dovka

The batman is truly Amazing. Everyone should be required to go see it or be shot in the face…

Truly amazing

If you're a fan of RPGs like myself (obligatory link to rpg2knet), the fact that Chrono Trigger has been announced for the Nintendo DS probably hasn't escaped your attention. It's pretty fantastic news if you're a fan of the struggling Square-Enix. Lately, they seem to be pretty obsessed with releasing poor rehashes or half-sequels of their old classics. Fanboyism asside, I played through and thouroughly loved Final Fantasy VII when it was first released. I locked myself in my room with my friends Playstation and played it solidly, only coming out for toilet breaks and meals. I cared for the characters, and I don't feel any other game has managed to surpass it so far. Even a fool can see they are attempting to cash in on VII's success by releasing tripe like Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII.

Finally it feels like they are getting back on track by developing something that the fans actually want. I mean, I know it's still a bit of a cash in (with it probably being a direct port of the SNES game [although people have hinted Square-Enix will continue porting the FMV into the DS versions of their games, as seen on the PlayStation edition of Chrono Trigger) but at least it is a product that the fans will actually be interested in. I think the Dirge of Cerberus tie-in was a complete insult to the intellect of their fans (duuur you like FF7 so you'll immediately buy this game). A large cross-section of their fans would not have played previous Final Fantasy games and bought FF7 on the strength of the reviews it received. If you're the sort of gamer, you're not going to rush out and buy any title that has been labeled an obvious doozey by a reputable magazine such as EDGE. Final Fantasy tie-ins are no exception.

Well… rant over. I'm just glad to see something that, in my eyes, is worth doing by Square-Enix. With this announcement, I thought I'd compile my top 5 16-bit era role-playing games that I would like to see get the DS treatment:

1. Earthbound. And Mother 3. I will CRY if they announce this.
2. Secret of Mana (imagine link-up play for co-op!)
3. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals
4. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the 7 stars
5. Shining Force 3 (I wish they'd done the map engine in 2D, though)

All relatively unlikely, but a gamer can always dream…

TimesUnion: Man dressed as penis disrupts graduation

I think it would’ve been a better soundbyte/quote if the officer had said “…he was pretty easy to catch because he was tripping over his testicles.”

If you would allow me to go a little nuts (pun intended) here and talk about something I enjoy, I will…although the 4 people that read this blog have no interest in it, in the hockey world the Toronto Maple Leafs are going nuts. It makes me happy. They are my team and Cliff Fletcher has finally started turning them around; the only problem I foresee in this is that people are going to expect a cup winning team next year. Not likely. It will take a couple years to build a new foundation centered around a hopefully prosperous career of Toskala. Anyways, however it turns out, I give the man credit for trying.

On another sports note… GO SPAIN…

I would like someone to explain why this would make me want to buy Diet Coke more:


That commercial boggled my mind. I was waiting for the punch line and it never came…no wonder I like Pepsi better…

I have used several IDEs for scripting PHP over the past five years. Since starting my job in 2006, I've been forced to switch a couple of times for hardware reasons. A bit of back story. When I first began to dabble in PHP I used UltraEdit32, on recommendation of a friend that was proficient in C. It suited my needs as a HTML editor originally, and was pretty flexible when it came to PHP (offering syntax highlighting) but no code completion.

Some time in 2004 or 2005 whilst I was at university, I was lucky enough to win a copy of Zend Studio 5. Obviously I began to realize what I was missing in my IDE. Before this point I don't think the IDE I was using really crossed my mind. However, the code completion was absolutely excellent (still unrivaled for PHP, I reckon) and the spread of features was awesome. One of my favourites was the built-in support for version control (CVS and Subversion) which became a bit of a killer app for me whilst coding my final year dissertation project.

Now, some of you might have tweaked that I said I switched due to hardware, and Zend Studio (as it is written in Java) is cross-platform. When I started my job I was thrown into the world of Apple Macintosh. After getting used to the basics of the operating system and falling in love with the BSD-esque underbelly, I got my copy of Zend running nicely under OS 9.0 Tiger. After a couple of months of glorious use, it began to get extremely sluggish. Loading it up took 20+ minutes, and each keystroke seemed to lag for about 2 seconds. Obviously, this was completely unusable. Apparently, it's something to do with the cache folder that Zend creates inside the user preferences directory. Despite following those instructions, it didn't remedy the situation.

I moved to OS X and a new (more powerful) iMac hoping that it would remedy the situation. Not really, I found. It still feels much more responsive on my PC in my home office, despite the specifications of the machines not being that distant from each other. In frustration, I went through some other popular IDEs for Mac:-

• Dreamweaver CS3 - Terrible. Honestly, I can't understand why people use this IDE. Crash-happy, slow, irritating text-completion. The site-wide (or project-wide) search is a decent feature, though. I hope more IDEs pick it up.
• Coda - Very enjoyable to use. Obviously an exercise in Cocoaforge for the authors, who have a very good grasp on GUI programming. It is missing certain tools, and some of the features are annoying (and cannot be changed via preferences). The IDE will shine with the advent of modules or plug-ins, if that ever happens.
• TextMate - My current IDE of choice. I switched to this for it's flexibility (code completion via Textmate 'bundles' is a fantastic idea and full-circle, reminds me of UltraEdit32). Thanks to my co-worker for praising it enough for me to take notice(!)

