Category: Uncategorized

1. A Mind Forever Voyaging

I played this very engaging text adventure game, one of the best pieces of interactive sci-fi I’ve seen, on a friend’s Amiga in my first year at Crazy Go Nuts University, but never actually finished it.

Does anyone know where I can buy or download a copy of this game?

(Bonus reading: Check out Grand Text Auto, a blog about “computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms, including interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, and shared virtual environments.”)

2. A copy of the MAD anthology with the scooter story

You might be able to tell from my stories that MAD magazine, which I read voraciously as a kid, is one of my influences. I remember one specific anthology of 1960s MAD which had a story about the rising popularity of scooters and how they’d be an indispensable part of our lives in the future. The story predicted that in the future, Americans would end up shaped like Weebles, with their legs reduced to vestigial nubbins. The last panel shows a buck-toothed caricature of a Vietnamese solider pushing an American around as if he were one of the those inflatable clown puching bags that bounce back after you punch them. I wanted to post some scans of this comic when the Segway was announced.

Does anyone know whch MAD anthology contains this story?

(Special bonus irony: Jack Kamen, father of Segway inventor Dean Kamen, was an illustrator who helped redesign MAD magazine in the 1950s.)

Boss Ross has declared that we are far enough out of stealth mode for me to use my powers as Tucows’ TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator) and actually say what language the developers are using to write this pretty cool blogging tool called Blogware…

Ruby!

Some of you might right now be cocking your head to one side. Ru-what? If you’re one of these people, Ruby is:

• A complete, full, pure object oriented language. Even the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.
• Flexible and dynamic. It’s both dynamic (no need to declare variables) and strongly typed (types are checked at runtime). What to add methods to a class at runtime? No prob. Want to add methods to an instance at runtime? Once again, No prob.
• A language with a nice clean, consistent syntax
• Open source

For more detailed information, check out the following:

• What’s Ruby? from the Ruby language web site
• Ruby author Yukihiro Mastumoto’s foreword to Programming Ruby
• The Wikipedia entry for Ruby

Ruby is on the list of languages I’m actively learning, and I’ll be documenting my experiences and other Ruby-related news here.

My co-worker Rob, who sits beside me and coincidentally has the same birthday as me (and Ike Turner), has asked me to stop tarnishing the name of the cinematographic chef d’oeuvre known as Freddy vs. Jason. In the interests of harmony, goodwill and accord, I will comply.

I’ll just let R.K. Mulholland do it instead.

(I loved Surf Nazis Must Die which gets a 3.1 rating from IMDB — Freddy vs. Jason gets a 6.9 — so you should take my movie recommendations with a grain of salt.)

Recommended Ranting

You can discuss the merits of Freddy vs. Jason at the IMDB message board for the movie. Go on, you know you want to.

My friend Nikki (bartender at the Velvet Underground) tells me that our friend Peter has this saying:

Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy.

She also has stumbled across negatives from “back in the day”, three of which are for photos of a teenage Cory Doctorow, The Mohawk Years. Bidding will start at one pint of Guinness.

(Memo to Cory: That old nickname of yours made me groan with pain. Not even George “Old pal Hotchner” Scriban is capable of groaners like that.)

Mike Fletcher gave a really good and engaging talk on Python metaclasses last night. While it’s highly unlikely that I’ll need them (the advice seems on when to use metaclasses seems to be like the advice for knowing when you’re in love; when it happens, you’ll just know), the tour of the underpinnings of Python’s class/object system was pretty enlightening.

We also had a pretty high Mac laptop count — there were about ten of us there, and there was an iBook, my 12″ G4 PowerBook and a 17″. If only the meeting place had WiFi.

(I’m looking into getting Tucows to let us use on of their meeting rooms for upcoming pyGTA meetings — that way, we’ll have connectivity, demo machines, whiteboards, comfy chairs, WiFi and a nearby pop machine.)

…for I wield the only human weapon that can harm them.

(Thanks to Jeff Darcy for the link!)

(Sorry ’bout the short notice.)

The Greater Toronto Area Python Group will have a meeting tonight at the 519 Church Street Community Centre (519 Church Street, just north of Wellesley) at 8 p.m.. I’ll be there, as will my housemate Paul, and there’ll be a presentation on Python’s metaclasses — about which I know nothing, nada, zero, zip, honkis de konkis — so I’ll be paying extra-special attention.