Category: General

Well maybe that title is a little harsh, but that’s what came to mind when I saw on GameSpy.com that Atari had shipped 2.5 million copies of Driv3r to retailers. Pressing CDs and DVDs is cheap these days, but that’s still a lot of disks for a game that is so far getting lack luster reviews. Also keep in mind that only the most successful titles actually sell anything near 1 million copies, let alone 2! So why is Atari shipping so many?

The most obvious answer is, they need the money. Atari is counting on Driv3r to take them out of the red as the second quarter comes to an end. A little less obvious is that they sort of got away with this sort of thing when they released Enter the Matrix. They flooded the retail channel riding a wave of movie premiere hype and managed to sell over 500000 copies. Many of those copies were probably sold before the really bad reviews of both the movie and the game got around. Doesn’t matter though, it’s still money in the bank. So Atari is going to have another go at it with Driv3r. But without a movie to hype it up and the bad reviews getting around, Atari may have made one trip too many to the well. At least I hope that spamming the retail channel like this won’t prove to be a winning strategy for lackluster games.

In this unintentional continuing series of complaints about Windows, today I vent a little bit about NTFS. I’ve spent most of the last couple of days recovering a system from a hard drive crash. Fortunately I had already made backups of everything important and I actually had confidence that I could get the system back up in the usual manner. Boot the Windows set up CD then open the Recovery console, etc…

As you can guess, this did not transpire. Instead the machine froze on every attemp to get to the Recovery console. And, btw, Disk Doctor from emergency floppies doesn’t do NTFS. Lovely, so when an NTFS formatted disk bites the big one, that’s just it for all practical purposes. At least I haven’t yet found an alternate utility to fix an NTFS disk from the command prompt. Now there are things to like about NTFS, like smaller cluster sizes on large disks and user permissions, but for most users, being able to fix it when it breaks may take precedence. Right now, I’m definitely thinking about some alternatives. But alas, I fear I have no practical alternatives, at least professionally…

Enough venting, back to work!

More flaws have been found in the Internet Explorer web browser! That’s not really news, now is it? A new twist on this old story is that now there is an adware company that has been exploiting this flaw in order to install a toolbar in IE to facilitate pop up ads, often pornographic. Click here for the CNet story.

This is just ridiculous, if there were any other product with the kind of defect rate the IE has, it would be pulled from the market and its creator sued and/or fined. Still IE continues to walk the streets free and clear!

The CNet story makes bare mention of the existence of other browsers that do not have the flaws of IE. And while it does have links to Microsoft for IE work around instructions, it doesn’t have links to Mozilla, Firefox, or Opera. For my time and money, it’s a lot easier to install a better browser, than wade through yet another work around. When are people going to wake up and stop using IE? When someone finally dies because of IE flaws, will they put Gates on trial?

FirefoxMozillaOpera

Over lunch today I was thinking about a story that aired on the news last night about how some antidepressants were causing suicidal tendencies in some teens. They did an interview at length with a girl who was wearing a black t-shirt that said "Talk Nerdy To Me" across the chest. I was a little surprised that they didn’t blur it as is usually the case these days with logos and provocative statements on clothing.

The thing that left the greatest impression though was the fact that there really wasn’t anything wrong with the girl. She came off as intelligent with all of the sort of nerd girl quirkiness. She had had some problems with drugs, but aside from that, she didn’t seem to have any real need for medication. (She kinda reminded me of the nerd girl from Real Genius, plays drums too!) Indeed, she indicated that the prescribed drugs put her in a worse state than the illegal drugs.

I wonder, have we reached a state when everything and anything is to be medicated, especially people who don’t comform to what mainstream society expects? It sure seems that way. While companies ship thousands of IT jobs overseas and complain about how they can’t find good people here in the U.S., we drug up the quirky people who come up with most of the innovations that have built our technological society. This cannot end well.

For that last couple of weeks I’ve been using the beta of Mozilla Firefox as my default browser and I must say that I am impressed. Now this isn’t like earth shaking stuff going on, but just the little things.

Its a little quicker on my box to start up and I really like the image scaling along with Mozilla staples like popup blocking and such. And compared to IE, the relative security it leaves me one less thing to worry about. It also seems more compatible with IE leaning sites than Mozilla. In all it just has a few minor rough spots that should be ironed out by the 1.0 release. So if you haven’t already, give it a try, you won’t regret it!

