I was just reading the license agreement for the OS X Starcraft Installer, and... It turns out the license prohibits tunneling! In other words, you want to play, you have to play on Blizzard.NET.
This is, I think, one of the top three most ridiculous things I have seen in a license agreement (I have forgotten the other two... except I think I remember a license for an early spyware program that was supposed to give them the right to collect just about any data and reuse it - yeah, let me just click okay here...). I think it is repressive, and downright silly. In other words, twenty years from now, when Blizzard is shut down, none of us will be reminiscing about how great Starcraft was and pulling it out to play (like we do with, say, Combat, which is actually slightly older than 20 right now) because we won't be able to play it properly. Well, we will, but only if sitting on the same local network, which is much more restrictive than playing it wherever we want, as we do with every other networked game now. Not that there would be any technical restriction, that is the whole point of using the tunneling - we can get around even old dumb games networking code, like, say, our beloved Warcraft.
Way to step back in time, Blizzard. It's a shame Blizzard has turned out to be such an obnoxious company (this isn't the first time they've done something stupid and mean), because they are certainly excellent game designers. But eventually, bad business practice will catch up with you. Gamers won't put up with idiocy forever.
(I have to wonder how enforceable this clause is, but I assume completely. I mean, you know what you are getting into, right? I have to say though, I probably wouldn't have bought yet another copy of Starcraft if I had known playing it on Mac OS X would have involved seeling my gaming soul. Which makes me annoyed about licensing agreements in general. I havce always been against them, but the as they become even more idiotic, I am beginning to hate them even more, if that is even possible. You have no idea how much I appreciate open source software with a sane license at this very moment [er, I wasn't thinking of GPL-licensed software when I said "sane," though I admit it has its advantages].)
Okay, my day has been made... I just found out two really useful things you can do in Emacs:
Resize "windows." If you use split windows in Emacs (C-x 2), it will split the windows evenly. To resize the one window, use M-x to get to the command buffer and then enter the command enlarge-window. On my copy of Emacs, the shortcut is C-x ^ (which is a bit awkward to enter, but hey - better than typing "enlarge-window" 5 times...).
This is the big one: Make Emacs scroll one line at a time! Incredible... Anyway, the command is M-x set-variable then scroll-step then 2. That is, of course, long, so you could also add (setq scroll-step 2) to your .emacs file. This command works in newer versions of Emacs though (20.1, perhaps?), so if you are on an older one, you are out of luck. (This tip I found in an article by Larry Ayers.)
Having smooth scrolling has just made my life so much easier.
[Update: Why on earth does that article suggest a value of 2? Two works, but set it to 1 for much better effect. I noted at the time that was an odd value, but I assumed there was some reason for it - though apparently there isn't.]
[Okay, so I have been having trouble at least on Mac OS X with it set to 1. Beats me. Anyway, you may experiment, I guess. Or look it up. I will eventually....]
Well, I finally got the new blog for Jon at Christian Challenge up. In the end I did end up using Wordpress. It was a close call, as both provide pretty much identical functionality. I have the feel for Nucleus down much better, I admit. Wordpress had three advantages, though: (1) out of the box it was (narrowly) closer in functionality and compatibility to what we needed (e.g. XHTML without chaning one thing), (2) it (as far as I can tell right now) cooperates with our established PHP includes, and (3) it has a much simpler intial setup, which meant I was able to get it working with our site much faster. As it is I actually don't have either one integrated right now, but it will be much simpler to get the Wordpress one fixed (I am pretty close). Mostly it was chance I had Wordpress up first. By the way, Nucleus does have a few things going for it: It has a much simpler page layout that lends itself to better integration with an existing design, and its functions return strings instead of printing out text - much easier to combine with an existing page, except for the whole lack of PHP integration. It is a shame that the initial design is so complicated - it isn't necessary. But I had to change a lot of HTML to get it to where I needed, and I had to change both "skins" and "templates." The split functionality of the two has some advantages, but it has a high cost for intial setup if you don't accept a default skin and template. Next step is to make the blog fit in with the rest of the site, instead of having a completely different appearance.
