Archaeology on Marcello Barnaba

GRcalc: A Graphical Calculator in Turbo Pascal, 2002

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In February 2002 I was 20 years old and taking a Programmazione (Programming) exam. The assignment was: a data structure representing books, stored as binary records in a file. Write a program to list, add, and delete them.

I didn’t do that. I built a graphical calculator instead.

Sux Services: Multithreaded, SQL-Backed IRC Services from Scratch, 2002

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the sequel to Forking Bahamut for Azzurra IRC: IPv6 and SSL in 2002. After forking the IRC server, I started writing services from scratch.

One of the things I’m enjoying most about working with Claude is digital archaeology. I’ve spent twenty years accumulating old projects on backup disks, SourceForge, forgotten servers — code I wrote and never looked at again. Now I can just point Claude at a tarball and say “convert this to git” or “explain what 21-year-old me was thinking here” and get an actual conversation going with my own past.

Today’s dig: I went to SourceForge and downloaded the CVS repository for a project of mine from 2003 — Sux Services, my attempt at writing IRC services from scratch, in C, for the Azzurra IRC Network. I said “Claude, convert this CVS repo to git” and a few minutes later I had a clean Git repository with 954 commits, three authors, and a continuous history from September 2002 to November 2005.

I never finished this project. I left the network before it was ready for production. A Latvian developer picked it up, wrote 192 commits, and then the trail goes cold.

I wrote about it at the time — a WIP post from March 2003, when NickServ and ChanServ were working and I was stress testing with 100 bots.

Looking at this code now is — I don’t know the right word. Moving, maybe. There’s something about reading your own commit messages from twenty years ago, seeing the excitement and the frustration, recognizing the patterns you’d use for the next two decades but couldn’t name yet. It’s like hearing your own voice on a recording from when you were young — familiar and alien at the same time.

Forking Bahamut for Azzurra IRC: IPv6 and SSL in 2002

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0200

This is the prequel to Sux Services: Multithreaded, SQL-Backed IRC Services from Scratch, 2002. Before I started writing IRC services from scratch, I spent the better part of a year doing something arguably crazier: forking an IRC server to add IPv6 and SSL (now known as TLS). I was twenty-one.

The project lived in a CVS repository on SourceForge — it’s still there, a digital fossil. Claude converted it to Git — 171 commits, three authors, continuous history from February 2002 to January 2006. I wrote it — a fork of Bahamut, the IRC daemon that powered DALnet, one of the largest IRC networks of its era. Let me tell you about it.

How I got here¶

I discovered IRC the same way I discovered Linux — through linux&c, an Italian magazine (there are scanned copies on Archive.org, including issue #0 that I bought) that was one of the few entry points to the open-source world for Italian teenagers in the late ’90s. An article mentioned Azzurra (history), the Italian IRC network. I connected, founded a channel with friends — #sniffo (inline skating and funny faces, nothing pharmaceutical) — and a Monopoli/Milan/Bologna axis of smanettoni was born.

Ska from Milan, me in Bari, and Alk from Bologna, circa 2001. Three smanettoni who met on IRC and converged physically to do nerd things together.