Backes
rtc@gmx.de
Welcome to my home page! If you like it, consider also to have
a look at my blog.
The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night,
when there are so many urgent things needing to be done.
—Donald E. Knuth
About me
My name is Peter Backes, and I am a computer hacker. Some
people might also know me by my nom de guerre
‘Rattacresh,’—or its short form, ‘rtc,’
which is my login name. It was inspired by the name of one of the
protagonists from an old children’s TV series that I liked when I
was young (and still do). I share the character’s attitude
of a lone space bounty hunter … Sometimes, I use 
, a modified version of the protagonist’s
logo (but not to be confused with the entirely unrelated symbol used by
the squatter movement, which has edges that touch the circle.)
I like writing computer programs, especially ones that parse and
deal with obscure file formats. Another hobby of mine is
researching the history and philosophy of computing and hacking.
The first computer that I owned was an ATARI ST (in 1992) and I learned
about UNIX and the Internet quite soon (at university; my father worked
there). Quickly, I started to appreciate the value of Free
Software, since I used many GNU and BSD tools on my ATARI in an attempt
to set up a UNIX-like system with MiNT as the kernel. My life has
been a better one ever since I got rid of the remaining proprietary
software, especially for the GUI stuff. Today, I prefer Fedora
with XFCE as the desktop environment.
But I am also interested in general philosophy. So if you like
to discuss the the meaning of life with me, do not hesitate to do so!
Computer programs
OCEANIA (font), OCEANIA (documentation), OCEANIA (source code)
- Hinted METATYPE1 font of the typeface designed by Phil Cordingly
and Phil Watts for Ocean
Girl, an Australian television series which I liked watching
as a teenager. Animation Works actually
used a modified version of an early draft for their 1998 animated
series The New Adventures Of Neri and its accompanying
website! (Sad that they set the animated series in a universe
completely different from the original and traded its charm for
Arielle-like cheesiness.) Note that there is not much meta-ness
in it and that it could be implemented in a much more elegant
way. I am also aware that it contains typographic
beginner’s mistakes.
- cvsclone
- Clones CVS repositories over the cvspserver interface. Works
for anonymous access.
- bintoiso
- Extracts an ISO image out of a CDRWin .BIN dump.
- card
- Extracts files written by the CMS CARD dumper utility.
- jpgsalv
- JPEG salvager. Extracts JPEG images from arbitrary
files. Since it takes the JPEG format’s syntactic structure
into account, it works even where the more primitive tools fail.
(It cannot solve every case, though: If your picture consists of
fragements spread across the file, there is no way for the tool to
figure out how to handle that.)
- mas
- Expands .MAS into raw disk images. Such MAS files are
supplied on the Public Domain CD once sold by the ST
Computer magazine for ATARI computers. It may be that
these were created by a program called DISKETTE MASTER, but I am not
sure about it.
- unmsa
- Expands .MSA into raw disk images. These are produced by the
Magic Shadow Archiver.
- rightly
- filesystem timestamp converter.
- satu, example table
definition for RFC822
- string analyzing table generator
- ONS
- Reads tokenized GFA BASIC version 3.x source files and converts
them to human readable ASCII listings.
MATRICKS
- A set of programs written in QBASIC on a 90 MHz military computer
while I served the army. MATRIXC is a matrix code
implementation; use q, a, w,
s, e, d, c, p
and the space key to change parameters. MTXNAKE is a clone of
the game snake in which you have to clean the Matrix from hostile nul
bytes. Play with the cursor keys; the space key pauses. It even
keeps a high score list. Finally, MTXT can fade messages in and
out of the screen. INVADRIX and TETRIX were supposed to be
clones of space invader and tetris one day, but I did hardly start
them before I left the military. MTXT and MATRIXC work with FreeBASIC without changes.
- CSVUTIL
- A set of very basic file catalogueing utilities, based on CSV
files.
- autoupd
- Automatically keeps an exported copy of a CVS module. Now can
export to a remote machine over ssh!
- mpcimg
- Converts to and from MagiC PC harddisk image format.
- mmtoyacc
- Extracts syntax rules from metamath files and converts them to
yacc format. Metamath is some kind of a modern version of Bertrand
Russell’s groundbreaking Principia Mathematica
Computer graphics
diam
(MetaPost source), diam (result), diamond rendered using diam data
- MetaPost program to compute diamond cuts and a rendered picture that
used a diamond modelled with the resulting data. The picture was
generated with Blender and YafRay.
- pump
- One of my first experiments with modelling and rendering,
imitating a picture done by Phil Watts. It still looks pretty, I
must say.
PGP Key
Type bits keyID Date User ID
RSA 1024 0x8DD46B59 1997/02/18 Peter Backes <rtc@gmx.de>
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP 6.5.8
mQCNAzMJ6QMAAAEEAMJz8VBpXfTluiM63wX6fjaobfvLuihvQEi5MIQkrcbpIO+B
9XcpheEIN7OBR/813FSePK7txScgGa7rJfa4CK92FUxAhkTF8HGj7Hsz0TnvPsLK
gG8Av3BSIA9JFnQIVaWWqslKCS+78zv6at3lFws88sMHDNXylYkVxdSN1GtZAAUR
tBlQZXRlciBCYWNrZXMgPHJ0Y0BnbXguZGU+iQCVAwUQOd0hv4kVxdSN1GtZAQEC
iQP+MU843SOPw+hfOWKf1G0ERzjahEQ1cPtPNshRDjn3EX4hA5ALjbkQ91+mYo0z
C1gieFTMmq86MGn03/6gcFxDYWmzBhH0Ve8yHjCD632ip1T43Wl3kuKnugfwHsM7
xu0umGqZ7xPTB4AYdVEehT07mqs5FL+Tbf/yKoOQmJhKl1k=
=ffkd
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
, a modified version of the protagonist’s
logo (but not to be confused with the entirely unrelated symbol used by
the squatter movement, which has edges that touch the circle.)