Zork online

Zork is one of the first computer games published; it's played by entering text at a command-line.  My co-workers and I took turns playing -- during breaks, of course.  It can be an infuriating game to play, but, like most games, sucks you in.

There are sites that offer Zork for play online, no flash or plugins to load.  One is Web-Adventures.  Here's what the opening screen says:

Welcome to ZORK.
Release 12 / Serial number 990623 / Inform v6.14 Library 6/7
WEST OF HOUSE
This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
A rubber mat saying 'Welcome to Zork!' lies by the door.

>

Before you can get very far into the game, you need to know the available commands.  There's a list of them at the Zork Wiki.  And, if you don't want to repeatedly find yourself going around in circles, you'll need a map.  I found three.  One is by St. Ruckus at Tripod.  Another is by L.A. Free-Net, where you can find 4 maps and download the DOS games (probably not usable if you've using newer versions of Windows).  I've included this third map, found at Iron Realms Entertainment, because it's so artful.

For an interesting history of Zork, check out the article, Eaten by a Grue, by Rob Lammle.

While looking around to playable versions of Zork, I came across Retro Thing, "vintage gadgets & technology," a site you may want to explore.  To play Zork and many other games here, you have to sign up.

-- Marge

Brother Francis and the Wanderer

Both Brother Francis and the Wanderer are characters that begin the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz,

a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller, Jr., first published in 1960. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the story spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the fictional Albertian Order of Leibowitz take up the mission of preserving the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the day the outside world is again ready for it.

There's quite a lot on the web about this novel, but no eBook.  When I say this, I'm excluding ebookbrowse, because downloading the full version produces a small .EXE file (which spells d-a-n-g-e-r to me), and ebook3000, because clicking on the download link takes you to a page with a downloader app and I haven't had good experiences with them (other than Amazon's).  An interesting possibility is a radio drama adaptation by John Reed at Internet Archive. 

Why am I talking about this novel?  Because it seems applicable today.  I first read it at a time when we were still living in the shadow of the Cold War, a shadow that didn't dissipate until the Berlin Wall came down in November, 1989.  Now that's a day worth celebrating.  Many lives were lost when trying to escape Communist rule by crossing the wall to freedom.  (For an idea of what the Soviet occupation was like, take a look at Michener's The Bridge at Andau.)  A map showing the Berlin wall is below.

A Canticle offered a ray of hope in a dark time, humor, an interesting viewpoint, and was a damn good story.  Here's a sample from goodreads, Walter M Miller, Jr's page:

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

Another good one is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart -- I still see the copper rivets in their jeans reflecting the firelight in mind's eye.

-- Marge

Cartoons about climate change denial and more

There's a treasure trove of cartoons on climate change at the U.S. News and World Report site in their Energy Policy Cartoons section; so many good ones that I got greedy.  Here are eight of the forty about energy, the ones that I particularly like.  Warning: some of these are not really funny, just straight to the point.

How To Build a Game In A Week From Scratch With No Budget...

...is an article at Gamedev by Jay Barnson of Rampant Games.  The article is a little long but gives a lot of good information about the process of creating a game.  Click this Hackenslash link to download and play the game Jay created. The source code is available too.

Below are the lessons learned, quoted from Jay's article:

Lesson 10: Doing something like this really was worthwhile

I didn't think I'd have time to do something like this when I first found myself challenged. But now that it's done, I found it not only taught me a few things, but it increased my enthusiasm for continuing work on the project I put on hold for this. You wouldn't think that working on Yet Another Game would feel like a vacation, but it did. And after all, I didn't lose that much time – only forty hours. This was a fun experience – one I'd be happy to repeat again in the future.

Lesson 9: Cutting features isn't always free

Some of the last-minute changes to Hackenslash really blew the game balance out of whack. The inability of monsters to cast spells, and the lack of need to for the player to 'conserve resources' as he pushes deeper into the dungeon trivialized some of the challenge to the game. If those features were going to stay 'gone,' the game needed another design pass to re-balance it and improve the modified gameplay. In other words, cutting features introduced an additional cost to the development of the game. This made me wonder how many retail games were released in a terrible state because the development team didn't have time to re-visit the game design after features were cut to meet schedule.

Lesson 8: Do the important stuff first

I found I tended to be more productive, efficient, and make more progress on the game when I was in 'crisis mode," realizing how tight my deadline was and making a conscious decision to (usually) only work on the pieces that made the biggest difference in the game.

I think I may run through a similar exercise with all of my future projects: I'm going to try to break my development time into, say, 8-hour segments, and play a little game with myself: If I pretend that I only have those 8 hours to 'finish' the game, what could I do that would make the biggest difference in those 8 hours? I don't know if it would pay off as well at the end of the project as the beginning, but it's worth trying.

