Don't forget to *enjoy the sauce*.

one of the greatest games of all time, Star Control 2, has been released to the public as The Ur-Quan Masters.

I used to play this game in my first year of University, shortly after it came out, in my friend's room across the hall. on many an afternoon, the techno-driven music could be heard blasting out of his rez room, accompanied by explosions and curses as I found myself blown to bits again (usually by another person, but occasionally by the computer if I played by myself).

this game had it all; an epic storyline, action, adventure, intrigue, humour, and (at the time), wicked graphics. it looks dated now, but the game play is still top-notch, and the sound is no worse than a lot of games nowadays.

and speaking of sound, The Precursors Team have slowly been releasing modern remixes of the original music and combat ditties. The Precursors Team consists of members of the original music composers, and the group "Medieval Future." the music is very atmospheric, and is easy to listen to on its own, or as part of the game. I've downloaded the first three expansion packs, and am eagerly awaiting the fouth.

finally, a wiki titled The Ultronomicon has been set up that will eventually contain all the information on the Star Control Universe that one would want or need to know. I'm anxious to see how this works out. I'd like to contribute, but so far, I've only managed to ally with the Orz, and get to the Spathi homeworld, so I'm lacking a little bit of knowledge on the subject.

Random Word Generation

when playing a System Administrator, I often a need for tools to help me generate passwords. these passwords need to be secure, but they also need to be relatively easy to remember. at one point, I had written a script that generator quasi-random passwords. this created nice, secure passwords, based on some rules that required it to alternate hands, and include vowels, consonents and punctuation in certain orders.

my co-workers hated it. I was incessantly mocked for my incoherent passwords. they didn't like that there was no mnemonic to help them remember the words. bastards.

this led me to the next logical step: random word generation.

I did some googling, and came up with a couple of places that generated random words from a database:

• The Sanguma Creative Thinking Guide Random Word Generator
• Wong Yi Wen's Random Word Generator

both of these generated fine, strong words. however, this wasn't quite what I was looking for. so, I kept looking, and came up with Sushi's Random Word Generator. this program accepts a word or sentance as input, and munges it, returning a completely different, non-real word. the problem here, though, was that the words didn't really look or sound like real words. so, again, not quite what I was looking for.

next, I found a couple of true random word generators. The first, the Fourteen Minutes Random Word Generator, generates a short list of completely random words with no input, or generate words with based on the starting letters that you input.

the second, Sean Puckett's Random Word Generator, creates random words from the paragraphs that you enter. the more seed words you enter, the more new words that are created. this has the advantage of being able to create words that are based on a certain subject matter. for instance, if the generator is fed a list of girl's names from the 1800s, a list of new and unique girl's names is generated. imagine the fun generated from a list of naughty words!