News You Can Bruise for 2003 March 2

Sun Mar 02 2003 21:29 What Do We Want? Software Roundup!:

• PixiePlus harnesses the well-known graphical acumen of pixies to display many popular and unpopular graphics formats. You can also use pixie dust to generate HTML image galleries, which I suppose makes sense; why should I have to create my HTML image galleries in a command line context where I can't even see the images?
• CVSHistory is a useful plug-in for CVSWeb that lets you slice the repository history in various ways. The more ambitious Bloof runs software metrics against a CVSWeb repository.
• Emacs MP3 player. Unfortunately, it's just a front-end to mpg123; it's not the whole MP3 player in Emacs Lisp.
• To me, mainly interesting for its name and pedigree: Enemies of Carlotta, a mailing list manager written by Lars Wirzenius.
• The cunning twocrypt encrypts two files, the real file and the "plausible deniability" file, into one; sort of like Rubberhose.
• LinPacker is a genetic algorithm for solving the bin-packing program. The website has a really cute navigation menu... but what operating system is it for?
• FormKit for Python crushes LOMP like a molehill of Japanese steel.
• Should I ever decide to implement the LiveJournal protocol in NewsBruiser, I can use ljchk to test it, because ljchk is an interface to the liveJournal protocol. The end.
• rb.log, a blogging program written in Ruby.
• Python Desktop Server, a weblog/RSS aggregator/dashboard for your Digital Lifestyle^TM.
• jSight The Freshmeat entry promises "A code generator set to create a user-defined system of Web robots", so watch out! Somewhere the author is cackling, "At last! My code generator is set to create a user-defined system of Web robots!" The page is all about using it in bioinformation applications, but either I completely misunderstand what it's for or it could be interesting in many other contexts, whenever you have a variety of related web applications with different interfaces.
• Comment, a minimal note taker.

Sun Mar 02 2003 21:49 When Do We Want It? Game Roundup!:

• There's a new version of Nethack out.
• Catch The Furball is a combination graphical adventure/icebreaker discussion game. It's got disparate elements which work together well.
• Consider if you will, Intelligent Tetris, the Tetris clone that includes a Tetris AI. Yes, it can think!, says the Web page. It used to be a DOS game, and I have a soft spot for games that used to be DOS games. This is very convenient; now the computer can play Tetris while you get useful work done.
• Ashwin N. finally cleaned up Alan Cox's old, segfault-prone Linux port of Rogue, and gives us LinuxRogue. Rogue is apparently some sort of roguelike game.
• The Valley. Eto retro! This game was originally published in a computer magazine in the '80s, and the author has recently rewritten it. I originally thought it was an Oregon-trail-like thing, but it's more of an Ultima/BBS door type game.
• gtk-manix is your standard Pacman clone with a very Unixy-looking Pacman. I have no facts to back this up, that's just my subjective impression. He looks like a Pacman who accepts energy dots on standard input.
• Slune, a car racing game in which Tux the penguin and a certain Gnu team up to deliver AIDS drugs to Africa. The Gnu, in particular, has a wry buddy-cop-movie sense of humor that I never envisioned him having, but which fits pretty well.
• There is no escape from Sokoban 3D! Come back, you! I said there was no escape!

Sun Mar 02 2003 22:21: I think there's an untapped market for a talk show that features people who are neurotic or freakish, but not really neurotic or freakish enough to be featured on existing talk shows. This show would capture viewers who feel guilt or shame when watching existing talk shows. My proposed show would feature such minor deviants as:

• People who make jokes that seem a little over the line, "the line" being defined by context and the makeup of the joke audience.
• People who still live with their parents, but they're trying to get jobs and they're still in their mid-twenties so it's not incredibly pathetic or anything.
• People who cultivate little everyday superstitions, and try to perform them in unobtrusive ways so that people don't notice and ask them why they always eat their food in alphabetical order.
• Women Who Love A Little Bit Too Much, And The Men Who Love Them, But Not Quite Enough.
• The audience members from any other given talk show.

Eventually the talk show would become desperate for ratings and go all sensationalist, but when it did it would only be as bad as a regular talk show is now.

The other thing I think talk shows could do is form a Talk Show Wrestling Federation like the WWE, have talk show hosts bad-mouth each other and every once in a while get into a ring and hit each other with folding chairs. They could orchestrate rivalries and make up story arcs about how host X had stolen host Y's guest, or whatever. I don't know whether this would help ratings, but I figure it's a good test case for this alleged superpower of mine, where I can trick arbitrary people into hitting each other with folding chairs.