C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

As a postscript to my last entry: I realize some of you will be curious to try out interactive fiction right away. I recommend you start with Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold, both because it's designed as an entry point for people who played too many bad pieces of IF in the eighties and gave up, and because you don't have to download Frotz to play it. It's playable as a web browser applet.

I've been making a miniature toy Penguicon. You can run around in it and interact with artificially-intelligent miniature versions of people you might recognize. It's a shame Randy Milholland of "Something Positive" isn't returning this year--- had I made one for last year's Penguicon, it would have included something like this:

> GIVE FANFIC TO RANDY

You hand the crumpled sheaf to Randy Milholland. His eyes, as they traverse the lines, lose their light by progressive stages. Finally he slumps into the sofa. "I've lost my will to live," he says.

Rippy the Razor Blade walks into the Consuite.

> EXAMINE RANDY'S WILL TO LIVE

It's no longer here, it's lost. Maybe you can find it.

The sort of game you can play using an interpreter program like WinPlotz used to be called a "text adventure". Occasionally the word "storygame" tries to get traction and fails. The term of art has come to be "interactive fiction". The difficulty in naming results from so many simultaneous categories: programmers call it a simulator parser or a conversational interface, authors call it narrative prose, and gamers call it a puzzle game. Just as in the blind descriptions of Rudyard Kipling's elephant, they are all correct.

This project is experiencing feature creep like mad. I'm using it for a learning experience, and the more I discover the InForm system can do, the more I build in. It now simulates the player's mental and physical condition along several dimensions. I'm actually toying with the idea of having the game ask you for your LJ username, and building a programming track from your interests list, so you can plan out how to maximize your "fun" points score as the weekend goes by. I'm also realizing how many games Andy Looney has designed which you could play against him in the game room.

But no, this thing has to get out the door some time. I'm not going to program in every flower planter in the lobby. Building the hotel convention center and its contents is mostly finished, but the markup has run to the thousands of words. This is to say nothing of the pseudocode that scripts the behaviors, events, and puzzle mechanisms.

This is so fun, I think I need to find an organization for Interactive Fiction and see if I can get on the Board of Directors or something. Yeah, I'm that excited about it.

Let me tell you a bit about user interfaces as it relates to Interactive Fiction. An interesting thing happens when people get really good at writing text adventures. They're trying to manage the state of your knowledge: not too much too soon, not too little too late, see? Because it's a puzzle. Also they're trying to motivate you, carefully adjust to your expectations, respond to your constant errors, and put you at precisely the right frustration level, see? Because it's a game. They're also trying to predict and manage how you feel about it, see? Because it's a literary drama with a plot, setting, and characters.

All of those things involve them modeling the human, not modeling the computer system.

And what happens -- aha! -- when such people are also programmers? Not just any programmers, but programmers in the area of natural language interface. What happens when the best of them get together and program a development environment and framework, and then design the user interface for it, and then write debugging error messages and step-by-step documentation for it?

You get software that seems to read your mind, that's what. InForm 7 (available free for Windows, Mac and Linux) has the most kickass debugging error messages and step-by-step documentation I've ever seen.

Well, that was instructional.

To recap:
I found a nice old PC in the curbside trash.
I tried to upgrade my Linux box running Ubuntu to the latest version, "Gutsy Gibbon", but it only would boot to a command line.
At this point I still had not done anything with the curbside PC-- we're talking about two different computers, just so we're clear.

Well, this evening I took both the hard drives out of the Linux box, and put the 160GB hard drive from the curbside PC in there. I formatted what's-his-name's data, and installed Ubuntu Gutsy on the curbside drive, mounted in the Linux box.

It only booted to the command line, precisely as it did on my computer's previous drives.

This means the problem is either on the Ubuntu installation disk (which passed an error check after I burned it), or in my BIOS or graphics card or something other than the hard drives.

The same thing has happened when I tried to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) as happened the last time Canonical released an upgrade (Feisty Fawn). The upgrade manager only freezes.

