Wake up and smell too much coffee

(0,0) is bottom right, x = 8y. The rather obvious answer is y=5 millimeters.

Friends in low places...

_{(Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, La Strada)}

More about my mini-stroke — Apparently, despite some immediate progress yesterday, getting back to normal will take longer than I'd hoped. Still feeling kind of beat up and unusual today, but it's not in the grand scheme of things very serious.

(Yes, I like Gelsomina, too ;-)

Linux Fortune Cookie

You can not get anything worthwhile done without raising a sweat.
       — The First Law Of Thermodynamics

What ever you want is going to cost a little more than it is worth.
       — The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

You can not win the game, and you are not allowed to stop playing.
       — The Third Law Of Thermodynamics

Hmmm...

Had a little mini-stroke yesterday morning, so my typing is a bit off... Evil spirits?

Silly Walks on the Mild Side, or, More Preppy Twits of 1951

Synopsule. Rich kid gets beat up by a pimp in New York City. J. D. Salinger hides his face for sixty years, then dies.

Holden Caulfield was a goddam riff on Woodrow Wilson.

The intellectuals in my high school were reading The Stranger and Nausea or maybe (if they were lame enough) On the Road and Old Man and the Sea — stuff with some relevance to the Atomic Age and our private beatnik apocalypso. Caulfield Lite is Chevie Chase, at best. Salinger is dead. He always was. End obituary.

Eidogo plays nice with KJD

Eidogo is cool. It's Javascript, so you can run it on your own server.

Vaporware

I've been noodling on a little Inform 6 adventure game called venture.z5 since 2007, but it's not done yet. To wit:

About the Venture

The orbship Gaspin Bobtree, a huge private yacht serving no great purpose, was brevetted and re-commissioned as the hospital ship Venture by Captain Zygga Fan during the Great Bugout from Earth in 2388 C.E. The Venture carried refugees from the Downundaland of Oz away from the apocalyptic carnage that engulfed the Sirius Sector that year, the year Betelgeuse turned blue and went nova.

Unfortunately, as it attempted to escape, the unarmored Venture was crippled by attenuated flares from a subspace cataclysm milliparsecs distant.

Some 300 years later, the sphere of the Venture, cracked like a coconut, was discovered adrift in the Kuiper Belt surrounding Barnard’s Star, turning metaphorically end for end in the feeble light of its distant ruby sun, plague lights flashing violet, gaping rents in its hull patched over with force fields.

The Venture was hardly lifeless.

The lapse of 300 years had, however, not redacted a galactic propensity for extreme diplomacy (i.e., "war") to erode the best (especially the best) intentions. All record of the Venture dropped from the scope of pressing concerns until you, beset on all sides by desperation, evanescent hopes and bone crushing debts, caught wind of it.

By kidnapping your uncle’s wife’s youngest sister and selling her into slavery to Bruth the Buttbreaker (ok, ok, we’ll agree not to speculate how you REALLY did it...!), you’ve managed to acquire an implausibly spaceworthy caravel, the freighter scout Nel Zelpher.

Now here you are!

Here you are, not a million miles away from the very place beneath your feet where others have found fortune and fame ... or slow death, medium-quick death, or sudden death. Madness! And horror, lots of horror! Yes, the Venture is no pleasure world! [n.b. If you missed the reference to Star Bridge right there, you're not my intended audience.]

You’ve located the coordinates BRU-6713-112 stencilled neatly on the orange hull. Somewhere nearby lies an entrance.....

Were you Cleopatra in a former life?

Good choice! Everybody wants to read that book. Well? Doesn't that make sense? We live in the 5th dimension, after all.

Your life from birth to death is like a calligrapher's stroke of the pen, utterly open and revealed. The only question is, are you the artist? Or were you drawn? Is your life an open book? Are you an autobiography? Aren't you in the library?

Wouldn't you love to check out Cleopatra?

One moment please...

Toys in the Attic

I always imagine "molecules" like the shapeless, wiggly purple blob monster from the Toys in the Attic episode of Cowboy Bebop. Terror and fun? Cool!

Lost in Userspace

Speaking of software archaeology, here are a couple of well-preserved bog relics from the dankest, darkest depths of the intertubes.

• WordStar Installation Manual
• WordStar Reference Manual

These old manuals (for Version 3.0) kind of glossed over the fact that WordStar documents used ASCII, but had their high bits set to mark word boundaries and other non-"Non-Document" details. In other words, when the rational world of real word processing arrived (see below), WordStar was sulkily out to lunch. It was, irregardless^†, the "killer app" that enabled PCs to ramble, like Rincewind's luggage, off the hobbyist workbench and onto office desktops.

WordStar died when IBM put the Caps Lock key where the Ctrl key used to be, next to A. Later, Microsoft introduced Word and a generation of bleeding edge WordStar typists were swept out to sea by the Seattle tsunami. That, and your average luser couldn't patch the WordStar customization area to do CUPS ("cursor position") with common VT100 terminal emulations like xterm or gnome-terminal — the escape sequences don't fit in available space for line or column greater than "10" (i.e., 0x31 0x30 is one too many bytes). When WordStar was hot, a lot of conventional computer behaviors hadn't standardized on "user friendly" yet. When that happened, WordStar 3.0 dropped through the trapdoor.

Emacs may be the last surviving dedicated "text editor" from those days, but few learn it, except perhaps for perversity's sake^‡, despite a phenomenal feature set. Echoes of WordStar's "Non-Document Mode," useful for programmers, survive in notepads and programmer's editors abounding still — my favorites were UnderWare's Brief and PFE. On Linux, my choices are gedit, Geany and (sometimes) Code::Blocks IDE.

Of course, the only practical document processor these days is Sun Microsystems' Open Office suite. Sun was bought by Oracle, though, so I guess now it's Oracle's. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

^†"Irregardless." Yegods, I love that word!
^‡Perverse, as in, you "extend" Emacs by programming in Lisp!

Do you know where your trowel is?

^{Genuine official Software Toolworks Certificate of Wizardness dated 04/04/86. Curiously, the BBC still maintains a page where you can play a "fully illustrated" version of the text only Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy online (requires Java). And wonder of wonders, I've found Mike Goetz' original SIGM 011 distribution of Adventure!}

No Bicycles Allowed

^{[See my second-favorite artist, fox-orian at Deviant Art.]}

Scorpio (Oct. 23–Nov. 21)

Smiles today avail you nothing. People think you're up to something. The meter maid ignores your protests. Your tone of voice aggravates everyone. Your dog snaps at you. Your cat has disappeared. Your parrot has zits. Your passport expired last week, but you haven't noticed. If your natal Moon was in Pisces, you're off your meds. Seek help, if anyone cares. Ignoring you and your petty problems altogether, Gargoyle has been running on Linux since August of 2009. Some things are more important than you. Get a life.