Zork Ⅰ is a really important game to work through, if you’re going to try to understand where interactive fiction came from. It’s not the first, but it’s a major early milestone of the golden age of commercial IF, and its book is alluded to repeatedly throughout later works. I’m really glad that I’ve played Zork Ⅰ, but my feeling after playing it again is that once was probably enough.

Quite a while ago, I decided that I had too many petty interests, and that I should pick one and pursue it. I thought I’d work on running some really good D&D, but basically it hasn’t worked out. I have been unable to establish a regular-enough group of players, and have not felt entirely compatible with some of the players who I was able to attract. It has been a big let down.

Last week I wrote about the speed of Perl file finders, including a somewhat difficult to read chart of their relative speeds in a pretty contrived race. My intent wasn’t really to compare the “good” ones, but to call out the “bad” ones. Looking at that graph, it should be clear that you “never” want to use Path::Class::Rule or File::Find::Rule. Their behavior is vastly worse than their competition’s.

Sometimes you need to walk a directory tree, pick out files, and do stuff. If you’re working in the shell, you can use find — at least if you have GNU find. Those other finds… shudder.

I really liked using OmniWeb. Back before Safari existed, OmniWeb was, for me, a much better option than Firefox. It was very fast, did a good job saving my session, had per-site preferences, and had workspaces. I am stymied, deeply and daily, by the lack of good workspace support in every other browser.

…it probably shouldn’t be this one. Instead, go read Breno G. de Oliveira’s piece on hash randomization.

Okay, look, it’s really nice that iTunes is so much faster, now. I mean, it’s really nice. Most of the visual changes are nice. A lot of it, as usual, is just little changes that I don’t care about. The new context menus are okay. Super, okay? They’re great.

Horror Movie Month 2012 is done! Thirty-one movies in thirty-one days! (We missed one day but watched two on another.)

Still exploring the museum under the statue of Cosativa, the troop poked around the counter at the east end of the room, where they found an old green backpack. They catalogued its contents, argued a bit over who should take what, shuffled gear around, and then moved on to inspect the featureless black sphere floating over one of the display stands. Watching it, Red was transfixed and treated to a strange display proclaiming the broad scope of the now-defunct empire and the meaninglessness of his life. He kept it to himself.

Sometime during the Red Moon, 937