Today’s Big Help award goes to my dad! In my rush to get my new portal theme out the door, I made a mistake that resulted in unreadable news stories. The fix was quick, avoiding potential embarassment. Well not too much embarassement, but at least minor irritation.

Way to go Dad!8)

Well actually, if they are very very good then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Anyway here is an interesting book I ran across in a post on Slashdot. The title alone makes it intriguing.

There’s no soccer today so I’m hoping to get more work done on the portal theme makeover. I finished up the main work on my Amazon shop module and now I want to get visual! Last night I must have spent 4 or 5 hours in the code on the module before I realized it! I guess I was having too much fun.

Anyway, I got inspired and decide to go in a different direction for the new theme than I had originally thought. I’ve got an image in my head involving lens flare. Unfortunately, Fireworks MX (my graphics weapon of choice) doesn’t have this built in. But I did find a tutorial on Lens Flares in Fireworks MX that looks pretty good.

Click here to see the Lens Flare Tutorial.

Since the Iraq mess got started I’ve been wondering if maybe Gene Roddenberry hit it right on the head with Star Trek’s Prime Directive. The Prime Directive basically states that the Federation will not interfere in the development of other civilizations. So Kirk and company can’t go down to some primative planet and give them fusion reactors for example, or topple a government they don’t like. Now any fan knows that there have been numerous violations or bendings of this, but it is still a starting point.

Anyway, the Iraq mess is more proof that we never really know what is going to happen or how people will react, good intentions or not. Perhaps it would have been better to let the Iraqis eventually remove Saddam, if that was their choice. Who is to say that more people would have suffered or not? The invasion took this choice away from them and may have delayed the true creation of a freer Iraq.

We do need to have relationships with other nations. And we should make our opinions known to them. But maybe it’s time to stop interfering in their internal affairs and leave them free to develop the civilization they want to have. American style democracy is not what everyone wants. I think, because we are all humans, we want to have a say in how we are governed. But the shape that takes is necessarily different for each culture. And some cultures are closer to their ideal than others. American guns, ships, and tanks can only mess this up when used as they were in Iraq. I hope that we’ve learned a good lesson.

I got an email from my brother this morning which contained humorous musings on what Patton would do if he were president wrt the Iraq situation. Basically, it was the usual crazy isolationist sort of stuff about withholding aid from countries that didn’t help us, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Usually I read this stuff and let it go, but I just had to tell him that I thought this is just a myth. The money the United States sends to other countries ultimately goes into the pockets of U.S. corporations, especially banks I’m sure. This is the real reason we will likely never see any retaliatory withholding of foreign aid. This whole Iraq mess we’re in has made it very plain just how much influence corporations have on national policy. On the one hand Cheney and his oil pals are looking to profit on Iraqi oil and reconstruction of the country. While on the other hand the big media giants, like Disney, clamp down on dissent at home. That whole flag draped coffin business and the Michael Moore Fahrenheit 9/11 movie censoring business supports this idea.

When will Americans finally realize that we can’t just act like we can go it alone? Look around, how much of what we wear and use everyday was made in part or in whole somewhere else? We need the world just as much as they need us.

Well I couldn’t resist, so I went ahead and linked to my portal site. It makes it easier for me to get here too. I also found a how-to on the Nucleus site for creating new skins. I should look at some skins that others have created too. Always steal from the best! 😉

Ooh I feel like a kid with a new toy!

It looks like the first posting went okay, so the next thing on my list is skin. I’ll need to learn how to change the look of this thing. This is gonna be fun! Later, I’ll link back into my portal which is also undergoing a serious makeover.

After looking at a bunch of options, I’ve decided to give nucleus a try as my blogger of choice on this Yahoo! Webhosting server.

The real challenge here is that PHP is limited in various ways so the only way to really know if something works is to install and test it out. Yeah, they have a list of functions that are enabled, but there are some subtle gotchas. For example, they don’t say that when using the mail functions, the from address must be from an account on your domain. Because of this I’ve had to hack my portal a bit to allow users to email articles. No big deal, but it isn’t documented anywhere that I know of.

Despite this, Yahoo! Webhosting has been a pretty good platform for me.