Warped as it was 8 years ago, in all of its eye-grating goodness.¹ Word.

1. And before in-browser spell checking. ↩

A thorough look at the making of the Colossal Cave Adventure, including pictures of the caves that inspired the game, the game’s history, and some of its source code and design.

The classic nethack game (tile screenshots) is now available for the Nintendo DS. Some background on the ubercool Nethack, a game that captured the essence of the nerd hacker in the 80s.

Miscellaneous Thoughts for Programmers talks about avoiding the hard stuff. It quotes the classic Ruby versus Java myths page:

In what serious discipline is “It’s too hard” a legitimate excuse? I have never seen a bank that eschews multiplication: “We use repeated addition here–multiplication was too hard for our junior staffers.” And I would be uncomfortable if my surgeon said, “I refuse to perform procedures developed in the last 10 years–it is just too hard for me to learn new techniques.”

In the theme of groking your gut: The Hacker’s Diet, a free, classic text online … engineering for your self.

The Cook’s thesaurus, a veritable vernacular of vegetables and other edible vestiges. It sports an entirely useful (but retro web1.0) facade.

[stars: 4] How to write science fiction (Card). A great read even if you’re not planning to write a novel: it inspires you to understand what goes into a great story, and makes you want to write better.  Orson Scott Card puts his genre in perspective, and hints at some of what makes him a great writer.  The cover is a trendy, simple retro-brown too.

I had a fit of inspiration on the weekend and some free time, so I took a swipe at simplifying the site. I had been toying with designs over the summer, but all of my ideas turned out boxy and busy. There’s something about the tools that suck me into piling on the partitions and tidbits.

The design and implementation are easy for me, it’s the inspiration that’s elusive. I can look at hundreds of designs, finding things here and there that I like. I’ll go away and sketch out some of the ideas, but nothing will stick. I can spend gobs of time in inspiration limbo and then one day I’ll find the one thing that tweaks me. Then there’s no stopping me.

This time I was inspired by a number of things that reminded me that it’s the writing that is important. The writing is only important if it’s read, and you can’t read it if it’s drowning in sauce. So I mocked up a whitespace-laden layout and started to play with logos.

Into logo hell …

The new layout took just under 3 hours to hash out as a Wordpress template. The logo took a bit longer. Again I lost my inspiration: I had a clean layout, but no colour or logo to anchor it. I wrote a script to render a slice of my font library in a few different colours, one of which it picked at random for the site’s banner. I couldn’t decide. Nothing seemed to fit.

But of course the logo doesn’t matter, if it’s the writing that’s important. I slept on it, and woke up to clarity. I saw the semi-randomly-selected font and instantly saw the colour and theme. It’s retro, and it’s chock full of whitespace.

The SimpleJ tools allow you to build simple retro games. The IDE includes a virtual console that lets you see/test your game while developing it.

A discussion about Upstart, a new sysvinit replacement. Upstart is slated to replace the classic SysV init boot process in Ubuntu Edgy this fall.