Archive for May, 2006

Bug 242207 was recently fixed on the Firefox branch, which means it’ll make it into Firefox 2.0. This is great news, especially since I run into this problem all the time. The issue is that removing an entry from your address bar using Shift+Delete occasionally nukes your browser history. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into this and then wondered what was causing my history to get lost. It’s nice to see that someone has found the problem.

In preparation of this Thursday’s launch of Half-Life 2: Episode 1, I fired up a little Lost Coast this weekend to reacquaint myself with the Half-Life world. Unfortunately, all those nights of playing Oblivion have taken their toll. I found myself repeatedly trying to use the Oblivion key mappings in Half-Life 2: pressing ‘E’ to jump, ‘F’ to sheathe my weapon, etc. It took quite a while for me to adjust keyboard schemes, but I finally got back into the groove.

I find it interesting that game developers have accepted a ’standard’ WASD control scheme for player movement, but don’t agree on any other controls. Quick-save and quick-load always seem to vary (although they are almost always between F5 and F12), jumping is always different (some games use the space bar, some use shift, others use something else entirely), and the ubiquitous ‘Use’ functionality is never what you expect (I prefer using my middle mouse button for that particular action, but Oblivion makes use of the space bar). Switching among games becomes a bit of a challenge in and of itself, much like switching between programming languages can be (the old ‘else if’ statement comes to mind: variations include else if, elseif, elsif, and elif).

Anyways, I’m glad to be spending time with Half-Life 2 again. Unfortunately, my video card conked out while I was playing through Lost Coast. Hopefully, this won’t be the case throughout Episode 1. It’s high time that I built a new machine…

A new build of Googlebar Lite is now available over at Born Geek. The ‘disappearing search box’ bug, which I have mentioned previously, has been fixed. I’ve also added support for the Bon Echo alpha builds, and two new translations have been added (Slovak and Chinese Simplified).

I’ve just installed the latest alpha build of Firefox 2.0, and things are looking real good. The Burning Edge has a change log for this latest release, displaying what’s new between these alpha builds and the current 1.5.0.x line of Firefox browsers. Alpha 3 adds session saver support, anti-phishing support, search suggestions in the default search box, and more. If it proves stable enough, I might just switch to this alpha build for my main browsing platform. The inline spell checking feature is great!

Half-Life 2: Episode One has gone gold! I finally pre-ordered the other day, and I’m looking forward to playing it on June 1. But enough about my excitement…

Will the episodic content model work in the long run? While no one really knows for sure, I’m remaining fairly skeptical. Gamers are used to paying their $40, $50, or even $60 for a complete game (although the term complete is fairly ambiguous, especially since game lengths differ so drastically). Forking over $20 for a game snippet is something new. Something that, to some people, is fairly frightening. Whether sales are strong enough to warrant doing it again remains to be seen. Valve has apparently announced that there will be three episodes, the last of which should be available around Christmas of 2007. That means that they are at least willing to take the risk. And I salute that boldness.

It’s my hope that the quality of this episode will match that of the original game. But can a 4 to 6 hour game hold up against its 40 to 50 hour parent? I don’t think we’ll really know until after June 1. The strength of the Half-Life world lies in the powerful story telling. With any luck, it will be just as strong as it always has been.

It’s rare that I have a problem with Firefox. But I can consistently make it fail when loading up a Java applet. I use the official Java distribution from Sun (version 5 with fix pack 6) to no avail. One particular applet that resides locally on my machine causes my browser to lock up instantly, every time. Perhaps the problem is with the applet itself. Or perhaps it’s “just Java.” But the applet works in (yuck) IE. Shouldn’t Firefox yield the same results?

I have yet to poke around in Bugzilla to see if there are any bugs filed on this problem. I can’t believe that I’m the only person who runs into this on a semi-regular basis. Granted, I do my best to avoid Java at all times. But every so often, I have to make use of this technology, regardless of my level of disdain.

I don’t follow horse racing at all, nor do I have any interest in the Kentucky Derby. But I wasn’t surprised when I heard that the Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro broke its leg in the Preakness. Not too long ago, I watched a 60-Minutes episode on ESPN Classic (from way back in 1979) that discussed horse doping, and its surprisingly legal status in the world of horse racing. Apparently, horse owners drug their horses with pain-killing “medication,” allowing them to run a race even when they really shouldn’t. It’s a shame that this kind of thing goes on, especially since horses can’t tell people how they feel. Hopefully this tragic turn with Barbaro will be the wake-up call the horse racing world needs.