Scrib (short for Scribbington Dreud) was originally just a little project I had thought up to learn Python. He was to be a simple little command line interface (CLI) chat bot. As time went by and I started using IRC more, I started building him for use on an IRC server. While he never really went public there, those who had talked with me about him had wanted to see his code. His code had been elementary at best, so I never showed anyone.

A few years later, that changed. The last few months have seen many updates to Scrib. He is often seen on Freenode and converses semi-regularly with a variety of people. For now, he is just a chatbot (a rather wonky one at that) but he’s being actively worked on to have more than just chatbot features. His source code is now available on GitHub and a support forum has popped up over in the Scoundrels Community.

The most up-to-date information can be found over on Tenach.net

I just plugged into Dwarf Fortress by Bay 12 Games for the first time this week. So far I think it is fun, exciting, and challenging. It is currently in Alpha stage development, but is very playable.

I run Ubuntu Karmic 64-bit and the game was a bit of a challenge to install. I had not yet loaded the 32-bit libs so I had to retro my system to get the libncursesw.so.5 to identify correctly. Then I found that Ubuntu is only supporting libjpeg62 at this time so I had to compile a 32-bit version of libjpeg.so.8.0.1 and make a link to it in the [df]/libs file called libjpeg.so.8 and that was it.

For your convenience I have made the file available here:
(Pre Compiled 32-Bit) libjpeg.so.8.0.1
Or you can go to http://www.ijg.org and get the code to compile it yourself. (here is a quick link to the source tar)
http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v8a.tar.gz

As soon as you get a chance, check this one out!
(don’t forget to sign up to the forums @ http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php)

Arch Linux is a great Linux distribution for those who wish to install a minimal setup and configure their system just the way they want. Coming from a Debian-based distribution (Ubuntu), I have learned that installing 32-bit applications is not as easy as downloading the ia32-lib package.

The first time I downloaded 32-bit libraries inside Arch Linux, I figured out that they can overwrite or modify existing files. After refreshing my install, I set about for a better way to run 32-bit programs. What I found was a wiki entry inside the ArchWiki. After going through the steps a few times, I decided to create a script that would automate the steps to make installing it again less cumbersome.

Since the process can be a bit intimidating for people less acquainted with Linux and the use of the terminal, I have made my script available for download. Let me know how it works for you!