About ten years ago, I created a version of Eric Raymond's brilliant DOS game Sleuth. SleuthJS, as I called it, was designed to run in a browser window. It used CraftyJS , and a lot of people played it for some time. One thing which had been missing was a really brilliant feature which allowed you to enter the names of eight friends (or anyone, really) and then puzzle through the game with those…
A ZX Next development env on the M1 Mac
The multi-system simulator SIMH is an absolute work of genius. One of the Raspberry Pis in our rack has been set up as an Altair running CP/M 2.2, with a number of programs like ELIZA and all sorts of other things, on the A and B drives. You can connect to the system with telnet at altair.bencollier.dev:2380
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A lot of people are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The theory goes that humans have basic needs – food, shelter, and so on, and that once these are satisfied, we look to satisfy other requirements, like reproduction, and eventually “self-actualisation”. Here’s a diagram: Each level of the hierarchy only finds expression once the lower needs are satisfied.…
The use of parentheses and quotes in Bash can be quite confusing. Here is a quick guide, which comes largely from https://www.tldp.org , in the public domain. Square Brackets if [ CONDITION ] Test construct if [[ CONDITION ] Extended test construct Array[1]=element1 Array initialization [a-z] Range of characters within a Regular Expression Curly Brackets ${variable} Parameter substitution…
PART ONE 1959 - “Mack the Knife”, as sung by Frank Sinatra, was top of the charts. Harold Macmillan’s Conservatives had just beaten Hugh Gaitskell and Labour in the British Parliamentary elections, as the Austin Motor Company released the first Morris Mini-Minor. And in the United States, the Committee on Data Systems Languages released COBOL, which was partially based on the…
In this first of a new series of articles on the dodgiest of dodgy programming language features, we discover ‘variable variables’, and a slew of fun and exciting security vulnerabilities which you can introduce to your code if you choose to use them! ”..your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” 1…
You begin with a ‘Hello World’, then have to build a loop for the main game, and some keyboard handling to take input. The next thing to sort out is string handling, as you begin parsing commands. Simultaneously, you have to learn about the language’s data structures (and possibly object models) as you work to find a way to represent the game world. Once that’s done, you…
Just like every other sane person on the face of the Earth, I’m a big fan of Commander Riker, from Star Trek. Since the release of the utterly brilliant ‘ Riker Ipsum ’, I’ve been using it for Ipsum text generation on a fairly regular basis. But I needed more. I needed a service which would give me a RESTful Riker on demand, to generate regular sample dialogue excerpts as…