For all you Mac software pirates out there, there is a new site for old Mac games called OldMacGames.com ("Because 16 colors is the onlyway to go!"). It does have a few commercial games, but mostly old shareware games. Actually, now that I look through the site some more, I think these are all shareware games at worst. Shufflepuck was the shareware version of Shufflepuck Cafe, although I'm not sure about Crystal Quest (I don't think there was a shareware version, just a demo). Very little that I can use myself, as even with the Classic layer I don't think I can run 16 color or black and white games...

In my ongoing interest in the GPL vs BSD licenses, there's an old (1998) article by Michael Maxwell, which is quite anti-GPL rather than pro-BSD. But it's an interesting view from one person who saw the early rise of Linux (and its predominantly GPLed code) and his reaction to it. He's a bit too "GPL is Communism and Anti-Capitalism"; still he does analyze the GPL a bit (and the GPL is not an easy read). As always, I will continue to favor the BSD license as superior and more "free" than the GPL...

I bought Bushfire, a small shareware game for Mac OS X. It's only $3 which is a nice price for a game (you do have to send it as cash though, to the UK; or pay $4 with PayPal). You have a helicopter in a side-scrolling world. Kind of like Choplifter with real terrain. Lots of individual trees, the occassional house or hill or stream (where you can refill). And fires, lots of them burning down the forest. You have to fly around, drop water to put out the fires, occasionally rescue people or battle enemy helicopters or pyromaniacs setting forest fires.

You also have four smoke jumpers, which you can drop and pick up. On the ground the smoke jumpers go from tree to tree putting out fires slowly. They do have to see a fire before heading to it, though they have a good vision range. They're also used to capture pyromaniacs from the Anti-Forest League or whatever it's called (there's some kind of storyline as you battle the AFL trying to burn down the forest). It's a simple and fun game. Full screen and it will change your monitor resolution, or you can press the Shift key as it starts and it doesn't change the resolution (and I hate programs that change the monitor resolution or colors).

The two brothers who created Bushfire are disappointed at the shareware sales of their game (they mentioned only $150). That's a really big problem with shareware games. People use them and get tired of them (or finish them) before the trial period is up, so they don't pay for them (in addition to the slime who don't pay for shareware in the first place)...

Another program I'll look at today is Synk X 3.1 (Beta for Mac OS X). It's a backup and synchronization program. A little aside about backup. The issue I have with shareware "backup" programs is that doing a Finder copy is not what I consider a backup. Although technically it is, it's not very useful for true archival purposes (and I guess what Retrospect does could be called archiving which would solve the problem). For me backup means compressing into one big file.

Anyway, Synk is the cheapest synchronization program I've seen for Mac OS X (true, there are only like three out there right now). It has a relatively clean interface, pretty easy to use. You specify two folders (if either is on a network drive you also need to type in the username and password to mount the volume) and the direction of copy.

If you're doing one-way synchronization (like I do), you can specify that missing files on the source folder be deleted on the destination folder. You can specify wheter aliases are copied, ignored, or their source is copied. You can also specify that top level aliases are always source copied (that way you can specify a folder of aliases to other folders whose contents you want copied, without saying that all aliases are source copied too).

Finally you can set up filters to either include a set of files or exclude a set of files (but not both, all the filters are inclusive or exclusive). Not bad for $15. I'm using it to backup my user directory to my server machine. It's really slow about creating folders and deleting files. It doesn't detect loops (so if you have aliases source copied and an alias that points back up the hierarchy you get an infinite loop). It does copy Finder info (including location in a folder), though it doesn't detect (maybe that's not possible) that I'm copying to Mac OS 9, which doesn't support 32+ character filenames.

It does seem to work. It keeps logs of its runs. I have to find a way to run it automatically. Wait I found one. You can open up documents from Terminal using 'open'. You can save Synk run files which run the backup as soon as the file is opened. I can set up a cron job (and I have a little utility called CronniX, which is just a nice editor for the local crontab) to open the file in the wee hours of the morning. And I'm set.

One annoying thing is that Mac OS X aliases are not BSD links. So you can't navigate through aliases with Terminal. Such a shame, but probably necessary since aliases have more information than just a path to a file. Still, it would be nice if the tcsh included in Mac OS X were a customized version that could navigate aliases (though that probably wouldn't help other applications, a thorny problem).