IM formatting test

  • Post category:Life

Sam: This is a test.
World: A test?
Sam: Yes.
Sam: A Test.
World: What are you testing?
Sam: I’m testing the automatic colorization of IM logs.
World: The hell you say??
Sam: I wrote some code for my LiveJournal S2 style that should automatically format any entry tagged “chat”.
World: But I don’t see any colors?
Sam: If you’re viewing this through your friends page, this text should look normal.
Sam: But, if you view it from www.c99.org or c99koder.livejournal.com, it should look all pretty.
World: Hey! That’s pretty cool!

Weapon of mass confusion

  • Post category:Life

Sohail: hey you might know how to fix this
Sohail: so i was taring some files today and
Sohail: the first group of files i tared i tared wrong
Sohail: so when i went to fix my mistake all but one of the files fixed themselves
Sohail: and no matter what i try it wont fix its self
Sohail: any ideas?
Sam: I have no idea what you just said.

owned

  • Post category:Life

Sohail: mac:/ exphyl$ sudo dd if=/Volumes/”Ubuntu 5.10 i386″ of=/ubuntu.iso
4+0 records in
4+0 records out
2048 bytes transferred in 0.000714 secs (2868092 bytes/sec)
Sohail: what am I doing wrong?
Sam: putting quotes in the middle of a filename.
Sam: also, specifiying a directory as a device.
Sam: and finally, using dd instead of Disk Utility.

DreamZZT 3.0.6.1 for Dreamcast

  • Post category:Dreamcast

DreamZZT 3.0.6.1 is now available for Dreamcast. This update includes all the changes in 3.0.6.1 for the other platforms, as well as enabling sound support on the Dreamcast.

You can grab the update from the DreamZZT download page.

Starting audio stream…

  • Post category:Dreamcast

I’ve got DreamZZT’s sound code working on the Dreamcast. There are still a few little bugs to work out, but a sound-enabled Dreamcast build should be available in the next few days.

DreamZZT 3.0.6.1

  • Post category:Dreamcast

DreamZZT 3.0.6.1 is released. This release addresses several issues in 3.0.6, including:

  • Pressing the enter key in certain situations could cause the game to crash
  • Users with capital letters or punctuation in their passwords were unable to login to DreamZZT Online
  • Enemies were triggering ZZT-OOP touch events

For more information visit the DreamZZT website.

Blocked!

  • Post category:Web

Looks like the code I wrote for www.c99.org that used the LJ API to pull the list of tags / dates for the calendar was polling the LJ server too frequently and I got myself blocked as a bot. I opened a support request after fixing the bug, so hopefully I’ll get unblocked soon.

In the meantime, I wrote a custom S2 layer based on Quite Lickable so my LiveJournal template looks identical to the www.c99.org template, and I’ve redirected the front page of www.c99.org to my LiveJournal. The only issue is that LJ doesn’t seem to allow JavaScript in their templates, so the drop-down menu for “Games” doesn’t work.

Ravishingly obscure

  • Post category:Dreamcast

A while back I found out DreamZZT had been mentioned in a book: Gaming Hacks.

Well, O’Reilly started offering a free trial of their online book service, so I’ve finally been able to read that section. Both DreamZZT and FrotzDC (which the author mistakenly calls DCFrotz) are mentioned in the Dreamcast emulators section.

Here’s the blurb about FrotzDC: (Pretty sure quoting is covered by fair use, don’t sue me O’Reilly!)

You can find out more about making your own text adventure ( [Hack #85] ), but if you have a keyboard or keyboard adapter for your Dreamcast, you can play text adventures here. There are plenty of freeware Z-Machine interactive fiction pieces available. DCFrotz even supports sound effects if you want to use or program a game that plays spooky WAV files.

And the blurb about DreamZZT:

Finishing with another ravishing obscurity, DreamZZT is a Dreamcast conversion of Tim Sweeney’s famous ZZT PC game-creation tool. (Back in the early ’90s, he wasn’t yet famous for Epic’s Unreal series.) ZZT graphics are entirely made up of ASCII characters. There’s a multitude of public-domain games available, both turn-based and real-time. Many are RPG-like. The Chocobo.org site has a decent ZZT game selection (http://www.chocobo.org/~butz/zzt.htm) if you’d like to try some third-party titles, all of which seem to run reasonably well.

The other Dreamcast projects mentioned in that chapter are DreamSNES, Dream-O-Rama, MDCNG, Frodo, and Stella. Considering how much homebrew software is available for the Dreamcast, it’s exciting to have not one but two mentions in the book!

Anyone want to buy me a copy?

whooosh

  • Post category:Life

Jay‘s couch is windy.