Doom Still Kicks Ass

I was wandering around FilePlanet the other day when I stumbled upon Doomsday, a frontend for the jDoom Win32 port of Doom. This is the port I've been looking for. Unlike ZDoom and numerous others, the entire engine is re-rendered in full 3D in OpenGL, so mouselooking on the y-axis is no more warped than looking around on the x-plane. It also incorporates all manner of real-time lighting effects and can enhance any Doom .wad with 3D model packs. And the packaged launcher, Kickstart, is at least as good as the old Doom95. Absolutely the only way to play Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom on a Win32 platform.

The entire classic Doom package can be had for ten bucks at any Walmart, and any of you kids who don't know what all the hoohah is about should pick it up. With a nice port like jDoom, the entire series is still a huge amount of fun and stands up to any shooter released in the last ten years.

Deer Park Alpha 1 was released tonight. This is the first developer preview for Firefox 1.1, and I don't recommend it for anyone but Firefox hackers and people who don't mind using a browser that doesn't actually work most of the time.

Deer Park and Netscape

Just a word of warning: the latest nightly builds of Deer Park (Firefox 1.1 alpha build candidates) are extremely unstable. Unless you're a developer, give 'em a pass until a release candidate appears.

Netscape Browser 8 is rubbish. Don't bother with it. I know it's getting decent reviews, but only in comparison tests with Internet Explorer, Opera 8, etc. Netscape 8 is a big, bloated, unwieldy mess of a user interface slapped on top of Firefox 1.0.3. It's sort of like Mozilla Suite, only with a lot less class and a lot more suck. It's much more stable than the Netscape Browser release candidate and follow-up beta, but it seems all those UI issues were actually "features." Thanks anyway, AOL.

I finally got around to renting The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Sideways last week. I really liked Aquatic, it's my favortite Wes Anderson film so far. Just the right amount of originality and accesibility (it's damned hard to get into The Royal Tenenbaums, however brilliant it might be). As for Sideways, I think I appreciated it more than I actually enjoyed watching it. Paul Giamatti is a genious and we all know it, but the movie just wasn't two tons of fun. On the other hand, the rest of the DVD was terrific. The ridiculously well-hidden easter eggs and the Giamatti/Thomas Haden Church commentary are hilarious, and suggest that making the movie was a lot more fun than sitting through it.

The Last Opera Headache

This morning I read about a third-party freeware app designed to block ad banners and pop-ups in Opera called OperaAdFilter. The inability to selectively blacklist ad banners is the No. 2 reason that I don't use Opera for daily web browsing (right behind No. 1, "awful user interface"), so I decided to give it a try.

The OperaAdFilter (or OAF) site says it works with all current versions of Opera including the version 8 betas. So I assumed it would work with the final version of Opera 8. And I was wrong. The OAF installation wizard tells you that you will need to find your Opera 7.5 opera.ini file. A browse window then appears, titled, "Locate your Opera 6 opera.ini." And the best part is that Opera 8 contains nothing even remotely resembling a file called opera.ini. I picked what looked like it could possibly be something like what OAF was asking me for, and finished the install. And then Opera refused to even attempt to resolve any URL whatsoever.

Obviously, it was the botched OAF install that fucked Opera 8 up, but I uninstalled them both anyway. Firefox has an extension called AdBlock that works flawlessly every time. I'm done with Opera. I tried, and tried, and tried, but version 8 is the last build any hard drive of mine will ever see.

News for Nerds

First, we have an InformationWeek article about whether Thunderbird is ready for prime-time. The short answer is "yes." It's super neat-o and you don't really need an integrated calander anyway.

Also, Firefox 1.0.4 has gone public. It's a quick fix for the JavaScript security hole that was discovered all of four days ago. If you're the paranoid type, download it. Otherwise, wait for the 1.1 betas like the rest of us.

Finally, Saturn's "wavemaker" moon has been found. Cassini snapped a nice candid of it on the 2nd. Somewhere, Asa Dotzler is doing a backflip.

musikCube Update and the End of The Simpsons

musikCube 0.92.3 was released tonight. It's another incremental update, bug fixes mostly. Here's the changelog, but you really should just go download it.

Tonight's episode of The Simpsons was just horrible. They long ago stopped making excuses for the gratuitous celebrity cameos, and in certain cases, like the trip-to-England episode featuring spot-work by Sir Ian McKellan, J.K. Rowling, and even Tony Blair, it worked. But tonight's show was a 22-minute commercial for Fox's American Idol, strategically aired at the low-point of the show's entire run. It even had what seemed like a six-and-a-half-hour solo by Fantasia Burrino. What the hell? Personally, I think the entire production team just gave up after Fox canceled Futurama, then gave two shows to arch-nemesis Seth McFarlane. Sure, they're still under contract, but that doesn't mean they have to give a shit anymore.

There's an article at Ars Technica this week called A History of the GUI. I'll just say this about it: Forget everything you think you know about Douglas Englebart, man, because you don't know jack shit.

America Online Thinks You're Stupid

A new "minor" update to AIM 5.9 comes bundled with AOL's anti-spyware app, SpyZapper, and a full install of a new AOL browser. No, it isn't the Firefox-based AOL Browser, it's a new product based on Internet Explorer, brilliantly named AOL Explorer. From this BetaNews article:

AOL Explorer does not automatically replace the user's default browser, but can be invoked independently through the Start Menu and adopted as the primary Web browsing application. Users are not given a choice to opt out of an installation while installing AIM...

AOL's SpyZapper anti-spyware security software is also turned on by default in the beta release. After AIM is invoked, two instances of AOLHostService.exe will run to load AOL Explorer and some other peripherals, increasing AIM's footprint on system resources.

This is absolutely the most cynical, insulting marketing tactic since xXx: State of the Union was greenlighted (thanks, Sony!). Apparently adding a function like "tear-off tags" is enough to justify forcing yet another AOL-branded edition of IE into unsuspecting users' systems (how many PC's came straight from the factory with AOL-specific versions of IE5 in the last five or six years?). And once AOL Browser goes final, countless AOL and AIM users will suddenly find themselves with at least three different browsers -- AOL Explorer, AOL Browser, and IE6 -- that they did not intentionally install.

This is why browsers like Firefox and Opera are rightfully proud of their distribution numbers (maybe a bit too proud in Opera's case). This point has been hammered on before, but users had to consciously choose to go out and find, download, and install these browsers, and the same can be said for a number of other small-market-share alternative browsers like K-Meleon and Camino. If you make a quality product, people will find it.