So I burned it to a CD and went through a reinstall process. It told me if I wanted to install on the master hard drive it would delete all my data. I installed it on the secondary hard drive, since it's blank and the master hard drive has been telling me lately that it's detecting errors and is about to die. Just as the upgrade to Feisty did, this has hosed my system, which now only starts up to a matt@ubuntu:~$ blinking prompt.

So I swapped the order of the hard drives on the IDE cable and changed the Master jumper to Slave jumper and vice versa. Now the screen only fills with endless repetitions of the word GRUB.

Will someone help me fix this?

I suddenly have a new computer! For free, of course, as they all are. (Wait long enough, look in the right places, and manufacture luck through social networking, and spending money is often unnecessary. In money as in so many other aspects of life, waiting and watching is one of my superpowers.)

Yesterday the Lojban User Group met at my house. On our way back from a Vietnamese/Thai restaurant, Nick suddenly slammed on the brakes. A pile of four computers sat in a trash pile on the curb. After we got them home we discovered they work fine, and were state-of-the-art 2002! Nick took three and I took one, with a 160GB Seagate hard drive and three 256MB sticks of RAM. I'm thinking I'll use it for an Ubuntu server as I learn web development with Python under the Django framework. (I'm just not ready to use the TurboGears framework yet.)

Normally I avoid installing software under Linux unless it's in Synaptic Package Manager. Contrary to popular belief, this results in an extremely full-featured computing experience, since it's a rare application that is not found there.

But from time to time I like to stretch myself and attempt to learn a bit of Linux usage that has flummoxed me in the past. When I found version 7 of Inform has been released, and Synaptic Package Manager only has version 6 for Linux at this time, I was enticed to declare this to be a circumstance deserving of special treatment.

I followed the instructions included in the download and after I remembered to type "sudo", it worked. It is running. I have installed a tarball of an application under Linux, from the command line. Here's hoping it is seldom necessary, but now I know that I can generally get around that obstacle.

Sadly, according to the README file,

All it really does is generate a UUID for the project and invoke the appropriate compilers when asked.
It is fervently hoped that, a Linux port having been released, that some enterprising soul or souls will provide an actual interface to it of the quality and feature set of the Mac OS X or Windows versions.

So I'll use the Windows version. Now, how do I uninstall an application under Linux? ;)

Robin Lee Powell cut-and-pasted to me an excerpt he found on a chat channel containing quite an unfortunate and amusing insight about how to get experts to help newbies.

< dm > I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.
( Read more... )

Just when you thought you didn't need yet another version of Linux...

Hot on the heels of Ubuntu Christian Edition is Ubuntu Satanic Edition, "Evil Edgy" release.

I don't speak on behalf of Penguicon and I'm not claiming the views expressed here are representative of anyone else running it. That's as it should be. Penguicon is all about 1. Fun, 2. More Fun, and 3. Keep Fun First. It's not about ideology. But Penguicon has two incidental side benefits that get me excited and are very fun for me. One is spreading Free and Open Source Software to fans of science fiction, fantasy, games, anime, and comics, who aren't technically skilled. The other is to use the political and social visions of science fiction to interest some of those hackers who are not yet interested in Hacktivism. I want to get them excited about how the fight for “knowledge goods”-- not just code alone-- benefits hackers, how non-engineer users benefit hackers, and how damage to the knowledge ecology harms innovators first like canaries in a coal mine. Specifically, I want to get more hackers interested in contributing to software for non-engineer users, and keeping non-engineer users around with volunteer tech support.

( Read more... )

I've been waiting for this a long time. AllPeers is a method of file transfer that lets you set up your own private network of peers with whom you can send and receive files of unlimited size. There's no more need to email a bulky file and wonder whether it's going to get through. Add friends and family members who also use AllPeers in the Firefox web browser, and decide what files you want them to be able to get from you. Click here if you have Firefox, to go to the download page for this extension.

