Wednesday 22 December 2010

Just had a quick look at the votes so far...

And we have a tie for first place.

Over 500 people voted last year, so make yours count...

Friday 17 December 2010

Request for votes: Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2010

166 roguelikes were released this year... this is, again, a new record for the number to qualify for this competition, up from 99 the last year.

How did the roguelikes qualify?

The list was taken from the roguelike releases announced on the Rogue Basin news section between December 16th 2009 and December 16th 2010 and from the list of Actively Developing Roguelikes maintained by Michał Bieliński [Edit: My sincere apologies for the oversight. It used to be Jeff Lait].

What about 'x'?

Make sure you announced your roguelike on Rogue Basin for next year.

What about the 7 day roguelikes?

I decided to exclude any 7 day roguelikes that weren't announced separately. However, most of them were on Jeff Lait's list.

What's the prize?

Pride. And a sexy logo - if you want one. You can see the winning 2007 logo on the Dwarf Fortress links page. Other winners are free to request them, but haven't done so. Logo designs for this year are welcome.

Having a competition is a dumb idea/offensive/stupid when you can't police the results.

Yep. Doesn't stop it being fun. You can vote for multiple different roguelikes. The idea here is that you will be encouraged to go out and download a roguelike that other people consider interesting, not that there is any kind of real competition element involved.

Poll results for "How do you find high level play in Unangband?"; new poll

This poll has been around a little while - thanks to the 21 of you who voted:

Too easy; make it harder
0 (0%)
Just right thanks
0 (0%)
Challenging
3 (14%)
Frustratingly hard
0 (0%)
Grindtastic
1 (4%)
Haven't made it to high levels
12 (57%)
Haven't played Unangband
6 (28%)

Next poll; it's that time of year again.

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."

Of the Top 50 Programming quotes of all time, the above is the one that is the most true for me.

Unfortunately, this year appears to have been one long Monday...

Saturday 11 December 2010

Rant mode on

As a loyal Mac customer, you have to put up with the digital equivalent of Steve Jobs urinating on you on a regular basis.

Case in point: I've just bought my wife an iPhone 4. I have always owned Mac laptops, instead of PC laptops but the last one I purchased, about 3 and a half years ago, is still running fine on Tiger.

The iPhone 4 cannot be used with Tiger. It can however be used with XP, which is the direct competitor's product, which has been around for 9 years, that is 5 years before OS X could run on Intel CPUs.

With my current iPhone 3G, I can't tether the phone in Tiger to use as a modem and I can't run Steam natively (but Wine runs absolutely fine and I was playing Counter Strike and Day of Defeat years before Steam play came out).

Cost to upgrade to the latest OS (were I interested in doing so): a third of the price of a new iPhone 4.

(Don't get me started on Linux. I'm still waiting for the operating system to actually do what an OS should: which is work flawlessly without me having to spend a single second thinking about it).

/rant off