Sat Jan 11 2003 00:11:
A. Holloway read the entire NYCB ouvre for 2002, and decided that his favorite entry was the very first one of the year, the one about Carmel. Runners-up: Smells Like Teen Circuit, The Two Saturns (aka "How Leonard Thinks"), The Weblog Foundation series, and the one where it gets weird.
My mother's favorite is the putative description of Kiss Me Kant.
That's it (unless you have an email on this subject that you've been holding off sending).
Sat Jan 11 2003 13:59 Software Roundup:
A longer game roundup coming soon. Here are three interesting non-game programs I saw on Freshmeat:
- Bright Noise,
a counter-Tempest program for the terminal. Has the side effect of
making your terminal look like a pointless special effect out of a
movie, which raises the intruiging conjecture that many of those
pointless special effects are actually counter-Tempest measures (think
about it; can you ever make anything out on those screens?).
- soundmosaic is
the aural equivalent of a photomosaic program. It doesn't work as well
with sound, because sound has a time dimension, but it's a cool idea.
- Diet Monger Ass
Kicker is a nice-looking interface to the USDA nutrition database.
I actually think the nutrition database is the star of this entry, and
that DMAK is only along for the ride because of its cool name. DMAK is
written in a programming language called Euphoria, which I'd never
heard of before.
Sat Jan 11 2003 14:14 Game Roundup:
Some of these games I've actually played, others I've just looked at the screenshots. Just like real game reviewers, except I'm honest.
- Polyroids
is a cross-platform port of an old Asteroids-ish SGI game. In this
game, you must prevent the sentient shapes of Flatland from taking
over the universe. Space Command has equipped you with a ray which
will reduce the many-sided Flatlanders to successively lower castes
until they die of shame. Unfortunately, there's a bug (?) which makes
it easy to cheat, even inadvertently. It's still a difficult game,
although I find all Asteroids-ish games difficult because I never move
around the screen.
- Senken is a Simcity-style game. It's too micromanage-y for me, but others might like it.
- Kamikaze is a
nice-looking KDE Bomberman clone.
- The Perl
BlackJack Engine does what I was going to do, only in Perl.
- Gnome Attacks, a
game worthy of the "Carnage" brand. In fact, it's very similar to City
Destroy Carnage except that the cities can't fight back.
- I should mention PoopmUp, "An Urban Flight
Simulator", and leave it at that.
- AirStrike is a clone
of some Amiga dogfight game or other. I think all such games should
have a Snoopy vs. the Red Baron mode, but this one doesn't (in fact, I
don't think any of them do, unless there's a special licensed game
which only has that mode).
Sat Jan 11 2003 22:52:
I wrote a rough draft of an abstract for a presentation for the Python conference. The topic is the advantages of CGI-based configuration systems, and the implementation of same. I sent the abstract to Jason, who's published papers galore. Anyone else want to see it?
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