The big news from E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) is the first official showing of Doom III. The video they are showing there is available for download includes in-game/engine footage and interviews with members of id, along with a history of Doom. The in-game footage is amazing and pretty photo-realistic. The models breathe, roar and move in unbelievable detail.

The first scene is a monster pawing around a dead zombie in a bathroom. It drools, the zombie is batted around realistically, a... [More]

Doom III will depart from standard id games in another important way. There are plans for a plot. The game engine’s amazing sound and video capabilities (see Doom Technology) allows the artists and designers to create a terrifying atmosphere and focus on the environment’s role in the game, rather than using many monsters (Doom) or other players (Quake III) to create fear. GameSpy has a full article, DOOM III: The Very First Look, with more details.

Watching the video (see Doom III E3 videos),... [More]

Doom III is going to be ground-breaking in many different ways. First of all, it doesn’t seem that it will attempt to replicate the super-fast gameplay style of the original Doom. In There’s no ignoring Doom III on MSNBC, John Carmack says “If you … have everybody running around at 100 miles an hour, you would lose the immersion.” It will be “about the fear, the scary, extraordinary, unknown environment and not knowing what can happen.”

There are many departures for id from their standard... [More]

If you’ve ever watched Conan O’Brien, then perhaps you’ve seen Triumph, a hand puppet of a cigar-smoking dog. He’s often hilarious, but I’ve never seen him better than in Triumph at Star Wars (available from ShizNitt). It’s a ten-minute WMV (Windows Media Player movie) file and shows him interviewing, insulting and sadly mocking the “nerds and geeks” that come out to stand in line for Star Wars movies.

If the link above doesn’t work, then try to download from a local copy I made here [Triumph... [More]

FIFA World Cup News is reporting that Rivaldo fined for fake injury, which occurred (or didn’t, in fact) during Brazil’s match against Turkey. Apparently, the fine was assessed in lieu of an outright ban from the tournament, as FIFA is admanant about preventing fakery from dominating soccer. From the looks of some matches, this is almost definitely a losing battle, as there has been quite a bit of excess flailing and extreme acrobatics again this year.

“Rivaldo admitted after the match that he... [More]”

earthli Projects is functional enough to move the site changelogs into the automated format. The Albums, News, Recipes and Webcore logs have been imported.

Democracy − Who is she when she’s at home? on ZNet by Arundhati Roy from April 28 is a long article about recent racist riots in India’s state of Gujarat between Hindus and Muslims. Ever since “Muslim ‘terrorists’ who burned alive 58 Hindu passengers on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra…”, though no claim to the terror has been laid or evidence shown, Muslims have been persecuted in the Gujarat.

“Officially the number of dead is 800. Independent reports put the figure at well over 2,000. More... [More]”

I received this through email and thought it was a nice demonstration of the Powers of 10. If you’ve been to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, this will be familiar to you, but it doesn’t go quite as far as that one does. This Java applet lets you navigate from 1023, “10 million light years from the Milky Way Galaxy” to 10-15, “face to face with a proton”. Be patient, sometimes it takes a few seconds to load the next frame once you click an arrow.

Real Madrid won the European Champion’s Cup for the ninth time on Wednesday, on a goal from Zinedine Zidane that was simply amazing. Goal.com (UK version) has Zidane wonder-strike clinches Real´s ninth European Cup, which has the best coverage I could find.

“Roberto Carlos sent a speculative looping cross into the area and the French international midfielder showed wonderful balance and composure to lash an unstoppable volley into the top corner.”

I didn’t find a video, but this is pretty... [More]

earthli Albums has been upgraded to the latest WebCore code and benefits from fixes and improvements made to the code shared with Recipes and News. earthli can now offer text-searching in the Albums; you can look for pictures or journal entries, searching in the title or the description or both.

USA Patriot Registration on the White House lets you sign up for Ashcroft’s new program. Register now to make sure you’re in the clear.

Just recently, I had the pleasure of hearing a discussion laced with mystification at the rest of the world’s displeasure with the wonderful United States. These opinions are espoused in an information vacuum lovingly prepared by U.S. media and a will to believe. I was able to offer that “they hate us for our freedoms”, which was swallowed whole and agreed with enthusiastically. There is no individual effort to determine whether there may be reason behind the mystifying dissatisfaction with the... [More]

The Washington Post published Against Depression, a Sugar Pill Is Hard to Beat recently, covering an “…analysis [of] the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades…”. It seems positive thinking, or believing that you’re taking a pill to make you feel better, is more likely to cure your depression than actually taking an anti-depressant, many of which have terrible side-effects.

“… new research suggests that the placebo may play an extraordinary role in the treatment of... [More]”

ZNet published Chomsky’s Dýyarbikar Speech on March 25th. He discusses several interesting topics, mostly giving a fascinating history and framework on which to hang U.S. and British behavior in the last century (and into this one). In all cases, he goes out of his way to mention that the U.S. is simply behaving like any other empire would and the repression and conquering outside its borders should be lamented, but not come as a surprise.

The history runs from British terrorism in the... [More]

You probably know one, a pen-spinner. One of those tricks that looks so easy, so cool, so non-chalant. The kind of trick that makes you throw your pen across the room when you try it, so you have to skulk, hunched over and mortified, to pick it back up.

