Thursday, June 19, 2003

GIF Patent Expired -- 11:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Everybody shed a tear. The compression algorithm that you love to hate, LZW, the power behind GIF files, expired at midnight EDT in the United States. Non-U.S. folks will have to wait until about this time next year. Anybody remember "burn all GIFs day"? I'm sure The Master will chime in on this one. I assume this means that the GIMP will soon have proper GIF support. I wouldn't even care if $%^#!@* IE would support PNG transparency properly. Grrr . . .

UPDATE! MacGIMP had a GIF-enabled version ready for download at midnight. They (and others) have dubbed the 20th "GIF Liberation Day".

The Master comments: Yes, I remember "Burn all GIFs day", and I also remember having to worry about the use of .gifs on our corporate website, and whether Unisys would decide to attack us for licensing fees. Now, we have to worry about it with Jpegs. I can't tell you how much I hate software patents.

Diablo II 1.10 Chat -- 11:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

DiabloII.net posted a Q&A session with the Diablo II team about the upcoming changes in the fabled 1.10 patch. As always, the ETA for the patch is "soon." Thanks Shacknews.

UT2K4 for Linux: Confirmed -- 1:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I got a response back from Epic's Mark Rein about whether or not there will be a Linux version of Unreal Tournament 2004. His answer was short, sweet, and to the point:

Yes there will be.

SoU Linux Installer Fix -- 9:51 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just saw on the Neverwinter Nights Linux forum that there is a problem with the installer script for the Shadows of Undrentide expansion. Apparently someone used a Windows tool to create the script so all the lines terminate with a ^M. Oops. Thankfully, all you have to do to install the expansion is go into the directory where you installed NWN and unzip the four zip files on the SoU CD. After that, run ./fixinstall and you're ready to roll. They meant well, anyway :)

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

So Easy, Even A.T. Hun Can Do It! -- 12:31 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Few phrases strike fear into more people's hearts than the words "kernel upgrade." Roling your own kernel still isn't the most fun thing in the world, but modern distros have made upgrading a snap. I just completed my first kernel upgrade in Slackware following this security advisory. I just had to download the packages, run upgradepkg, run lilo, and I was done. Piece o' cake. I also made a new boot disk (Remember this step, kids! You'll thank me later). The only thing was that I had to remember to set /etc/inittab to boot to a console instead of to X so I could recompile the NVIDIA kernel module. After having made that mistake several times, I'm pretty good at avoiding it now.

Shadows of Undrentide Review -- 11:02 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespy slapped up a review of Shadows of Undrentide, the new expansion for Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. It sounds pretty much like what I would have expected. If you like NWN, here's more of it. My guess is that the best part of the expansion will be what mod makers do with it. Thanks Shacknews.

Mozilla 1.4 RC2 Released -- 9:26 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Mozilla team has released Mozilla 1.4 release candidate 2. You can check out the release notes here and download the build of your choice here. I've been using RC1 with no problems since it came out.

Past Two Days' News

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