|
9:11 PM
Tekken 3 debuts
Tekken 3 PSX made its debut at Namco's Wonderpark in Milpitas, CA on March
12th. Seems to look pretty good. One guy took some photos (very blurry though)
and put them on his homepage.
The 3D backgrounds are actually just a cube...nothing really complicated, which is
smart. I didn't want character detail to be sacrificed for the backgrounds.
To think my copy will be here in a little over a week! Actually, the way things
are going, I might get Tekken 3 before StarCraft. I never imagined that would be the
case a few months ago...but now it's looking more and more like reality.
By the way, check out this URL over at
Namco Japan for some interesting Tekken 3 art.
8:30 PM
WinAMP 1.8 released
This new version appears to have "skins" support for different
looks, as well as a 64-bit decoding mode for enhanced quality.
http://winamp.lh.net/getit.html
12:25 AM
Far, far away
I'm attempting to update this from Vermont, so please, bear with me. The
first article is about
the use of oversampling techniques to simplify and reduce the cost of imaging systems.
Quite frankly, it seems to me like this is the kind of thing that would have been done a
long time ago...but whatever. The second article is about AMD's
efforts to get the K6-3D out on the market by the 1st half of 1998. Apparently quite a bit
of their strategy with the K6-3D relies on software being written specifically to take
advantage of the K6-3D's proprietary extensions. Sounds like a losing proposition to me.
Nintendo announced plans for a Color Gameboy, which I believe can not only play old games
in color but also new ones written specifically to be in color. The new Color Gameboy is
supposed to be even smaller than the Pocket Gameboy. Could be neat.
2:30 AM
Need to hire somebody?
I've got an 11-hour train ride ahead of me tomorrow morning, so I'll make
this short and sweet. I'm done with school come this May, which means I'm going to
be needing a job. I've got a couple of offers already, but, as always, I'd like to
see what else is out there. If you know of a position at your company that you think
I might be qualified for, then take a look at my resume
and contact me.
4:16 PM
Going skiing
Won't be back until Friday. I may or may not be able to update the
page...it depends. It certainly won't be as easy as doing it from my own computer.
Serious Iomega Buz work
So how many of you have a Buz and have been playing with it? I've
been hearing about a lot of weird problems. In particular, effects and transitions
are said to render in the wrong field order, causing them to look all weird and jittery on
playback. Apparently this means the Buz is only good for cuts-only rendering and
maybe low-resolution output for viewing on the PC. The Buz also appears to have a
bad habit of causing device conflicts on installation with the "Standard PCI-to-PCI
bridge."
My friend is having extremely bad luck with it. He can't capture at any more than
around 1MB/sec (which is strange, his hard drive isn't THAT old). He also can't
render large files without the Buz driver bombing. He also has those device
conflicts. Some people seem to suspect it's a problem with the 440FX chipset.
Unfortuantely, he can't test it in another system, so we really have no way of knowing.
If you've been having good luck with the Buz, I'd like to hear more about your
experiences on the message board.
Screwed up online services
While I was planning my ski trip, I looked around some websites for things
I needed to get done, like transportation. Amtrak
seemed like the best option so I went over to their website and tried to use their online
reservation system. That thing is in a state of total disarray. It doesn't
work correctly at all...it tried to tell me that no routes were available to my
destination until the 13th of March, even though each individual leg was available and
these trains run practically every day.
I checked Greyhound also...but their site is
nearly as bad because they don't have addresses of stations, fare calculation or online
reservations. I say it's almost as bad because, in my opinion, telling a customer
you have something when it doesn't work correctly is worse than not giving the customer
any service at all.
The last thing I wanted to check was the locations of a couple of places in Vermont.
I went over to Mapquest, my usual favorite
for checking out maps and directions. I discovered two things. Number one, I
could get the addresses I typed in to show up on the normal maps but not if I wanted
driving directions between the two places. How useless. That made no sense
whatsoever. Second, I could only open one session at a time, because if I tried to
open another window to look at a new location while keeping the old map around, things
would go weird...both windows would take on the same address information. Of course,
the old window wouldn't actually change unless I tried to zoom in or out. I ended up
going to MapsOnUs, which is a far less user-friendly
site that I had never heard of before, but which actually worked. And that, my
friends, is what counts.
| 