MacOS 10.2.2

MacOS X 10.2.2 has just been released. As always there is a document describing what’s changed. It’s unexplicable to me why they have not fixed the bug with Mac Mail not recognizing the IMAP-Folder-Prefix, leading to IMAP-Folders not being displayed. Apple itself suggests quite a stupid workaround: Create another dummy-accout and the folders will be displayed.

After all just setting the IMAP-Folder-Prefix in the Account-Properties to “INBOX” does help in most of the cases without having the user to create a dummy account. Anyway: This is clearly a bug and should be fixed by Apple. I don’t know why the did not.

Xenogears – Yepp. I like it

This seems to be becoming more game-centered than I intended… However:

Yesterday I did another lengthy session with Kingdom Hearts on my video-beamer and after not being able to kill the boss in Atlantica (Ursula, it’s name), remembering the frustrating hours used up for my tries to kill the fish-boss in “Zelda – Majoras Mask”, I switched my playstation off, entered the Xenogears-CD and turned it on again.

The next 7 hours where most interesting. I began playing just after Fei and his crew where shot down by Bart when fleeing from the attack against Kislev when I arrived at the Thames fleet. From there I played until the fight against bishop Stone in his gear where I screwed up and deceided that two o clock in the morning is a good time to stop playin anyway (why must this always happen to me in fights after a long cut-scene without a chance to save after having seen it? Square should consider giving the possibility to skip a scene if you at least have seen it once).

All Squaresoft RPG’s (with the exception of Kingdom Hearts) have a good deep story, but Xenogears has the best of them. I remember lively when the whole plot araund the Ethos, something the player fears for the whole game, got revealed to Billy. It’s jsut great.

If you find the game somwhere, consider buying it. It’s just great. I would even suggest you to import an americain PS just for Xenogears as the game was never released here in Europe (I’ve imported mine for CronoCross which too is great but not nearly as great as Xenogears).

Why I like jEdit

jEdit is a texteditor written in Java. Actually it’s not just a texteditor – it’s the texteditor. It combines the usage-guidelines known of other programs running under Windows or windows-like environements with the functionality (as an editor, not as a newsreader webbrowser filemanager «insert whatever else emacs can do) of Emacs.

When you download the current release (you can easily take the current 4.1pre-Release – even the CVS-Snapshot is stable enough for production use [at least for me]) and install it via the provided installer, you will get quite a simple looking UI. So the first thing to to is to load the PlugIn-Manager and to download and install whatever you need. Then restart the program and begin with the configuration-session…

On the screenshot, you can see many of the features I like about jEdit:

  • The cool look&feel (install the L&F-Plugin and chose the Metouia-Look to get mine).
  • The File-Browser always open on the left side. You have to select it under Global Options/Docking to get it sticking at the left side.
  • The search-bar which even supports regular expressions
  • The split-view. I am currently looking at the same file, but chaning this is a matter of selecting another tab (install the BufferTabs-Plugin to get those) in one of the views.
  • The color-scheme of the editfield. I really like having bright text on a dark background. It’s so much easier to read.
  • The yellow triangle marks in the gutter of the editfield are for folding the sourcecode. Click them and the associated block will be folded.

Please give jEdit a chance even though it’s written in Java: The thing is extremly feature-loaden and really fast. Trust me!

Kingdom Hearts

Yesterday evening I played another round of Square’s newest RPG, Kingdom Hearts and I have to admit, this is the first Square RPG which I don’t really like. Although it’s from the same team as the Final Fantasy Series, it’s more like Zelda than FF. With one difference: The camera sucks. When playing an action RPG like Zelda, it’s important to have your characters always in view and to know where you will be jumping to. Unfortunatly the camera in KH is quite buggy and thus you run into situations where you cannot see where to jump next. Rotating the screen does not work either as it’s quite jumpy and seems to know better what the user wants than the user does…

And: What I like best about the FF series (at least the newer games) or even more in Xenogears, is the complex story in those games. Unfortnuatly, KH’s story is soooo obvious and simple. And finally to the battle-system: As I said, it’s like Zelda. But in Zelda there is only Link to take care of. In KH, it’s three characters. Two of them are controlled by the KI and they have a tendency to senslessly use Ethers and Potions all the time which would not be that a big problem if only those where not that expensive to get…

After all, the only two things I like in the game are its graphics and its sound effects.

I hope, Xenosaga comes out soon…

Welcome

My first entry to the newly opened gnegg.ch weblog. Here you will find all kinds of stuff, from technical stories over reviews to unimportant stuff I came across, but also announcements if I have time to add more to my full-fledged Webpage. As I am not-so-good™ with layout, I kept the default one of Movable Type, my blogging-engine. Maybe Richard will help me here sometime in the future.