Mozilla and Valve have been busy.

Unlike me.
by AC - permalink

Yesterday Firefox was updated to version 1.5.0.5. It's another incremental security/stability update, fixing several flaws rated critical. As always,

If you already have Firefox 1.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu within at any time.

And this morning, the corresponding update to Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released. The auto-upgrade patch for both apps is around 500K. All of my extensions carried over without any problems.

And speaking of Firefox extensions, if you happen to have one called "Numbered Links 0.9," you might want to look into better anti-virus software because it might be a trojan horse. This isn't an extension sneaking a virus into your system via Firefox. It's actually installed into the browser by Downloader-AXM as a delivery vehicle for a virus known as FormSpy or, to the cool kids, Troj/FireSpy-A. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the extension system of Firefox (or Thunderbird, or Moz Suite) has been used to install malware. The doom squad has been predicting that this could be a problem since day one, and it's always been an inevitability. But this particular horse doesn't look to be much of an issue, and Firefox's extensibility is still nowhere near as vulnerable as, say, ActiveX.

Valve has been busy as well, churning out update after update for Steam games and Steam itself. There have been a total of four updates and four new Steam games released in the past week, plus the availability of the Sin Episodes: Emergence SDK. That last bit is good news for anyone who might like to try actually making an interesting Sin episode. Anyway, among the updates is a major content package for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. At the same time, it was announced that RO: Ostfront will be available for free via Steam for five days, beginning August 2nd.

I've thought about getting this game, after tinkering with the original RO mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. A major issue with that mod was the dimwitted bot AI, which makes playing it offline not much of an option. RO: Ostfront is supposed to have the same problem, and that makes it hard for me to put down the money. Making things worse, for some reason the game is $25 via Steam but $30 at retail, at least where I've seen it. I know that with Steam acting as download manager, I can actually incrementally download something the size of Ostfront, even with dial-up. I did manage to download Lost Coast and several demos and massive patches. And you can back up games purchased over Steam onto blank CDs or DVDs. But I just like buying games in boxes. The problem with Ostfront is, I don't want to pay five bucks for that box.

And I'm still having all kinds of problems with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. I left this game alone for a while, and now I remember why. It's just a massively unpolished release. Thanks again, EA. I'm still troubleshooting and figuring this shit out, and if I can get it going smoothly, I'll write a post on it. The game was just twenty bucks when I bought it, and so far it's hasn't been worth ten.

Boredom post.

Here's something to read. Enjoy.
by AC - permalink

Just a few quick notes. Thought I'd mention that the first official beta of Firefox 2.0 has been released. I'm not so big on the betas myself, especially the really early ones, cause I'm way too hooked on my extensions, and odds are that none of them will work. Firefox 2, though, has a lot of new features that make several of my extensions obsolete. Anyway, give it a shot if you want.

Here's my new favorite web site of all time. They call it the Deep Sky Frontier, and basically what it is, is a single web page measuring 22 AU to a side. If you don't believe it, click and hold the scroll down button for six or seven decades, then get back to me. It's just all kinds of trippy and more than a little mindbending, and I love it.

And that reminds me, I read the last 150-or-so pages of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos this morning while getting over a hellish headache and unable to get much else done. I already liked the book, and then Kilgore Trout showed up and I fell completely in love with it. Good as Gold is next up.

Edit: Changed my mind, I'm reading Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick next instead. Thought you should know. Because it's important. Yeah.

New desk. And so on.

I'm too tall.
by AC - permalink

So I bought a new computer desk today. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while. A couple of years maybe, if that qualifies as "a while." Anyway, it's smallish and stylish, and clearly designed for someone shorter than 6' 2". There's nowhere for my legs to go other than out the back, so I've had to pull it out from the wall farther than I'd like to. It has a slide-out keyboard tray, and I gave it a shot even though I hate them, and I was right, I hate it. I've put my keyboard on the desk in front of my monitor, where it belongs, and I feel much better now, thanks. Now it's a slide-out tray full of all the games that force you to put in a CD to play them. That is, everything but the Half-Life series, Quake III, and UT 2004. That's all. And I have a lot of games. Pain in the ass...

Anyhow, it came in a very long, very thin, and very heavy box, which should probably have told me that "some assembly is required" meant "all assembly is required." It was basically plywood, dowels, and screws, and now it's a nice little desk with a shelf and a drawer and I'm all proud of myself for actually building something.

