Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:50 pm on 3/17/2006
Ace British tech Matt Webb and former Game Neverending developer Ben Cerveny may have just saved me a great deal of work:
playsh is a MOO-like text environment that runs on your local computer. The basic object types and verbs are based on LambdaMOO. It’s organised geographically, so you can walk north and south and so on. You have a player, so you can take and drop items. You can create new things and dig to new rooms, and there are verbs attached to all of these. There are ssh interfaces so you can connect to playsh from other computers, and other folks can connect to your playsh instance from their own.
[...]
I wanted to build on a couple of things that our brain does really well – geography and narrative – that are sidelined in our current “direct manipulation” paradigm (distance and locality are really powerful metaphors to build representations of knowledge and social structure on. Note that people have PhDs in geography, but not in picking shit up). I wanted something that was social from the ground up, as much as View Source is part of the browser, but also let people see the world in their own way, and experiment and share these different ways. MOOs fit the bill in so many ways.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:37 pm on
(click to enlarge)
This sort of thing is why I moved to Portland. No, not the alcohol part as such. Well, okay, a little bit the alcohol part. But you just don’t find things like this in the Bay Area, things that just make you say, “Awesome.”
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 9:42 am on 3/7/2006
It’s not “Why is MySpace popular even though it’s ugly?” MySpace isn’t ugly; it’s just simple, and doesn’t use, you know, rounded corners and Verdana and shit.
The real mystery is, why is MySpace popular even though its central features break every other time you try to use them?
Maybe ideas really do matter more than execution.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:39 pm on 3/3/2006
Dear tech community: thank you. Thank you for refactoring the job of web development so elegantly and comprehensively over the last couple of years. In every language from Ruby and Python to PHP and Perl down(?) to JavaScript, we now have powerful new abstractions that dramatically lower the barrier to building a web site that does something. Thank you. We needed that.
Now: why don’t you go to work on synchronous apps? If I want to make a web app I don’t have to completely stack blocks from the bottom up anymore, but if I’m putting up a chat server, or the back end to anything that’s really, really meant to work in real time, I still have to start from scratch. Granted, the scratch I’m starting from is better scratch these days, thanks to libraries like Twisted (love their new front page design). But still, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to write code that looks a bit like the following:
class MyChatRoom < SyncServer
def start
port = 7777
welcome_msg = "Hi! Welcome to my chat server, please log in."
welcome_prompt = "Login: "
require_password = true
user_store = "my_users.db" # or whatever
prompt = "Say (/? for help): "
commands = "file_full_of_commands.xml"
spaces = "file_full_of_rooms_defined_somehow.xml"
end
end
chatter = MyChatRoom.new
chatter.start
...and end up with a chat room that basically works and has a few different rooms. Probably some of you can come up with a much better abstraction than the above, even. And I think it's clear how this is generalizable to a hundred different flavors of game server and interactive networked useful thingy.
Why has there been a lack of interest in this problem? Is it because chat is for the lower classes? Is it because lowering the barrier to making whatever sort of server you want is perceived as dangerous? Is it just because more people want to make web sites than want to make arbitrary other weirdnesses? Is it because people think Twisted is really all you need?
link here
