News You Can Bruise for 2003 March 8

There's a French hosting service (?) called Free, and every time I see its URLs ("free.fr"), I think that it's as opposed to "vichy.fr".

While not really doing anything I found some 1981 Usenet archives. I found the NET.games group interesting; apparently the only games back then were Rogue and Pacman. One historical note is the original proposal (as far as I know) of a potion of hallucination.

There's also another for my collection of accumulated-through-serendipity lists of recipes.

Packed full of useful hints and sarcasm, it's How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Remember gopher? Once it was the king of protocols; now it eats humble pie. gopher has always held a fascination for me: back then, the fascination of access to the Internet and its massive data stores; nowadays, the fascination engendered by relics of a simpler time one is not obliged to reenact.

The point of this little stroll down memory lane is to point you to an essay Rohit Khare wrote, called Who Killed Gopher? Gopher is still being developed, at a stately pre-bubble pace. It's like 1993, only with Subversion.

Before I sleep, a funny line from this review of a Tolkien Roguelike game:

The author is very concerned with the poor realism of allowing humans to become mages...but does not bother to explain why hobbits and half-elves are shop-keepers in down-town Minas Morgul.