Lazy Reading: down memory lane

Entertainment, this week.  There’s several items here that will be more entertaining if you’re over 25.  Or maybe 35.  Get clicking!

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.
Lazy Reading: puzzles, git, old things

Something for everyone this week.

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.
    Lazy reading: toeplitz, forking, curating, Nethack

    I totally meant to post this yesterday.  Oops!

    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:

    Messylaneous for 2010/01/15

    Still not used to typing “2010”.

    @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.

    @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.