For your weekend reading: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. It’s far more clever than the source material suggests. (via)
Two recent roguelike items:
Gamasutra has a 4-page article about Rogue, emphasizing its origins being intertwined with the original BSD UNIX. Read the comments for some BSD history, from that actual people involved. (via)
The latest @Play column about roguelikes is very long, and that will not be a surprise after you read the title: How To Win At Nethack. I find articles like this fascinating, but then again, I also enjoyed reading through the AD&D Dungeon Master Guide for the charts.
Hubert Feyrer, for his PhD, put together a Virtual Unix Lab – a whole lab of NetBSD systems for teaching System Administration. It’s a good strategy for an environment where some percentage of the systems will be irretrievably mangled. It’s available as a book.
Here’s an article on chiptunes. (What’s that?.) The writing is very exacting, but the page has been liberally sprinkled with video examples of the source material. Read the dry text while being serenaded. Highlights: comparisons of Metallica to a 1988 C64 game, and compilation of crack screens. (via I lost track of it, sorry)