Logo by Tom Purves

12:39 PM
New TCP/IP flaw
Both Linux and Win95/NT are affected, so far as we know.  Info about it is below, and it basically takes advantage of another weird bug in IP fragmentation/reassembly.  By the way, I was on IRC yesterday and my computer crashed...hmmm? :-)  Thanks to Joe Kellner for the heads-up!

http://gomer.mlink.net/ip_fragment.html

1:39 AM
The Jackal
My friends harangued me into seeing it.  This was a good movie, up to the point where they assed out the Jackal completely.  Seriously, there was no way he should have been caught.  He was too good.  We were all rooting for the Jackal, because Richard Gere just sucked compared to him.  They basically had to make Gere psychic to catch him.  It would have been much better if the Jackal had just gotten away.

The Jackal (Bruce Willis) also seems to do this weird thing a lot where he turns his head to look at somebody in slow motion.  That was getting kind of cheesy by the end.   You'll see what I mean if you see the movie.

3Dfx plug-in for WinAMP 1.6
I was floating around IRC when I went into #mpeg3 and noticed that a 3Dfx plugin for WinAMP had been released.   The best place I've been able to download it from is http://members.visi.net/~flipino/wa3d001.zip.   It's nice I guess, but really not a big deal.  I can hardly tell if the thing is responding to the music or not, it just looks like a big mess of vibrating polygons.

GL Quake 0.97 released
The revision supports multitexturing (for those 3Dfx cards with two TMU's) and fixes some minor bugs.  Also, Linux gets GL Quake!

GLQuake 0.97
GLQuake for Linux
GLQuakeWorld for Linux

2:37 PM
Video in/out on NVidia Riva 128 cards
The Canopus Total3D 128V has video in/out, which is, in my opinion, a really cool feature.  Turns out the newest revisions of the ASUS AGP-V3000 3Dexplorer has video in/out too.  I've seen this card for around $160-170, so it looks like a much better deal than the Canopus card.

4:01 AM
Info pages, reviews, web sites, etc...
I ran across this web site called www.coolinfo.com the other day.  I clicked on the advertising section and it looks like a total rip-off of the one on Anand's Hardware Tech Page.   Or maybe they both ripped it off from somebody else?  I wonder how those pages get so many hits.  I only seem to get about 300/day on the front page.  Which is not bad, I guess, but it could be better, right?  Any advice for building traffic?

Speaking of which, I don't like Anand's page at all.  Tom's Hardware Guide is much better.  Why?   Because when I read Tom's page, I actually learn stuff.  Anand's page is updated almost daily, but reading his page is like reading a cheerleader, if that's possible.  I also find the idea of reviewing the overclockability of motherboards somewhat strange.  How you can draw any reliable inference about a line of motherboards from one sample is beyond me.  Sorry if that sounds wrong, but that's the way I see it.

One thing I do wonder is how these people get so much computer junk to review.  Do they get companies to send this stuff to them for free?  Man, I'd like a piece of that action if that were true.  I'd review my ass off!  Maybe I should call around and see what kind of stuff I can get sent to me.

Speaking of reviewing, I ordered the Winstone 98, Winbench 98, and ServerBench benchmarks from ZDBop.  Not to review stuff, but just for my own personal benefit.   I think that fact that they don't allow people to d/l Winstone is stupid, so since they say they would make it free if they could, I'm going to do it.  I have an account on Simplenet, which, by the way, hosts web pages and gives you unlimited disk space at a reasonable price.  So I figure, I'll just put the benchmark on there and people like me will never have to mail-order those CD's just to run a benchmark again.  I hope the benchmarks aren't TOO huge, but I'll guess we'll see when they get here.

5:06 PM
Outlook 98 Beta 1 available
The first beta of Microsoft's e-mail and scheduling client is out.   I'm not sure if it's worth it for me to try it out, but if you need better support for Internet standards (like, say...IMAP) then you might want to try it out.  There's something wrong with the download page right now and you're going to have to go through the painful registration process that puts a cookie on your hard drive, but those are the breaks.

Microsoft Outlook 98 Beta 1 download page

4:18PM
BeOS is free
For now, anyways.  Preview Release 2 for Power Mac's is available for free download, and includes some pretty decent stuff, like an e-mail client, a web, ftp, and telnet server, and the core OS itself, of course.  Additional add-ons can be downloaded as well.  I'm only interested in this because it's going to be available for Intel eventually.  But it does look kind of neat, doesn't it?

The Be web page

South Park madness
I think I'm addicted to this show.  I can watch each episode again and again and they make me laugh every time.  There are very few shows that I would take the effort to watch twice.  I want to video capture some of the episodes and encode them.  There are huge versions of each episode available at http://chauser.simplenet.com.  The downloading from that site is extremely unreliable, though; I have a direct connection to the internet and even I can't complete the download of one episode.  I'm probably going to try encoding parts of or maybe an entire episode.  I'm trying to figure out what frame rate is used in the animation of South Park.  It's obviously not that high, so using something like MPEG-1 would probably be overkill.

Integrated 2D/3D solutions
Recently a lot of cards with integrated 3D acceleration have been showing up.  The "freebie 3D," as I like to call it, on these cards, however, is actually quite good!  In particular, cards based on the Riva 128, the Rendition V2100 and the Permedia 2 all seem to provide excellent 2D and 3D acceleration.  The Diamond Stealth II (V2100 based) is basically on par with the Voodoo and the card itself, with 4MB onboard, only costs about $110!  The Permedia 2 based cards (like the Diamond FireGL Pro 1000) can come with up to 8MB of memory and feature full OpenGL ICD support, making them serious contenders if you like to work in NT with 3DS MAX or other graphics intensive applications.  The Win95 support is not too shabby either, and speed is just slightly below that of the Voodoo.

