Apparently this is a good week for Lazy Reading links, cause I have lots! If you have any specific suggestions of where to find more links, I’d welcome them. I’m sure there’s more people to follow that come up with tidbits like these…
- Coding Tricks of Game Developers. A mix of genuine techniques and deadline near-misses. (via)
- Insane Calculations In Bash. Ostensibly, it describes all the work required to convert number series to “sparks” (inline UTF-8-based graphs) using bash. What it really shows is how far down the paths of madness shell programming can take you.
- From the same person, It Came From The Hold Space, a description of how crappy things could be pre-1990 or so when, say, sed was the most capable tool you had. Read the presentation description first. Bonus: the presentation explains a non-acronym source for the name “grep”.
- Hey, I’ve seen that logo before. (via Koston on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Mounting files from the web. (via luxh, same place)
- Here’s a Google Summer of Code success story that made me feel good just for having participated.
- “If a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have an option which enables it to be easily played by a moderately inebriated person who isn’t good at math, it is a failure.“
- Hey, Window Maker finally got updated. (via) It was always my favorite window manager.
- Michael Lucas published his sales numbers so far for SSH Mastery. (reviewed by me here, totally worth buying) The interesting takeaway for me was that despite the reach of Amazon, Smashwords was more profitable – and I like the variety of Smashwords’ DRM-free formats more.
- I’m linking to this mention of open source operating system cost estimates mostly cause I like the phrase “Debian for the most part is a package repository.“
- Hey, that’s cute. (Make sure your terminal is wider than 80 columns to see it.)
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak. An animator in the UK; I like the rhythmic repetition in his (occasionally disturbing) animations.
As I mentioned last week, DragonFly developer Venkatesh Srinivas is collecting pledges for his crazy-long bike ride, raising funds for cancer patient support. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother died from cancer in a long, agonizing process some years ago. The support system funded by these pledges would have helped us tremendously. Please donate a few dollars to ease someone else’s burden.
The name is Window Maker, not WindowMaker.
It’s been that long since I had to type it. Fixed!
I hate to say it, but: forget D&D. It demands far too much time.
Look at the new Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. It’s like the 1979-era blue book “basic D&D” set with a bit of polish and refinement. Meant for people who have one evening free once a month to hack monsters and steal treasure. http://www.goodmangames.com/5070preview.html.
Aargh, now I have to order the rulebook and read it. My nerdiest nerd hobby is reading RPG rulebooks – not even playing, which I haven’t done in years.
Tabletop RPG BOF at BSDCan? ;-)
That would be fun. Of course, I’d have to make it to BSDCan…