Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Pondering the Imponderable -- 4:41 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

OK, where's the DOOM3 1.3 patch . . . *strums fingers on desk*. I've got this nice copy of Resurrection of Evil, but I can't play it in Linux without the 1.3 patch. I preached patience when the Linux client for the original game took a little while to come out. Guess I'll have to preach the same thing to myself. I tried to install it in Cedega, but it got a bit messy and I didn't feel like trying to figure it out.

In the meanwhilst I've been beating Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal on my PStwo to death. I've enjoyed the single player campaign. Now I've got to bust out my spare network cable some more and try it online. A little birdie told me that there might be a copy of the Star Wars Lego game in my family's future. I've heard nothing but good things about that. Of course the Episode III game is not far off, to say nothing of Episode III itself.

Otherwise, I reinstalled Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast the other day and have been playing through that. I like it well enough, but Jedi Academy seems to have better staying power with me for whatever reason.

In other news, I've been trying to resist the temptation to buy a palmOne Tungsten E2. It's not that I need it, but there are several ways that it would be really nice. If I would get it, I'm going to have to get a Bluetooth USB dongle for my computer so I can enjoy some wireless goodness. I'm not sure how good the ability to surf the web throughout the house would be for my marriage.

Open Source: It's Not The Cost -- 10:16 am CST, Update by The Master

Groklaw has some commentary up on a recent study done in Europe on the use of open source (O/S) in large businesses. They discovered that cost was NOT the top item that got O/S deployed, it was the ability to deploy any O/S package at will, and the ability to customize those installations. I'm sure Micro$oft will make a statement contradicting this via some paid consultant soon.

Monday, April 25, 2005

iPod Blues -- 10:17 pm CST, Update by The Master

My wife was awesome enough to get me an Apple iPod, and so far I have loved it. I use a passthrough stereo cable to hook it up to my line in at work, and I can listen to tunes and still hear voicemails and stuff through my PC.

I have one massive complaint, however. The shuffle function sucks. I get settled in at work around 8:00am, and I pretty much hit shuffle on the iPod at roughly the same time every day. And with some variation, I pretty much hear the same set of tracks every day. I think Apple needs to think through the shuffle function a bit. It might be time to introduce a better source of randomness than whatever they're using on the iPod (I'd guess the built-in clock). I'd propose setting up a 64 byte array of random values synched through iTUnes to some random number server, so we can get some true randomness in our shuffle playlist.

A.T. Hun comments: What, no /dev/urandom? PLZFIXOKBYE!!1!

The Master comments: Nope, no /dev/urandom, and I believe that would only be a marginal help, since there is no good source of true randomness on PCs either. We need a free source of random data bits, perferablly something that picks up radio interference off the sun or something. Winamp has exactly the same problem, and it's annoying after a while.

Now THAT'S a Home Theater -- 10:12 am CST, Update by The Master

All I can say is: wow. That home theater is completely insane.

Bleh -- 8:28 am CST, Update by The Master

I finally spent some time this weekend playing a few games. I fired up Doom 3: ROE and played for about an hour Saturday. I can say one thing for certain at this point in the game: Nerve is a lot more devious in their trap layout than id was. I'm sure this is due to the fact that Nerve was designing an add-on, but my Saturday session was viciously ended by a three-way slashing attack, and I was so mad I cussed out the game and quit. I dread restarting that section.

I also spent some time with Master of Orion 2 again this weekend (big shocker there). Playing this on my old Windows 2000 machine was very painful, since DirectX would bomb out after about 20 minutes or so and you'd have to restart in order to be able to read the screen. Windows XP has been much better for this, and does a much better job of emulating a DirectX 2 installation. If I ever make the Linux switch, this game will be a must-have for cedega.

I reinstalled Deus Ex and UT2K4 last week, along with Quakeworld. I've got a lot of gaming to do if I can ever find the time . . .

No Old News

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