New Gallery!

After spending a long overdue afternoon dumping the contents of my CF cards, I realized that my gallery software was outdated. I try to keep things up to date, so in that effort I downloaded the latest release of Gallery 3 (beta 3.)

I’ve used Gallery as my primary web photo organization tool (from 1.4 onward.) I can say this: the developers have been working hard on 3. It looks like they have worked over some of the most confusing and time consuming tasks for gallery admins and make the whole experience a whole lot more intuitive. However. There is no themes (yet.)

So in the meantime, I’ve moved to Zenphoto. Zenphoto has been around for a while, and although it is not nearly as powerful as Gallery, it also hasn’t gone through a recent major development, and has a large body of themes that work with it. Being the lazy college student that I am, I don’t really want to develop my own theme for Gallery3 just yet, so I switched. We will see how this works out.

Check it out: dsouthwick.com/gallery

Electronic Arts, Need for Speed, & Video Game Theory

Coming in last place after "Dominating"

After recently loading up EA’s latest title (“Need for Speed: Undercover”) on Microsoft’s latest RC build of Windows 7, I have to say that I am left scratching my head. What is the logic in creating games that are not win-able? Creating challanging & sometimes frustrating games is always a good thing, however you DO (read: should) make them able to be won, as this gives your target audience a sense of accomplishment, and leaves them waiting for the next challenge (read: next 50$ game.) However, if you make something so difficult that your target audience writes it off, you are seriously hurting your reputation (and bottom line.) Why EA decided to go with an un-scalable difficulty system that is completely unrealistic (broken) is beyond me.

For those of you that haven’t had the “pleasure” of this latest iteration of Need For Speed, let me fill you in. The newest title is what you’d might expect: shiny cars, smooth graphics, and a wonderful online system. However, my problem lies in the career mode. In order to advance, you must beat other AI’s in races (nothing new…) but they’ve added a new “Domination” flag that awards if the player “Dominates” the race. Well, it seems that this moniker is nothing more than insult to injury. Many players (and avid fans) are left unable to advance after “dominating” by more than a few seconds – because the AI is over-scaled.

What does EA have to say on this:    …well… they made it harder.

Jerks!

Radeon HD 4xxx support coming to OSX?

It appears kernel extensions in apple’s upcoming 10.5.7 release may include native support for ATI Radeon HD 4000 series cards. Netkas released drivers on his site, also available on osx86 irc.

I will probably wait until 10.5.7 official release, but WOO HOO!

Finally, 4850 with Quartz Extreme!

visit: netkas.org

insanelymac.com

Why is the internet so slow?

“Why is the internet so slow? Son of a bitch…   I feel like killing now.”