I decided to break in the new ergonomics by playing a bunch of Half-Life 2, starting at Route Canal. I didn't break my new "play-til-it's-over" mantra because I've already finished Quake IV. I didn't realize it before, but that's a short goddamned game. I blasted through it in two days. It isn't even half as long as Doom 3. Score another point for id Software. Raven gets a point or two for "Best use of Peter Stormare," though.

I started a new Club Pogo account last week, and it's been eating up a ton of time. I'm starting from scratch in all the games I'd mastered and there are suddenly tons of badges to go after. If you've been a Pogo member long enough to rack up seven or eight million tokens, I highly recommend getting a new account and starting over again. Everyone in the heads-up games thinks you're a newbie, and you can slap 'em down nice and hard.

Desktop expansion.

Or re-expansion, I guess.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to buying a new monitor this afternoon. It's not a particularly good one, but it was cheap, and it was there, so no shipping charges. It's a 17-inch KDS flat-screen CRT. I've been using an old borrowed 15-inch CRT with a max res of just 1024, so even though this one can't go past 1280, it's still like being able to breath again. Now that I have the extra desktop space, I'm finally getting around to playing with Hammer and the rest of the Source SDK. There were some tempting LCDs, including a very nice widescreen 19-incher for just $250, but I need the resolution flexibility for gaming.

Case in point: I decided my next "I'm playing only this til I'm done" game is Quake IV, and I like to run that game at 1152. I think it's a slightly underrated game. It gets repetitive over the last third or so, and it's disappointing that getting Stroggified doesn't really change the gameplay in any way (other than the other marines telling you how much they'd like to kill you). But it's a solid shooter. There's a fantastic level just before the tank mission that slowly builds up the tension level as the building your guys have established as a base is taken over by the Strogg. And the actual Stroggification is pretty sweet, in a gruesome kind of way.

Oh, something about Doom 3 I forgot to mention. Pull down the console at the start of the game and type "g_PlayerShadow 1." You'll cast a shadow wherever you go, and it really adds to the immersion level. It works so well that I figure it was only disabled for performance reasons. The only downside is when it shows you "floating" up ladders. But it's worth that when exploding imp blasts you've dodged cast your shadow on your cover. For whatever reason, it doesn't work so well in Quake IV. It just tends to get in the way. But it's not a big deal, because Quake IV is less about atmosphere and more about killing.

And one last note. iTunes lost a cool point or two with how it handles randomizing playlists. On three occasions I started the same playlist with random turned on, and three times it put the tracks in the same order. That's not actually random, it's just a new playlist. That earns musikCube a free plug.

Doom 3 and nostalgic gaming.

My PC budget hasn't been wasted.
by AC - permalink

Quick, think about three or four of your favorite games. Imagine playing them, think about why you love those games. If you're like me, you're thinking about the first few levels, if not just the first one. When I first fire up a game that's going to turn out to be great, it's those first maps/stages/levels that stick in my memory, because those are the maps that made me fall in love with the game. So when I get the urge to start one of my games over from the beginning, I always get sidetracked somewhere around the halfway point and start playing something else between sessions, and I never get back to my last savegame.

So I decided not to play any other FPS until I'm finished with my third play-through of Doom 3. And I think it's working. I started five days ago, and I'm only about two-thirds through now, because you do tend to get numb if you try to play this game any faster than that (it's not Half-Life 2, after all). And it's working, because I'm really loving this game, more than I did even when it was new. Since I started playing it, I've played only Club Pogo and old Genesis and 32X games, no FPS, and I'm eager to keep playing it. I just teleported into Hell after BFGing my first two Hellknights. I love those guys. They're just so badass, stomping around and smacking the holy hell out of you when you get too close.

I installed the Doom 3 1.3 patch this afternoon, but I might as well not have. There's virtually no noticable difference, and looking at the changelog, it seems that's because almost all the changes since 1.0 are on the multiplayer side or are related to the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, which I haven't bought yet. I've noticed a total of one change in single player: the game now remembers what my previous weapon was when switching to the PDA and back while holding the flashlight. Whether that was worth a 30+MB download, I dunno.

