I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.
Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.
Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.
I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.
I don’t read too many news stories that effect me in a way that this one has. I’ve known now for a while that Microsoft was trying to get their new Office Open XML document format ISO approved. I figured that Microsoft’s OOXML format was good enough, and that it would be a good thing to have an “Open” format as an international standard… Boy was I wrong.
I suppose in principle, a ISO open format would be a wonderful thing, but OOXML is definitely not ready to become that format. In her article, Stéphane Rodriguez lists 13 different scenarios where the Whitepaper results from Microsoft don’t seem to actually be valid. She even goes as far as listing the exact steps necessary to reproduce the results. From a programmatic perspective, OOXML is amazingly bad. A programmer could probably spend a good couple years trying to write code that would be able to work with these remarkably unpredictable XML documents. Some of the elements in the VML part of the documents aren’t even valid XML elements!
It is good to see that someone (among others) is standing up against bad standards. Microsoft is inciting a format war, that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. They are afraid of being left behind as governments and other public bodies see the need for an open format, and are starting to move to ODF. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, said “What the world needs today … is a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past.”
Wow, Transformers, probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time! I thought Michael Bay and ILM did an awesome job making the Autobots and the Decepticons look amazing detailed and believably realistic. The story was good and the action sequences were even better!
I guess someone made a short film titled, “Transformers Preview Review” which looks at all of the material that was out before the movie and tried to make some predictions. I’d say for the most part, it was valid. A point that I thought was really interesting was that the Transformers movie was setting up for a trilogy. I suppose this makes sense, because most of the huge blockbuster films over the last few years have been three movies. Some of them that come with built in fanbases (i.e. Spiderman, Batman, and Transformers) create a new movie with new characters and pretty much drop all of the references to the original series. I guess Michael Bay was told that he could only have 4 vs. 4 or 5 vs. 5 or something like that, rather than having an epic Tranformers battle.
Overall, I thought this movie was amazing, and if I had the time, I would definitely go see it again! I remember reading just a couple of months ago that low theater attendance was being blamed on piracy. The MPAA can blame it on anything they want, I still feel that the real reason is because there aren’t enough “Transformers” in the theaters. So if you haven’t seen it yet, like giant robots, and were born in the 80′s… what are you waiting for?!
I thought it might be nice to put up a quick update of what’s been going on lately. I have tons of stuff to talk about, so I’ll have to post some more later. And no, I don’t especially love Vanessa Carlton, I just liked the sound of the words.
Anyways, for starters, I am currently employed at ABB part-time over the summer. This is pretty cool because in order for me to make the same amount of money every pay, I would probably have to work about 2.5 times more hours than I work here (Here being where I am right now). Not to mention the work isn’t too difficult (Note the last parenthetical statement). Also, this summer, I finally embarked on the Great Journey (read Circuits II), hopefully it will turn out like I expect it to. Speaking of the Great Journey, I bought a Xbox 360 back in May, and it is leet. I tried to buy used, to save some bucks, but that was a bad idea. Out of the two used ones I had, neither worked… Regardless, I now have a pretty all white Core system, and the Halo 3 beta kicked serious butt!
The new Transformers movie comes out today! It should be cool, I’m going to go see it at 10:20 PM tonight. I’ll have to put up a post of what I thought of it. Today I had this for an away message… “Transfloormerz! Robuts in Da’ Guys!” And Ben Radey messaged me with “transgenders! more than meets the eyes!”. That was good for a laugh!
I’ve done a couple things to the site lately. First of all, I made a new header. I used the base Flash file that the snow header was created from, rewrote the action script, found a cloud image and did a little PSing, and it looks pretty good to me. I also dropped a Twitter javascript into my sidebar. So that’s been a summary of the last couple months. I’ll update again with more soon.
So, i was just sitting here, really trying hard to find something to do (that didn’t suck), and I started typing a really long section of commented code in to my VB app… Then I realized that essentially I was writing what I should write in my blog. so, here it is.
