Friday, September 29, 2006

Xbox News, Willy's Birthday and 4-Hour Deliveries

X06, Microsoft's annual Euro Xbox show, took place Wednesday and Thursday. There was a lot of big news, mainly:

  1. "Halo Wars," a real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe and developed by the guys who made Age of Empires. Trailer here.
  2. Peter Jackson teaming up with Microsoft Game Studios to create two new games, including one Halo-based one.
  3. Project Gotham Racing 4 was announced.
  4. Another Banjo Kazooie game from Rare was announced.
  5. Bioshock, the next Splinter Cell game (after Double Agent), and two downloadable Grand Theft Auto IV "episodes" (to be released shortly after the main game) are now Xbox exclusives.
  6. Assassin's Creed, an incredible-looking ex-PS3-exclusive game, was demoed live for the first time. The producer mentioned that the Xbox 360 version will actually have slightly better AI than the PS3 one thanks to better threading technology (whatever that means).
  7. The original Doom is now available on Xbox Live Arcade.

Pretty exciting. :) The great thing about the Xbox Live Marketplace (the place for all Xbox Live downloads) is that Wednesday afternoon I had already downloaded trailers and demos of games just being shown at X06.

Speaking of rapid distribution...

I just learned of "LicketyShip Same Day Delivery." It'll get whatever gadget you order to your door within four hours. That's crazy. And incredible.

Willy's Bday

Willy's birthday was yesterday. One gift is now sitting on top of our Xbox: the Xbox Live Vision camera. It enables video chat during games (and outside them), picture messaging, custom display pictures, and gesture-based gaming a la the EyeToy. It also lets you overlay the current video on your Dashboard background with a few nifty effects, including a verrrry nice water effect that makes the image ripple when you move. (Not the text, mind you, only the background... rippling text with just get annoying...)

Sunday, September 10, 2006

'Enemy of the State'; Bin Laden trail goes 'stone cold'

Last night we watched Enemy of the State on AMC. Quite a good movie, and incredibly relevant today, especially considering it was made in 1998 - the plot sounds like something that would be thought up today, not eight years ago. The amount of surveillance today is amazing, and not just on the part of the government. Thanks to Google, MySpace, and other wonders of the modern web, ordinary people have more ability than ever to spy on their fellow citizens.

Get a name, do a lookup on Google. Do a little phone book searching, or reverse phone book search if you start with a number. Find an address, get satellite and aerial imagery. And all of that can happen within a minute. Do a search on MySpace or Facebook and find even more. If their information is "private," ask to be their friend. Chances are they'll accept. If not, friend their friends to give yourself a little more credibility, so that it doesn't seem like you're coming totally out of the blue. It's creepy.

Of course, the government has far more capabilities, as explored by Enemy of the State. This morning I read an article on MSNBC about the ongoing hunt for Osama bin Laden:

WP: Bin Laden trail goes ‘stone cold’ - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

Very interesting stuff. Sounds like it would make for an excellent movie a few years down the road...

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Back to School

Yesterday was my first day back at school. School means homework. Homework means sad Toph. :( Oh well, it wasn't all that bad...

In other news, Tophtucker.com 5.0 should be online by the end of the weekend. Wohoo!

Now I'm off to sleep... tomorrow I leave on a one-night orientation trip... off I go...

Saturday, September 02, 2006

The Red Sox, Little Miss Sunshine, and Blake Ross

The Red Sox are kind of falling apart. They won tonight, but in the press conference Terry Francona was about as depressing (and depressed) as I've ever seen anyone on TV be. As the NESN commentators put it, you wouldn't guess from the sound of it that the Sox had won. After each question there was a long silence before someone finally worked up the nerve to ask another question.

I can't remember a time when so many of the Sox's star players were injured. Manny, Nixon, Varitek, Schilling, Papelbon, Mirabelli for a while... Ortiz has heart issues, and Jon Lester has cancer, for crying out lound.

Little Miss Sunshine

On a happier note, we went to Little Miss Sunshine tonight and it was excellent. Steve Carell was excellent, as usual, as was the rest of the cast.

Blake Ross

Best known as one of the lead developers on Firefox. I do not use Firefox, and I don't like the fanatical tack some people take on the issue, particularly folks like those at Explorer Destroyer who advise webmasters to actually block access to their web site if the user is using Internet Explorer. What!? That's ridiculous... I thought Firefox was supposed to be about giving users choice.

Today, though, I read a couple of interviews with Blake Ross, and he seems like a very sensible fellow. He's not afraid to say that IE7 is actually pretty good. He doesn't categorically denounce Microsoft as evil tyrants. His arguments are logical. He's not cocky, he's down-to-earth, he understands that there's a middle ground. "We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing," he said in the Seattle PI interview. As he puts it, he didn't start Firefox to destroy Microsoft. It's more that the whole field had become too stagnant; that you can't let Microsoft rest on its laurels, because that just results in the proliferation of spyware and adware and all that nasty stuff.

I wish that some of the more zealous Firefox advocates would be more like that. :-\