The bottom line is, these are excellent solutions if you need to buy an all-new video card, and getting good 3D acceleration won't cost you a penny more.  Hopefully whatever you get will tide you over until Voodoo 2 comes out!

1:00 AM
SCSI weirdness
In an effort to discover why my system sometimes fails to boot properly (it occasionally locks at the blue screen, like I mentioned before), I tried to put my old SCSI adapter back in and attach the narrow devices to it.  NT didn't like that one bit.  It blue screened (a REAL blue screen, with all the nasty addresses) on startup.   I thought that was weird, since I could've sworn that I had it working before.   Anyhow, I tracked the problem down to the Symbios drivers I was using.  I had downloaded the Symbios NT drivers from the Symbios website and for some reason or another they don't like it when I have two SCSI adapters in my system.

Unfortunately, I can't recall if I had the Symbios drivers or the default NT drivers installed when I had the two SCSI adapters in before.  So for now I'm just working on the assumption that it's a problem with the Symbios drivers and I've reverted to the Microsoft drivers, which work just peachy.  The Symbios drivers had some nifty performance optimizations you could hack in, but I guess I'll have to live without them until I can figure out more about the lockups during the boot process.

I'm becoming increasing wary of drivers from vendors.  I've been having very bad luck with getting anything but the standard Microsoft supplied drivers to work properly and completely bug-free.  I wonder if it's just me or if there really are problems with the drivers.

Netscape Navigator 4.04 released
The latest version of Netscape is released.  Get it below.

Direct download for V4.04 Win95/NT standalone

Namco's next fighter
The working title of this game is "New Weapon Fighting Game" (ooh :-) )  and it looks on the surface a lot like Soul Edge.  Supposedly Namco is really digging for some player suggestions in the development of this game, so I guess we'll see what develops.  No word on what hardware it's running on, but the screenshots (there are quite a few, I suggest you check them out) seem to suggest the System 12 hardware that Tekken 3 ran on or something similar.  I don't see any bilinear filtering on the textures.

Next Generation's story

Another IE4 security bug
This particular bug only affects Windows 95.  Using the res:// URL, l0pht, a hacker group, discovered that if the URL was longer than 256 characters, it could overrun the buffer and crash IE4, as well as do whatever it wants to by writing into memory.  The article below has a link to a URL that will modify your autoexec.bat.  The fix is expected Wednesday.

TechWire's story

3:41 AM
StarCraft premiere date set
The premiere will be occurring at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center in Seattle on Dec. 4.  I recall Blizzard reps saying the game would be out well before Christmas...well, now it looks like it's gonna slam home straight into finals time.   Still no beta, I don't know quite what's going on with that.  If they're going to release the game any time soon they need to get the beta out NOW.

Diskeeper 3.0 trial out
According to Executive Software, the trial version of Diskeeper 3.0 is out.  Diskeeper is one of the first defraggers for NTFS, in case you didn't know.  For a while, it was the only one, until Symantec released their Norton Utilities for NT.  The vast portion of Norton Utilities, by the way, are what I consider to be the modern day equivalent of snake oil.

Diskeeper might be too, but I could never really figure out whether or not running Diskeeper helped, so I run it every so often just for the hell of it.  Version 3.0 allows you to defrag on boot-up, allowing for defragmentation of files and directories that normally would be in use during operation and thus couldn't be defragmented before.

Diskeeper 3.0 30-day trial for NT 4.0 Workstation (x86)
Diskeeper 3.0 30-day trial for NT 4.0 Server (x86)

10:24 PM
Slow lately...
Not a whole lot going on...IBM announced a 16GB 3.5" form factor drive shipping some time in December which appears to be a refinement of their MR technology (it's using GMR - Giant MagnetoResistive heads), sounds nice.  Apple is going with a direct build-to-order strategy and Internet marketing to try and revitalize the company.  Too little, too late.

PK'ing in UO
I commented before on the state of PK'ing in UO, namely, that there aren't any penalties to compensate for the ease and rewards of PKilling.  Now it seems like they are ready to implement some extremely harsh penalties.  At first glance, they look like too much, but from what I understand these are just suggestions and subject to change.  As usual, http://www.owo.com has the latest info on the upcoming patches.

X2 56K / AT&T Worldnet
If you haven't heard already, AT&T Worldnet has rolled out X2 capability in 11 cities here in the US and is going to be rolling it out to a lot more by the end of this month.  K56flex is also coming but I guess X2 comes first.  I told my friend in Houston about it and he ran straight out to get an X2 modem.  Well, he tried it at both his apartment and house and no dice.  After checking with his phone company, he found out that his apartment line has multiple CODECS/multiple A/D conversions.  I read up a little earlier and it appears you can get your X2 modem to report the status of its last connection by typing ATI11 in a terminal program after hanging up the connection.  If it reports multiple codecs, then you've got a problem.   Note that that isn't always truly the problem, but if your modem is reporting it there's no way you're going to get X2.

Meanwhile, I may need to get a 56K modem.  I really would like a USB modem, but NT has no USB support and there aren't any USB modems either.  Sucks, but oh well.   For some reason, my serial ports don't perform well above 57,600 so there could be a serious bottleneck if I end up getting an external modem.  I don't need it yet, so hopefully something will change before I do need the modem.