News You Can Bruise for 2003 May 19

Belated catchy yet inexplicably unusable alternate title for What Fools These Mortals: "God Mode".

Leonard's Law Of Meetings: "An employee is a meeting's way of making more meetings."

A little while back I set up a CVS repository on the machine that hosts Crummy. Today I spent some time importing stuff and setting up ViewCVS, and the result is Leonard's Repository Of Fun. There's also anonymous CVS access; directions are on the RoF page. So far I've put up codebases for the following programs:

• Degeneracy
• Guess The Verb!
• The Eater of Meaning
• ksethdavidschoen
• The Me Software Map
• Tonight's String
• What Fools These Mortals

More coming soon (don't worry, I won't list here every single one I add). I put some work into importing old backup codebases I had for my IF games, so if you're interested you can poke around in the history and find old design docs, like the stream-of-consciousness trancript which was the first thing I ever wrote for Guess The Verb!.

Also, please let me know if I've made some horrible CVS-hosting mistake.

First, let me shill again for pyblagg, which helps me find so much cool stuff that I don't even care that I'm hopelessly behind on Software Roundup. First, a 1998 paper called on reuse called The Selfish Class, which tickles my buttons (the low-key version of "pushes my buttons"). I'm not sure how much of it is an eloquent statement of things I already knew and how much of it is actual new ideas that just sound very familiar; it seems each section starts with the latter and concludes with the former.

Then there's the awesome ezPyCrypto, a GPLed (so beware)library which makes it incredibly easy to do crypto in Python. Encrypt everything, just because you can! Encrypt your own source code in some sort of obfuscation/trusted computing thing! Encrypt the very name of your program! Encrypt your cat!