Lesson 7: Scope will expand to exceed your budget and schedule

Every programmer I've ever met tends to underestimate the time required for him or her to complete a feature. Add to that the dreaded 'feature creep,' and you can guarantee your project is going to be way over schedule. I'm not one of those guys who believed that "feature creep" is always a bad thing. I think some of the most killer features – the ones that turned games into hits – often came about as a form of "feature creep." But new features are seldom free. You will have to make room for them in your budget – and that often means cutting other, less worthy features. This project taught me a little bit about being ruthless in cutting features. In truth – if I had the option, I should have added an extra ten hours to make the game truly "work" – but only after cutting all the fat (like doors, magic wands, etc.)

Lesson 6: Get the Game Playable as Fast As Possible

The sooner you are able to get things on screen and start playing around with it, the sooner you can revise and improve your design, weed out the things that don't work, and come up with great ideas for making the actual game better. It also helps you catch bugs (especially those ugly design bugs) earlier, which makes them much easier (cheaper) to fix. It also aids you in sorting through priorities.

Lesson 5: It's sometimes much faster to throw away old code and start over

I only ended up completely throwing away some code and starting over once in this project. While I can't know with a certainty if I really saved time by doing this, I suspect I would have been fighting the design flaws of the original method all the way to the end of the project. On the flip side – throwing away the old rotating feature code and starting over with a better design might have saved me some trouble.

Lesson 4: Python Rules!

I can't believe how quickly many features came together using Python as opposed to, say, C++ or even Java. Things like typeless variables, dictionaries, and extremely easy-to-declare lists (allowing a mixing and matching of object types) made it very easy to implement content lists, attribute handling, spell effects, and so forth. I was already a fan of the language, but now the prospect of using Python, tied into a high-level 3D engine, has become extremely appealing to me.

Lesson 3: Don't underestimate the art requirements

Looking up source art, drawing, tweaking, testing, and re-tweaking artwork… even little 32 x 32 bitmaps – consumed a great deal of my time – and the results weren't nearly as satisfying as what I'd have gotten if I had devoted those hours to programming.

Would an experienced artist taken less time? Undoubtably – though the difference probably wouldn't have been too extreme. Would their results have been better? Absolutely. Be careful not to trivialize the effort it takes to generate art for your game, whether you are doing it yourself or getting someone else to do it for you. It can suck up a great deal of time if you aren't careful.

Lesson 2: I need to be more efficient in my use of time

A night where I'd devoted four hours to working on the game often ended with only two hours (or less) of actual development time taking place. Some of the time went to documenting what I was doing, but I also found myself losing focus, taking extended breaks, not immediately returning to work after a minor interruption, surfing the 'Net, playing (quick) games, or whatever. Now, taking breaks during long stretches of development is a good and healthy thing. But by recording my actual productivity, I was pretty surprised at how inefficient I was with my usage of my development time.

I'm not getting paid by the hour. Better use of my time means I can get more done AND have more 'free time' to do other things. So I'm going to be making a concentrated effort to improve my use of time when I am "on the clock."

Lesson 1: IT CAN BE DONE

While Hackenslash in its current, 40-hour incarnation is hardly a poster-child for high production values, I think it demonstrates how much can be done – on a fairly complex game – with no budget and very little time by a single developer. Given more time – and even a fairly insignificant budget – or the help of a few friends – who knows how much better it could become?

The bottom line is this: If you want to develop games, nothing is stopping you. You can find the time. You don't need a big budget or fancy tools. You don't need a team of specialists. You don't need years of training. All you need is the will to make it happen.

And that's the most important lesson of all.

If you decide to try your hand at building a game, you don't have to use a Python engine, there's Unity (a free full version for Windows with Unity Pro and Android trials is available for download) and Glest (a free 3D real-time strategy game and engine).  Check out this list of game and rendering engines for additional info.  Not all the game engines are free and API bindings are listed as well, so approach with caution.

Here's a screenshot from Glest.

While looking around I found the site Sploder, that offers making your own online game.  You can play games, make one, and there's a weekly contest.

-- Marge

Home science

Today I started looking for information on contamination (because it's flu season and people near me have been touched), but ended up finding out about home science, especially chemistry.  Chemistry can be fun (and not just the "better living through chemistry" kind).  It's complex work that requires caution, skill, knowledge and being in tune with what you're doing.  A healthy respect for the reagents is also needed.

Below are three videos looking a difference aspects of chemistry.  This first one is a safety video that's somewhat incomplete.  Note that last bit of info about pathways.  Also there is an MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) available for every chemical that can be purchased.  Yes, household products are chemicals too.

