News You Can Bruise for 2005 June

• There's a whole genre of games I never knew about before: Slime Volleyball. First invented by computer science students at the University of Western Australia, it has spawned a Roguelike number of variants. All the variants are fun to play, mainly because you're controlling these awesome slime characters. Very good character design here. Iconic.
• Lost Labyrinth of previous Game Roundup fame has lost its Unix branch, but the developers have put a lot of new features into the Windows version and the game is much more playable now, assuming you have Windoze, as the kids call it, though probably not the kids in this part of the timeline. I think it's still too hard, but there's not so much near-instant-death as previously.
• crosssum lets you solve those number puzzles that take place in crossword grids. Not the Sudoku which became popular in the UK between the time I wrote that sentence and the time I wrote this one, and which indeed made me have to write this clarifying sentence.
• In these times of crisis we must find ways to reduce our dependence on foreign games. This is why more and more game makers are producing explanation-efficient ludemic hybrids. Torrent combines SameGnome and Tetris: you must click on adjacent blocks of color to remove them, to avoid the blocks from reaching the top of the screen. Now I can use words on something else!
• Like Batalhao, a fun little Brazillian tank game in which your tank has to protect the city from other tanks. The other tanks will try to blow up your pizza parlor and your hospital, with no regard for the relative strategic values of those locations. In fact I think the city in this game is the town where Encyclopedia Brown lives, which was always being described in terms of the buildings within the city limits (two delicatessens, a synagogue, etc.). This game has some tactical element missing that if present would make it a great game; as it is it's just a good game.
• It had to happen: 3D Minesweeper. The only question is, why? On that soul-searching note, I end this Game Roundup. My antivengeance is complete!

Working on a little project which is fun and which you might like when I'm done. Also trying to get my sci-fi story done before someone actually implements the idea and it becomes pointless New Yorker fiction instead of sci-fi. My next article isn't due until the end of the month so I have a little time to do other things.

Anyway, when I watched it with Sumana we watched it in Japanese with subtitles, just because that's how we saw Spirited Away in the theater and we liked the voice work for that movie. About halfway through the second viewing, the disc started acting up and we tried various things to fix it, including switching the audio track to English. And gaah! but the English track was a mess.

There was already a perfectly servicable and (as far as I could tell) pretty faithful English translation, which was used as the subtitles for the Japanese audio track. But in the dubbed version, this translation had been jettisoned in favor of what was clearly a much looser and greatly inferior translation, complete with entirely new lines of dialogue that didn't even work. It was like someone's bad fan fiction had been dubbed onto the movie. So I guess I am going to have to be a subtitle snob, if that's what they do when they dub movies. I never really compared the subtitled versions of a particular movie to the dubbed before, because I assumed they used the same translation for each. Does this always happen?

Perhaps if I made marshmallows using John Agar as the thickening agent. Yes, that would surely work.

It's called The Bayes Motel and it does a pretty good job. By which I mean I wrote applications using it for a domain where Bayesian rating obviously works, and one where it almost works, and... it works and it almost works. TBM also does something I've been wanting for a while without realizing it: different tokens are displayed with different colors, to help you visualize how a piece of text got a certain Bayesian score. Pretty slick! And inefficient. Oh well, it's not supposed to be a big heavy-duty application anyway, just a prototyping tool. I hope you find it useful.

If I were a real hacker I would forget this Bayesian nonsense and do a Python implementation of Fast and accurate text classification via multiple linear discriminant projections. Even in accomplishment I feel guilty!

He's also got lots of other interesting recipes, mainly for homemade cheese and other dairy products. My seventh grade science teacher was named Larry Fankhauser; I wonder if the two are related.

No packaging; I'll just put it inline for those interested. You need the Eater, of course, and Beautiful Soup (or one of those fancy del.icio.us-Python interfaces with all the XML dependencies).

