Archive for November, 2006

Last year at this time, I was thinking about various content management systems for user over at Born Geek (sister site to this blog). I never made a decision, mostly because so many of the available options seemed weak to me. One year later, very little has changed and I’m still looking to migrate the site from the hand-built system I use today to a database driven solution.

Currently, I’m leaning towards using WordPress, the same package I use here at this blog. I like the interface that it offers, its documentation is top notch, and I’m already quite familiar with it. The only real downside I can see with the package is that pages are built on the fly. Every month, Born Geek averages 1.56 GB of data transferred, 542,818 hits, and 17,955 unique users. With this much activity on the site, I’m a little concerned about database accesses and the subsequent processor time needed to generate each page. A caching plug-in is available for WordPress, and I hear decent things about it. But will it be enough?

I’m seriously thinking about giving it a try later this winter (converting the site will take some time). So keep your eyes peeled. In the mean time, if you have suggestions for CMS-like systems that might fit the bill, let me know. I’m certainly open to suggestions.

The Concerned web comic, which is based on and set in the Half-Life 2 game world, recently ended for good. It’s a shame that it had to end so soon, but the goal all along has been stated in the comic’s description (”The Life and Death of Gordon Frohman”). If you haven’t read the comic, I highly recommend it (note that you should start reading from the beginning to best appreciate it). The writing was top notch, the visuals were great, and I will sorely miss the updates that I used to look forward to.

My dad and I had our first leaf-burn of the season yesterday, and I took some photographs of our work. It’s quite fun to live out in the country where this kind of thing isn’t against a city ordinance (and is, therefore, quite legal). Judging by all the leaves still on the trees, there will be a number of fires yet to go. Good times!

On an unrelated note, I’ve been tweaking the style used at this blog. Most notably, the line spacing here at the site has been increased. I think it makes things a little less cluttered looking, and easier on the eyes as a result. Comments? Suggestions? As always, let me know.

Some readers may be surprised to learn that I was once heavily involved in the Duke Nukem 3D gaming scene. During that time, I had the good fortune of taking over and maintaining the map editing FAQ, which eventually made it on to the official game CD (which was quite an honor). At the time, the game was revolutionary and incredibly fun. How excited, then, must we all have been when Duke Nukem Forever was announced?

That announcement date was almost 10 years ago (April 27, 1997), and we still have no game to play. DNF has single-handedly become the laughing stock of the gaming community, having been torn down and reconstructed multiple times. I can’t help but think that the game will fail miserably when (or if) it launches. The fan base from the original game has grown up. I fondly recall my days with the Duke, but I have a hard time envisioning myself getting as interested in that gaming line today as I would have years ago. What went wrong? Here’s my theory:

DNF is announced with much fanfare, and development work begins. The Unreal gaming engine shows promise, so the development team switches, adding delay. New, innovative games begin appearing using this and other engines (Half-Life, for example), and the DNF developers think “wow, our game isn’t near that good … let’s start all over.” Development begins anew, adding more delay. As work nears completion, more innovative games are released, and the weaknesses in DNF become apparent all over again. Rinse. Repeat. It’s an unfortunate snowball effect. Just as soon as the developers are ready to release, another product beats them to the punch, outshining their efforts. This is a battle that is very difficult to win.

If DNF ever does see the light of day, I’ll probably at least give it a look. But my feelings for that brand just aren’t the same. Time has moved on, and I’ve grown to appreciate more mature material. But here’s hoping that the Duke will shine again. Those days of old were certainly fun.

I’ve recently had the fortune of playing with Windows Vista release candidates at work. Though I haven’t spent much time with them, I can tell you one thing for certain: it doesn’t feel any different to me than XP. Sure the windows are translucent and shiny, but shouldn’t there be more to this? Come on Microsoft; what have you been doing for the past decade (or however long it’s taken you to get this thing out)? The new start menu is horrible. Something that basic should have been left alone at the very least; not made worse.

Anyways, now that Vista has a release date, I’d like to make some predictions for the OS. Due to the headaches that will be coming down the pipeline based on all the new security stuff, I’m betting that few people will adopt the new operating system at first. Those that do adopt will essentially be “beta testers” for Microsoft, helping to work out all the last minute bugs. Things will go rough for several months, MS will reduce the price a time or two to help boost sluggish sales, and people will slowly turn on to it. I’m guessing that it will be another year (or maybe two) before the ball really starts rolling and substantial numbers of people start converting. Corporations will easily take that long before they begin rolling it out. So much has changed in this release that I doubt any large company will be willing to risk converting immediately.

Microsoft isn’t helping things by offering seven different versions of the OS. Which version am I supposed to choose? And why should I go with that choice over the other six? Two versions seems complicated enough in XP (the Home and Pro editions). Why must we make things harder here?

To me, it all comes back to the way it feels. If I don’t feel substantial change, why should I switch? What I’ve seen so far doesn’t impress me, and I don’t plan on switching for several years.

Users of Googlebar Lite 4.4 might run into a rather severe bug in Firefox 2.0. The code that Googlebar Lite uses to handle toolbar customization can render the browser menus unusable, given the right circumstances. This is pretty serious, and I am currently testing a fix that I have implemented for the next Googlebar Lite release.

Apparently, this bug will only surface if other extensions are installed that also change the toolbar customization code (though I’m not certain on that point). I recently found this problem after I installed the official Google toolbar (alongside Googlebar Lite), though there have also been several forum posts about it in the MozillaZine Forums. Breaking the browser in this way is clearly not what I want to do, so hopefully the fix I have implemented will work across the board.

I’m currently waiting on my translators over at BabelZilla to complete their particular localizations for version 4.5. Once those are available, I will release the new version ASAP. Also, there are some new treats coming in version 4.5: Google Video search, Google Scholar search, drag and drop support, and more.