Bob Congdon was surprised to find that he had only seen 2 of the ‘films’ on the IMDB Bottom 100. I guessed that I could beat that record, and I was right.
First up, the two entries I own copies of. Howling III: The Marsupials is one of my all-time favourite werewolf movies. Not because it’s scary, mind you, but because it’s a cheesy and fun Australian werewolf movie. I also own a copy of Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf, which is not scary, not fun, and not cheesy, but it does have Christopher Lee, and, well, if you own #1 and #3 it just makes sense to own #2.
Now, also in the cheesy-but-good category, but not in my video collection is Spice World; the downside to working in a video store is that you see movies you would never choose to see, the upside is that some of them are surprisingly good. Unfortunately, only Howling III and Spice World fall into the ’so bad they’re good’ category. The rest are just bad. Filling out the list of entries I have seen but do not own are: Santa With Muscles, It’s Pat, Jaws: The Revenge, Teen Wolf Too, and Werewolf.
Which leaves the count at eight. However, I have a secret weapon: Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and its ilk. If I add in the titles I recognize from those fine shows, I can pad the list out to thirteen horrible movies, which seems a fitting number. MST3K films: ‘Manos’: The Hands of Fate, Hobgoblins, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Laserblast, and The Beast of Yucca Flats.
Posted on 22 September 2006 in Uncategorized
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Long ago and far away (well, a decade ago and approximately half a continent away), I had a mild SimCity 2000 addiction. I still remember the amazing wonderment of the update that gave me African Swallow speed mode. On a Macintosh LC II, it actually made it possible to play the game on a long-term basis.
Over time, I have become more separated from the game, but I’ve never forgotten it. This morning I heard an interview with Will Wright on BBC World and I suddenly wanted to play a game of SC2K. Unfortunately, I don’t have the floppy disks on hand. (Wow… floppy disks, how time flies…) If I did have the disks, I could set up a Basilisk II virtual machine running some variant of System 7 on an emulated 68k Mac.
So, lacking an on-hand way of getting my SC2K fix, I turned to the Internet. And I quickly located a copy of the Windows SC2K CD-ROM Ultimate Edition for download. My old copy of SC2K is the basic Mac version. So, by using this copy off the Internet I would be both changing platforms and upgrading myself to the CD-ROM content and SCURK. Hence my problem. If this was the basic Mac version, all two floppies of it, I wouldn’t have a problem. But the version I am downloading gives me an additional 106MB of game content.
So, my quandary: is it ethical for me to use this copy of the Windows SC2K CD-ROM Ultimate Edition considering I only own the basic Mac SC2K? I want to believe so, but I can’t quite convince myself of it. In my defence, I first looked for a way to buy SC2K from Maxis (or, EA, or whoever is the parent company nowadays…), but no method jumped out at me. And, my copy of the SC2K disks are in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia while I am in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; there is almost half a continent between me and them. Still, I suppose I can find some solace in the fact I ignored the pirated copies of SimCity 3 and SimCity 4 this copy of SC2K was nestled between.
Update: It turns out that the Windows 95 version of SC2K won’t install on Windows XP. As in, the Installer won’t even run. So, I did what any sane person would do: I dug out an old PC-DOS/Windows 3.1 CD and set up a new virtual machine in Parallels. I managed to get the VM running and WIn3.1 installed in about 3 hours. (The wonders of boot floppies and CD-ROM drivers and the vagaries of copy vs. xcopy…). And, presto, the SC2K/Win3.1 installer ran happily. And the game launched, and I realized the VM was in 4-bit video mode. And I couldn’t get it switched to 8-bit. So that was out.
And then I managed to find a CD-RW with disk images of my SC2K floppies. A small amount of work later, and I was running my legally purchased copy inside Basilisk II.
So, in the end, the ethical question no longer has any practical value to me. C’est la vie.
Posted on 10 September 2006 in Uncategorized
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I made a rather significant blunder in the previous post. I completely forgot about BBEdit’s #! menu. Luckily, there are people much more together than I am who can call me to task for this sort of foolishness. BBEdit has support for every scripting language TextMate does. Every single one. Because BBEdit runs shell scripts (and perl scripts, and php scripts, etc.) though the exact same exec mechanism that TextMate does. (Well, actually, I can’t say that without seeing the source code for the two apps. But, rest assured, they are exceedingly similar mechanisms, if not identical.)
In fact, I managed to get so far off the rails in the previous post that I forgot to include the point I was intending to make. BBEdit applies it’s scripts to the whole document. TextMate allows the script to be applied to the whole document, or just a small section of it. And TextMate allows you to specify sections relative to the current cursor position (both physically and in terms of the lexical scope) in the document. This allows for things like a tab trigger that takes the word to the left of the cursor, sends it off to a web service and inserts the response to the right of the cursor. To my mind, that is pretty amazing, space age stuff. The fact that you can specify that that tab trigger should only be active if you are in a block quote inside of a function in a class that inherits from a specific base class blows my mind.
I have never created a BBEdit lexical structure specification for any language. On the few occasions where one didn’t exist, I simply went without syntax colouring. To be fair, I’ve never defined a lexical structure for a language in TextMate. I have, however, extended TextMate’s lexical structure for PHP. With a few simple regexs, I was able to add scope selectors for PHP classes that happen to be CakePHP controllers, CakePHP models, and the like. What this means is that I can limit my Controller-specific tab completions to Controller classes, and likewise for my Model-specific tab completions.
That is just a small example, but it’s indicative of the difference. BBEdit is a powerhouse, it runs text files through filters and scripts and factories better than anything else. BBEdit is the king of huge documents and batch processing. I use it for any search or search and replace operation aht affects more than one file. Heck, sometimes I use it even when it only affects one file because I prefer BBEdits Find… dialog to TextMate’s.
But when I am writing code or debugging, I don’t need batch processing. I want an interactive environment that adapts itself to what I’m writing. TextMate gives me that bespoke environment. Or, rather, TextMate gives me the power to create that bespoke environment.
My wishlist for BBEdit 9 is short and sweet: TextMate Bundle support. I’ll be upgrading BBEdit regardless, but having that would make me a whole lot happier. Plus, it would put the ball back in Allan’s court to shore up TextMate’s batch processing. And, as I said in the previous post: if MacroMates and Bare Bones get into an arms race, the only winners will be us users. Fingers crossed…
Posted on 2 September 2006 in Uncategorized
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