#!/usr/bin/python
#Del Eat
#by Leonard

import urllib2
import os
import sys
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from eater import WordEndingEater

if len(sys.argv) != 4:
    print 'Usage: %s [username] [password] [path to Eater prefix file]' \
          % sys.argv[0]
    sys.exit(1)

username, password, path = sys.argv[1:]
if not os.path.exists(path):
    print 'No such Eater prefix file: %s' % path
    sys.exit(1)

authinfo = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
authinfo.add_password('del.icio.us API', 'http://del.icio.us', 
                      username, password)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(authinfo)
xml = BeautifulSoup(opener.open('http://del.icio.us/api/tags/get').read())

eater = WordEndingEater(path)
print '<ul>'
for tag in xml('tag'):
    eaten = eater.eatWord(tag['tag'], 'text')
    print '<li><a href="http://del.icio.us/tag/%s/">%s</a></li>' % (eaten,
                                                                    eaten)
print '</ul>'

Now, you too can gain entry into this lucrative field (writing, not dinosaur hunting)! Tony thought of me when his editor needed someone to work on a Python book; now I'm paying it forward. My Wiley editor needs someone to finish a chapter about clustering on Knoppix. I don't have the equipment to run any kind of cluster, but I bet one of my readers does.

You should probably know something about cluster programming, but not neccessarily anything about Knoppix. The ability to write good prose is 5-10 times more important than knowing about the topic beforehand. You just have to be good at picking things up quickly, because by the time you're done you will need to know a whole lot about the topic.

Send me email if you're interested in this. It's just one chapter and much of it is done already, so it's about the easiest introduction into the world of writing you could hope for. If you deliver on time the editor will have a mental picture of you as someone who saved their bacon, and think of you for other, larger projects, and pretty soon the world is your scallop.

I made some bread yesterday actually. A couple weeks ago I was running out of pizza dough so I decided to make some more. But I wasn't thinking and I made french dough starter instead. So, lots of french dough starter in the freezer.

I finished the revision on my Cheetah article, and submitted the first draft of my CherryPy article, so now I'm ready for my next overambitious project! Man, this is a big one.

Floyd also mentioned that he dabbles in Ruby, so that's one. I am going through the Poignant Guide, which is funny and gonzo and Fafbloggish, and I have a simple question about idiom. I see code like the following, which sets up a block that deals with a single item:

File::open('foo.txt', 'w') do |f|
  f << "text"
end

This idiom makes sense when you're iterating over a bunch of items, but why create a new block to deal with a single item? Is it somehow more Rubic (Rubyic?) than the following code, which seems much more straightforward?:

f = File::open('foo.txt', 'w')
f << "text"

Let me know. I'm trying to spare you the details of my mastery of Ruby (and puppets), but this is undoubtedly the first of many questions.

The DVD we borrowed from the library, which is apparently the only edition available in the US, was dubbed (who knows how well etc.) but supposedly Disney is going to release a subtitled version soon... Hold on, I've just been handed a late-breaking bulletin. It seems Disney won't have enough incentive to release the subtitled version unless copyright is extended another twenty years! Hey, why is this "bulletin" written with letters cut out from magazine headlines?

Oh yeah, the movie. Not as funny as The Ladykillers, but a more interesting plot, with several good dramatic moments. The Lavender Hill Mob is now waiting at the library, so our Film Festival of the Long Now proceeds apace, in which we will eventually see all the Ealing comedies starring Alec Guinness.

• The mini-game Ambassador of Pain really cleared up a lot of my misconceptions about diplomatic service. For instance, who knew that international relations were so much like a snake game, except without the snake? And how else would I have found out that the major topic of discussion at summit meetings was pain?

  There is not a whole lot to this game, but you can define the levels with ASCII art, and it has a level in which you must make your way up the TCP/IP protocol stack. So that's two points in its favor.

