1999-Jun-12, Saturday

I got my hands on a copy of freeware PGP for Windows. It integrates smootly into your system and into Eudora or Outlook. One of the many download sites for this is here.

So, here is my public key. And now I expect to see those some sensitive material in my inbox soon.

1999-May-08, Saturday

Well, it's another depressing, dreary Connecticut morning. I just love it here.

End of the first week in May and we still can barely get into the high-60's for temperatures.

Found out about a great site of collective unhappiness called bittersweets.org This would be similar in spirit to the Fray, but not so much in large long stories. Just little snips that people submit frequently.

Microsoft VisualC 5

I use VisualC to work on C/C++ projects. But I really don't like the DevStudio IDE that comes with it. Sure, I need it for debugging as the debugger is visual (and very good).

But it would've been nice if they provided a console debugger like Borland used to. And then provided the opportunity to not install the hulking IDE.

If you watch the output window in the IDE during compile you can see it uses the 32-bit console apps to do the actual compiling and linking. It wouldn't have been that much more effort to decouple the debugging from the gui, I think.

1999-May-02, Sunday

I'm reading a fantastic book of science fiction short stories by Greg Bear called The Venging. Take a look:

    "With night, things become less certain. It was easy to stare at a dark wall and let dreams become manifest. At one time, I've deduced from books, dreams could not take shape beyond sleep or brief fantasy. All too often I've had to fight things generated in my dreams, flowing from the walls, suddenly independent and hungry. People often die in the night, devoured by their own nightmares."

-from PETRA, by Greg Bear

Dawn of Darkness demo ships

About a week ago we released the first public beta demo of our game, Dawn of Darkness. It's a total conversion that runs on Quake2. Set in medeival times with creatures, weapons and architecture to match, this is to be a commercial product, sold in stores on a CD. Demo size is ~11M.

The demo is receiving favorable reviews so far. I'm working even as we speak on bug fixes and whatnot.

We got our source code up on a CVS (Concurrent Versions System) server. Tracking and maintaining the source code has been much faster and easier now (not to mention safer). I love version control.

WavingDuke for Waba

I put up my WavingDuke program for Waba (Java for PalmOS and WinCE devices). See it here.

It's a simple animation program. Really just to help me learn the Waba APIs.

1999-Feb-26, Friday

Windows is making me insane

I'm starting to get the impression that Windows98 sort-of self-destructs every 3 to 6 months. We'll need a new buzz-phrase for it. "OS decay" maybe.

So on one of our computers at home I have to redo the whole thing from the top. The only warning we had was the cd-rom drive stopped working a couple of months ago. Not broken, just not working in Windows. Works fine from a Win98 boot floppy once the command-line comes up and the CD drive detection is finished.

I tried all the obvious stuff. No virii were or are present according to McAfee. Disk is spiffy, defragged and in good repair. I guess it's just Windows that is the problem here.

I reinstalled Win98 over top of the current install. Sometimes this is a good thing. This time it was definitely not. Now it's unstable as hell. Crashes. Warnings upon boot about .vxd device drivers in the registry or system.ini that are missing. I'm very lucky if it's able to connect to the net at all. Takes many tries and lots of waiting. In a word: ugly

I'm very weary from reinstalling these systems over and over. I want Linux. I want it 24/7. Sure, Linux is more difficult to master. Much less polished. Poor hardware support with lots of peripherals so far. But there are a lot of up sides to it. I don't know that much about the guts of Linux yet but I believe it's more logical.

Windows Update

As far as I understood you had to connect to Microsoft's Windows Update site each time you wanted to install patches and whatnot for Win98.

I wasn't aware of the download site where the actual installer apps are available for all of this: Windows 98 Download Windows Update

Opera browser

I love this thing! It's an excellent piece of work!

I love the MDI windowing. MSIE and Netscape always bugged me with the style where every new browser window is another child of the desktop directly.

I love the association power. You can wire up anything. Any mimetype you want. Including Java stuff.

Speaking of Java.. This browser actually works with the Sun Java plugin 1.1.2 What this means is: No buggy or intentionally incorrect Java virtual machine for Java applets. Full state-of-the-art support.

With this browser and the Java plugin, you can use today's Java technology -- not last year's.

1999-Feb-13, Saturday

Well, it's been another month or so since I've updated my site. Been very busy with work for both the game and the real job

new MechSelect 1.0.4

I had received some emails about bugs in my MechSelect program.

A serious bug involving hard-coded strings was fixed.

Mechwarrior 3

I read an article in Computer Gaming World on MW3. The graphics looks amazing, but I read something that disturbs me.

They said you will still have to group your weapons in the mechlab. This was an inconvenience with prior MW games. If playing single-player you could apply weapons groupings in the mechlab. And if you were playing on the net you had to configure groups in the actual game each time you dropped (or regenerated).

