Tao of Mac

Aug 2nd 2003 · 1 min read

Glider is now Freeware

After Casady & Greene closed up shop, the original creator is making the game available here. I haven't played it since my Mac OS 6.x days - now I have no excuse.

Of course, the new version looks a lot better than the original screenshot above... But it's still fun as always :)

Color Diffs

If you don't have a fancy ANSI-enabled diff handy, you can make do with the following awk script:

#! /bin/gawk -f
function escape( text ) {
  gsub(/</, "\33[0;31m<", text);
  gsub(/>/, "\33[0;32m>", text);
  return text;
}
{ print escape( $0 ) "\33[0m" }

Entanglements with

Learning a new programming language can be extremely wierd sometimes, especially when you can almost grasp what a particularly terse section of code does or when you need to get a feel for proper program structure.

I've been hacking my own version of a rss2pop3 proxy, and for now I've been getting a feel not just for the program logic, but mostly for the language itself (with the help of a couple of vim macros to deal with syntax). But the language feels strange - it's not the indentation or the lack of explicit block closure - I need to close blocks anyway to get vim folding to work properly, and no way am I going to deal with more than a hundred lines of code without folding - it's the wild abandon with which things pop out of nowhere in code (the whole language, not just the specific bits I'm hacking).

Maybe I've been Coding For The Ages for too long to recognize simplicity. Or maybe I'm too bloody disciplined to allow for flexibility.

Time will tell.