Prior Art

It's a toothbrush that detects background radiation! It costs less than a penny a day to run. I claim prior art. And that's only one of several million possible inventions..Hmm. Someone ought to patent this thing :) Design #3532055259 is particularly good.

Tile Generator

I was trying to write a tile generator the other day, something that takes in a 32x32 tile and then spits out 16 different versions of it that are shaded to look like a wall as in a rougelike game with graphics tiles. The advantage of automating this was that you could use a perlin noise generator to generate dungeons with different looking stone walls, or brick walls, or bright purple marzipan walls if your game was going to be that kind of game, but I was a bit frustrated by the lack of an imaging library that can simply read and write various file formats (png, mng, tif, jpg, whatever) and do a few stragihtforward pixel level operations on them. There must be some. SDL_image I eliminated because it only loads images, the python imaging library is nice for reading and writing, but pixel level access is too unpythonlike to be sensible, and there's ImageMagick. Which looks good but I can't find the documentation for the C Api..sigh. It looks like the PIL is the least bad option.

Mozilla Regina.

Mozilla development is finally starting to outpace IE development. Some delicious platform independent tools are starting to appear for it, including the delightful
MozBlog.
It looks like I shall have to give it a whirl and bid Blogger adieu. Maybe.

In the meantime the Mozilla surge means that MS is now fighting Open Source on two fronts. Firstly the well established GNU/Linux system, secondly Mozilla: a platform independent browser that serves as a platform in itself.

Computer Gamers against the Bomb.

Let your Sims say NO to an Iraq Attack.

A la recherche du temps perdu

What should you do when you find an old flame on the web? What exactly is the protocol? "Excuse me madam. I desperately wanted to shag you ten years ago. Do you remember me?". No. I'll leave well alone, I think..

The Strange Rebirth of the Text Adventure

Locked in a room for three days with nothing to eat and an intelliegent evil fish? What is this? Well, it's a A Day for Fresh Sushi, a charming little text adventure, a representative of a medium that was supposed to die with the demise of INFOCOM , but never did, quite. And Emily Short must be it's finest exponent. I've been thrilled by her beautiful textual peices in a way that no recent release can match.

Another go.

So I moved my right hand side column to my left hand side column so there are no tags with attributes following the YACCS code for blogger to eat..hopefully this will stop the site looking silly.

GlAnts

GlAnts won't win any awards for graphical presentation, but it does have an original premise, and it makes for potentially interesting gameplay - you vs an ant colony. Nice to see someone in open source land NOT doing a clone of a commercial game.

The Tags Mystery Solved

Well, I've solved the mystery of why Blogger eats the attributes in my template tags. Sort of. I know it's something to do with YACCS. It only does it when the comment code is in the template.
Weird.