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Wednesday, May 29, 2002 |
The single most useful thing I have run into on the web recently, more useful than Google has been Google Groups. An old dot-com company called Deja News started putting up newsgroup archives (except for the binaries groups) years back but then Google bought them when they were nearing extinction. Late last year Google finally finished a project Deja was undertaking where they put up an archive of nearly every newsgroup post ever since 1981, a project which entailed combing nearly extinct and destroyed tape archives. Consequently, anything anyone's ever posted about anything in the last 20 years can now be searched. The information is mind boggling. Some conversations have been drug out over decades. Google is the shit.
Something else I've noticed - people harp on Microsoft and people harp on developers who choose Microsoft platforms, but the trust is I've discovered that Microsoft is pretty damn fair, all things considered. They came up with DirectX and they give it away for free - anyone in the world can write for it. Sure, it's not compatible with Macintosh and Linux, but why should it be? Why should Microsoft bother with platforms they don't own? They came up with the .NET framework and they give it away for free, complete with the compilers. You could use DirectX and the C# or VB.NET compilers they give you and write a computer game for free, not paying dime one (except of course for the Operating System they run on). Sure, Microsoft also sells VisualStudio.NET, an IDE for .NET but you don't 100% need it (though it makes things really nice). They're even going the next step and contracting a company to port .NET to Linux. How's that for playing along? Plus, Microsoft has developed their answer to the next C++, C#. They went on and made C# a downloadable free standard and there's already companies making C# compilers for other platforms. Meanwhile Sun has never made Java an open standard, despite making many broken promises to do so. Finally, Microsoft takes SQL Server, their, um, SQL Server product, and makes a free scaled down version of it, MSDE. Sure, it doesn't have the nice GUI the ~$20,000 version has but it's nice and free.
Say what you will but Microsoft is actually pretty damn fair all things considered.
Man I really want to get back to Torque. Soon. After I get some ViaTexas things sorted out.
Monday, April 15, 2002 |
Perhaps I'm attacking this wrong. I figured that I needed the little robot vehicles to pick up weapons and such. Perhaps I don't need them to - perhaps they can just come with their own weapons and not need to pick them up. If this above mentioned code is a bust, I'll probably try that other route.
Tuesday, April 02, 2002 |
Also, I'm exploring the possibilities of reimplementing ViaTexas with Microsoft.NET. Previously, I laid out the site using Visual InterDev 6.0 as a layout tool. Worked great, except for the fact that it used DHTML to do the layout translation, and Microsoft and Netscape didn't agree on how DHTML worked. The .NET framework, however, coupled with VisualStudio.NET, figures out the DHTML on the server end, interpreting it based on what browser is hitting the site, so a page I laid out last night which would have choked non-IE browsers worked perfectly in Netscape, Mozilla and Opera.
Have I mentioned how much I love .NET?
Thursday, March 28, 2002 |
I've been developing a work-related .NET application on the side at work. If I could work in VisualStudio.NET all day that would be the shit. Sure as hell beats COBOL at a Terminal window. If only...
And for the second time in three days I've had to fix my Wife's Outlook 2000. Similar problem, same fix. Gets annoying. Makes me wonder...
Tuesday, March 26, 2002 |
Then this morning I fixed my Wife's Outlook 2000 problem. Life is good.
Wednesday, March 20, 2002 |
Oh well, that's what I did tonight. I'll work on it again on either Sunday or Monday - headed off to Dallas after work tommorow.