Supposedly they're going to eventually open the source code. Also, supposedly this method is much faster than sending files through email or an instant message client, because it incorporates BitTorrent technology.

Just one neat example of a little trick you can do with this, is instantly share a screen shot with a peer who's online... such as a tech support scenario.

My username is MattArnold. Add me to your networks!

The computer on which I run Linux had a hardware problem and wouldn't boot up; overthesun took it and fixed it in half an hour by resetting the BIOS chip. Thanks, overthesun!

I've also had a software problem for months: the Firefox web browser wouldn't start. Even uninstalling and reinstalling it didn't fix this. I logged on to the chat channel of Ubuntu Linux, and within half an hour the friendly folks there had identified the problem and took me step-by-step through setting things right. Somehow Firefox was living in a directory called "firefox" when it was expected to be living in a directory called "mozilla-firefox". All my buttons and menu items that were supposed to open this application were looking for it in the wrong place. The Ubuntu free tech support volunteers helped me create a symbolic link, so that when the buttons looked in the wrong place they'd be directed to the right place; since then all has been well. Thanks, Ubuntu volunteer folks! The good reputation of this "Linux for Human Beings" distribution is well-deserved!

My Linux box is still set up to the resolution or refresh rate of that monitor which burned out last week. On every other monitor I use it with, it looks fine through the booting phase showing the Ubuntu logo above a scrolling list of things that are happening. But just when it is about to get to the desktop, the image shuts off and is replaced with the words "OUT OF SYNC".( Read more... )

Penguicon's tech guest of honor in 2007 will be Bruce Schneier, security guru. I was mentioning to Eric Raymond that I will be Head of Programming for Penguicon this year and looked forward to putting Bruce Schneier on panels about viruses, spyware and rootkits. Eric said something to the effect of not being interested in closed source software. I can't remember the exact sentence but it may have been referring to something to do with security programs that people use to protect their computers, such as McCaffrey, Symantec, Norton and so forth. Those are closed-source software.

Bad Windows security seems to affect Linux users too. We don't want to have to live in a world full of compromised botnets that are being used to send us spam.

Here now is the setup to my question.

The reason open source software can be trusted and closed source software can't is that someone can read the code of the open source software to ensure that it's free of spyware and other malware. A computer geek who reads the source code, compiles it, and installs the software can be assured that he knows what he's running.

Those of us to whom source code is unintelligible, and who don't know how to compile software from source code, use pre-compiled installer programs of open source software that we download from the internet. Someone in the open source community has presumably checked the source code of the program, but what about the particular copy of it that we are getting? What's to stop someone from distributing a precompiled installer of a popular open-source program, but altering it to include malware that will compromise the computer? Those who can't read source code would think we had the same program as everybody else.

Is this scenario likely or unlikely? Would it work? Is there anything set up to prevent it?

Good news! The smoke and the "pop-hiss" didn't come from the computer, it came from the monitor! The computer's fine. I have no shortage of monitors. None. In fact, a dozen monitors were deliberately abandoned at Penguicon. If you're coming to the Stilyagi party at our house on Saturday the 13th, maybe I'll give you one. Especially if we can sign you up to be on the convention committee for ConFusion 2007!

Last night I followed a burning smell to the area of my computers. The Windows box responded when I nudged the mouse, and was in working order, but the screen of the Linux box remained blank. A minute later, there was a brief sound ("fssss") like a sparkler being lit on Independence Day. The power supply still lights up when I turn the computer on, so apparently it's not that component. But the computer doesn't boot.

