dimator | head

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the installation framework that’s used to install many, many applications. I was going to write a review a while ago, and it was going to be negative, but I thought I would wait a while to see if the problems I was having were just from the awkward syntax and unorthodox operational flow of the framework.

For the most part, I like how it operates. For the simple tasks that most installers need to do, it is great. There are built-in “pages” that handle everything from showing licensing data, to selecting installation components and types, to showing install progress. There’s a long list of plugins available as well, for doing some of the more out-of-the-ordinary installer tasks, like downloading a file.

The NSIS scripting language attempts to be similar to assembly. I think this was done for speed and smaller, self-contained executables. The event loop took me a while to wrap my brain around. For doing what I wanted to do, which was to rely on an external process to handle all of the file installation details, I had to jump through a lot of hoops, adding a lot of complexity. I found myself wrestling with the architecture often.

So for general purpose scripting or programming tasks, the NSIS framework falls short. NSIS does offer access to most of the Win32 API calls through a plugin, although the syntax for that plugin is extremely cumbersome. NSIS is much better suited for very installer-specific tasks, which is obvious, now that I think about it.

(I found out there’s an NSIS Python plugin, but from the example file, it does not look very useable in a real-world situation.)

So now that 24 is finished for the season, I thought I’d make a quick list of things Jack didn’t do once in the whole day, in order of believability:

1. Smile.
2. Go to the bathroom.
3. Eat anything.
4. Drink anything.
5. Charge his freakin’ cell phone.

I’m sure I’m missing more.

(Some spoilers ahead.)

I watched it, but not in a theater. That’s right, I downloaded it. (Did I say “I” downloaded it? I meant a buddy downloaded it, and he burned it for me. I don’t condone his actions, and he should be locked up for stealing from the poor starving film maker.)

Anyway, I’ve come a long way from calling radio stations for Phantom Menace tickets, and waiting in line for hours for the best seats. This time, I didn’t even care about the theater experience. I just wanted to find out what happened, so I could go on with my life and pretend these prequels never happened.

The dialog simply made me sick. If you’re a billionaire, why wouldn’t you hire the best of the best to help you make your dialog writing ability not suck? The scenes with Anakin and Padme were just horrendous. Vader’s retarded lines at the end of the movie were especially bad, because this was Darth Fucking Vader. He is an international film legend. You don’t expect him to say things like “Where is Padme? Is she safe? Is she all right?” His final “Nooooooooo!” was just painful.

Other than the dialog, there was a lot of light-saber action, I guess. I still think the Darth Maul light-saber battle was the best one, though. The special effects are there, but I can’t judge them because I saw the movie on a 12 inch laptop screen. Yoda looked a lot less fake than the previous 2 movies.

Maybe I’m so jaded now that this movie would have to be a ‘10′ on all scales for me to be impressed. I’m just happy it’s all over, and now I have an appreciation for how amazingly lucky Lucas was to produce such quality with the very first movie (Episode 4).

I scammed up an E3 pass. I drove my ass 300+ miles to L.A. to check it out. I wasn’t too thrilled.

Right when I walked in, I knew this wasn’t the place for me. The expo has a strong consumer-oriented bias, obviously, but I don’t give a shit about playable demos of Need for Speed 37, or any one of about 50 FPS’s that look exactly the same. The whole time I was thinking about how I was surrounded by video games and I should be happier than a pig in shit, but I wasn’t.

I’m not a video game consumer. Sure, I care about what direction certain franchises are going, like Zelda or Metal Gear Solid, or select new titles like Shadow of the Colossus. For the most part, I’m more interested in what goes on under the hood. Development is what gets my juices flowing. I guess that’s why I’d rank GDC as much more fun.

What did occur to me, though, is how little the game producers want to deviate from whatever works. It’s safe to say that the majority of games I saw were sequels or derivatives in some way. That’s just pathetic. Are people really that void of ideas? The games industry shares the same goals as any other, I suppose: maximize profit. If Doom 75 will sell, why try something new? (You can draw strong parallels with the movie industry.) It sucks to think about a modern day Miyamoto being denied his creative impulses, because his parent studio is busy on Grand Theft Auto: The Moon.

I wish there was a business model that would reward the more daring producers.

According to Wikipedia data, “Ann Coulter” is only 2 degrees away from “Anal sex!” And she calls herself a right-wing extremist lunatic…