Wednesday, June 14, 2000

Replacement Stylus -- 10:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After getting sick and tired of trying to write with the dinky stylus that came with my Handspring Visor Deluxe, I made a little trip to Office Max (no affiliation, yadda, yadda) and purchased an Autopoint Stylus+. It's a pen, mechanical pencil, and PDA stylus all in one. Very nice. My Graffiti (the PDA's character recognition method) writing has improved dramatically. You can check out a review of the four-way version of the pen at Visor Central or buy it online at Stylus Plus.com. That version of the pen just adds another ink color or a highlighter. The four-way is US$19.95 (online) and the three-way is US$14.95 at Office Max. It's a bargain at twice the price. Now that I have one, I realize why all these PDA sites rate it so highly.

Doom Round Table -- 6:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The folks at Digital Eel got a round table discussion going with a number of developers on id's decision to make a new Doom. You can expect to see debates like this rage on messageboards all over the Net over the next two years (only with a lot more profanity and a lot less logic). This link came courtesy of The Shugashack, the spot for those kinds of messageboards.

SoF 1.05 Patch Released -- 5:58 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Raven's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with word that the 1.05 patch for Soldier of Fortune was released as promised. You can snag the 1.8M patch (which only updates version 1.03 aka the retail version) from the mirrors that are FilePlanet, or Blue's News. Here's the list of changes, brutally yanked from Blue's:

EAX performance optimizations

Update to A3D's A3DAPI.dll to provide detection for Vortex 2 chipsets

Pure server option. By default, this option is disabled. You will need to go into the parental menu to enable it, in order to connect to modified servers.

Added "net_mainip" cvar to specify the main IP index (use ip_list to see the IPs)

Update to the WON library that addresses some bugs

Addressed an issue where people behind firewalls are connecting from the same IP

By default, the Pure Server option will be set to "Locked Out" under the parental menu. When this option is locked out, you will only see multiplayer games in the server browser that are running the un-modified version of SoF V1.05. Enabling this feature will allow you to see all servers, including ones that are running code that has been modified by the community (i.e. MODs).

New Creative NVIDIA Drivers -- 8:13 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a whole slew of new drivers over on the Creative Support Site for the Creative Graphics Blaster TNT/GeForce lines. The NT and Win2K drivers are on top of the list-there's also Win98 drivers down a ways.

History today -- 12:02 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1775: The U.S. Army was founded.
• 1777: The Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag.
• 1789: 19 Survivors cast adrift from the HMS Bounty Mutiny Reach Timor.
• 1822: Charles Babbage proposes the "Difference Engine" in a scientific paper presented to the Royal Astronomical Society.
• 1846: A group of U.S. settlers in Sonoma proclaimed the Republic of California.
• 1922: Warren G. Harding became the first president heard on radio, as Baltimore station WEAR broadcast his speech dedicating the Francis Scott Key memorial at Fort McHenry.
• 1940: German troops entered Paris. In addition, Nazi Germany opens it's concentration camp at Auschwitz (in German-occupied Poland)
• 1943: The Supreme Court ruled schoolchildren could not be compelled to salute the U.S. flag if it conflicted with their religious beliefs.
• 1951: Remington Rand introduced UNIVAC, the first commercial large-scale business computer. Its first customer was the U.S. census bureau.
• 1954: President Eisenhower signed an order adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
• 1967: The U.S. space probe Mariner 5 was launched from Cape Kennedy on a flight that took it past Venus.
• 1982: Argentine forces surrendered to British troops on the Falkland Islands.
• 1985: The 17-day hijack ordeal of TWA Flight 847 began as two Lebanese Shiite Muslim extremists seized the jetliner shortly after takeoff from Athens, Greece.

Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Pictures! We got pictures! The first is of Gordie Howe and me (40K) as he signs my copy of his book And Howe! (yep, that's me with the Howe #9 jersey). The second is a scan of the cover of my program from the Eric Idle show (124K) I attended in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yessir, that's his very own autograph on there. Now that I've met my two heros (of sports and comedy), I don't really know where I can go from here!

Appeals Court to Hear M$'s Case -- 9:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In a move that is guaranteed to cost U.S. taxpayers more money than Microsoft has already bilked out of them, the United States Appeals Court has agreed to hear M$'s appeal of Judge Jackson's antitrust ruling. The only thing that this guarantees is that more expensive lawyers will be employed for a few extra years. Remember to thank Bill when you fill out your 1040 next spring. Thanks Slashdot.

Personally I think they should send the whole case to Judge Judy and have her give Gates a gavel to the head.

Obi-Wan First Look -- 6:29 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

GamePower posted a first look at Obi-Wan. The article covers the author's impressions of some hands-on testing with LucasArts' current build of the game. It concludes with an interview with the game's project leader, Stephen Shaw (the man behind the Mysteries of the Sith add-on for Jedi Knight). Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

New NVIDIA Linux Video Drivers -- 9:54 am CST, Update by The Master

There are new drives available for NVIDIA video cards over on NVIDIA's website. There's also a changelog from the drivers available over on LinuxGames. I'm sure A.T. will be letting us know how these drivers do when he gets online. Thanks Blue.

A.T. Hun comments: I'll download them and check them out. I could never get the .92 drivers to install properly (the .93 changelog indicates that a "fix" they put in for TNTs in .92 really didn't fix anything; maybe that's the culprit). Hopefully these will work. Some folks on Linux Games are reporting that these drivers give a nice little speed boost (which is cool since they were pretty darn fast to begin with).

UPDATE! 11:10 A.M. I downloaded and installed the new drivers. Now NVIDIA automatically has you download the kernel source RPM if you are using Red Hat 6.2 or running a custom Linux kernel. The drivers work just fine now and give a slight speed increase on my TNT (42.3 fps in DEMO001 as opposed to 41.5 with the .91 drivers). If you've got an earlier version of these drivers, I'd say these .93 ones are a must-install.

Deus Ex Demo Due Friday! -- 9:52 am CST, Update by The Master

Wheeeeee!!!! According to Blue, we can expect a demo version of Deus Ex on Friday, June 16, as an exclusive release on the Gamecenter Website.

I really hope this game is what everyone has been saying it is-cool. I want a cool single player game to puzzle over for awhile, since I've already finished Sin :-)

History today -- 12:06 am CST, Update by The Master

• 323 B.C.: Alexander the Great Dies in Babylon, in present-day Iraq at the age of thirty-three.
• 1886, King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in Lake Starnberg.
• 1888: Congress created the Department of Labor.
• 1898: The Yukon Territory of Canada was organized.
• 1900: China's Boxer Rebellion targeting foreigners as well as Chinese Christians, erupted into full-scale violence.
• 1925: First telecast of a moving object was achieved from a radio station in Washington DC.
• 1927: Aviator Charles Lindbergh was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
• 1942: President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information, and appointed radio news commentator Elmer Davis to head it.
• 1944: Germany began launching flying-bomb attacks against Britain.
• 1966: the Supreme Court issued its landmark "Miranda" decision, ruling that police had to inform suspects of their constitutional rights before questioning them.
• 1967: President Johnson nominated Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall as the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
• 1971: The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam.
• 1977: James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was recaptured following his escape three days earlier from a Tennessee prison.
• 1983: The US space probe Pioneer 10 departs the Solar System.

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