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arrived through the post from ebay yesterday. It is superb. Exactly my kind of game, and with loads of features from the old game (one of my favourites of all time), all updated and made even more beautiful. It is incredibly atmospheric, and so far the gameplay has been utterly compelling. Am I more excited about this than the pervious post? Surely not.
Category: Tech
Sourceforge
I have requested a Sourceforge project for DIYBlog, and it just struck me again how utterly fantastic Sourceforge is. What would the Free and Open Source Software world be like now without Sourceforge? A lot poorer, I reckon.
I’m desperately trying to find time to test FreeGuide for a 0.10.2 release. So far it looks like although my favourites have been imported, they are not working. In fact, when I create a new favourite it works for that run but when I restart the program they are not highlighted. Hmm.
The dangers of learning to code
I was speaking to someone over the weekend who works in HR and has been enjoying making various Microsoft Access databases to do useful things for work. I warned her she might get the programming bug and then never be able to stop. Then I realised she already had it when she summed it up beautifully:
“You can make it do things.”
I love coding.
Train gaming
For my train journey, I ended up downloading a few emulators that didn’t work, and a few games that didn’t work, but what did work was the PC version of Prince of Persia, and the PC version of Cannon Fodder, both of which were very enjoyable.
Especially good were some new levels someone had created for PoP – a lot harder than the original ones! It did show how much work went into creating games, even back then, though, since there were a couple of subtle bugs in the new levels that led to you getting trapped with no means of killing yourself, which means your entire game is over and you have to start again, which is quite frustrating.
I did dig out the code for my track and field game, but when it appeared all on one line with weird symbols for the carriage returns, and I contemplated the idea of fixing this (and coding generally) in notepad, I decided to go back to PoP instead.
More on the track and field game later. It’s in Python…
Constantly changing passwords
I know it’s supposed to be best practice to force users to change their passwords regularly, but how are we supposed to remember them? I wonder whether anyone has done any research into passwords becoming lower quality as people are asked to change them. It just becomes increasingly difficult to think up memorable things that are not obvious, or look for ways of fooling the computer into letting you have a similar password every month.