This second video is about where to get lab chemicals.  Note that the speaker, Robert Bruce Thompson (aka TheHomeScientist), mentions early in the film that buying chemicals can attract the attention of law enforcement.  Also I didn't know that home science is somewhat a movement; looks like there's a lot of homeschooling and inventing going on (I'm studiously avoiding any other possible uses).

In this third video are some tips from ChemicalMyst, mostly about lab equipment, which can be expensive.  I think I'd pass on the glass distillation chamber (been burned too many times on other projects).

And for simple fun here's SteveSpanglerScience with color-changing milk:

What I see is -- soap, being a surfactant, changes the surface tension.  What do you see?

-- Marge

Joe, Willie, Sad Sack and G.I. Joe

My always questing brain settled on WWII cartoons for today's post.  I didn't realize what I was getting into -- Disney and Dr. Seuss both produced propaganda for the U.S.'s war effort.  Some of Seuss' work is clearly racist (gasp!).  Wikipedia's article on WWII cartoonists mentions a cartoonist --

Arthur Szyk received recognition for his political cartoons during World War II. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt called him a "one-man army." Adolf Hitler even put a price on his head.

I was thinking of Sad Sack and the guy that did Joe while he was in the trenches.

Bill Mauldin drew Willie and Joe cartoons during the war.  Here's a lovely homage from RoadCaptainEntertain:

 

Sad Sack is a comic strip and comic book created by Sgt. George Baker, also during this war.  According to Wikipedia:

Set in the United States Army, Sad Sack depicted an otherwise unnamed, lowly private experiencing some of the absurdities and humiliations of military life. The title was a euphemistic shortening of the military slang "sad sack of shit", common during WWII. The phrase has come to mean "an inept person" or "inept soldier".

Here's a sample:

The term "G.I.Joe" was coined by Dave Breger who

...created the syndicated Mister Breger (1945–1970), a gag panel series and Sunday comic strip known earlier as Private Breger and G.I. Joe. The series led to widespread usage of the term "G.I. Joe" during World War II and later. Dave Breger was his signature and the byline on his books. During World War II, his cartoons were signed Sgt. Dave Breger.

Posted at ComicArtFans by John Michael Jackson is this piece of memorabilia by Dave Breger:

G.I. Joe evolved into a media blitz in the '80s.  The National Review revisited the era in this article, written by Loren A. Smith.  There's a wiki called JoeGuide, last article posted in 2006.

And that's the news today from the front, folks.

-- Marge

Thomas Nast vs. Boss Tweed

In a previous post about editorial cartoonists, "Cartoons that can change history," I mentioned Thomas Nast.  Today I'm going more into detail on his work.  He was a cartoonist, an illustrator of children's books, and a contemporary of Lincoln.  And, between his publication, Harper's Weekly, and the New York Times, Boss Tweed was indeed brought down.  For biographical info on Nast, you can type his full name into the search input at Google and get a short history, pulled in from Wikipedia, some images and other searches related to Nast, and about 1,470,000 results.  The same is true for typing in Boss Tweed, except only 1,300,000 results.  A cartoon portfolio of Nast's work can be found at Ohio State University's site.

Nast's was published from 1859 to 1886.  He supported Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and in the 1863 cartoon below linked emancipation with patriotism.

The cartoon below, also from OSU's site "was widely reproduced by the Republican Party for use in President Lincoln’s campaign."

His campaign against Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed deeply undermined the organization, which was considered a Democratic machine at the time.  Below is his depiction of a gouty fallen ex-gladiator.

Harper's Weekly went out of print in 1916.  And, since Nast's time, the Democratic and Republican parties have essentially switched roles.  PBS has a timeline of the political parties active during Lincoln's time.  Lincoln's opponent during the election of 1864 was George McClellan, a democrat.

It's interesting to note that all of the original images were woodcuts.  Maybe sometime soon a post on printing techniques...

-- Marge

There be unfriendly forces lurking

Funny, but the title "Hunt for Red October" has been coming to mind lately, then today I came across this headline "Red October Espionage Network Rivals Flame" at Information Week/Security.  In the article author Mathew J. Schwartz states:

Security researchers have uncovered an espionage malware network that's been operating undetected for at least five years and that has likely stolen quantities of data that stretch into the terabytes.

"The campaign, identified as 'Rocra' -- short for 'Red October' -- is currently still active, with data being sent to multiple command-and-control servers, through a configuration which rivals in complexity the infrastructure of the Flame malware," read research published by Kaspersky Lab.

Flame malware was discovered in 2012.  There is an interesting article by Kim Zetter at Wired with the title "Coders Behind the Flame Malware Left Incriminating Clues on Control Servers."  The article ranks Flame third after Stuxnet, then Duqu. 

