From Brad.
Interesting…
The thing that sold Windows as a viable gaming
platform for most people was the appearance of WinQuake (and
then later GLQuake and QuakeWorld). Taking a cue from past days, Vertigo Software
has ported the now GPL'd Quake
II engine to .NET (using Managed C++, of course).
A few weeks ago I got an email from a reporter at Software Development Magazine, telling me that she’d written something using stuff off my blog and asking for a picture. As amused as I was to have a complete stranger asking me to send them a headshot, I was curious to see what she’d written. My referrer log told the tale today. The article is here. As suspected, she’d come across the AOP bit I’d written and that John Lam (and others) replied to. And she refers to my stance this way:
DevelopMentor instructor Craig Andera is also smacking down aspects.
Heh. One of the wonderful things about blogs is that one can post some fairly uninformed speculation (I’ve never used AOP) and it winds up in the strangest places. Still – the discussion is interesting!
After ordering a computer from Alvio, I got an email virus that looks like it came from them. Herein lies documentation of my attempts to communicate with them about it.
I’ve had my latest Direct3D article ready for a while now, but because I author using Word 11 Beta 2, and because the XML format changed between the “released” beta and the recent beta refresh, I had to make some code changes to my website before I could post it. Then, when I did so this morning, the whole CraigWriter.Write section of my website stopped working altogether. Dammit!
As it turns out, it was completely unrelated to the changes I had made. Rather, the little _vti_cnf directories that FrontPage barfs in your site were screwing up my code because of security issues. That issue has been addressed. Sorry to those that came by looking for things today and found them unavailable.
In any event, the Meshes article is now available! Meshes are Direct3D’s way of wrapping up all the stupid little details that make up an object, so you don’t have to remember that your ogre model is made up of 23,000 polygons, and the first 1527 are red, the second 42 lime green, and the rest kind of purple. I like to say that they frees us from working with vertex geometry and let us work with object geometry. Enjoy!
One of the things I’m looking forward to about having a new computer that runs Windows XP and has some reasonable graphical horsepower is that I’ll be able to screw around with Windows Movie Maker. We took a bunch of video when we were in Hawaii getting married, and I’d like to play around a bit with some editing. WMM is convenient because it ships with the OS.
One of the problems I have, though, is that my camera (like all video cameras, I believe) only downloads video via FireWire. And the only IEEE 1394 port in the house is on my laptop, which runs Windows Server 2003, which doesn’t support WMM. After a bit of poking around, I found DVIO. It lets me stream video out of my camera to my laptop, where I can save it off to one of the machines where I can do some editing. It’s free and it seems to work. About the only issue I’ve seen with it is that it crashes when I stop streaming, but that doesn’t seem to affect the file.
I’m a complete newbie when it comes to video, so if anyone has any advice, I’d love it if you left a comment.
I feel a bit dumb. Phil Scott and Nic Wise both pointed out in comments that my complaints about Direct3D not working well under Windows 2003 were easily addressed by running dxdiag and enabling DirectX acceleration. I had remembered the other necessary part (which turns on acceleration at the OS level) but not the part where you need to turn it on at the DirectX level. (The FAQ they pointed me to contains some other useful details, too.)
What’s funny is that I must have done this the last time I installed Windows 2003 – I just forgot half of the process. Oh well, perhaps my ignorance will help someone else figure out how to play Quake on their work machine. And the good news is I still have good reasons to have bought my new computer.
Martin Gudgin – a friend from his DM days and now a Microsoftie – has
a good clarification of the SOAP Processing Model:
The SOAP Processing Model continues to cause confusion
amongst my friends, enemies, colleagues and associates. This may be in part to the
somewhat vague nature of the description in SOAP
1.1. The description in SOAP
1.2, which has also been appropriated somewhat by the WS-IBasic
Profile 1.0, is more complete, yet confusion still reigns …
