robotfindskitten – the Mayan Apocalypse Edition!

Today’s very special non-world-ending software release, triggered if not originated from here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories is the amazing Zen simulation, Robot Finds Kitten. I bow in respect before Leonard Richardson and the other giants of kitten-finding history and am humbly proud to be counted among the select few who have contributed to this monumental, er, monument.

Get yer hot fresh tarball right here. It will improve your sex life, clear up your financial problems, cure your acne, and make you as a god among men. Would I lie?

19 comments

  1. It occurs to me that such a feature would almost certainly be missing the point of the zen aspect, but it might be interesting to keep track of and display the number of moves.

  2. I’m not sure if this is a mistake in the distribution or just too zen for me… this version appears to have changed from having the NKIs hardcoded into the binary to loading from a file at runtime, but does not ship with that file at all.

    The last entry in the changelog implies a major version number of 1.6180339, but the previous version (corresponding to a changelog date of 2007, and the current version in http://robotfindskitten.org/download/POSIX/) is 1.7320508, and the actual version number on the tarball is 2.7182818.

    1. >I’m not sure if this is a mistake in the distribution or just too zen for me… this version appears to have changed from having the NKIs hardcoded into the binary to loading from a file at runtime, but does not ship with that file at all.

      Try re-downloading. That directory was missing in the list for the packaging production, but I’ve fixed that.

  3. “…and the actual version number on the tarball is 2.7182818.”

    Oh…you got the transcendental version. It won’t load into a fixed number of bits…

  4. “Would I lie?”

    I doubt it, but you might feed us some really obvious bullshit just to make us smile.

    @Stark, somehow I seriously doubt that 30 year-old clone microprocessors wear pant[ie]s.

    Is the next version going to be 3.1415926? Is there going to be a 19.9990999?

    (Don’t recognize the number? http://xkcd.com/217/)

    P.S.: “It will improve your sex life, clear up your financial problems, cure your acne, and make you as a god among men.” There is something that can help with that last part at least: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ (I’s too busy to hunt kittens)

  5. The README promised that a ./configure, a make and a make install will improve my sex life. And it did. “which robotfindskitten” revealed mere emptiness. So instead of wasting half an hour for boring sex life, I found out that it was installed in /usr/local/games and said /usr/local/games is not in the PATH. How could I be so ignorant not to notice?

    So I sacrificed another 5 minutes of bad sex life for finding out that a ./configure –prefix=/usr will sort it out. Now I was able to run robotfindskitten from its own source directory.

    But not from anywhere else. It complained about missing nki-s. Now was the time to replace my deplorable sex life with healthy abstinence for real! I plunged into the source code to find out that there are three dirs for no-kitten-indicators: SYSTEM_NKI_DIR in /usr/share/games… (commented out), USER_NKI_DIR in ~/.robotfindskitten (not created or populated by make) and, well, “nki”.

    Then the words “esr vs cups” and “Luxury of ignorance” sprang to my mind, upon which I went to bed.

    Only to wake up to find out that the Mayan Apocalypse was canceled. What a happy day.

  6. Much thanks to ESR for injecting new excitement and life into the robotfindskitten consortium! We wouldn’t have released before the world ended if it weren’t for you. Huzzah!

  7. @szg:
    >Only to wake up to find out that the Mayan Apocalypse was canceled. What a happy day.

    I went to the movies on the 21st, and saw a trailer for a Lone Ranger movie starring Johnny Depp as Tonto.

    This tells me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the world has, in fact, ended. Anything that might seem to remain is merely the product of a deranged imagination.

  8. “…and Michael Bay still gets to make movies! There is no God!!!” – Stan Marsh (I think).

  9. “I went to the movies on the 21st, and saw a trailer for a Lone Ranger movie starring Johnny Depp as Tonto.

    This tells me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the world has, in fact, ended. Anything that might seem to remain is merely the product of a deranged imagination.”

    Uh uh…that RIGHT, Kemosabe!

  10. I went to the movies on the 21st, and saw a trailer for a Lone Ranger movie starring Johnny Depp as Tonto.

    There is absolutely no way it can be worse than Bewitched (2005), which may be one of the worst movies I have ever, ever seen and certainly qualifies for “harbinger of the doom of civilization” status.

  11. Now we know why Eric has been too busy to pontificate about the politicisation of gun violence since 14 December: he has been saving the world, one robotfindskitten tarball at a time.

  12. >he has been saving the world, one robotfindskitten tarball at a time.

    Or he might be ending it: can you think of any way for the human race to survive a robot-kitten alliance?

    Well, the robots might let the hackers live, and the kittens might let the Cat Lady’s live so thats something anyway. Heh, two groups that stereotypically don’t get laid very often.

    — Foo Quuxman

Leave a Reply to esr Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *