Weekend Round Up.

Steam on Mac
So Steam will in a couple of weeks be available for the Mac/OSX.  On top of offering on-line access to Mac compatible games, all valve games will be released with native builds of their games, and (to sweeten the pot) all valve games already purchased on PC will also transfer (in ownership) over to the Mac builds of the same games.  I'm pretty excited to be able to play Team Fortress 2 natively on my Macbook.  Though I have successfully ran TF2 on Steam in the Crossover windows app wrapper somewhat satisfactorily one can't refuse a few more nano-seconds off their ping.  I am also hoping alot of the non-Valve games I have on Steam follow suite.


Pure Pwnage on Showcase
So I got to watch the first TV episode of Pure Pwnage last night on YouTube.  Despite the nice shiny look Showcase has given the show they somewhat got me laughing at gamer specific humor I have come to love about the web show.  Thankfully, Jarrett Cale, Joel Gardiner and Geoff Lapaire reprise their roles as Jeremy "Teh Pwnerer", FPS Doug (Jeremy's best friend and FPS expert), and Kyle (Jeremy's brother and the man behind the camera of Pure Pwnage) because frankly I don't think anyone else would make a show about a man wasting his life away playing video games this entertaining.


Zen Photo CMS Gallery Package Theme Creation
I have been working on customizing a theme of Zen Photo CMS for some side work by using the well written and well documented templating framework under the hood of this easy to use install-your-self gallery.  For an intermediately skilled web developer (such as myself) creating this custom theme has be somewhat rewarding and yet easy. Not once did I have to hack the base frame work or fuss with server files permissions.  I literally tossed it on my test server in under 5 minutes, read the documentation over 2 nights and was half way done my custom theme as of yesterday. Definitely worth a review for a possible CMS upgrade of a gallery/portfolio site.

Pub Club Meet-Up at the Irish Embassy Pub and Grill (Montreal)
Went to show my support at one of my assistant organizer's Meet-Up as a recent entry of Montreal's growing list of Irish Pubs.  Had many a Guinness while my girlfriend enjoyed her evening over some aged Bushmills.  Food was classy with some modern twists.  Most of the meet-up-ers present enjoyed the fois-gras burger special that evening.  Although enjoyable I was wondering at the end where the fois-gras was (well, at least till my third Guinness).

Flash Game - Submachine 5
I got into playing a flash game on-line called "Submachine 5".  It's free and there are 6 games in all under the same title.  5 so far (not sure why I started with 5) was enjoyable despite the minimalist look and feel of the game.  A good though uncomplicated back story you play some anonymous intrepid explorer of an abandoned house who stumbles upon a deserted lab with trans-dimensional doorways to some pretty weird places.  Your mission is simple: make your way through all the areas and piece together what happened to its previous occupants.


Flex and the Rich Text Editor
Been tinkering all week with a problem at work to get around the Flex container's inability to render HTML table tags.  At the moment I'm thinking building on the existing Rich Text Editor would be a lost cause and instead made some notes and research on a possible solution that would allow users to create and store a document with an collection of text areas and datagrids.  A crazy idea at first but I guess the only way to convince the boss of the plan is to come up with a simple demo of the solution.  More work to come this week on that note.