FastEddie Blogs!

E3 was a madhouse this year. I was a bit disappointed that none of the 3 new consoles introduced this year were available to play. But there were some neat games on display. Some ones I am going to be keeping my eye on:

- Spore - Will Wright’s talk at GDC 2005. It’s just amazing.
- The Movies - Can’t wait for this one.
- Final Fantasy 12 - 100 meg trailer on my server, ‘Save As’ first, then play.
- Xbox 360 Promo - 30 meg movie on my server, ‘Save As’ first, then play.
- Zelda!
- Shadow of the Colossus
- Okami
- Mario Baseball
- Game Boy Micro
- Kevin’s Marc Ecko game - Yay Kev!
- Ghost Recon 3 - 75 meg trailer on my server, ‘Save As’ first, then play.
- Killzone - 100 meg trailer on my server, ‘Save As’ first, then play.

Some good stuff coming out. Lots to look forward to…

Has it really been a week since my last post? Gotta do something about that…

It’s utilities time. In the dos days, I lived on Norton Commander, Norton Utilities and PC Tools. Give me those, and I could do anything. These days, it’s all about small, random freeware and shareware utilities that get the job done. Here’s a compilation of other bloggers’ utilities:
- Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools List
- Scott’s List of Ultimate Visual Studio.NET AddIns
- Mike Gunderloy’s What’s on your keychain?
- Steve Makovsky’s What’s on your keychain? - Comments have some good ideas.
- Nauman Leghari’s What’s on my USB?
- Ask Engadget: What do you keep on your USB keychain drive? - Look in the comments.
- Jeremy Wagstaff’s A directory of programs designed for USB drives

- The Floppy Drive Must Die - This kind of fits the theme.

Comic Time!
- JobCast: Meet Hans Bjordhal, creator of Microsoft’s very own comic strip, Bug Bash - geek comics for Microsoft employees.
- FoxTrot - Star Wars is coming…

So I was reading this article the other day: ‘Geek speak’ confuses net users. You think the people at Hitachi had the same information when they decided to make this video?
Get Perpendicular

Wow, how time flies when you’re busy. I figured it’s time to start blogging again.

Some Microsoft geek humor. These are a series of videos advertising TechEd. Watching these reminded me of the Dilbert comic where he tries to suggest jokes to the Marketing types. Not so much laughing with them… Programmers shouldn’t be allowed to have video cameras.

Rory and Scott go to TechEd - A love story
Rory and Scott design some software - TechEd - Revenge of the Sith
TechEd Video #3 - Drink the TechEd KoolAid

Cool little util to try out, WinDirStat. Gives you a neat little graphical look at how files are spread out on your hard drive. You might find a 2 gig file hiding somewhere on your desktop that you didn’t know about.

The first technical information about the Cell processor is trickling out now. Here’s one article from ars technica.

Introducing the Cell — Part I: the SIMD processing units

My first opinion so far is that they better have some really good compilers supporting it. It looks like it might be very difficult to program for.

Do you think we’ll ever see some sort of advanced Search ability (like Google Desktop Search) integrated into Windows? Maybe not. Read this article to find out why.
Microsoft Won’t Bundle MSN Desktop Search with Windows
It seems like a natural thing an OS should have. Of course, it seemed natural for the OS to have a web browser and email as well. And that’s when trouble started. Sigh…

John Deweese (thanks!) pointed me to this neat demo for a presentation at the upcoming GDC. It demonstrates how to network your physics-enabled game. How do you keep the clients and servers in-sync if they both are running the simulation? It’s a neat demonstration of how network latency and packet loss affect your application. Source and execuatable are provided! Give it a try.

Zen of Networked Physics

I’ve read a few interesting articles by this guy, so I should mention him here. Erik Sink is a developer at SourceGear. He has great insight into the subject of his work, and has good views of the industry in general.

His blog is definitely worth the read.

Articles to note:
Source Control HOWTO - a great series on how source control works. Great for those new to the subject.
Be Careful where you Build - How do you decide what Platform you write your program for? This is a good discussion.

I’ve mentioned articles before theorizing that CPUs are hitting a ceiling in terms of processor power, so we should concetrate more on optimizing our programs.

But after reading this next article, I’ve come to the conclusion that processors are too complex for hand-optimization anymore. Raymond Chen, Optimization is often counter-intuitive

I don’t think it will be possible to keep up with the technology being built into the latest CPUs. It’s just so complex. Just let the compiler handle it.

It’s sad to think that the whole art form of assembly language will practically disappear. It makes books like Michael Abrash’s Black Book more of a history book rather than something you could actually use.