roguelike – Page 7 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/12/12

Lazy Reading: Lots and lots of it

Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading. I hope you’ve got some spare time for this… Let’s get right into it:

Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering. He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file. Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“. Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game! Aw, it’s Windows-only.
Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them. He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran? I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
Yacc is not dead. (via) I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
Database design ideas. There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.

2010/10/17

Lazy Reading: puzzles, git, old things

Something for everyone this week.

Via sjg/IRC: The next platforms for DragonFly: Dragon 32 and Dragon 64.
chmod -x chmod: a slideshow of possible solutions. (via) As ‘blinkkin’ pointed out on IRC: “hammer history /bin/chmod” and “cp /bin/chmod@@0xtransaction_id” would also fix it.
328 slides of git-wrangling tips (also via)
How to pretend to be busy. I wish I had time for this.
The first MUD, as a solution for class conflict, and not the fighter-vs-mage-vs-cleric type. (via)

2010/10/032010/10/03

Lazy Reading:books, talks, games, games

This Lazy Reading post actually has some good lengthy reading in it.

Modern Perl: The Book: (actually a pre-print draft) Even if you don’t know Perl, I’ve always liked the way the author, chromatic, writes. Many articles about a language or other technical subject tend to either wander about loosely or become a ‘shopping list’ of actions, but chromatic’s work retains focus.
Robert Watson presents Capsicum; a recent USENIX talk on Youtube. (via a number of places)
12 Forgotten Games – the slideshow is of most interest. (via) Online games that predate the vast swarm of today’s titles. MUDs, MUSHs, roguelikes, etc. The nice thing about the slideshow is the link on each slide to a still-running, still-accessible online version of that game.
Kieron Gillen‘s moving away from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a gaming review site that has some honest to goodness decent writing. (My Lazy Reading posts are similar to their Sunday Papers for a reason.) One of his articles was all about ZangbandTK. I was all set to link to that in pkgsrc, but it’s not there – just games/angband-tty and games/angband-x11. Darnit. Anyway, read his article and then go play something roguelike.

2010/09/132010/09/13

Lazy reading: toeplitz, forking, curating, Nethack

I totally meant to post this yesterday. Oops!

We’re using toeplitz. I just like the name; I don’t understand how it works.
The idea of software forks has been around since, oh, BSD and System V Unix diverged, if not earlier. Here’s an article that talks about forking in general, rather breathlessly. After reading that, read this perhaps more accurate fork parody. (via)
You know what we could use for pkgsrc, and all the other port/package collections? Explanation. They face the same problem phone application stores face: too many programs to easily select what you need. You could certainly build a whole site just around package reviews; it’s even possible to argue that Ubuntu or PC-BSD are built around just making some 3rd-party-app choices ahead of time on an existing operating system. Anyway, here’s an article talking about that idea specifically around the Apple App Store. Please won’t somebody who is not me do something like that for pkgsrc?
This writeup of one man’s experience with Forth gives a good feel for the language, or at least as good a feel as I can understand. Posted in memoriam for our recently departed Forth bootloader. (via) There’s other enjoyable articles on that blog, too.
This describes about two years of my life, except it was mostly Zangband.

2010/02/052010/02/05

Messylaneous for 2010/02/05

I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:

Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.

2010/01/15

Messylaneous for 2010/01/15

Still not used to typing “2010”.

I have no idea if bup is a worthwhile backup tool or even if it would compile on DragonFly, but more products should be described this way. (via)
I’ve seen plenty of articles along the lines of “Open Source and X”, where the article explains at great length how open source in certain situations can work well. “Doing It Wrong” comes at it from a different direction.
BSD Magaine is going free, meaning it’s a free download starting with the February issue. The site says “sign up for our newsletter and get every issue straight to your inbox” – the correct link is “Newsletter” on the upper right corner of the page. PDFs of the print issues are available too.
The Open Source Business Resource is now publishing weekly articles in addition to their monthly issue. The inaugural article is “Avatar, Open Source and Humanity 2.0” by Stephen Huddart, and the second is “Do, Delegate, Defer” by the wonderfully-named Emma Jane Hogbin.
Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX: linked many places. It’s a good argument, which reminds me… anyone want to work on DRM for DragonFly? It could use some loving.
A Python script that takes your picture and uploads it every time a merge (in Mercurial) fails. Someone make this work for Git, please. (via)
Speaking of Git, here’s a way to get auto-complete of git commands and local/remote branches in bash.
The latest @Play covers the new, developing roguelike Dungeon Crawl, part 1 of many. It’s listed as running on “all the BSDs”, though I don’t see it in pkgsrc. It is playable via telnet to other servers, though.

2009/12/23

Messylaneous for 2009/12/23

Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist. And he used DragonFly!

Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play. Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld?

Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly – I am a big fan of that idea.

top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.

2009/11/122009/11/11

Text Game history

The National Center for the History of Electronic Games is looking for tangible artifacts having to do with old text-based games, like Adventure or Zork. The article includes some history, too.

(This place is in my town, and it’s eye-bleedingly awesome. I predict that a few years from now, when people realize what this is, it will become a game history Mecca along the lines of PAX.)

2009/10/252009/10/25

More @Play: items in roguelikes

I’ll indulge myself in a bit of roguelike enjoyment: the @Play column is targeting roguelike equipment types, starting with Potions and Scrolls. Loot!

2009/08/28

@Play: going overseas

The latest @Play column, “A Date With Asuka“, covers an unlicensed Japan-only roguelike in 3D for the Dreamcast. I had to think about that sentence very carefully in order to type it; @Play is seeking out more esoteric roguelike variants than I thought possible.

2009/07/29

@Play: programming the dungeon

The latest @Play column talks not about specific roguelikes, but rather programming them, delving into python programming. It’s a new level of nerdy.

2009/06/26

@Play: Fatal Labyrinth

This time, it’s what happens when you take Rogue, export it to Japan, and then see what you get back as a Sega Genesis console game.

I had no idea there were so many permutations of roguelike games. A few years ago, I’d have listed rogue, nethack, moria, [zmw]angband, and ADOM, and felt like I covered it all.

2009/06/182009/06/17

Nethax: AJAX and nethack

Another installment in my continuing obsession with roguelikes: Nethack, implemented as an AJAX application. (via)