The Return of Evil Empire Gaming
Sunday, September 27, 2009I have a special place in my heart for the first blog I ever started. It was back back in 1998, I was really into Quake 2, and we formed a Quake 2 CTF clan called Evil Empire after the Rage Against The Machine album. Our clan moniker was [EvEm]. I've written about it before when I made the claim I still stand by that blogging got a kick start because of Quake and not Dave Winer.
Now it's back! It's been existing as a static archive for ages, but I've installed Wordpress and made it live again. I've trawled through all the archive CDs I had and even pestered Adrian to see what he had.
The biggest lesson learned from restoring all these archives: closed binary formats are BAD. Adrian had loads of archives... all in Retrospect format which rendered them useless. But he did have some CDs of saved files and one of those was a missing version of the site... as a Lotus Notes database ( .nsf) file.
At first this seemed like a barrier. I have a running copy of the Lotus Notes client in a VM, but the database couldn't be opened because of it's ACL. I was ready to give up because it'd be impossible to recreate the Notes ID files that would allow access. Then came Jake Howlett to the rescue. Apparently, if you open the file in a hex editor and zero the bits between offset 0x16c and 0x1a7, it leaves a blank ACL: default access level of Manager.
While I haven't been able to get a static archive of the whole site (in a Lotus Notes database all your site design and templates are stored in the same file as your data), I've been able to extract all the images. To get the whole site I'd need to get a Lotus Notes Domino server running. Boy, that sounds like fun.
So the history of Evil Empire is now available in the Evil Archives, and also in the Gallery O' Gibbage. In the gallery I've restored 2000+ game screen shots, photos and other images from all the old versions of the site.
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