Street Fighter X Tekken (SFxT) came out Tuesday.

Got my copy, been playing and enjoying myself.

I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 (SF4) and Super Street Fighter 4 (SSF4) and the subsequent releases in that series for the last few years with a few friends. It is one of the best crafted fighting games ever and has been a lot of fun. SFxT is similar in how the engine works for large portions of what it does and how stuff tends to look, and different in the visceral feel of things and how the new mechanics and the new characters work. I’m looking forward to spending a while over the next year or so playing it and learning to appreciate it.

I was talking to some folks today about what constitutes a dead open source project.

As an example of a dead project, see Colloquy. Growl support has been broken on their latest release for years. There are several long standing, show stopping bugs which have never been fixed¹. There are no apparent plans to make a new release and while the source tree shows activity, almost all of it appears to be dedicated to just keeping Colloquy building as Xcode moves on, with some effort given to updating the iOS port in the same way.

I think the best definition of a dead project is one in which there are outstanding issues being actively complained about in the project’s support forum², and there are no new commits to the source tree and no plans for a release. For projects that a purely source based, this is a little iffier but if there are no new commits and no active management of the source and community, I would conclude the project is defunct. Mature projects may go multiple years between releases, but a mature project that has active management is different from a mature project where no one’s there to run the shop. I expect a mature project to respond in a timely fashion to major issues with the latest release(s).

If a project you rely on is dead, it’s time to look for an alternative.

I was fiddling with bash earlier and thinking of ways to script out some stuff for octopress and other things I do from the shell. One thing I thought was handy was an alias in my .bash_profile to open the most recently modified post in my chosen editor and do a couple other things. That one liner follows below.

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$ octopost='cd path/to/octopress/source/_posts && $EDITOR `ls -tr | tail -1` && cd path/to/octopress'

This will open the most recent file in your chosen editor¹ and then move back to the root of the octopress install so you can do further tasks as needed. If you find it useful, you might want to add it as an alias in your .bash_profile or .bashrc. I’d suggest tweaking as needed for your own personal habits and workflow.

If you’ve got comments or suggestions, love to hear them.

Been fiddling around with the blog and realized that octopress has a limitation as of the last stable version; it’s designed to work by default with rdiscount, which is a markdown parser. Quite a few people using markdown use extensions from markdown extra which allows for prettily formatted footnotes. Rdiscount does not support any of those extensions, and while octopress can be told to use 2 other markdown parsers¹, the default theming isn’t setup to format footnotes nicely.

Addendum: I spent some more time googling and discovered a few sites with some helpful code snippets and suggestions. So for now I’m using kramdown and have functional footnotes.

testing

Would you rather watch a great movie, or a terrible one?

I love movies. And I’m not sure I’d choose the great movie.

I love great movies. But I also love me some terrible movies. I’m just as happy and sometimes happier to be watching Santa’s Slay¹ than watching something like The English Patient².

Was thinking about why I liked some movies and realized I’d been watching a run of terrible movies via Netflix lately (purposely and with no small amusement). But most movies are either great, good, bad, so bad they’re great fun to watch, or just bland and pointless.

I’d rather watch a great to good movie, or one so bad it’s fun to watch and mock, than watch something just tepidly bad or bland. I especially detest the bland stuff because there’s no entertaining value and it feels like a pure waste of time. But a terrible, terrible movie like Freddy Got Fingered has some great moments where you wonder what was going on and how that movie got made and how it didn’t get stopped.

All this movie talk makes me ready to go and tackle Troll 2.

Welcome to the new blog. Got tired of wordpress and decided to fiddle with something new and octopress came up a few times in conversations and recent readings. Fired up terminal.app, followed the documentation and here we are!

In the coming days and weeks, I hope to fill this blog with interesting posts.