• Jump n Bump has nothing to do with arcade classic Bump 'n' Jump, except that both involve bumps and jumping. You'd think that would be a lot of commonality, but while in Bump 'n' Jump you were a car and you needed to jump over obstacles and bump your opponents, in Jump 'n' Bump you are a bunny and you need to jump onto your opponents (bumping them is also an option). Multiplayer only. Lots of fun, very polished; a basic carnage game.
• Dragon Hunt is a little Python game of the Final Fantasy genre, written by the guy who ported all of Kenta Cho's games to Linux. Not very difficult, but kind of fun. And c'mon, this guy ported Kenta Cho to Linux. Give him a break and play his game.
• crossfire is a Roguelike I've known about for years but never really tried out, possibly to avoid a namespace collision with the old IBM game called Crossfire, covered in an earlier Game Roundup. It's multi-player and semi-real-time, giving it sort of a Gauntlet feel, which is really nice. What's not so nice is the weird feel of the tile system. Not sure what's going on there. Also the interface is kind of awkward: you can tell it's been programmed for extensibility but not actually extended that much. However it does have lots of user-contributed maps in its map set; it's like Rocks 'n' Diamonds, only not overwhelming to the point of aggravation. I shouldn't have overlooked this game for as long as I did.
• Silmar is an updated Java version of a DOS Roguelike that I remember uploading to Da Warren. So this guy's been working on the same game idea for over ten years. You don't see that kind of dedication too often. So how is it? Well, I took the old version out of mothballs to do a comparison, and I must say the new version is much nicer. The only feature of the old version I miss is the enormous number of character classes: the old version was the only Roguelike I've ever seen that lets you play a baseball player.

  Nowadays Silmar is an interesting Roguelike, pretty tough, with an IF-like fixation on light management and lots of interesting non-character-class related features like a spell that bookmarks your location on a particular level (so you can get back there later). It's also got abandoned mine shafts that you can't resist poking around in. You'd think there'd be treasure in there, or a bonus level, but half the time they're just empty and the other half they contain a ferocious dragon who comes out and slaughters you. So it's got a real sort of Lassie "don't poke around abandoned mine shafts" vibe.

• RPGD is a BBS-style game, but I couldn't get signed up with it so I never got to the point where I figured out if it was like the door games I like (Wizard's Arena) or the door games I don't like (Legend of the Red Dragon). I guess I suspected it would be like the latter and I didn't care enough to sign up for an account. I like the ANSI graphics though; that brings back the memories.
• Widelands was covered in an earlier Game Roundup (the one linked above) and I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. Now it's been improved, made more usable, and I see that it's an RTS game after my heart, kind of like SimCity. The focus is on building roads and structures to gain new types of materials, but there's still no real indication of what you're going to do with those materials so it's like playing FreeCiv without any knowledge of what the tech tree is for. I'll check back in another few months.

  I'm also not sure what is it with these games and frame rates. They seem awfully proud of their frame rates, so much so that it has to be displayed on the screen at all times. It makes no sense to me.

We did see a guy who works at the aquarium and was a college friend of Pete Peterson II, and the jellies were incredible. They were illuminated from within the tanks, and in one of the tanks you could push a button to turn off the light and see the jellies become nearly invisible.

Coming soon: sea creature nomenclature prescriptivism: exposed!

Also while writing this entry I noticed that there are some MP3s up from Jake's new album, which now that I think of it I should probably buy cause it's not just gonna magically get sent to me. The songs on this album are based on search requests to his website, and in the postcard he says he's looking forward to the album I've barely touched. "Trouble rarely stops but when it does we make our own," he says.

When we went to the Monterey Bay aquarium last weekend there was one awesome permanent exhibit with a lot of jellyfish. Also a "The Art of Jellies" exhibit which was pretty gimmicky if you ask me, though it did position a tank of jellyfish in a mirrored room, giving you the impression that they had you surrounded. But apparently the marine biology cartel now wants you to say "jellies" (or, I suppose "sea jellies") instead of "jellyfish", because those things are amazingly not fish.

The only other non-fish with a fishy name I can think of is "cuttlefish". I've never heard anyone saying you should call a cuttlefish something else, but I checked "on the line", as the kids say, and "cuttle" is the hot new name for that beast. How long has this been going on? Did people used to refer to cucumberfish, anenomefish, and urchinfish until someone rewrote the aquarium displays to encourage the biologically correct usage?

