No longer maintained/supported. Kept for historical reference

• Created on: 2000/06/05
• Last updated on: 2000/06/07
• Version: 1.0
• License: GPL
• 2000-2004 Jesus M. Castagnetto (jmcastagnetto at php dot net)

Electronic games are now much better than they used too, far more engaging, complex, interactive and visually appealing. Now with that truism out of the way, along with all the good stuff in games come some interesting features, usually unintended, sometimes fun, others frustrating.

I found a fun and useful glitch in “Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando”. When in the frozen planet level, if you kill one of the monsters that pop up from the holes in the ground at the right moment, it will freeze in mid-air and block other monsters from appearing from the same hole, which is a good thing as those monsters are annoying and can reduce Ratchet’s health very fast when they attack in groups. On the left there is a screenshot of a frozen monster. Timing seems to be one of the variables for this glitch and a big gun helps too :-).

Ever since I got my iBook (it’s a 12” one), I have been a Watson registered user. Such a great tool, with so many goodies. A true information integration application.

Pashua is ”… a tool for creating native Aqua dialog windows for Perl, PHP, Tcl, Python, Rexx and shell scripts as well as AppleScript …” written by Carsten Blüm. The GUI definition is quite simple and straightforward, basically you write a configuration files that has a syntax reminiscing of an .ini file, and Pashua will use it to draw the dialog elements in the order in which they appear in the configuration. In the configuration file you define variables, assign their types, options and defaults, then feed that file to Pashua, and Pashua returns the user input in standard out. Just what you would like to have for you command-line PHP script.

I got an iBook a couple of months ago now, and really needed something like this O’Reilly book to understand the non-Unix things in Mac OS X. Bought the book (at my local bookstore) a couple of days after I got my iBook, and read it during the weekend. The good thing is that it’s given me a better grasp of that Operating System, but there are some minor omissions and errors on things that (at least for me) are important, for example the problems with the PHP shipped with Mac OS X: even though there is a /System/Library/PHP directory (which is empty), the libraries (both loadable libs from C extensions and PEAR packages) are in /usr/lib/php (the loadable extensions would be put in the extensions sub directory).