Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7

If you owned a personal computer in the 80s and played computer games, you probably played at least one Infocom text-based adventure game like Zork or (my personal favorite) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Known as interactive fiction, or IF, these games used the most powerful computers on the planet for their processing engines … your imagination. Instead of fancy color graphics and digital sound effects, Infocom games were just white text on a black screen controlled by you typing in commands like “go north” or “examine the small box” and usually involved solving complicated puzzles to win.

I’m actually a little surprised I haven’t written about IF before on this blog considering how fond I was of playing Wishbringer or Moonmist on my Atari 800XL back in the day. Even my daughter had even gotten into playing IF games on my iPad with Frotz. She’s an avid reader and also loves playing games, so IF games are a natural fit for her. Back in late August I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing her a personalized game which eventually evolved into the idea of making the game a scavenger hunt of sorts for her birthday in December. That gave me about four months to plan, design, write, and test the game.

Continue reading ‘Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7’ »

WIJFR: Catching Fire

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

During our summer road trip we listened to the audiobook version of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” and my daughter quickly read the remaining books in the trilogy shortly afterwards. With the upcoming March 2012 release of the movie, I know I’ll probably be taking her to see all of them anyway so I figured I might as well read the rest of the books myself.

“Catching Fire” is the second book in the series and begins about six months after Katniss and Peeta emerged as the dual victors of the 74th annual Hunger Games, as they prepare to go on their Victory Tour of the other Districts. This year’s Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell, which occurs every 25 years and usually includes some sort of miserable twist to the Games. The surprise for this Quell is that the Tributes will be selected from past victors, which means Katniss and Peeta are going into the Arena … again.

The secondary plotline continues to be the unrest in the Districts towards the Capitol. As the title suggests, Katniss has become the spark that could ignite a revolution and the Capitol will do everything in its power to prevent that. So where the first book focused more on the Games themselves, this story gives us more detail on the other Districts, their relationship with the Capitol, and the current political situation in Panem overall.

Just like the first novel, “Catching Fire” is laid out in three parts of 9 chapters each, and is an easy read (not surprising since it’s really young-adult literature). It seemed to end rather abruptly just and events were really picking up, but having started “Mockingjay” now I know it picks up immediately and keeps going, so it was the logical break point for the book.

Just remember who the Enemy is …

Home automation with Z-Wave

A few weeks ago we upgraded our home security system and added ADT’s Pulse service. In addition to the remote security features (such as being able to monitor, arm, and disarm the system from a browser or an app on my iPhone), Pulse also introduced us to home automation via Z-Wave devices.

Continue reading ‘Home automation with Z-Wave’ »

Amazon Kindle Keyboard (WiFi + 3G)

Six months ago I got my daughter a refurbished 2nd generation Amazon Kindle from woot! and she has been inseparable from it. Thus, it was a distressing day for her this past Thanksgiving weekend when she turned it on and found just a series of black lines on the screen. None of the reset methods I tried would restore the screen to its former working state. The USB connection to my laptop still worked, however, so I was able to backup all of her files/books.

woot! had indicated the Kindle had a 1-year warranty from Amazon, so I called up Kindle Support (or rather, they called me once I initiated the request from their support site, which is pretty cool). The support rep (an extremely friendly, American gentleman) told me refurbished devices only have a 90 day warranty, not a year, and the warranty on my particular device expired in July 2011 (a month after I got it, so that must have been tied to the original warranty before the unit was refurbished and then purchased by me).

Continue reading ‘Amazon Kindle Keyboard (WiFi + 3G)’ »

WIJFR: Zero Day

A plane over the Atlantic suddenly needs to reboot its computer to stay in the air, and the pilots barely avert disaster. A hospital network mixes up patient information, resulting in the death of several people. A law firm, which has lost all of its clients’ data and can’t get its system running again, turns to Jeff Aiken, a former government analyst and computer expert. He discovers that all of the crashes are insidiously connected, and an even greater disaster is coming.

I just finished reading “Zero Day” by Mark Russinovich, a cyber-thriller on par with Daniel Suarez’s “Daemon” or “FreedomTM.” At its core, “Zero Day” addresses a real-world, incredibly difficult to solve dilemma: with so many unprotected/unpatched computers in the world today, could a well-crafted virus potentially wreak havoc on the global economy?

The plot: an insidious computer virus, masked by different rootkits, multiple variants, and seemingly multiple authors, is secretly infecting computer systems all over the world, with a trigger date of 9/11. The virus is only noticed ahead of time because some of the computers it infected had incorrect system clocks which caused it to trigger a month early, completely crashing them. Jeff Aiken, a computer security expert, and his former colleague Daryl Haugen, the Assistant Director Computer Infrastructure Security Unit at the Department of Homeland Security, are on the trail of the virus, trying to track it back to its source before the zero day strikes. Who is behind the virus? How long has it been propagating? How widespread is it? Can it be stopped? Will anyone believe them?

We’re all familiar with the concept of viruses and malware and the importance of running anti-virus software and firewalls and keeping our computer systems patched. The reality is, however, that there are a lot of machines complete unprotected or unpatched, which opens a lot of vulnerabilities for the bad guys to exploit. Russinovich, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, is well-versed in the topic at hand, and so I found his novel to be a little more realistic than the Suarez books I referenced above.

The book is fast-paced and a good read even for those of us in the computer industry. For more information about “Zero Day,” check out the book’s website.

Amazon dumps Stanza, so I do too

One of the first apps I put on my iPhone 3GS was Stanza, to replace iSilo from my Treo for reading e-books. At that time, Amazon had just acquired Lexcycle and I remember wondering they would end up combining the Kindle and Stanza apps. Well, now we know the answer: nope. A recent update to the Stanza iOS app (version 3.2) added iOS 5 compatibility, but effectively killed the app on iOS 4.x. It just crashes immediately.

Continue reading ‘Amazon dumps Stanza, so I do too’ »

They’re creepy and they’re kooky …

This afternoon we caught a matinee showing of the just-started US tour of “The Addams Family” musical at the Straz Center.

It was an enjoyable, funny show and our whole family had a good time watching the antics of the Addamses and the Beinekes. I didn’t find the music/songs to be as earworm-worthy as those from “Wicked” or “Rent” but they were still pretty good. As a comedy goes, though, I found myself laughing a lot! If the US tour is coming near you, I recommend you check out a showing.

Obtaining the Oneiric Ocelot

I learned my lesson last time and decided to hold off a few days before upgrading to the new release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot.

That was a smart decision since the upgrade took just under two hours this time instead of over eight. I did have one (self-induced) snag during the ‘do-release-upgrade’ step. I was trying to copy some text and accidentally used Control-C in my screen session which killed the process! Luckily I was able to resume it with a ‘dpkg –configure -a’ command and I haven’t noticed any problems due to my screw-up (yet, whew!).

I also had fewer post-upgrade problems this time than with Natty. In fact, both issues were related to the newer version of Perl in Oneiric. They were easily fixed by re-building ZoneMinder and MRTG so I was back in business relative quickly.

Since I run Ubuntu on my server I don’t normally see (or care about) any of the user-facing changes like the Unity interface so I can’t comment on those features. The only real change for me is the new 3.0 Linux kernel.

Up next in April? Precise Pangolin.