Friday, May 14, 2004

PERMALINK

Back to BASIC David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games (1978): I actually have a copy of this book in paper, dug up in some used book store pile ages ago, but now, you can revel in its full glories online. Before there were sprites and polygons and first-person-shooters, before there were CRTs on every desk to splash graphics in our eyes, there were simply teletypes chattering out lines of text. And there were paper tapes for you to store your work. Right around the time Richard Nixon was being kicked out of office, I was learning BASIC by reading the code to some of these games. (We didn't get them from the book -- they were just floating around on the minicomputer we timeshared.) "Hammurabi," a sort of primitive, text-only SimCity, was the one I and my circle of friends latched onto -- and proceeded to amend. Because all these programs were free and, in the manner of their time, open source. [Thanks, Boing Boing and Oblomovka] comment [] 11:07:19 PM | permalink

Random notes I noticed with some amusement and glee on Monday that the Wall Street Journal published a list of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the latest jobs report, and what was at the head? "Internet content producer"! OK, it's not 1999 all over again, and thank goodness for that; the actual number of new jobs in the field (2000) was small. But hey -- after what this business has been through, any good news is good news. I haven't gotten it together to spend the money on one of those PC-to-stereo bridges that lets you stream music from your computer to your home audio systems, but when I do, I'll look first and most closely at the Slim Devices Squeezebox -- not only because it looks like a good product, but because the company that makes it lets anyone play with the open-source software that runs it: Slimserver. I've been having fun with Slimserver: You install it on the computer that has your music library and you can then access your library from any remote computer with a decent Internet connection. Requires a little effort to get the hang of it, then seems to work like a charm. A browser interface lets you control what's playing. Very cool. I've turned on "item level titles and links" in Radio Userland, so instead of handcoding my little headlines, they should appear in RSS 2.0 feeds as properly coded titles. You can do this too -- just look under Radio's preferences under "item level titles and links." Thanks to Tim Bishop for the tip. Another useful piece of open-source software I'm making a note of (thanks to Jon Udell for the pointer): Audacity, an audio-file editor. comment [] 12:59:15 PM | permalink

Free Press milestone memories The Wall Street Journal Online published a good piece earlier this week by Carl Bialik capturing a small but significant (and, to me, personally important) moment of Net history. Ten years ago this coming November, I had my first real experience of Web publishing as part of the team that created the San Francisco Free Press, a short-lived by valuable experiment in publishing an online newspaper during a strike against the S.F. Chronicle and the Examiner (where I then worked). Carl quotes me a couple of times, noting that, for me, the choice between (a) marching a picket line in circles while chanting slogans and (b) working on editing and posting files to the Web was a no-brainer. Like just about everyone else quoted in the Journal article, I told Bialik that the Free Press experience changed my life. Afterwards, the return to the Examiner newsroom -- the strike only lasted two weeks -- was an immense anti-climax, and there was no question in my mind that I'd be moving my career on to the Web as fast as I could manage. comment [] 12:56:04 PM | permalink