Just so I don't feel like a slacker

I took a week off from work this month (and I'll do this once per month until the end of the year, since my vacation time doesn't roll over) and have been trying to actually use it productively. Here's a list of some interesting things that I've done so far:

• Twisted stuff: there was a developer sprint on Sunday that Itamar, Glyph, Jean-Paul and I attended, and since then I've been sporadically (but much more than usual) reviewing branches to try to get a release out. Speaking of which, Twisted contributors: please review #3487!
• Did a bit of evangelism for the new GarGlk project on Google Code, organized a mailing list and rustled up some members, and started making an Ubuntu package for the new Gargoyle. You should see something by the end of the week.
• Worked on my own interactive fiction game, which is progressing at just about the right pace to be ready for the GameplayComp mini-competition in September of 2009.
• Posted a couple of updated extensions to the I7 Extensions page: Emily Short's Ordinary Room Description and Jesse McGrew's Dynamic Objects.
• Watched Resident Evil: Extinction (the third in the series), which did not have as good an ending as either of the first two.
  

Of course, in addition to this I've been spending way too much time playing video games (Far Cry 2! Fallout 3! Man, there is a ridiculously awesome influx of good games lately. And I am looking forward to Left 4 Dead). Of course, I am never one to be satisfied with simple pleasures, so all this gaming has been inspiring me to brew up an essay in my head which I'm thinking of calling The Purity of Interaction, or less wankerly, Consistency in Interaction. We'll see. I do still have three free days before I have to get back to the salt mines.

Oh yeah, and if you're in the mood for something spooky for Halloween (or as I like to call it, All Hallow's Evening), check out Dave's latest blog post.

Im in ur web site, postin ur Inform 7 extensions

Hi, this is a quick note that now people who want to add extensions to the Inform 7 Extensions Page should now contact me at i7extensions@wordeology.com; Emily Short has handed off the responsibility to me, and I've just updated Liquid Handling and Supplemental Actions by Al Golden, and Epistemology by Eric Eve.

Hopefully at some point the email address will be replaced by a web form that streamlines this process a bit.

Glulxe packages for Ubuntu

So I got all the IFComp 2008 games, unzipped them, and tried to play them. Then I found out I didn't have any decent interpreters for the games and couldn't find Ubuntu 64-bit binaries for them on the net. So I decided to start making packages.

Glulxe (using the glktermw backend) is now packaged and available in a Launchpad Personal Package Archive that I just set up. You can get it by adding the following software source to your Ubuntu machine:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-if/ubuntu hardy main

And installing the 'glulxe-term' package.

edit: Thanks to Peer Schaefer for the original packages, on which my packages are based. Sorry I forgot to mention in the initial post!

I hope to offer 'glulxe-gtk' package soon; ideally, I'll replace both of them with a 'glulxe' package that can dynamically use any Glk backend by making use of GlkLoader, but that'll probably require some real coding.

I'm also working on packages for Gnome Inform 7, but unfortunately they contain proprietary code so I can't publish them on the PPA. I'm hoping to be able to split that package so that I can create a 'gnome-inform7' package separate from an 'inform7' package, but that's iffy because it would make installing from .debs without a repository significantly more annoying - right now you just click the .deb link on the Inform 7 web site and then click "Install package".

Anyway, look out for more Ubuntu/IF work soon.

Interactive Fiction Competition 2008

There are a slew of posts about it on Planet IF, but given that my readership is largely outside of the IF community, I'm going to mention here that IFComp '08 is now under way and is accepting votes. There are 35 games which you can get in one bundle. Most of the games can be run on any computer (Linux, Mac, Windows), with a few platform-specific (Windows-only) games.

In case you don't know what interactive fiction is, you can read Emily Short's short introduction. If you're looking for the interpreters needed to run the games, you can check out the relevant page on IFWiki.

This is the fourteenth year that the competition has been running (I was eleven when it started!), and it's the first in which I've decided to vote. Please join me.