Seven lucky seven

As an avid user of The Editor, it's a no-brainer that I'm anxiously expecting the release of Vim v.7. To make my salivate even further, Linux.com are offering a review of the 7.0f beta, running on Ubuntu 5.10, would you believe it :)

Another of the Great Ones has been awoken from it's slumber, as Graham Nelson releases (after 10 years!) the next release of Inform, aka inform 7. Inform is a language for writing Interactive Fiction, fully compatible with Infocom's Z engine, which makes Inform interpreters able to play Infocom games as well as more contemporary ones. Inform 7 is a complete IDE package (including an editor as well as an interpreter), with a 'correct while you test' feature, as well as many other niceties.
The language itself has shifted from the more programming-language-like syntax into the land of cargo cult "natural English-language" syntax.
For more information, Brass Lantern offers a nice introduction.

While on the matter of updates, I've just discovered that updating both my desktop and laptop to the latest Ubuntu Beta 2, has broken GTK-VIM and TinyCOBOL on my laptop (I was able to resurrect TinyCOBOL by downgrading libncurses5), and GTK-LyX on both the laptop and the desktop. I hope that eventually this will be fixed in one way or the other, but it's not a big issue, as GTK-LyX was only introduced with the 1.4.X version, and up until that point I was using the QT flavour (the GTK version is also less featured, I needed to set most of the preferences using the QT one). To those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, a quick "first look" at LyX is available at the LinuxCult.