Today is Carl Sagan Day. I’m thinking of finally getting a TV and then watching Cosmos on it to celebrate the fact that I, too, am made of Star Stuff.
Microsoft to Close Massive
http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/10/08/report-microsoft-to-shut-down-massive-in-game-ad-division/
I wonder what this means for Anarchy Online’s Free-To-Play program? In-Game advertising was a significant revenue stream I believe. Well, maybe Funcom will sell the advertising boards themselves. I say put lolcats on all of them!
I had a great time last night at SuperHappyDevHouse40, and at the end we managed to get a dozen or so people together to play Werewolf. It’s the perfect venue, because everyone is already a nerd.
People were lying and cheating, trying to deduce and influence, and at some point Shaun from saucelabs started writing probabilities on a whiteboard. Good Times. I got to actually play and not just be GM (thanks, guys!) and was Werewolf twice, with great success.
This is not progress
I get about 4-5 authorization request spams on ICQ every day. This used to be no problem at all, because I could tell my IM client to ignore invites. However, about a year ago I moved to using Jabber and talking to ICQ via a transport (the superior way of talking to ICQ servers from more than one computer at a time), and since then, none of the IM clients ignore auth requests anymore.
This is pretty annoying, and if there’s a plugin or a setting for Miranda IM or Pidgin, I’d love to know about it. Because I’m not adding any new ICQ contacts. ICQ is legacy mode for IM.
Clarke and Dawe on the U.S. Oil Spill.
Brilliant.
The Hero Core save file has an attitude.
(via micasaessucasa)
I love it. This reminds me so much of a room I had in Oslo. My apartment here in California is huge in comparison, and I have no idea what to do with all this space – but there’s just nothing like this small, space-optimizing yet bright room anywhere.
Scheme on Ubuntu (with Chickens!)
My plan is to use Scheme for a game. Why? It’s an awesome language. And someone has to do it. This is my log/HOWTO that explains how to install it. I’m using Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx
Step one: Install chicken, a scheme interpreter/compiler, and gcc.
$ sudo apt-get install chicken-bin gcc
Step two: You are done.
$ csi
CHICKEN
©2008-2009 The Chicken Team
©2000-2007 Felix L. Winkelmann
Version 4.2.0
linux-unix-gnu-x86 [ manyargs dload ptables applyhook ]
compiled 2009-11-30 on vernadsky (Linux)#;1> (print (cons “Hello” “World”))
(Hello . World)
This is the interpreter, but we want to build executable files. The compiler, csc, does this for us.
$ cat > hello.scm
(print (cons “Hello” “World”))$ ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erehling erehling 18845 2010-04-21 18:11 hello$ file hello
hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, not stripped$ ./hello
(Hello . World)
Notice that we’ve got a real executable now – nothing’s interpreted. This is promising!
Next time we’ll draw some graphics.
“Now they’re saying that we can’t have gay marriage because it would confuse the kids. But you know what else confuses kids? Everything: Time zones. Books without pictures. Cargo pants. Certain hair colors. Jello molds. The magic trick with the quarter behind the ear. Mirrors. Mentadent toothpaste dispensers. Everything confuses kids, because they’re kids. So "Will it confuse kids?” is probably not the best litmus test for, well, anything besides toys and Spongebob plotlines (and even then, there’s a lot of leeway). “