If you play Doom 3 and you have an ATI graphics card, there is a possibility that you can increase the performance by downloading and installing the Catalyst 4.9 beta drivers, supplied by ATI themselves. Thanks Tim, for pointing to this page.
Which Golden Girl Are You?
Yesterday I went to “The day after tomorrow”. Although the story is quit promising, and the effects are astonishing, the movie turns out to be another romantisized disaster-movie. Bummer. I had a good time, don’t get me wrong. You shouldn’t skip this movie, but if you wait for it to be for rent/sale on DVD, you’re not going to miss anything.
The title says it all: he’s finally blogging too…
If you’re a student, or you want to do some non-commercial 3D modelling, or you want to evaluate the full (Maya Complete) commercial product, you can download Alias Maya Personal Learning Edition. Normally this version is one behind the “real” version, but I just saw on their website that both the real version and the PLE are version 6. It’s a 130MByte download, and you can read more about it on this page.
I was waiting for a decent Windows-installable version of PostgreSQL, and it was announced that 7.5 would have such a thing. There’s no 7.5 release, but an 8.0 beta! Still no native Windows installer, but there is one here.
The good thing is, that this release has/will have a native Windows server process, installable as a service. It has point-in-time recovery. It supports tablespaces, to ease diskspace-management/layout. It has savepoints, to fully control whether transactions fail partly or completely. You can change column datatypes now. And the list goes on. Read the full version here.
I’ll definitely check this one out later this week.
SP2 for Microsoft Windows XP is finally done and ready for you to download. It took some beta’s, leaks and other non-legitemate versions, but finally everybody can enjoy it 😉
SP2 (just like SP1) takes space on your harddisk. If you don’t like that, and you was planning to reinstall your Windows anyway, why not use AutoStreamer to create an ISO for you that already has SP2 (or SP1)? All you need is the original Windows CD, the downloaded SP2 and SlipStream does the rest.
You can also choose to do the integration “manually”.
Download the full SP2 here or turn on Auto-Update on your machine to automagically download the update(s).
If you’re into gaming, then go get Doom3. If you’ve never played Doom before, you’ll be thrilled by the awesome graphics, the neat effects and every bit of detail in the game. If you are like me, playing FPS games since Doom, then you’ll be happy to find that the chainsaw made it to this version of Doom. “Now find some meat”.
Be sure to get the latest drivers for you videocards: I was one version behind and had some nasty hangups, but after upgrading things runs smooth. Albeit that my P4-2.6GHz with 1GB RAM and a ATI Radeon 9600Pro only allows me to play on 1024×768 High Detail. Higher resolutions or switching to Ultra High Detail makes the game choppy. And we don’t want motion-sickness, now do we?
Get the latest ATI drivers: here
Get the latest NVIDIA drivers: here
Get DirectX 9.0c: here or here
And while you’re at it: pre-order one of these!
Last Friday I received my Oracle ISV kit, as described in this post. Its contents are two boxes: one with the Windows CD’s and one with the Linux CD’s.
The strange thing about the delivery is in the DHL part. Oracle sent me the kit via DHL, and earlier last week they TRIED to deliver the package at my address. But I was at work, nobody was home, so they left a message that I should call them for another appointment. When you call them, you will learn that DHL in The Netherlands does NOT deliver outside office hours. That’s a service level from the stone age! What normal household has people in the house during office hours? I arranged something with my girlfriend, but otherwise I would have to collect the package at their headquarters in Apeldoorn. That’s a 40-minutes-trip by car. That sucks! In other words: DHL (at least the Dutch one) sucks!
If you draw diagrams on a regular basis, chances are that you already own a softwareprogram that helps you with that. But if you have to draw diagrams only on a very irregulare basis, Microsoft’s Visio might be a bit expensive. Consider using Dia, a gtk+ based diagrammers tool. It’s free, and there is a Windows version as well.