Tuesday, September 18, 2007, 5:43 AM
Do you remember the Ultima series of D&D-style video games?I remember playing Ultima III, IV, and V in the 80s and 90s. They were awesome in their day. Many of my youthful late night hours were spent sitting in front of my Apple II+ hacking and slashing away.
Fast forward to 2007. I know for a few years now about a shareware re-creation of Ultima III that was actually sanctioned by Lord British. But then, I came across xu4, an open-source project that has made the original game run on modern operating systems. Furthermore, I also found Ultima V: Lazarus, another open-source project that has re-recreated the Ultima V game using the Dungeon Siege engine.
Now, while xu4 is faithful to the original, right down to the graphics and sound, Lazarus is not due to the use of a 3D engine as well as several other factors that you can read about here.
I don't have Dungeon Siege, so I cannot check it out. However, I was able to run xu4 on my PowerPC Mac w/ 10.4.10 installed without issues. And boy did it bring back memories!
Check it out for yoursevles!
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007, 4:02 AM
I've been following Microsoft's dealings w/ the EU antitrust courts for a while now, and where the company seemed to have prevailed in the U.S., it is running into a much tougher stance in Europe.While a part of me wants to shout w/ glee and say that Microsoft is getting its due in a different court system, I do wonder, though, if the Europeans have a bias against American companies in general.
I mean, it's not just Microsoft that's having issues, but Apple also, and maybe others I have not read about....
Your thoughts?
Tuesday, September 11, 2007, 4:28 AM
I just realized that I needed to implement the ICloneable
interface in one of the classes I wrote for work, only to find out that there is no generic-enabled ICloneable<T>
equivalent in .NET Framework 2.0. So I whipped one up for myself.It's such a useful little interface, wonder why the .NET Framework architects didn't think to include it.
I looked into the documentation for Framework 3.0, and it appears to absent there as well. Hmm....
Tuesday, September 11, 2007, 3:15 AM
Back when I computed on green-screen terminals running VT100 emulation connected via telnet to Unix systems, just about everyone used vi. I think some people used emacs, but I liked vi's simplicity and usability.Now, some years later, I have bought and drank the IDE kool-aid. I use Apple's Xcode to support Freeciv on the Mac, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 to support my day job as a C#/ASP.NET developer, and Eclipse + Aptana to dabble in Ruby on Rails in my spare time.
However, I finally got fed up with Eclipse's speed on my not-so-recent Mac (alright, it's actually ancient by computing standards) that serves three masters: myself and two other family members.
So I took inventory of the features I relied on when I used Eclipse, and I went about searching for a speedier and equally priced replacement. Lo and behold, I came cross the Vim editor, which is not only a much improved version of the old vi editor I, but it also supports a large array of scripts that can be easily downloaded and installed to enhance and extend vim.
After some experimentation, I settled on the following setup:
- Vim.app - GUI version of vim, installed via MacPorts
- vim - Command-line version, installed via MacPorts
- rails.vim - Ruby on Rails: easy file navigation, enhanced syntax highlighting, and more
- genutils.vim - Enables extra functionality in rails.vim
- vividchalk.vim - Color scheme strangely reminiscent of Vibrant Ink for a certain OS X editor
Feature | Eclipse | Vim |
---|---|---|
Syntax highlighting | Yes | Yes |
Auto-insertion of keywords, symbols, & markup tags | Yes | No |
Hierarchical view of Rails application directory structure | Yes | No, but I can get there using the Finder or Terminal |
Integration with Subversion | Yes | Yes, with the use of another script, but I found it clumsy, so I reverted to using svn via the command-line |
Class outline | Yes | No, but a quick text search suffices for now |
As you can see, I am doing pretty well. For a little extra typing, I gain development speed plus a much smaller CPU footprint. I'll buy that for ... hey, it's free!
Wednesday, May 2, 2007, 11:14 PM
Someone posted a query to the MacPorts user maiing list asking why the bittorrent port requires XFree86 or Apple's X11 to build. It is a reasonable question, since at first glance bittorrent doesn't seem to need it:% port deps bittorrentA second glance says the same as well:
bittorrent has library dependencies on:
py-wxpython
py-twisted
py-crypto
% port deps py-wxpythonI ran into a similar problem in my use of MacPorts, where I needed to determine all the dependencies a port has. So I wrote a Python script,
py-wxpython has library dependencies on:
python24
wxWidgets
% port deps py-twisted
py-twisted has library dependencies on:
python24
py-zopeinterface
% port deps py-crypto
py-crypto has library dependencies on:
python24
rdeps.py
, which outputs the following (emphasis added):% rdeps.py bittorrentThis has saved me from needing to repeatedly execute the
+- bittorrent
+- (L) py-wxpython
| +- (L) python24
| +- (L) wxWidgets
| +- (L) jpeg
| +- (L) tiff
| | +- (L) jpeg
| | +- (L) zlib
| +- (L) libpng
| | +- (L) zlib
| +- (L) zlib
| +- (L) libiconv
| | +- (B) gperf
| +- (L) expat
| +- (L) libsdl
| | +- (L) XFree86
| | +- (B) perl5.8
| +- (L) libsdl_mixer
| +- (L) libsdl
| | +- (L) XFree86
| | +- (B) perl5.8
| +- (L) smpeg
| | +- (L) libsdl
| | +- (L) XFree86
| | +- (B) perl5.8
| +- (L) libvorbis
| | +- (L) libogg
| +- (L) libogg
| +- (L) libmikmod
+- (L) py-twisted
| +- (L) python24
| +- (L) py-zopeinterface
| +- (L) python24
+- (L) py-crypto
+- (L) python24
port deps
command by hand or going through Portfiles to hunt down dependencies on many occasions.Of course, my little handy Python script only provides a skin-deep explanation of why X11 is needed by saying "because the Portfile says so", which isn't all that insightful. A slightly better explanation can be found here. Basically, bittorrent has a dependency on libsdl, which will not compile unless X11 is present.
Now why does libsdl need X11 to build? I don't know the answer to this one. Do you?
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