Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Mozilla.org Redesign -- 9:56 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Mozilla.org, the homepage for Mozilla and its derivatives, has been given a facelift. It includes an announcement of the Mozilla Foundation. It's goal is:

to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the award-winning Mozilla standards-based web applications and core technologies, including the Gecko browser layout engine

Funding continues to come from AOL and also sources like Red Hat and Sun. It sounds like they're trying to make financial support from the outside easier by making themselves not-for-profit.

In a no doubt related story, AOL announced that they were cutting 50 jobs at Netscape. That's not terribly surprising since they threw up the white flag and surrendered to Microsoft (for $3/4 billion, of course). Why develop another (albeit superior) browser, when you can use IE for free and take the cash to prop up the train wreck that is AOL-Time Warner? Thanks Slashdot.

J.t.Qbe comments: The Mozilla site has needed this facelift for a long time. It looks much better than the original. While there I read up on Mozilla Firebird, so I thought I'd give it a spin. Nice work, especially for a 0.6 release! It definitely has a snappy feel, I love the built in Google/dmoz/current page search field, and it's nice that popup blocking is enabled by default. I can't wait to see what 1.0 will be like!

A.T. Hun comments: I'm waiting for Mozilla Firebird and especially Thunderbird to become much more mature before I switch over from Mozilla 1.4. 1.4 works so well, I see very little impetus to change.

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Pondering the Imponderable -- 2:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The news that Rob Halford has rejoined the legendary British metal act Judas Priest has prompted me to break out 1984's Defenders of the Faith. Some sweet stuff there, especially The Sentinel. Why is it that you have to go back to the 80s to find metal bands that actually can play guitar?

In other news, will someone at MSN please fix the router that is making it impossible for me to visit ESPN.com? I'm going into withdrawal.

UGO on UT2K4 -- 2:20 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

UGO has a brief preview of Unreal Tournament 2004 and an interview with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski. Here's my favorite snip from the interview:

UGO: What's the one thing that will convince UT2003 owners to go for UT2004?

CB: Vehicular manslaughter.

You can bet that The Master and I will be nabbing this bad-boy as soon as it hits the shelves. Quality FPS + Linux support = A good time for A.T. Thanks Blue's News.

The Master comments: WWWWWwwwwwwoooooooooooott!

OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC1 -- 9:56 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Release Candidate 1 for OpenOffice.org 1.1 has been released. You can see a full list of the new/improved features here. You can download a build for your OS. Thanks Linux Today.

On a related note, I'm going to start looking into the WordPerfect filter that is in development for OOo. I really would like to switch over since OOo uses a more open format for its files (a zipped-up XML file) and WordPerfect development on Linux has come to a screeching halt. I've got about 15 years worth of files in WordPerfect format so I can't just abandon them all.

UT2K3 Troopers Mod Released -- 9:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The UT2K3 Troopers team has released a "demo" version of their Star Wars-themed modification for Unreal Tournament 2003. You can see a complete features list here and several download mirrors here. It weighs in a 146M, but it's apparently just a taste of what the full mod will offer. Get it while it's hot (or before it's Foxed). Thanks Blue's News.

It was a bit of a PITA to get this installed in Linux. Apparently the ut2mod installer didn't want to create the necessary directories. From your ut2003 directory, issue the following commands:

mkdir Help/ReadmeContent
mkdir Help/ReadmeContent/Gifs
mkdir Troopers
mkdir Troopers/TAnimations
mkdir Troopers/TMaps
mkdir Troopers/TSounds
mkdir Troopers/TStaticMeshes
mkdir Troopers/TTextures

After that, run the ut2mod installer thusly (you will need to point the command to wherever you unzipped the ut2mod):

cd System
./ucc-bin umodunpack -x TroopersInstall.ut2mod -nohomedir

Finally, edit the Troopers/TroopersLinux.sh script so it reads thusly (keep everything after ../ut2003 on one line):

#!/bin/sh
../ut2003 -ini=troopers.ini -userini=tuser.ini log=troopers.log -userlogo=TroopersLogo.bmp

If you are running a dedicated server, add -nohomedir to the end of that command. Unfortunately, I must say that my initial impressions of the mod are not favorable. I played a Rebel and if I get hit twice by a Stormtrooper, I'm dead. If I accidentally fall into some water, there seems to be no way to swim. You drown very quickly. I'll read up on it a bit more and report back later.

Past Two Days' News

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