Mars Attacks! and Dinosaurs Attack!

When I was a wee lad in the 80's, I thought that Garbage Pail Kids were the coolest thing on the block, since they were goofy, dark, and edgy... Little did I know the depths collectable cards could reach.

Zelda's Mars Attacks Home Page

In 1962 These cards were debuted by “Bubbles, Inc”, a division of Topps. Most people will recognize the Mars Attacks moniker from the Tim Burton movie of the same name. I loved the movie, and didn't realize until some wikipedia rabbit-holing turned up the card series.

Bob Heffner's Dinosaurs Attack!

Later, in 1988, Topps gave the extreme card series another try with time traveling dinosaurs... These were released after the above-mentioned Garbage Pail Kids released in the US, but were a wee bit more edgy.

My parents thought to “protect” me from such gory, violent, or otherwise questionable (these cards, most comics, GI Joe)... And look how I ended up. Bear this in mind before blindly restricting your kids from things.

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Technorati Tags: retro

Continuing saga of the bsdgames port effort

I think that I am going to wain until Leopard to continue working on the rest of the ports...

Leopard promises to bring the OSX libraries into the posix spec 100% and that may help the process for me.

Stay tuned until then.

Technorati Tags: games, programming, unix

Porting the “bsdgames” to Mac OSX - 31/47 complete!

Individual opinions may differ, but to my mind the traditional BSD games package contains some of the most influential games of history, even if most people have never heard of them.

When I recently got my new Macbook Pro for work, I started collecting all the bits and pieces to make it my home. Fink and MacPorts got me most of the way, but neither had packages for those games, so I set to making them work.

Prerequisites: I am using Mac OS X 10.4.10, so that's what's tested, and this will require the developers tools.

First, I had to find sources that weren't mangled for Linux porting. I found them here and used Cyberduck to grab the entire tree.

Second, I created a happy environment for them... mkdir /usr/games /usr/share/games /var/games and a few straglers you'll see while compiling.

Most of the games needed nothing more than changing into their directory, and running:

# bsdmake; sudo bsdmake install

That took care of arithmatic, backgammon, banner, bcd, bs, caesar, countmail, cribbage, factor, fish, grdc, hangman, mille, morse, number, pig, pom, ppt, primes, rain, sail, wargames, worm, worms, wtf, and wump.

Rogue compiled perfectly, but complained of a missing file on install. A moment on Google turned up this file, which I gzipped and placed in the USD.doc folder, and then the install went fine.

The next batch of problems surrounded the setresgid function. This doesn't exist as such on Mac OS X, so another round of googling tuned up the following answer - replace:

setresgid(gid, gid, gid);

with:

setgid(gid);

setegid(gid);

That fixed: battlestar, canfield, robots, and snake.

I am still working on making a few work, ones that have more esoteric things going wrong so far... adventure, atc, boggle, dab, dm, fortune (though this has a working port in fink and MacPorts), gomoku, hack, hunt, monop, phantasia, quiz, random, tetris, and trek.

I will be working on those stragglers and then maybe building packages for Fink or MacPorts, stay tuned for updates.

Technorati Tags: games, programming, puppy, retro, unix

That time of year again: The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard

As Halloween fast approaches, it is time again for one of my favorite stories:

Strange Horizons Fiction: The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard:

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch—mostly Autumn Gold and Big Max, as I thought he would find the Atlantic Giants tacky. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.

This eldritch horror is the epic tale of one Linus Van Pelt, friend of Charlie Brown, admirer of security blankets, and once devotee to the Great Pumpkin... Beware, His tale may strike terror into the hearts of any who venture into the darkness on All Hallows Eve.

Brought to you by Ecto on a Mac.

Infinite OZ teaser for “Tin Man”

Infinite OZ | Tin Man | SCIFI.COM:

SciFi's upcoming re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz looks really promising, I hope they do a Dune with it instead of an Earthsea.

The above linked Viral/teaser site gives hope for it working out, and I wesh I knew how Zooey Deschanel was getting involved with so many cool projects.

Thanks to Pop Candy for pointing out this teaser... I know what my DVR will be doing December 2.

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Technorati Tags: movie, scifi

The Ron Paul Revolution and the '08 election

I keep seeing more and more interest in Ron Paul for the upcoming presidential election... Especially in the Blogosphere: his name is in the top tags over at Technorati for example.

Now, I respect what he stands for in conservative politics: a return to fiscal conservatism and respect for the Constitution that has been trumped in the last 3 republican administrations by pandering to the Evangelical Fundamentalist agenda. A return to small, unobtrusive governing, a lighter hand in foreign policy, less protectionism for big businesses... At least that's how I read his positions.

That's all well and good, Or at least it would have been in 2000. If we were starting with a balanced budget, before Enron, before we pissed in every friend we have in the world...

Now, we need someone who can undo the damage of the last 7 years. Someone who will be compassionate to those Bush has forgotten or outright screwed. Someone who has a good standing in the world theatre (and has a husband who is a natural diplomat.)

In a word, we need Hilary in '08... and Ron Paul (or someone like him) in '16 or so.

Now someone fit that on a bumper sticker for me.

Brought to you by Ecto on a Mac.

Technorati Tags: hilary, politics, ron paul

Weblogs + Twitter vs. MySpace/Facebook

The reason we call it the Web is that it's supposed to be a system of sites, threaded together and interconnected so we can notice when disparate parts have something notable going on. Sadly, some of applications bringing the most attention to the internet are completely missing the point, and instead of  stretching the web wider, actively try to concentrate it into their own little nests.

I have tried banging my head against MySpace, eventually deleting my account because it was annoying to have to go into their mess of a site to do anything with it. Facebook I hear is less obnoxious but maintains the same concept of going to their site to accomplish anything.

Both of those sites commit a cardinal sin: for being so called "social networks" they don't play well with others. Most modern blogging systems have a number of features that make cross site linking easy (Trackbacks, Technocrati tags, etc), use RSS or atom to allow aggregation by a client, and have well documented ways of posting via clients.

Twitter, a relatively new micro-blog system of sorts, even takes on the comment wall concept that seems to be a popular feature of myspace and extends it with IM/SMS gateways and RSS so that you need never touch their site to use it.

Livejournal has been the mid-point between insular MySpace and completely open systems like Blogger or Wordpress, offering RSS feeds for posts (but not comments), and atom/blogger api posting, but still has some features that pull you back to their site on occasion, and some features limited to paid accounts.

I will be trying to keep up better with my Blogger and Twitter, using the wonderful blog editor Ecto for Blogger and Twitterific for Twitter, and setting up my Livejournal with syndication of those to keep my friends there in the loop.