Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Gaming. Video Gaming that is.  I've had an XBox for awhile now, and I've noticed that over the past few years I've become more inclined to buy driving games (Project Gotham Racing, etc.) and sports games.  I don't really play shooters anymore (Halo, Max Payne, etc.).  They just don't hold my attention the way they used to.  The only two shooting games that I play right now are Spy Hunter and Blood Wake.  These are simple and straight to the point shooting games. Lynn says it is because my eye hand coordination isn't good anymore.  I'm inclined to agree after fighting with Max Payne for a couple of weeks.  The bullet time stuff is awesome and looks cool, but there are too many interactions that have to go on at the same time.  I guess I'm getting old. [Justin Rudd's Radio Weblog] I enjoyed Max Payne at the beginning, but never finished it (can't remember how many levels I got through). I do remember one level that really annoyed me. Without ruining it for anyone who hasn't played it, it basically came down to a running through a building as "stuff" happens around you. No real skill involved -- you just had to play it about 20+ times to learn when to jump, duck, roll, speed up, slow down, etc... It was a simply memorized motions. I hated that... I still enjoy first-person shooters. I've loved them ever since DOOM (yes, I'm old and yes, I'm eagerly awaiting DOOM 3!). I especially like on-line first-person shooters. As good as AI gets (Half-Life!), it can't compete with the randomness and unpredictability of a real human. I know Brad recently made a post about Warcraft III. I've never been able to get into real-time strategy games. I enjoyed Civ2, but that was turn-based. I now find myself with less time to play games, so I'm more picky -- or just getting old... 11:20:38 PM

Supporting RSS from ASP.NET. Don finally supports RSS for his spoutlet. [Don Box's Spoutlet] Can you say SUBSCRIBED! :) 10:56:29 PM

.NET Architecture Center. Microsoft is promoting better application design with their new .NET Architecture Center. The articles I've perused so far seem quite useful. If you're architecting .NET applications, this is probably going to be a good resource to have on your toolbelt. [Drew's Blog] 10:49:20 PM

Blogchalk. Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: Spanish, Colombia, Medellin, Poblado, Tomas, Male, 21-25! [Commonality] I'm a day late and a dollar short! :) Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Shelby Township, Celeste Estates, Patrick, Male, 31-35! 10:36:14 PM

Blogging APIs. So, is there a standardized API for poking a blog (getting/writing posts, getting blog lists, getting user info, changing settings, etc.)? If not, is there desire to have one developed? If there is interest in developing one, I want to get right on it, because I'm ready to write my client-side blog posting tool. [The .NET Guy] Don't know of any standard API's (I'm new to blogging myself). However, I'm ready to beta-test anything you've got! :) 1:24:54 PM

Don Box now has a 'spoutlet'. This is a guy who never met a phrase he couldn't bend to serve his own ends - witness "MTS as the Rosa Parks of extensible metadata". Based on Don's posting frequency he *really* needs an RSS feed :-) so I'm scraping one with RssDistiller. The RSS feed is here, Radio users click here to subscribe. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] Neat! Thanks Peter! 1:11:53 PM

DynamicForms.zip This is a process that creates forms dynamically. The form description is held in an XML file, you pass the name of the file as a parameter to the process. I originally found this on Chris Sells RSS feed, but when I went to post it, I got a Radio error. Went back to the news page to try again and it was gone. Err.... Anyway, an interesting snippet of code. It's in MC++, but pretty readable if you're familiar with the .NET framework. 1:07:10 PM

© Copyright 2002 Patrick Steele. Last update: 8/2/2002; 9:15:10 AM.