Wednesday, August 24, 2005

The Coolest Forum Avatar I've Ever Seen

DOSBox

DOSBox rules. In particular, it's been letting me play Scorched Earth on my WinXP and Linux boxes. DOSBox's video operations can be a bit slow, which becomes fairly evident after a large explosion goes off, but the game's very much playable. Setup is a snap too. It takes a minor amount of DOS knowledge to work one's way around, but very little at that.

DOSBox is able to run Second Reality as well, a demo that continues to amaze me, especially considering that it ran at full framerate on a low end 486.

Monday, August 15, 2005

Multi Theft Auto

GTA San Andreas rules. Multiplayer GTA-SA would be even better. That's exactly what the people at Multi Theft Auto are working on. It hasn't been released yet, however they did recently start a blog to chronicle their development efforts.

The cool part about the upcoming MTA is that it'll be easily moddable by third parties. A nice CTF mod would be nice... real nice.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Book Report

Books I Read On My Summer Vacation
by David Ludwig
Homeroom Teacher: Hell if I remember

My two week vacation is coming to an end. I've been very good, and have prevented myself from doing any sort of coding, whether it be for work or on-the-side. In it's place, I read a few books. Not too too many, but a heck of a lot more than I usually do. (My usual reading list consists of magazine articles and technical documentation.) Anyhoo, here's what I've read:

* The Lost World, by Michael Crichton. A good read. Not as good as its prequel, Jurrasic Park, but still very good.

* Revolution in the Valley, by Andy Hertzfeld and others. This book chronicled the development of the original Macintosh computer, and was compiled and written by members of its development team. I've read a lot of books about Apple Computer and this one tops them all.

* iCon, The Second Greatest Act In The History Of Business. This was an unauthorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. What made this book particularly alluring was the response Jobs had to it's release, which was to pull all of the publisher's books from Apple's stores, which included all of the "For Dummies" series. Not surprising, considering the sub-stellar portrait it displayed of him in the earlier portions of his life, and the seeming fact that Steve Jobs is nuts. The book itself was alright, although I kept getting the feeling that it was rushed to the publisher, and could've used another draft. I can't explain that any further.

* (In Progress) Conspiracy Of Fools, but Kurt Eichenwald. This book, recommended to me by my bos as well as my dad, chronicles the Enron bankruptcy. It's a bit heavy on the finance-speak, but is otherwise alright.


In a few days, when my vacation ends, I think I'm going to try to keep up with the reading. It's been a long time since I read on a recreational basis (tech manuals do NOT count) and I had almost forgotten how relaxing they could be. I do think that more fiction will be in order, however.