Month: March 2003

Phillip Reed has Whispering Vault

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date March 21, 2003

Phillip Reed and Christopher Shy have bought one of the more interesting out-of-print RPGs, converted it to PDF and are offering it for sale online: The Whispering Vault. He’s also brought out an “adventure”:http://www.philipjreed.com/PJR/archives/000188.html, and two supplements, the excellent “Dangerous Prey”:http://www.philipjreed.com/PJR/archives/000194.html and the never-before-printed “Mortal Magic”:http://www.philipjreed.com/PJR/archives/000190.html (the “original cover”:http://www.tombaxa.com/portfolio/illos/jpg_1_mortalmagic.htm was swapped out for legal reasons).

Roleplaying

Castle Blackmoor

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date March 21, 2003

Castle Blackmoor is the home page of Dave Arneson, perhaps the world’s first DM and someone with a justified grudge against TSR and Gary Gygax. Fascinating stuff there about early roleplaying, including the entire Blackmoor supplement for D&D, where a lot of stuff that later showed up in AD&D first appeared (as well as plenty of interesting things that didn’t).

short Software and Programming

Developing Movable Type Plugins

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date March 21, 2003

O’Reilly Network: Developing Movable Type Plugins [Mar. 19, 2003]

Software and Programming

Reference Like It Oughta Be

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date March 21, 2003

Grrr. “Python”:http://www.python.org seems to have lots of useful libraries and services, for example codecs for translating between character sets / encodings, or an “HTML parser”:http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-htmllib.html (well, actually there are “two”:http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-HTMLParser.html – probably because the first one was too complicated).

And while this is all throughly documented, the documentation is mostly pretty confusing, because examples are thin on the ground.

So let me use this moment of frustration to point out why I think “Netscape’s Javascript Documentation”:http://devedge.netscape.com/central/javascript/ is simply *world-class*: it gives examples for everything. Practically every method of every object mentioned in it’s “client-side reference guide”:http://devedge.netscape.com/library/manuals/2000/javascript/1.3/guide/, for example, has sample code showing how the object or method can be created and used, and what the expected behaviour would be.

Which is probably why I’ll happily consider doing somthing in Javascript, but haven’t gotten deeper into Python than the simplest three-line script.

Oddities

Hotel California

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date March 20, 2003

defective yeti performs a valuable public service by researching what that Eagles song was all about:

bq(http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/000594.html). I assumed — erroneously, I guess — that everyone (including The Queen) had, while in college, attended a party where Hotel California was playing, and been cornered by a Way Too Inebriated College Guy, who insisted, with slurred earnestness, that the song was a thinly veiled paean (or perhaps “pagan”) to Satanism.* I mean, when I was in college this happened to me, like, twice a month.