This month in natlang awesome, Andy Baio has released a Z-machine interpreter site: playfic.com. The key innovation here is that it's both writeable and readable: play games, “view source” on them, download, modify, and upload a new, playable version.

Hearing about the natural language programming capabilities of Inform7 upon its release in 2006 definitely set some of the seeds for LOLCODE. As Baio points out on his introductory blog post, this is a fully playable 'game':

East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup. In the Treehouse is a container called a cardboard box.

AWSUM.

O HAI.

New friend Rob Muller pointed me to a project that he and his friend cooked up about a year ago. Since today is September 19th, Olde Timey Speke seemed relevant enough to today's a Talk Like A Pirate celebration to share:

Ye Olde Sea Pluss Pluss!

It's a preprocessor-driven variant, but it's a bit of fun up on github.

Inspired (once again) by the Ruby community (discussion here), closing nested blocks can be accomplished with repeating 'x' for as many “kthx”s that would be repeated. See the discussion at the above link, and it will be made clear.

(h/t Steve Losh & Bennett Kolasinski)

The best thing about UDP jokes is that I don’t care if you get them or not.

protolol

Hey! Long time no blog!

I don't know if anyone regularly watches LOLCODE news any more, but I will be hanging out at South by Southwest Interactive between now and March 16, 2011. If you've heard of LOLCODE, say hi. If you want to find me (or follow me), then ping me on teh twitterz: @atl.

You doubtless know that our older, far more accomplished cousin, the Cheezburger network, is serious business. What you may not know is that they now make several APIs available.

Naturally, the way for checking in with the API, the “Hello World” call, is at api.cheezburger.com/xml/hai.

Most of the other API elements are for hooking into the user- and submission-oriented features of the various sites on the network, but the Content Caption API is fairly nifty on its own, with a quite complete interface for placing text on images. I'd recommend checking it out.

I just had this brought to my attention. lolbash.sh:

# LOL!!1

alias wtf='dmesg'
alias onoz='cat /var/log/errors.log'
alias rtfm='man'

alias visible='echo'
alias invisible='cat'
alias moar='more'

alias icanhas='mkdir'
alias donotwant='rm'
alias dowant='cp'
alias gtfo='mv'

alias hai='cd'
alias plz='pwd'

alias inur='locate'

alias nomz='ps -aux'
alias nomnom='killall'

alias cya='reboot'
alias kthxbai='halt'

Well, that pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

(via @natevw)

Raised as possibly relevant to your interests:

Inception, a repository on github by A R Karthick that's the “Inception movie explained programmatically.” From the README:

My tribute to [Director Christopher] Nolan in “C” Language and a bit of assembly (x86) as the inception is done using x86 code morphing so that Fischer wakes up thinking that the thought was originated from his mind. Running the program would unravel the entire sequence in the movie. Reading the code would explain the movie Programmatically.

Nicely done. I'm always sympathetic to efforts like this. The commit log in itself is a nice artifact.

(H/T: @ericflo)