And so, I come to the REAL reason I started writing this blog. The PHPDoc competition for classes in the standard PHPdoc textmate bundle is ass. It is nowhere near as good as Zend Studios… but since that IDE isn't an option for me currently whilst I'm in the office, I've reverted to hacking away at the bundles in order to make it more 'Zend-like'. After reading through and putting into practice the TextMate and phpDoc Comment Blocks article at Killersoft, it became obvious that it is completely possible to do what I am trying to achieve. (Note: if you also follow that article, make sure you get the newlines correct in the bundle- if you copy-paste like I did, it does not work. Get the text-only version they supply and copy-paste that!)

So yep. Zend is great and all, but for the time being I'm flitting between Coda and Textmate. Is there any better alternative for scripting on a Mac? I can't get the Eclipse-based Zend Studio 5.5 by the way, since my license key won't stretch that far, and I refuse to pay for the upgrade!

I am speechless. Here is an absolutely insane medley of video game and anime songs overlayed by timed sound-effects from Super Mario World on the SNES. The crazy thing is, whoever has done this has gone and developed his own level (I assume via ROM hacking) which is completely hands free. Mario and Yoshi flow through this magical world bouncing off all sorts of blocks and shells to recreate the highlights of the backing track.

Weighing in at around eleven minutes long, it really must have been a labour of love. I had to post it as Mario is a strong favourite here at dovka, and I've never seen anything quite like it. It is quite fun to try and identify the songs in the video. I definitely heard a bit of Mega Man in there, some Final Fantasy and bizarrely a song by IOSYS. Have a listen, it is well worth it!

If you've been hiding under a rock the last week (or just don't follow technologically by repeatedly refreshing 20 different tech-blogs, you might now have heard of Psystar, but if you have, you no doubt have heard about the companies new, ultra-cheap Mac.

Yup, somebody finally flipped ol' Jobs the bird, and is selling a Mac computer. Originally dubbed the OpenMac (Psystar has since changed it to the Open Computer to avoid a potential copyright infringement suit, ironically). Psystar argues that they are not selling anything illegal; all the copies of Leopard are authentic and purchased from Apple or a licensed Apple Vendor and the machine itself uses a clever series of emulation layers to run Leopard (the fact Apple switched to Intel chipsets probably helps, too).

While Psystar has been in various forms of trouble all week; they were dropped by their payment processor for a Terms of Service Violation (more than likely with some added pressure from Apple's lawyers), and the store is now mysteriously down, it brings to my mind one critical idea:

Apple software can run on any machine, and the fact that you need to shell out $1299 CDN for a base model Apple-brand machine is ludicrous (Psystar was selling their Open Computer for $299 + Leopard Licensing Costs). Apple maintains a small market share, and perhaps most of this is caused by price. I know that, personally, I wouldn't mind a Mac, especially as my gaming needs shift away from PC and towards consoles. But there is no justification for the price tag when I can go spend a few hundred dollars on a system and stick a legal copy of XP on it, or a free copy of Ubuntu.

For the time being, I'll wait and see if Psystar comes back, and maybe I'll order a machine from them, it's still cheaper than the real thing, even if it's not as sleek.

Update: http://gizmodo.com/380488/psystar-exposed-looks-like-a-hoax - contrary to the URL string, Psystar is proving to be legit, customers are receiving the Open Computers as ordered and Psystars store has come into existence. (Thanks Lawrie for the link).

I really really hate blog spam. I get so much of it as well, despite all my little modifications to the forms such as adding a simple arithmetic 'CAPTCHA' (I didn't want to go down the image route because I find them intrusive) and testing against known spammy URLs. We even have an XML-RPC service checking the comments. Yet they still get through. How?

Interestingly, a lot of the comment spam I have been receiving lately contains spammy qualities, but the content (i.e. the the links that they are trying to embed) are useless. They are all made up of a random composition of URI-legal ASCII characters, with a '.com' suffix slapped on the end. I've been trying to think of a possible reason why this is happening. My first thought was that somebody was using my blog as a 'test bed' for some automated posting software, using my form to help the bot 'learn' how to overcome my CAPTCHA (solving the problem would be very easy once a human told the bot what to do). It seems viable, although I'm unsure why somebody would bother with my blog. It isn't really read heavily, has no 'subscribers' per se, and doesn't rank highly in google for many common search terms.

I'm not sure what to do now. Lawrie kindly pointed out that we'd had a bit of spam via SMS a couple of days ago, so I've tweaked it a little bit. Has anybody got any ideas of more unobtrusive ways to cut out this crap? Integrating Akismet into my blog looks like the only way…

Lazyness; It's something of a habit of mine. I will start coding a website and purposely leave out making the administration area just because it takes an age to write. But I've finally done it! It's only taken over a year, but in an effort to get people posting more regularly to this blog I bit the bullet and wrote some code.

What you readers don't know is that half of the reason for writing this blog is for test purposes. So, essentially you're a guinea pig within my internet laboratory. How does that feel? Pretty neat, huh. I've had to delete this blog about fifteen times now, since I'm trying to perfect the XML-RPC 'ping' mechanism that tells blogs aggregation sites around the world that little ol' dovka.org has updated. I think it's just about working now. Although there is one site that is persecuting me for pinging it due to me not being of Indian decent…

Interestingly as well, it appears that 3/4 of my links out of the site are now dead! Congratulations to Lawrie for being the only link to survive! Looks a little lonesome over there now with only one link. Anybody have some recommended reading material, eh?