Linux

Crop circles

Well, SamTown suffered yet another UFO attack, and this time they left crop circles in my farm!

Isn’t that cute?

Wheee!!

Ok, so I found this neat little app today called 3ddesk which is an OpenGL workspace switcher for XWindows. Basically when you hit a hot-key, your desktop (well, a screenshot of your desktop) zooms out and you can see all your workspaces arranged in a carosel (it has other shapes it can arrange them in, too, but I like the carosel the best), and you can spin them around until you see the workspace you want, and then hit enter and it zooms into it. Here’s the little animated gif off their website:

It’s pretty cool. I started off with the “useless eyecandy, but it looks pretty!” mentaility, but now that I’m used to using it, I love it. It’s much easier to switch between workspaces with it than the GNOME workspace switcher because you can see a full image of the screen. It’s much easier to remember which workspace I left GIMP open on when I can actually see it there.

Untitled

Ok, so GNOME comes with this kick-ass Unicode Character Map:

It shows what those crazy non-arabic symbols mean in the status bar. Anyway, here’s a funny conversation I had with James (you probably wont be able to see the japanese characters, but you wouldn’t understand them anyway):

(12:09:16) Sam Steele: 下丌
(12:09:23) Sam Steele: I made something that makes sense!
(12:09:23) Sam Steele: hehe
(12:09:37) James F: lol but its in katakana!
(12:09:46) Sam Steele: lol
(12:10:22) Sam Steele: 丈 = unit of length equal 3.3 meters; gentleman, man, husband

how are those even related? rofl
(12:10:37) James F: lol they aren’t but i can explain’
(12:11:03) ***Sam Steele waits for explanation
(12:11:28) James F: ok japanese isn’t just japanese
(12:11:42) James F: the kanji are all borrowed from chinese
(12:12:10) Sam Steele: ah, so one country’s unit of measure is another country’s husband.. I get it.
(12:12:18) James F: and sometimes when things change meanings from china, such as the origin kanji meaning of height
(12:12:52) James F: they are borrowed into the language… just like how a pound means like 5 different things in the us…
(12:12:57) James F: to hit
(12:12:59) James F: to weigh
(12:13:05) James F: to spend english money.
(12:13:07) James F: uhh…
(12:13:20) Sam Steele: that’s 3
(12:13:20) Sam Steele: lol
(12:13:20) James F: many other adopted slang references… …
(12:13:28) Sam Steele: … .. sure.
(12:13:29) Sam Steele: hehe
(12:13:35) James F: lol yeah.
(12:13:39) James F: totally unrelated.

Fsck you, theif!

As my way of saying fsck you to who ever has my laptop, I’ve revived the MS-DOS build of DreamZZT, and decided to pit it head-to-head (or xdosemu window to xdosemu window) with the original ZZT:

It still needs a bit more polishing before release, but it works well enough (even saving / restoring!), and I’m not gonna let the loss of my laptop stop me from coding. I’m hoping to do another release within a few days.

Go penguin, it’s your birthday

I finally got around to doing a Linux port of DreamZZT:

Because it’s built with libSDL, it should also build on Mac OSX, BSD, and other platforms supported by SDL that Jay doesn’t believe exist. I don’t have access to a Mac, so anyone out there with OSX and the compiler that would be willing to compile and test dreamzzt for me, please let me know.

-Sam