Hidden Quakes

Another game that I’ve recently discovered I have the Mac version of is Quake 3. I knew there was a Mac version of it, but I didn’t know if it was on the discs that I had. I found the CD case and examined it, but it didn’t say *anything* at all about what platforms were supported. So, figuring it was worth a shot anyway, I slapped the CD into the iBook and sure enough, a Mac installer was right there.

I also have Team Arena, since it was the Quake Gold package, but right on the front of its CD it says “Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT4”. Oh well. But maybe… Sure enough, after sticking it in, there was a Mac installer for it too.

Things get even stranger though. The first thing you do after installing any game nowadays is to go and grab the patches, right? Q3 was still running in Classic mode and was a bit choppy, so I hoped there would at least be a native OS X patch. Well, off to idsoftware.com I went, but oddly enough I couldn’t find any Mac patches at all. There were Linux and Windows patches to bring it to 1.31, but nothing for the Mac. Well, maybe the 1.30 included in the Gold package really is the final version for the Mac, I thought.

After poking around a bit though, there was a file named “Patches and Updates blah blah blah.html”, and it had a URL to quake3world.com’s files section. After a quick visit there I could see that they were actually up to 1.32 for the Linux and Windows versions, but there was only a beta version of a patch to 1.31 for the Mac. It was, however, a broken link. Well goodie. Starting from the front page of fileplanet.com I worked down to the Quake 3 files and, lo and behold, there was what I really wanted: a final, official 1.32 point release for Mac OS X. Ugh, it just had to be FilePlanet…

You’d think that the company’s own site would be the place to go for the latest updates. Or that the biggest fansites would have working links to the right places. No wonder people are wary of gaming on the Mac if they’re going to treat it like the red-headed stepchild…

*Sniff*

Ugh, I’d almost forgotten just how much it sucks to get a cold. It must have been a while since my last one — although I found some DayQuil and NyQuil in the cupboards, they expired over two *years* ago…

Here’s to hoping a new batch of the big Q will help tonight… “Merry Fucking Christmas!”

Oh My Dog

Upon arriving back at my mother’s house, I have in the past been welcomed by a dog. I have been overrun by two dogs. And now I have been completely mobbed by three dogs at once: Coco, my brother’s; Shyla, his girlfriend’s; and Buka, her family’s.

They’re nice enough dogs, but damn they are a handful to take care of. It’s nearly impossible to sit down and do *anything* without constant interruptions from one of them looking to play or trying to mooch food or just wanting to be nosy…

Road Warrior

In stark contrast to my electronic-less Christmas, this upcoming trip will be the most gadget-packed I’ll have ever had. I’ll be taking along:

– CD player
– Gameboy Advance
– digital camera
– PocketPC PDA
– iBook
– RSA key device
– zillions of cables, AC adapters, and batteries

And oh yeah, some clothes and stuff too…

Do I really need to drag so much stuff around with me? The answer is…well of course I do, what kind of stupid question is that? :-P We’ve all got to have our toys. In fact, I need *more* toys! I still don’t have a real MP3 player or even a cell phone…

Now I just hope I don’t break my arms dragging them all around.

Hijacking?

From the Georgia General Assembly:

(c) Any person seeking to have an execution performed shall first seek a grand jury indictment against the fetus for the commission of an offense for which the death penalty can be given, including the offense of murder as defined in Code Section 16-5-1, kidnapping as defined in Code Section 16-5-40, hijacking an aircraft as defined in Code Section 16-5-44, rape as defined in Code Section 16-6-1, armed robbery as defined in Code Section 16-8-41, or treason as defined in Code Section 16-11-1.

I tell ya, I was scared at first when I saw the gun in its tiny little proto-hands. But then I looked over at Bob and I knew we were going to be alright when I saw him hide the coathanger under his jacket…

Deep Thoughts

I wonder if cashiers hate it when I pay for something that’s only 2-3 bucks with a twenty. After all it depletes their stock of tens and fives and leaves them with something that they’re unlikely to get rid of since people rarely use fifties. But sometimes that’s all I’ve got since that’s all the ATMs give you now. But maybe I should be using more of my piles of change to pay. Do they like it or hate it when I pay with change? But then, uh…*thinks*…

I like cheese.

In Your Mouth?

At first glance you might think the Stones were back in town. Or that someone’s celebrating a late Valentine’s Day. But no, this is apparently the design for a set of urinals that will be installed in a club at JFK airport in New York.

As if there weren’t enough reasons to be embarrassed in public already…

(Update: They’ve scrapped the idea.)

Mystery Music

I’m sure everybody’s heard a song but not known where it came from. After some more digging through my hard drive I have one song that, even though I have a clip from it, I simply cannot track down.

So far the only lyrics I can more or less make out from it are “the voice that makes me sleep at night” and “you know the voice that makes me feel alright”, and searches on those turn up absolutely nothing. Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to search on sound samples otherwise…

You can listen to it here if you’re curious and think you might know it. It’s rather crummy quality unfortunately; the original file was only 8-bit mono.

Sharp As Fresh Fruit

One of the languages I neglected to mention in a previous entry was C#, the new offering from Microsoft and a big part of the .NET framework that is apparently to be the foundation of everything they do from now on. I didn’t really know very much about it at the time and, well, I still don’t, but I have to figure out if it’s worth the research.

Despite the initial suspicion you might have about anything coming from MS, C# sounds great — an object-oriented language with a large standard library that covers the most common requirements, that integrates easily into other object oriented frameworks and is platform-independent via a virtual machine and JIT compiling and… Oh wait. I think I’ve heard this story before.

On the surface C# really does seem like Java 2.0. There’s nothing really ‘wrong’ with the language, but its existence seems a bit redundant. Microsoft got slapped around by Sun when they tried to fiddle with Java, so they went off and made their own clone of it. Still, choice is good, and I’m sure there are numerous little subtleties where you can argue that one is better than the other, but I’m not an OOP expert so they’re largely lost on me.

What’s going to be important to me are two things: 1) Am I going to *have* to know it, and 2) Can I even use it? The first point is simply business; if five years down the road it’s going to be hard to find a job *without* ‘C#’ on the resume, then it’s probably worth knowing. The same could have been said about Java and it didn’t really turn out that way, but Microsoft is pushing hard on C# and .NET and they’re the proverbial 900-pound gorilla…

The second point is a bit more important. Currently, despite the promises of portability, the only real implementation of the framework and compiler is on, well, Microsoft OSes. There is an open source implementation in progress for other systems, called Mono, but it’s still in the early stages. For MacOS X there’s an environment from Microsoft themselves, but it doesn’t look well-supported (I can’t even get it to build). Certainly anything new has its growing pains, but at the moment, if I were forced to choose for an important project, Java certainly has a more mature development environment.

So, for the moment, I’m still fairly undecided on whether learning C# would be worth it. It seems unnecessary, with Java already out there, but it might be the next ‘wave of the future’ in professional circles. This doesn’t really affect me work-wise at the moment since we’re still heavily focused on C for portability and reliability (I imagine C# support for MVS mainframes is still a ways off…), but I still don’t want to feel like I’m falling behind. Looks like it’s wait-and-see for the moment…

Water Wars

Gotta love it when the water lines to your apartment get turned off for maintenance without warning. Maintenance in general is rather poorly handled in this building, despite regulations they have to follow, but I can’t complain too loudly — they could probably nail me with a dozen infractions in return. :-P

Saw Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the theatre last night, and was fairly impressed. I can’t speak as to its actual historical authenticity, but it certainly *felt* realistic.