Porting NU-Prolog (c. 1995) from BSD Unix to modern Linux

NU-Prolog is a Prolog variant designed by the members of the Machine Intelligence Project at the University of Melbourne, released circa 1986, with a version 1.6.9 released circa 1995.

Recently, I sought to port some software written in NU-Prolog (written by one of its creators, … »

Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware – Part 3

In part 2, we reverse engineered the decrypted format of the licence file data for this particular software. In this part, we investigate that how exactly that licence file is encrypted.

Into the fray

In part 2, we identified that the decrypted licence file… »

Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware – Part 2

In part 1, we reverse engineered the registration code licensing mechanism of this particular software. However, that mechanism was not the mechanism actually in use in 2004; rather, a different mechanism was used based on licence files named license.bin. In this part, we… »

Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware – Part 1

Background

This series concerns a software licensing system used in a proprietary software application from circa 2004. The software was available in an unregistered trial mode with limited functionality. A free licence could be obtained by registering online with the software vendor. The software became… »

Parcels? Subparcels? Not just for STV hand counts! – OpenTally dev log

Single transferable vote rules designed for hand-counting often contain references to ‘parcels’ (or ‘bundles’ or ‘batches’), ‘further parcels’ and sometimes even ‘subparcels’.

For example, consider the 4th stage of the ERS97 model election. 107 of Glazier's and Wright's ballot papers are aggregated according to… »

Implementing a BLT parser by hand in Rust (vs pest and combine): OpenTally dev log

OpenTally is open-source software which can count single transferable vote elections specified using the BLT file format.

Earlier this month, I replaced OpenTally's previous naive string-manipulation-based BLT parser with one using pest. A new parser was necessary to support extensions to the BLT… »