‘I am wri9ting this because I am suppored to be working right now
e’I reall don’t know how Long I can type snsles chars in to the VB editor
‘because i have still 1 hr and 57 minues, oops make that 56 minutes left
‘before I should leave. I reawlly want to gome and break out the 360 but mom wou
‘ld be so pissed that i bought one.
That’s life unscripted peoples…
Anyways, I really wanted to post some stuff over the last month, but either have been too lazy (bad me…) or been forgetful. So I will make another update soon. I mean for gosh sakes, the stupid server that hosts this blog is in my basement, there’s no reason for me not to update it!
Peace outs!
So, I guess this is my first post of 2007. The year so far has been a good one! I started my co-op position and its going quite well. The job can be fairly boring sometimes, however so far there have been quite a few challenges. I’m living with my cousin and his wife, and I am eternally grateful for them taking me in, room and board in the Cleveland area is way expensive! I usually am home on the weekends to see my family and catch up on the household chore-like things. It has been very cold lately, like single digits and below with the wind chill. Mark Nolan says “Arctic Air” from Canada has come down to visit… I don’t care much for Canada’s air.
I like to check in on my Linux box/Blog sometimes, I’m still surprised how well my site performs. I really hope over the next few years to learn more about PHP applications, and MySQL databases. Maybe I can write a WP Plugin or even help with development someday! My friend Ben is learning ASP .NET at work, and he is excited about that. We’re just a bunch of geeks!
I want to start my Photo365 project pretty soon, hopefully before 2008! I guess that will happen soon enough!
Stay tuned for more updates soon!
I found a funny blog article about programmers and programs being depicted in Hollywood Films. It’s pretty much true, I just wish movies didn’t depict computers in such a naive and complex way. Alwell…
10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.
What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)
I just really finished setting up the new server. This is a Intel Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD running Apache2, PHP 5 and MySQL in Ubuntu. It was a challenge to set it up, just like the first time on the ol’ K6, but was certainly worth the time and effort. I always learn a lot when I spend some time with my servers. Anyways, I will post some more interesting content soon, but for now I am just troubleshoot/optimizing my server and doing homework… I think I might be having a little problem with gZip in Apache, so if you notice weird behavior like you have to load the page twice before it shows or anything like that, let me know. Now… if I could only get some more upstream bandwidth… Alwell. Peace out!
I’ve been pretty busy with programming projects for school lately, and I thought I would share them. They are nothing to fancy, just something to play with and look at. The first program is a CAD style program, it allows you to draw different specified objects, move them, change colors, etc… It was to practice GUI and Inheritance in Java. The second program is a simple OpenGL program that displays a textured rectangle on the screen and moves it around using a sine function. It will grow if you right-click it, and shrink if you left-click it.
The source is included with the OpenGL program, but if you are interested in the source for the CAD program, contact me. Both programs are pictured below, CAD program on the left, and OpenGL on the right. By the way, the quote in the title is from my professor that teaches both my programming classes. He’s an awesome teacher.
A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity (finally) to play the new Battlefield game’s demo, BF:2142. It is created with the same engine as its predecessor, and is an OK game. BF2 has, for some unknown reason, progressively run slower and slower on my computer. And I seem to not be alone by checking some of the Battlefield forums occasionally. 2142 also runs fairly slow on medium-low graphic settings… Needless to say, I am disappointed. Mostly, because the game runs like crap-o-la on my machine, and it probably shouldn’t.
Some have griped that 2142 is merely a large “mod” for BF2, which is I suppose, a valid argument. Hopefully some of the bugs from BF2 will be gone, but I would have really liked to see this game in a different light than what it has shown so far. I will have to say, I have no idea why a company would push a demo of a product the way they did. The two days that I got on to play the demo, the master server probably kicked me 8 times. Not to mention, 3 times it took over 5 minutes to login or time-out. If the demo is supposed to represent the final game, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it, but Alex says that the game is better than how the demo played… Sometimes it feels like good games are just too few and far between.