Pentix to the rescue.

This site has detailed, illustrated instructions for the most popular pen-spinning tricks, (like the Normal), usually accompanied by a movie of the technique.

Lawmeme has posted the Top Ten New Copyright Crimes, which has coverage of a recent interview “with Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting (an AOL Time Warner company)”. He recently made news for this interview for the rather remarkable claim that:

“[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad- supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re... [More]”

Don’t think the choice of an NVidia card is cut-and-dried yet. Sure, the latest Radeon offerings from ATI are slightly slower than the Nvidia cards, but what about the visual quality? Speaking of visual quality, an old hand at making slow, nice-looking graphics has a new technology, called Parhelia. The Matrox site has pages of information, with screenshots and vidoes galore. They hope to lose the “slow” reputation with this one.

Ars Technica has an article, Aiming High at Matrox with some... [More]

U.S. Treasury predicts September 11!

Take a $20 Bill and fold it 3 times to get hidden warnings from the U.S. government! They knew about it all along!

The Register ran MS in Peruvian open-source nightmare. Peru is considering a bill to require that all public offices use only open-source software. Once Microsoft got wind of this, Señor Juan Alberto González, General Manager of Microsoft in Perú issued a stern warning against doing so and provided the usual raft of logic.

In an extremely well-written reply, and possibly the most eloquent and accessible defense of Open Source software I’ve seen, “[Peruvian Congressman... [More]”

Wil Wheaton published Now I’m Pissed, a raw response from a Californian to Enron. It seems Enron was responsible for the collapse of California’s energy market. And deliberately so. They exploited every loophole they could find, with cute-sounding strategies like “Death Star” and “Get Shorty”. Recent memos found in Enron documents, are a “smoking gun”. The SFGate’s article Enron memo describes how traders drove up state’s power prices says:

“Referring to a strategy called “Death Star” by Enron... [More]”

Noam Chomsky has been interviewed several times over the last 2 months with regard to the unfolding situation in Israel. The situation has garnered a lot of attention in both the U.S. and World press, but anyone with a good amount of familiarity with the situation there would fail to see any new developments. The level of violence has escalated, but not to previously unseen levels, and certainly there have been no ideological shifts on the part of any of the major players.

In an interview, Noam... [More]

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is visiting Cuba over the next five days and has been heartily welcomed by Cuban President Fidel Castro. The Newsday reports in Like Old Friends… that his visit is ostensibly to talk privately about Cuba’s human-rights record, but is also being interpreted in the usual rhetoric from all sides of the political spectrum. Of particular interest to many is the lifting of the almost 50 year old economic U.S.-led Western embargo of Cuba.

Recent statements by the... [More]

Another exciting product announcement at the Apple Developer’s Conference is Dreamweaver MX, from Macromedia. In fact, you can download an OS X or Windows version right now. It has a lot of new functionality, including better support for PHP/MySQL. Future testing will determine whether that support includes design-time data.

CSS, XHTML, XML and any other buzzword you can think of are all supported. Most of the automated design tools can be run in a standards-compliant mode, so it doesn’t stick... [More]

The Apple Developer’s Conference is full of cool announcements. First, and most importantly, is the impending release of OS X 10.2, called Jaguar. Apple has a A Look Inside Jaguar covering the major points. The most exciting is Quartz Extreme:

“Jaguar dramatically improves the performance of Mac OS X with Quartz Extreme hardware-based graphics acceleration. Quartz Extreme takes advantage of the OpenGL 3D graphics engine to make the entire desktop a fully accelerated OpenGL scene. A supported*... [More]”

The latest in a long line of great Q3-engine games arrived in stores almost 2 months ago. If you’re looking for a good game to get you ready for Attack of the Clones, which debuts on May 16th, this is it. Reviews have been very favorable, with only some of the more bizarre and pointless puzzles drawing criticism. The GameSpot U.K.‘s review:

“However, Jedi Outcast soon transforms from a typical first-person shooter to an exceptional Star Wars action game that contains some of the best combat... [More]”

id Software Partners With Activision on DOOM III™ at Yahoo Finance News officially announces DOOM III, the latest and greatest game from id Software. The game will be shown at E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo), but probably to a limited audience. Still, we can hope that a video emerges soon after.

“DOOM III will change what people expect to see and experience in a PC game,“ said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. “We couldn’t be more psyched about DOOM III, and are thrilled to debut the... [More]”

Here’s a great reference site with scanned images of currencies from all around the world. It’s called Ron Wise’s … Paper Money. Clicking through the continents, there seems to be unbelievable coverage here, with over 70 bills just from Tonga alone, for example. The one to the left is the beautiful 50 Gulden note (back side) from the Netherlands, which is, of course, no longer legal tender in that country with their conversion to the Euro. If you look at the replacement, you’ll have to agree... [More]

The contents of this article have been moved to the new section, Web Design.

Oz has just come back from a visit in upstate New York with a new sitter, because his usual sitters were abandoning him for a vacation with his parents. While there, his sitter kept a journal and took some pictures There was also a photo shoot back in March, as well.