There was a comment yesterday about interpreters for the file I uploaded. Here is a link to all the interpreters you could ever want.

Over the weekend I explored writing Interactive Fiction games (ie things like Zork from Infocom) using Inform. Inform was/is basically the same technology that Zork was written in, and things written in it will run using the same emulators that will run the Zork games now.

The language itself reminds me of Pascal more then anything, and has been easy to pick up. More then anything, I believe the difficulty in learning a language (any language) is not the syntax as much as it is learning the libraries and the APIs that accompany the language. I guess you could say the same thing about spoken language as well....the vocab and conjugation is a bear, not "the where" of the placement of a noun or a verb.

Anyway, I was going through a tutorial and wrote the following game. I did add a couple of my own features that were not in the tutorial, but still have a long way to go before I write anything that is really exciting.

If you are interested, here is the data file for the "game" I "wrote."

It is amazing what people can do with Legos

Last night I finished Myst: The Book of D'Ni. It is the third in a series that deals with the history and the continuation of the Myst PC Games. This third book deals with the discovery of a sister civilization to the D'Ni civilization, and their interaction with Artus and his group of survivors from the D'Ni and their Ages.

The descriptions of the sister civilization are beautiful, and the story is engaging. The only downside is that it takes a while to get going, and so it has taken me some time to read it. Once you get about half way through the book things start to get interesting, and about the last quarter of the book goes by very fast. Overall, a good book, if you can get past the beginning.

Jon Udell made an entry called, "Choose your superpower". What I find interesting is that back in February my wife and I had a conversation about this same thing. Of course we didn't limit it to just invisibility or flying, but rather any one super power.

What did I choose? Flying.

The NPR segment that got Jon going quotes one person saying that people who choose flying over invisibility are lying. Here it is:

I think a lot of people will tell you they'll choose flight, and I think they're lying. I think they'll say that in order to sound mythic and heroic, because the better angels of our nature would tell us that we should strive for flight. But I think if everybody were being perfectly honest, they'd tell you the truth, which is that they all want to be invisible so that they can shoplift, go to movies for free, go to exotic places without paying for airline tickets, and watch celebrities have sex.

I disagree. I have no interest in any of those things. I'd rather be able to move from place to place quickly. I often wonder what society would be like if we had transporters. Since we're talking about super powers though, I'd love to fly. I could see the scenery from high up and enjoy it on the way to where I was going, but still get there much faster.

What got me thinking about this back in February was an RPG (of course). Mutants and Masterminds. It has a huge list of super-powers for characters, as well as tells you how to create your own powers if you can't find exactly what you are looking for in there. That got me thinking about what super-power I would like to have.

I thought that these site stats might be interesting for some people. The links won't work (and that's intentional), but just look at the trend. More people visiting...Cool.

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culhaven

blog

Speaking of Choose Your Own Adventure, I was reminded of an online choose your own adventure called The Chronicles of Arborell. I haven't read them yet, but it looks interesting.

If you remember, back in the 80's there were these "Choose Youy Own Adventure" books. There were a number of genre's, but the ones that I read the most of were fantasy. So, when I saw this I was amazed. Basically a choose your own adventure game on a DVD. Over 1000 posible paths through the game, twenty decision points, four different endings, and some really cool graphics. Sounds like 18 minutes is the shortest it could be, while 40 minutes is the longest it could run. Comes out in July of this year.

This article on what books people are reading at big companies was cool. While it gives advice on purchasing stock based on the books the company is reading, it certainally gives you a bit of insight into what the company culture is like.

If a company's ability to perform was based solely on the books they bought from amazon, I'm not sure I'd help the company....most of mine would be aikido and tolkien books.

That doesn't mean that I don't read tech books...most of my reading is from sites on the net, as well as books I've been able to aquire from going to the Utah Java Users Group (see "free books"), and finally, I've got subscriptions to about five different magazines. So, you can't judge a company by the books they read. IMO.
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