Blogging Bonanza

Inform interpreters

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 23:21:23 GMT

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

A first crack at Interactive Fiction

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 00:27:46 GMT

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."

Fantasy Lego

Mon, 24 Mar 2003 16:47:29 GMT

It is amazing what people can do with Legos

Myst: The Book of D'Ni

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 21:13:29 GMT

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.

Super powers

Thu, 20 Mar 2003 17:30:01 GMT

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.

Site stats

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:20:07 GMT

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.

www


Summary by Month

Month	Daily Avg				Monthly Totals
Month	Hits	Files	Pages	Visits	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits

Mar 2003	1245	927	133	44	323	93619	852	2530	17631	23673
Feb 2003	1111	771	84	28	419	129848	791	2373	21599	31134
Jan 2003	185	155	35	13	347	22406	419	1109	4822	5744
Dec 2002	84	63	33	9	255	13866	306	1048	1976	2630
Nov 2002	73	50	40	10	283	11386	312	1225	1503	2190
Oct 2002	27	16	17	5	71	720	55	197	184	298

Totals						271845	2735	8482	47715	65669

culhaven


Summary by Month

Month	Daily Avg				Monthly Totals
Month	Hits	Files	Pages	Visits	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits

Mar 2003	165	127	58	40	461	80563	771	1114	2424	3145
Feb 2003	112	82	53	32	558	112177	908	1495	2318	3158
Jan 2003	100	76	47	31	472	121085	963	1480	2377	3116
Dec 2002	94	74	41	29	500	124499	908	1288	2307	2931
Nov 2002	103	80	38	25	437	99349	767	1165	2407	3118
Oct 2002	49	39	22	13	89	13648	148	247	429	548

Totals						551321	4465	6789	12262	16016

blog


Summary by Month

Month	Daily Avg				Monthly Totals
Month	Hits	Files	Pages	Visits	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits

Mar 2003	98	59	80	48	299	14825	928	1537	1137	1866
Feb 2003	80	47	61	35	356	19937	1004	1716	1338	2245
Jan 2003	35	27	28	18	261	8678	560	886	839	1112
Dec 2002	11	9	8	6	112	2272	208	276	286	356
Nov 2002	18	8	8	4	33	2424	120	264	250	558
Oct 2002	26	10	8	1	10	1100	13	97	117	294

Totals						49236	2833	4776	3967	6431

The Chronicles of Arborell

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:06:10 GMT

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.

Scourge of Worlds

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 22:53:09 GMT

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.

You can't judge a company by its book cover

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 18:16:22 GMT

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.