Backtracking a bit, I abandoned Gens for Fusion, a Genesis emulator that also handles Master System, Game Gear, 32X, and Sega CD roms. I like Gens, but it had serious sound issues on my system. On the other hand, Fusion conforms to the original hardware's sprite limitations and doesn't dynamically scale to any window size. But it does let me play all my old 32X games, like Star Wars Arcade and Knuckles Chaotix. The 32X was an odd little system, and it probably should never have been released, but it gave me the first version of Doom I ever owned (before the excellent PlayStation port), and I'll always love it for that. Now, of course, I have Doom 3 and Doom Collector's Edition (The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom), which I play via the Doomsday/jDoom source port. All I'm missing is Master Levels for Doom II. Now that I think about it, I should really have that.

Anyway, once I'm through with Doom 3, I'm torn between restarting Far Cry and Halo. I still haven't finished Halo, but it's because I just don't like it very much. It's actually one of only three games I own that I haven't finished, the other two being Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. San Andreas is one of my all time favorite games, but I haven't beaten it or Vice City because they were translated to the PC with missions that are completely unbeatable without a gamepad, and being a first-person shooter addict, I don't own one. Yet. I still have plans to pick one up, if not to beat those games, then to help with all my emulated 16-bit games, particularly my Genesis games designed for that legendary 6-button pad released specifically for the Genesis ports of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2.

Occasionally I think about digging up all my old consoles and games and hooking them up to my already convoluted TV/DVD/VCR/Satellite/Stereo setup, and I get a headache just thinking about it and go back to whatever I was doing. That's called preserving nostalgia, and is not at all laziness.

You only need one web browser.

And it isn't Internet Explorer 7.

by AC - permalink

I downloaded Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't install it. The first "final" beta broke my ISP's proprietary software, which pretty much made a new web browser pointless. But I decided to give the new beta a try anyway a few days ago, just before the release of IE7 beta 3. Oh, well.

Beta 2 didn't break my dialer software, so that was a plus, but I still have a major problem with it, and it's the same issue I have with Opera 9: it isn't Firefox.

I'm not saying IE7 and Opera aren't capable browsers, because they are. They're loaded with features and have useful interfaces. Their respective developers clearly have spent a lot of time studying what makes Firefox so appealing, particularly in Internet Explorer's case. From an end-user perspective, IE7 feels like Firefox inexplicably modded to include a lot of old IE6 design choices. But it still works. The problem I have with IE7 and Opera is that they lack what, at the end of the day, makes Firefox great: customization.

Firefox is open-source and extensible. Which means if it lacks a feature, or has a feature you like but with less-than-optimal integration, you can write an extension to make Firefox what you want it to be. What I'm getting at is AdBlock. I want to filter out web ads. I use Avant Browser as my secondary browser over IE7 and Opera because it sports integrated, customizable ad blocking. It's not quite as good as Firefox's AdBlock extension, but it's still there. I like Opera's style and the Opera dev team's commitment to creating a capable browser with its own identity, but I hate being force-fed gaudy, bandwidth-hogging ads on every site on the goddamn web.

Firefox and Avant give me a degree of control over the web content I access. Another Firefox extension, Sage, is the best RSS reader I've ever used. It's miles ahead of Opera's feed management, and it's only one of a number of RSS options you get thanks to Firefox's extension system.

Ever since Firefox started hacking away at IE's user base (which was, of course, pretty much everyone), the standard excuse for continuing to use IE has been, "So-and-so won't render properly in such-and-such browser, so I have to use Internet Explorer." Not anymore. Accepted web standards are here, and even the IE team has noticed. There's no longer any reason to use a web browser that isn't simply the best one. And Firefox is the best browser.

One quick disclaimer: as much as I like Apple and appreciate Mac OSX, I don't have a Mac, and I've never used Safari for more than a couple of minutes. If Apple found the time to port Safari for x86 platforms, I'd be first in line to download it. It could be the most revolutionary browser since Mosaic, but I'm way too much into PC gaming to buy a Mac just for the web browser.

iTunes vs. musikCube.

The Battle of Unconventional Capitalization.
by AC - permalink

Bad news for musikCube. I found iTunes's "browser," which duplicates musikCube's killer user interface function of giving you subwindows listing artists and albums above the master track list. This was the big UI feature that immediately showed me how much better musikCube was over older media players like Winamp and CoolPlayer.