No storage of groupings was possible. And it seems very silly that this couldn't be added to the mech data files. Some kind of default weapons groupings could be calculated by the game and modifiable by the player.

All of this really brings me to the larger issue with FASA's games:

Look at what the FPS games are doing with regard to modifications made by players. And do something similar. Quake/Quake2 would not have made id so much money if it wasn't for the released programming APIs.

Online MW gamers have been desperate to be able to add more Battletech and change these games. The closed-system game style is out. Quake1 changed all of that. People expect more. And a lot of people (like myself) are more than happy to get in there and write code.

Can't we please use Unix for mission-critical tasks?

A picture like this really scares the shit out of me.

Yup, that's a cash machine with a Win32 error dialog up on it's busted-ass screen. Frightening, huh?

RebelBoatRocker

Sad to hear that RBR and their Prax War FPS game has been shut down.

I'm a Java developer for a living so I was really looking forward to this.

Their architecture, as far as I understand it, was to interface a C/assembly game engine together with Java game logic code (essentially what mods would be coded in, too). This makes a ton of sense for portability and design. It was a very good thing. Provided the back-end engine was ported to, say, Unix, porting a given mod over would be trivial. Java is Java.

I wonder if Eidos will let the project loose as freeware or something now that it's been cancelled. I'd like to see how it was being put together.

Index Dot HTML

This is one of the absolutely best html reference works I've seen on the web: Index Dot HTML

It's mirrored all over hell so pick a close mirror to view it from and keep their main server from being hammered. Better still, the entire site is downloadable for offline viewing.

And while we're on the subject of html authoring, how about an html validator that's the real deal (from the W3C).

1999-Jan-06, Wednesday

Whoah, been over a month since I updated my page. The holidays are a tough time to find free time for things such as this. At least for me they are.

But the holidays are over pretty much for a few months at least. I've been able to get some serious work done again.

Very big update today. Lots of stuff has happened.

Apple's colorful iMacs

Saw this on the Scripting News 1999-Jan-05 entry:

'News.com: iMacs come in colors now. "We think one of the most important questions now is 'What is your favorite color?'" Jobs told thousands of attendees during his Macworld keynote. "This is far more important than the mumbo-jumbo associated with buying a computer. People don't care about that stuff. What they care about is, 'I want to express myself.'" I think he's serious.'

Isn't the whole point here to get lots of work done regardless of the color of the case of the machine? This is ridiculous. And pretty much what I've come to expect out of Apple in general.

And they want developers to take OS X and the rest of their technology seriously? Give me a break. I don't like Windows, but I like it a lot better than what I see happening with Apple's platform.

Games

Grim Fandango! I'm so impressed with this. It's very well made and has the typical Lucas sense of humor. I was waiting for this a long time ever since I saw the demo. It's excellent. Looks like even the cut scenes are rendered with the engine. I'd like to see a generic adventure game development kit made out of this technology.

Half-Life! Got this game from my family for Christmas. Best shooter I've ever seen. I haven't been so spooked while playing a game since DOOM.

Shogo MAD! I'm having some trouble getting into the way the mechs move and fight mainly because of years of Mechwarrior experience. But this game is beautiful. I'm looking forward to seeing how mod coding goes for it. And the anime influence is terrific. Authentic music, artwork, etc... I've been dying to see better Battletech gaming on the net and have this vague idea that an engine like this would be a good place to start.

Java tools

Since I don't use an IDE to program in general, I'm particularly interested in when we'll see a JDK 1.2 compliant version of the Jikes Debugger from IBM.

And speaking of not using an IDE, have I talked about VIM yet? It's a Vi text editor (Vi IMproved).

Weird to learn if you've never used Vi or Emacs, but very cool once you get the hang of it. I love it.

Java applets

At work today we had a problem. Someone using Netscape 4.05 for Windows was having a problem with a Java 1.1.x applet. The applet worked fine in Internet Explorer 4.x and also with the JDK 1.1.7's appletviewer.

No surprise there. Netscape's Java VMs have historically been crap. But what is a surprise is that even now neither Microsoft or Netscape have released the <applet> tag in such a way that the user can decide how it's handled. (Cough, the Opera browser, cough).

Anyway, we temporarily solved the problem by downloading Netscape 4.50 to replace 4.05. But this is a band-aid solution. The real solution is for the Java VM to be decoupled from the browser. MS, too. Just because the IE Java VM works reasonably well today doesn't give me the warm fuzzies.

1998-Nov-12, Thursday

I put up a counter hosted by Link Exchange. Hopefully I can replace it soon enough with a self-sufficient serverless Java counter.