Sunday, October 29, 2000

NFL Week #9 So Far -- 8:29 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

With two games left to go, my record is 9-3 for this week and Eeyore is 6-6. To top it all off, my fantasy football team seems to be doing quite well this weekend (for once).

UPDATE! After Sunday night, I'm 10-3 and Eeyore is 7-6.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 1:28 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Looks like we got all the excitement out of our system yesterday. Today looks like a good day to kick back and watch some football.

After downloading and installing Q3F beta 1F, I played around with it for a little while. It looks interesting, but it locked up my system once. I'm going to see if I can repeat the lock up. Upon Wraith's recommendation I also downloaded Weapons Factory Arena. WFA looks like it might be better, but it is a HUGE resource hog (they recommend a MINIMUM of 128M RAM). Obviously, more research is warrented.

UPDATE! I did manage to reproduce the crash. It happens when I try to use the medic's secondary grenade.

Further testing with Mozilla has gone very well. There does seem to be a slight memory leak somewhere. Otherwise it's been extremely stable. I'm trying to use it as my default browser now. One cool thing is that it must have read my Netscape plugin directory because RealPlayer and Flash worked right away. Pretty slick.

J.t.Qbe comments: So A.T., did you get that extra hour of sleep? I would have, but I squandered it playing Freeciv. They should have addictiveness warnings about that game.

A.T. Hun comments: I tried to, I really did. I was in bed and everything. My mind just refused to go to sleep until my clock showed the right time. How frightfully Pavlovian.

Saturday, October 28, 2000

Irresponsible Journalism 101 -- 8:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

If you want to find out the way NOT to be a journalist, head over to Salon and read the utterly irresponsible article posted there called Who cracked Microsoft? (note: improper capitalization of the headline). The author comes thisclose to accusing open source advocates (especially followers of Eric Raymond) as the ones responsible for the cracking and theft. It is nothing but pure sensationalism and conjecture without one speck of fact behind it. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, but if you are going to accuse someone of theft, you'd better have some serious evidence to back you up. Thanks sCary, I think.

J.t.? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this one.

J.t.Qbe comments: I have to admit, I was surprised when I saw the author's name: Andrew Leonard had written some really good stuff. I find it hard to believe that he wrote and published this. Maybe Salon's been cracked?

I sent him this email:

Shame on you, Andrew. You've done so much good and responsible journalism covering the open source movement, so where did this come from? Yes, there are some wacko zealots out there--on both sides of the fence--but how can you reasonably, without a shred of evidence, paint them as the possible culprits? You know full well that speculation does not equal fact.

Sure, this bit of fluff will get you some exposure and web site hits, but will it really be worth the ire of the open source community? Will it really be worth the possibility that the speculation will be repeated and will make the open source movement a villain among those who don't know any better?

You've published a lot of good stuff, articles I've really enjoyed reading. Please be more careful and more responsible next time.

It isn't surprising, when the real crackers are unknown, to wonder about some of Microsoft's known enemies. However, publishing this piece of speculation is completely unjustifiable. Shame on you too, Salon.

Q3F Beta 1F Released -- 6:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Better late than never, as they say. The beta 1F version of Quake3Fortress has been released. You can download it from their files page or through the online installer in the Windows and Linux versions if you have an earlier version of the mod. While you are waiting for the download to finish, you can check out what's new here.

Half-Life 1.1.0.4 Server Issues -- 4:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Valve's Eric Smith sent an email to Half-Life.net detailing some problems that were discovered with dedicated servers and the recently-released 1.1.0.4 patch. Here's a snip:

Several issues with HL 1104 have come to our attention and we wanted to make sure that the server admins know what steps we're taking to address the known issues. First, due to a mix-up with our version control software (totally our fault), we had a regression sneak into this build with respect to the status command. The code that printed out the user's IP address was inadvertently omitted from the 1104 source base. We'll be addressing this in a server-only release in the next week or so. Note that we're going to recheck all of the combined code as we've had unconfirmed reports of at least two other issues that appear to be regressions in the code base.

Thanks VoodooExtreme.

Mozilla: Success! -- 4:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I downloaded last night's (October 27) build of the Win32 version of Mozilla to see if it would work. As I mentioned previously, M18 and some nightly builds after it would crash on start-up. I'm pleased to report that this build works just fine on my system! I'm going to really give it a test now to see how well it works compared to M17.