I'm off work today on medical leave, and working on the Penguicon program book. I use my Ubuntu Linux desktop computer for web browsing, instant messages, music-- everything but games and graphic design software. I dropped the folder "My Music" into Totem Music Player so that it would queue up all the music files in my entire collection to play for me randomly while I lie in bed recuperating and working on the program book on a laptop. I liked one song in particular and went to find it in my filesystem. It was nowhere to be found by browsing, but turned up with the "Find File" feature:
( Screenshot behind the cut. )I right clicked it and chose "Open Containing Folder":
( Screenshot behind the cut. )It's contained in home: Music: Soundtracks: Ghost In The Shell. So I clicked the Soundtracks folder.
( Screenshot behind the cut. )The Ghost In The Shell folder is not visible in the folder that the computer says it's in. Why?

I've dreamed of an input device like the TactaPad for years. It resembles a little overhead projector. The camera on the stem is watching your hands and portraying a grey transparent sillhouette of them on the screen so that you don't have to look at your hands. It's a touch-sensitive tablet that can detect the touch of all of your fingers simultaneously, not just one point, and can detect differences in pressure and velocity. The surface gives you force feedback sensations.

Watching the demo movie of TactaDraw makes it clear why someone like me who has used art software for years would drool over this. I also would love to play a real time strategy game with this input method.

Of course, just as with its countless wonderful predecessors in the field of alternative input devices, there is no reason to expect this to be developed into a product that makes it to market, much less a product that succeeds in the market. Each application would have to be rewritten to accept the unique aspects of its input, and that doesn't tend to happen.

Thanks for alerting me to this, thefile! It's only a matter of time before cosette_valjean and I can explore the online virtual world of Second Life simultaneously, side by side. A version of the SL client program that can run on my Linux computer is under development-- long rumored of-- and has now been revealed. Linden Labs made a early and incomplete Alpha version of the software available for download and bug-testing.

I've downloaded it, and much to my surprise, the license says it contains source code. It also says that permission is given for anyone to modify and distribute it. That smells like Open Source Software to me, even though it's an Apache license which I'm not familiar with, rather than a GPL. If so, this is more incredible than I thought. Is this an act of self-destructive heroism on the part of Linden Labs?( Read more... )

Can some of you tell me more about this license, or about running web services? Do you think LL is crazy like a fox? What are they up to? In any case, I'm thrilled that Linden Labs has made this move, and hope that they are rewarded.

camgusmis had some great thoughts on the xartum development messageboard.

It looks like spell casting would almost always involve the Perl programming language, whereas altering the world with Lojban is then the equivalent of prayer because it requires somebody to implement it in Perl ... or it's the equivalent of incanting familiars to do one's bidding, depending on how one feels about transcendent artificial intelligences who have breached a toposophic boundary.

It also makes me chuckle to imagine characters in the game entreating specific real-world Perl programmers by name in their prayers (or grimoires, if the Perl programmer is a BOFH). We can pretend that one of the transcended beings used to be Nat Torkington or somebody. But he is certainly no demonic familiar. He's more like a trickster god, I think.

One of the neatest things about xartum is that I might actually have a purpose toward which to put programming skills. We have the idea of creating a School For Magic located in xartum, in which those players who know Perl will teach rudimentary ways to interact with the game database to those of us who don't. Classes will be held in character, and almost entirely in Lojban.

I like the idea of game rules that are code. If someone finds a loophole, we should take a page from the story of "cheating Death" in "Lessons from Lucasfilm's Habitat" and not violate the world model. The gods should allow the mortal to keep whatever result he/she get from it, and then patch the code to prevent further exploit.

The niftiness of xartum is increasing by mathematical factors.

Twenty years ago, my parents wrote programs for the Commodore 64 and submitted them to Ahoy magazine and COMPUTE!'s Gazette, which would print the code in its pages and send my parents about fifty bucks. I had almost forgotten about this in the time since then, but Mom just found their programs available for download on the web, complete with screenshots and full credit to them by name. "Elfred" was a Christmas game. There was also "Dots" and "Tree Tutor for Tots". The first one was a sci-fi action game named Devastator, programmed by my Dad. The site calls it "a quirky little game that is more notable for its historical significance as one of the earliest PC games distributed with a magazine."

My parents programmed free and open source software!