DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The BBC has published a Flash (!) version of the old Infocom text adventure based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That was the first and only Infocom title I ever bought. I’d poked at a few pirated copies of the Zork series and maybe Planetfall, but never played seriously or with any intention of finishing. Although I did download the instruction set for winning Zork I in the fewest possible moves, because I thought that was an important thing to have handy. (Geek trivia note: as it’s largely a series of one-letter instructions and short commands, the whole thing fit easily onto a couple lines of text on the BBS screen I downloaded it from.)

So I played the H2G2 game for an hour or two… got off the planet, got the fish in my ear, and got frustrated. I don’t think I ever ran the program again. I didn’t have much patience for games, much less games that lie to the player.

But now, thanks to the BBC, I can relive all my adolescent frustration for free, online, with pictures!! — a real change of pace considering the game’s ancestry.

Now I’ve spent about 20 minutes at it, and I can’t even stop the bulldozer. Clearly I was a cleverer guy at age 17 than I am now. Note to self: all those jokes about killing brain cells in college may have, in retrospect, been less funny than originally believed.

The BBC site also contains an interview with Steve Meretzky, the programmer who worked with Douglas Adams to create the Infocom game. (The interview alludes to the great difficulty of the Babel Fish puzzle, suggesting that, 20 years ago, I downloaded the solution to that from the BBS, too. Hmph.)

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time:
Steve, Don’t Eat It!

Following is an illustration of the only way to win an Ebay auction any more: wait until the absolute last second, and bid 29¢ more than than the next guy.

This auction closed at 12:16:50, one second after my bid was received. I nearly missed the window because I decided 3 seconds before close to revise my bid. I wasted 25¢, as it turns out.

Bidding in the last moment of an auction is called “sniping” and it is annoying as hell, unless you happen to be the winner. I’ve lost numerous auctions by $1.00 or less, in the last 10 seconds of action. And I’ve won numerous auctions the same way. In fact, most everything I’ve bought on Ebay in the past year — or failed to buy — has come down to a last-moment bidding war. I’ve saved a bit of money this way, and, probably, shaved 18 months off my life due to sniping-induced stress.

ZabaSearch drives another nail in the coffin of personal privacy. Type in a name and state and get the person’s full name, birthdate, address, and phone number. It’s like a time machine, too; their data goes back at least 15 years, retaining records of every place anyone has ever lived. Sigh.

David Lazarus did some nice investigative work for the Chronicle, in a column called It’s impressive, scary to see what a Zaba search can do. The article explains an unexpected and bizarre connection between the founders/owners of Zaba and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

See also Matt Haughey’s recent writeup on the issue: Strange, Troubling Privacy

Ask Jeeves announced some keen new search technologies at Etech. The main new innovation, which comes from the founder of Teoma (which Ask.com acquired several years ago) won’t be online for two weeks, but it’s compelling: basing relevance rankings on clusters of expert communities rather than on inbound link-count (aka PageRank). It’s a mouthful of buzzwords but it may mean their results are better. Certainly it’s likely to mean the results for ambiguous queries are more diverse, e.g. a search for ‘apple’ should turn up both Apples and apples — which is not the case at Google today.

Jeeves’ new technology can’t be seen for a couple weeks on their text search, but can be seen on their image search. Compare Ask Jeeves’ image search results for John with Google’s image search results for John. The Google results shows a bunch of people you’ve never heard of, with one exception; the Jeeves results page shows Travolta, Elton, Wayne, Kennedy, Cassavettes, etc.

But this may be a corner case. I tried numerous other searches, both ambiguous (bread, cardinals) and not (herman miller aeron chair). Results in all cases were similar. Neither engine showed a picture of a shrub in a search for ‘bush.’

The promise is there, even if the implementation doesn’t yet fulfill the promise. It’s worth watching.