Friday, January 5, 2001

Bleh -- 10:40 pm CST, Update by The Master

Saw an article over on Yahoo! News concerning the patenting of genes. Basically, the Patent Office has said that companies can patent genes, but only with a use.

Okay, I have a question. Why in the h-e-double-toothpick can anyone patent a gene??? I don't believe that Biobucks Incorporated invented the thing, did they? I believe nature did that 100+ million years ago? I'm going to go patent all of my genes. They're used to keep me alive-that's a purpose, right? Then, since I'll be in ownership of 95% or so of the genetic blueprint of the human race, all you corporate losers can suck it down :-)

A.T. Hun comments: Next thing you know, someone's going to sue God.

Terrain Map HOWTO -- 10:01 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id has released a manual for creating terrain maps for Quake III Arena/Team Arena, written my Paul Jaquays. I can't wait to see what comes out when the best mappers in the community start making terrain maps. Thanks Blue.

USB Mouse and Visor in Mandrake 7.2 -- 8:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Recently I acquired a USB mouse (actually, a trackball) which I wanted to get working in my Mandrake 7.2 installation. I also wanted to try to see if I could get my Visor working. After a lot of searching, the solution was pretty easy. I just had to locate the /etc/sysconfig/usb configuration file and change the lines that read:

MOUSE=no
VISOR=no

to

MOUSE=yes
VISOR=yes

Then the proper modules would be loaded at boot-up. I also had to create the /dev/pilot directory, make it a symbolic link to /dev/ttyUSB1, and change the permissions so that I didn't have to be root to use it. Then everything worked great with JPilot. Check out this page to find out what changes you need to make to your XFree86 and gpm configuration files to use the USB mouse.

Q3:TA Review -- 1:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Overdrive PC has posted a review of Quake III: Team Arena. The review itself is pretty staightforward. The most interesting part about it is the voluminous tweak guide at the end. It's definitely worth checking out to squeeze every last FPS out of your system. Thanks Planet Quake.

Unofficial NVIDIA Driver Patch -- 11:34 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Someone came up with an unofficial patch which will allow the kernel module of the NVIDIA XFree86 driver to compile with the new Linux 2.4.0 kernel. One would hope that NVIDIA would be coming out with a new revision of the driver soon, but I've been saying that for a couple of months now. Thanks Linux Games.

Thursday, January 4, 2001

Linux 2.4.0 Kernel Released -- 11:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

At long last, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 2.4 kernel, according to this email posted on Linux Today. Naturally, Kernel.Org is getting the bejeezus beaten out of it. Expect mirrors to pop up like mad soon. Hopefully Mandrake will get RPMs whipped up in short order.

UGO Cutting Back -- 9:48 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As if I didn't see this one coming down main street, the UGO network is reportedly cutting back on its payments to its sites, resulting in less money per ad view and even some sites being dropped entirely. I predicted that UGO would be the next network to trim back, if not fail entirely. Thanks Shugashack (a UGO network member).

Q3:TA FAQ Update -- 9:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The official Quake III: Team Arena FAQ has been updated to include information on mouse sensitivity, client disconnects, and demo playback. Thanks Blue.

RoQ Video Compiler Released -- 10:19 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Graeme Devine updated his .plan with word that their RoQ video compiler is now available for download. This was used for all the videos and cinematics in Quake III Arena and Quake III: Team Arena. Here's a snip:

The new intro animation is 512x512, which is a lot of textures to be uploading per frame (the Q3A movies are all 512x256). All the ingame videos are either 256x256 or 128x128. Ingame videos cannot have sound.

I'll release the source to the decoder "soon" so RoQ can be used in other products besides Q3A derivative.

This is a command line image compression program, it takes tgas, jpegs, tiffs (or whatever) + a sound file and compresses them into a video stream. It is not Adobe Premiere! I have thought about converting it into a Quicktime codec so that it could be an export option from such a program, but time is always a crunch here at id for some strange reason.

Here is a direct link for your convenience. Devine also comments on recent reports that id has dropped Omni and taken over the Mac OS X port themselves:

Finally. OS X. I didn't yank, pull, grab or drop Omni's excellent work on Q3A to this platform. They are my friends, peers, and fine people. My reason for working on the OS X build in house is that I simply like OS X and I like working in it. I'll still share the code with Omni so they can help make the OS X build the best. In fact, I'd like to get more of the tools ported across to OS X as soon as possible so levels, and mod compiling can happen on this platform (see above for time crunch).

Shockwave Buffer Overflow -- 9:56 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

According to this article, there is a bug in every version of Macromedia's Shockwave Flash plugin for every operating system that would allow for a buffer overflow and for arbitrary code to be run on the user's computer. The author reports that he has informed Macromedia about this bug several times, but they have not fixed it. Is it time to disable Flash? Thanks Slashdot.

Past Two Days' News

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