Sidestepping the hacker vs. cracker debate, I submit that we're really talking about cyberwarfare, whether conducted by a loosely-knit group of collaborators or a country.  In this Wikipedia article is the following:

The Economist describes cyberspace as "the fifth domain of warfare."

In its article defining cyberwarfare, Rand states:

 Cyber warfare involves the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation's computers or information networks through, for example, computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks.

That's not quite complete.  Classified information and corporations' intellectual properties are also being targeted as reported by the Los Angeles Times in "U.S. spy agencies to detail cyber-attacks from abroad" by Ken Dilanian, Washington Bureau.

Of course the U.S. and Israel are in the mix too (cartoon by Arend Van Dam at Political Cartoons).

In closing, seems to me -- if you use free antivirus software, it's that same as installing a fox in the henhouse.

-- Marge

Some recent cartoons that resonate (for me)

Editorial, aka political, cartoons offer us a glance at current issues and sometimes evoke a laugh. And sometimes they carry a message that goes deeper than the topic at hand.  Since I realize that not everyone sees things the same way, my offering today comes with the "for me" caveat.

At the US News & World Report site in a section called January Whispers I found this cartoon by Dan Wasserman:

At The Week is this gem by Bill Day:

From David Horsey's blog at the LA Times site, called Top of the Ticket, here's one:

In my online look-about today I found an organization for editorial cartoonists -- the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC).  You can find cartoons here as well, such as Adam Zyglis on climate change:

That's it for today, folks.  Have a great weekend.

-- Marge

Free Adobe graphics software

If you haven't heard yet, Adobe is offering one of the older versions of its graphic suite series, specifically CS2.  This page at Gizmodo gives more information about it.  Adobe produces some very useful applications, like Acrobat Reader (now an digital document standard), Flash and Shockwave.

Although I'm not a big fan of Adobe's graphics apps (they're fairly expensive), I was interested in seeing what's in the suite and what else is available.  So in addition to CS2, I now have Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 for producing Acrobat documents and forms, and Adobe Premiere Pro 2 for editing videos. Here's the link to the download page; remember to grab the serial number.

Some problems were encountered when installing the downloads on my OS (operating system) -- Windows 7, 64-bit.  It seems the app was written before this version of Windows (and possibly before Windows Me), because the installer wouldn't accept the folder designation "Program Files (x86)."  It's easy enough to direct the installer to a different folder, but getting past the "insert next disk" was impossible.

Here's my work-around.  Burn each downloaded disk to a CD.  After installing disk 1, go to the folder on C-drive you created, and find the file "Setup.exe."  It may be in a sub-folder created by the installer called "Adobe Creative Suite 2.0."  Run the setup and select one of the apps listed as not installed; start its installation and insert the disk requested when prompted.  After going through the list and installing each of the applications (one at a time worked best), run setup one more time to verify that all the apps are installed.

This is what the directory looks like when all the installations are done (includes Premier Pro, not in the CS2 package).

Hope this works for you.  You're welcome to comment.

-- Marge

People's stories

Not being much of a TV watcher, I'm behind the times on the popular shows.  Sometimes I'll buy a TV series years after it's over, or receive one as a gift.  This year my son gave me the first season of "Lost" (with the promise of remaining seasons if I like it).  I must say I'm enjoying it very much and especially appreciate the power of hearing the characters' stories. 

Because you might like hearing people's stories, too, here are some sites that feature them.

"9/11 Anniversary 2012: Survivors' Stories" is a collection of video recordings from people remembering.  These stories and other true stories are featured at Bio. Here's a sample from the 9/11 commemoration.

 

The BBC has compiled "an archive of World War Two memories -- written by the public and gathered by the BBC." There are 64 categories of stories.  For an American view of the war, try KilroyWasHere.org, "In Harm's Way."

Studs Terkel was a gatherer of stories and is perhaps best know for his oral histories.  His work, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" is one of his best.  

While collections of stories seem mostly to be about hard times, just a personal story can reveal intriguing facets and sometimes soothingly familiar details of other participants in this human stew.  As an example, take a look at Web of Stories. 

All this talk of stories brings to mind this image found at Dreamstime:

-- Marge

Fiscal cliff cartoons

You're probably as tired of hearing about the U.S.'s fiscal cliff as I am, but there are some good cartoons on the subject in the webosphere.

What I suspected all along -- a cartoon by David Horsey, published at The Week:

The following four are from US News & World Report's site, the Congress Cartoons category.  First is one by Chris Britt:

Marshall Ramsey gives us a look at Billy's Room:

 

Lastly two cartoons on points of view, one by Dick Locher and the other by Walt Handelsman:

***

And that's a wrap for today.

-- Marge