UPDATE! I've looked at the sites which have traditionally caused Mozilla problems--most notably, Evil Avatar--and this new build is working like a champ. It displayed EA's site faster than IE and many times faster than Netscape 4.75 (although I think I can recode it by hand faster than Netscape can display it). Each build is progressively more solid. There is still some weirdness, particularly in some of the menus, but it is minor. If you haven't checked out Mozilla yet, head over to Mozilla.org and snag it. By the way MozillaZine reviews all the daily builds so you can see if they are worth downloading or not.

MP3 Encoder Analysis -- 12:56 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Did you ever wonder which of the popular MP3 encoders does the best job sonically for a given bitrate? Well wonder no longer! A man by the name of Chris Johnson analyzed several MP3 encoders at differing bitrates and posted his conclusions. It's a worthwhile read of you are an audiophile looking to get the best out of your MP3s. Thanks Slashdot.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 10:58 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Master and family are off visiting relatives this weekend so you are stuck with lil' old me until Sunday night. I'll probably be spending most of my time pondering the cracking of Microsoft and smiling quietly to myself.

If you live in the U.S., make sure to set your clocks back an hour before you go to bed tonight (unless you live in parts of Indiana or other places that decided to rebel against the concept of "Daylight Savings Time"). Wouldn't want to lose an extra hour of sleep, now would we?

J.t.Qbe comments: You know, I always think that it's going to be nice to catch up on that hour of sleep I lost in the spring. Then I just end up staying up an extra hour. I betcha A.T. is going to do the same thing. . .

How Did The MS Crack Happen? -- 10:52 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

That's the musical question that this Wired article is asking. Here's a quote from one security consultant that I found interesting:

"I tell my clients to isolate all valuable information off the network. There's something about this whole Microsoft hack that doesn't make sense. Either they thought they were invincible, or they left a door very open for reasons I can't even begin to guess at."

The Master and I talked about that last night. We couldn't figure out why in the world Microsoft would have the source for their products on a server that was accessible from the Internet. It makes no sense. Here's another dandy quote:

Jonathan Addams, a freelance security consultant, says that virtually any firewall can be bypassed if the organization behind that firewall has "the Outlook e-mail program, a Windows NT box as the server and just one dim employee."

Here's to hoping that this fiasco teaches M$ a lesson so they actually do something about the security (or lack thereof) of their products, particularly Outlook. Thanks Linux Today.

J.t.Qbe comments: I love the irony of it: Microsoft refuses to a) admit that its software has security problems or b) fix those problems, and then Microsoft itself gets cracked. I remain silent. This one just goes beyond sarcastic comments.

Q3F Beta 1F Today -- 10:41 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Quake3Fortress team will be releasing beta 1F of their Team Fortress-style mod for Quake III Arena today at 1:00 P.M. U.S. Central time. Here's a list of the changes:

• 5 new original maps: The Causeway, Last Resort, Spamtech, Got Duck? and King of the Castle
• Lots of new visual effects for weapons and grenades based on our new volumetric explosions, particle emitters and beam generator
• Completely new menu graphics, animation, music and sound effects
• Over 70 new audio effects for weapons, players, ambience, menu music and special FX
• Tribes-style Radio Communications System
• Complete overhaul of all class and weapon balancing through 3 months of extensive play testing by our QA Team
• Over 50 game-play tweaks and bugs fixed
• Lots of new models and/or skins for weapons/grenades
• New commands for people on lower spec systems providing control over our new 3D visual effects
• Improved map-voting system
• Q3F Extended Entity System now extended further :)
• Anti-cheat protection (both automatic and server administrator controlled)

I'll post a link here when 1:00 P.M. rolls around. Thanks Planet Quake.

UPDATE! 2:20 P.M. Ahh, the dangers of giving specific release times. Q3F is almost an hour and a half late now, but I'll let you know when I find out anything worthwhile.

Patch Time! -- 9:50 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Patch #1: Yes, it's a further beta patch (1.11 beta2) for SiN! You can download it from Ritualistic. This newer version fixes some installer issues.

Patch #2: Loki has released a new patch (1.06a) for the Linux version of Soldier of Fortune. This patch fixes an OpenAL audio bug.

Thanks Blue.

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