The good news for musikCube is that it's still better at highlighting the currently playing track when switching playlists. But iTunes has an answer for that: the "now playing" window at the top of the app has a little button that will highlight the current track. It's an extra click, but that's not a dealbreaker or anything. And if desktop space is at a premium, you'll find musikCube much easier to work with, although iTunes has a mini-mode, and musikCube has a popular plugin called miniPlayer that equals it.

See my last post for more on iTunes vs. musikCube, but I have one more thing to add. musikCube eats up a little less RAM. iTunes pays for its slick interface and instant iTMS connectivity by using more memory. Both players average around 10MB, though I've seen iTunes spike at nearly 30MB. It's rare, but I've seen it happen.

But I have tons of RAM, and you probably do, too. It's hard for me to write off musikCube, because it's so small and simple and, above all, open-source and extensible. But iTunes is a very competent music player. Again, I'm not taking into account iTunes's interface with iTMS here, but even from a purely offline standpoint, it's hard to find a reason not to ditch musikCube unless there are plugins for it you just can't live without.

So there, I've said it. I'm endorsing Goliath over the David I've enjoyed for years. And I hate myself for it. I hope you're happy.

Shocked by AOL.

They've actually done something of value.
by AC - permalink

I was so bored yesterday that I actually decided to pop in one of those AOL CDs I get in the mail every few weeks, instead of chucking it under a passing car on the way back from the mailbox like I usually do. I'd gotten one months ago that had some "War of the Worlds" crap on it, so I decided to have a look at a vanilla AOL CD. I didn't autorun it or launch the setup app, but buried in a subfolder I found an installer for iTunes. I've never wanted to sit through an iTunes download because I don't really have any use for the iTunes Music Store, but I decided to go ahead and install it.

It ain't bad. I have a decent amount of music on my hard drives, considering it all came from my CD collection. It's between 500 and 600 tracks, more than thirty, maybe forty hours. With mostly complete albums and only a handful of individual tracks, mostly from compilation CDs I burned years and years ago, I've been a devout believer in musikCube. It has a really robust interface and fantastic virtual playlist generation. Plus it's open-source and extensible.

iTunes also indexes music to create virtual playlists, but you have to do more of the work yourself than you do with musikCube. But it's generally less buggy, and the equalizer is a lot easier to work with. Visualization is average. As you would expect from an Apple product, the interface is much, much better than Microsoft's competing Windows Media Player. I have Windows Media Center edition, and I still like the Media Center music player, but it's so limited from a power-user perspective that I have pretty much no use for it. If my PC were hooked up to my TV, it would be a different story.

So from a purely offline, non-iTMS perspective, I like iTunes. In fact, I killed a couple hours this afternoon digging up nearly 70 album covers online (cheers, Amazon) and attaching them to my music collection. Just because. But is iTunes good enough to give up on musikCube? I don't think so, but I'll keep tinkering with it.

Holy crap it's hot.

Pimping the temp.
by AC - permalink

So this house has been un-air-conditioned for a week now, and it's getting a little irritating. Last Saturday the fan in the consensor seized up, and we've been getting by with fans and open windows since. It wouldn't be that bad if it would stop being 90 fucking degrees every single afternoon, but this is Memphis and it's summer. There's a window unit in one bedroom, but it's so old all it can really do it slightly cool down that one room if the door is closed. So I've invested in Gatorade and beer, and keeping that on ice helps. Cooking is also a problem, since lighting a small fire in the kitchen is not generally a good idea when it's already 87 in there. So tonight it's MGD and burgers on the grill.

The new ATI drivers I installed recently seem to be pretty effective. I haven't run any benchmarks or anything, but it turns out both Doom 3 and my Source engine games are noticably smoother, and I know the Radeon drivers and Catalyst have been optimized for those engines multiple times since the old set I'd been using.

I've been replaying Doom 3 from the beginning for just the third time, and for some reason I just keep liking this game more each time I play it. Yes, it's repetitive enough that it's tough to take more than about 90 minutes of it per session, but it's an extremely long game by FPS standards, especially considering the crazy detail put into the level design and lighting. And the back third - from Hell onward - really picks up steam. Once you get you accept that long stretches are going to be uninterrupted, undifferentiated corridor-crawling, it's not a bad game.