In an interesting reverse of this trend, at the aquarium I also noticed that the fish that used to be called a "dolphin" is now called a "dolphinfish". I think chopping "fish" off the names of obvious non-fish is not really worth it, but I'm glad about the "dolphinfish" change because that was really confusing. I'd hear about sport fishermen catching a bazillion dolphin and wonder why nobody was upset about that.

2007 Update: I found this annotation in Google Book Search, in the Northwestern University Press's edition of Moby-Dick (ISBN 0810102684):

Apparently a misreading as the name for the elephant's owner. The editors of the Hendricks House Moby-Dick... point out that it does not occur in Melville's source passages and that its form is an impossible one in Greek. The NN [presumably another edition] editors have no explanation or emendation to offer.

I'm pretty sure Melville made up a dirty story and ascribed it to ancient history.

astroids that will come to earth and destroy it do you have a picture of that

Well? Do you, smart guy?

ingredients to make a real live metroid egg

Not gonna work.

This was in seventh grade algebra. We were given a mimeographed worksheet containing a "test of [our] ability to follow instructions". It had twenty instructions on it to follow. It said "Read this test all the way through before you do anything." So I did. The first instruction said to put your name at the top of the paper. All the rest of the instructions were to write down the answer to various trivia questions, except the last one, which was along the lines of "Stop! Don't write anything on this paper! Just turn it in!"

Ridiculous, I thought. By the time I get to that instruction, I'll have already written all kinds of things on this paper, and there's nothing after it. It's probably a trick to get people to follow the instructions out of order. Anyway, having read the test all the way through, I started on the first instruction. I completed all the instructions until I got to the one that said stop, then I stopped and turned it in.

Well, that wasn't what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to execute the the last instruction before any of the others, and never write anything on your paper. Why should you execute instruction #20 before executing instruction #19? Because #20 looks weird! Geez, Leonard!

I fought it, and lost. At the time I foolishly thought that mine was the only correct solution. But I don't think the worksheet said anything about the order in which you should complete the instructions, so there are actually a large number of correct solutions, including the one the teacher considered correct. So I could have satisfied my own sense of correctness while still getting a good score on the assignment (this was a big dilemma for me in school; it's not so much a factor now that satisfying my own sense of correctness is more closely aligned with doing a good job).

The moral, as always: don't mess with self-reference unless you really know what you're doing. Start by messing with Texas, and work your way up.

     EXT. ILLINOIS COUNTRYSIDE - AFTERNOON 

			   GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             I just got off the phone with Washington. The
             Gravlax is headed towards Chicago. You'd better
             pray this device of yours works, doctor.

                           PROF. TOUCHFEELY

             I can't shake the feeling we're making a huge
             mistake. We haven't been able to establish
             communication with the Gravlax yet. For all
             we know its intentions are peaceful.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             By golly, I won't see the Earth destroyed
             just to test out your pet theories! Sergeant, 
             activate the atom ray!

                            SERGEANT JONES

             Sir, yes sir!

      CUT TO: 

      There is a huge EXPLOSION (STOCK).

      EXT. ILLINOIS COUNTRYSIDE - CONTINUING

      The area is covered with a fine paste of GRAVLAX.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM
                      (scraping GRAVLAX off his hat
                       with one finger)

             What _is_ this stuff?

                           PROF. TOUCHFEELY
                       (tasting GRAVLAX from his 
                        tie)

             It's cured salmon, General. Perfectly harmless.

                       (wiping GRAVLAX off his suit)

             As I suspected, the Gravlax came to this planet
             to lend its salty taste to little sandwiches
             and other light appetizers. But we were not
             ready for it. In our arrogance and blindness we
             assumed that because it had a name like
             "Gravlax" it had to be some sort of hideous
             B-movie monster. Perhaps one day mankind will 
             learn.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             It's delicious.

      Enter PETE, frantic.

                                 PETE

             Doctor, General. I just heard from the lab
             in Peoria. That signal the Gravlax sent from
             its ship -- it was aimed directly at its
             original point of origin.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             That could only mean...

                           PROF. TOUCHFEELY

             More of them are on the way.

      CLOSE ON MCBOMBEM

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             We'll be ready for them.

                               THE END
                                 ...
                                  ?