E3 is going on in Los Angeles, and the world's video game makers are showing off some very cool stuff. I watched a few videos from E3, and some of the things that have been created are mind-blowing.

Microsoft has been promoting their Xbox 360. It is supposed to take online gaming to a new level, with integrated online storefront, content creation, video chat, voice chat, wireless, and more.

I think enabling people to sell content they've created will open up a huge portal to the creative efforts of a diverse collection of gamers. This sort of thing has been done on PCs for a while, and it's nice to see it happen on a console.

The Xbox 360 can play music and video streamed from your PC, wirelessly. That is breaking new ground for a console system.

The graphics I saw were incredible. I am very eager to play games with full dynamic lighting and physics. I even have dreams about being inside a game, and the kind of graphics my dreaming brain produces are starting to become able to be rendered by a machine in real time, albeit not at quite the same resolution (how many pixels can someone imagine anyway?)

MicroSoft has said they are aiming for a billion people to use their new online network. That is an insanely powerful idea, it's like an Internet inside the Internet, with more of a human touch. I hope they reach their goal, but it seems unrealistic.

The Playstation 3 was also very amazing. Sony has revealed that the PS3 Cell Processor has 8 cores, each running at 3.2ghz. That is a lot more power than most computers have, which are just starting to come in dual core flavors. Imagine that a game system about the size of a DVD player can do more computing than the full blown computer you are using now. That is a testament of the game industry's power to innovate.

I hope IBM/Sony make cell processors available to PC manufacturers, which would seriously upset the AMD/Intel battle. It would be a great advancement to mankind, bringing powerful tools of creation, communication, and entertainment into homes around the world.

I bought a pack of 10 LEDs from Fry's Electronics the other day. I intend to build battery powered devices with them. I used to play with these as a kid, and I want to build more complex devices now.

According to this site http://www.arunet.co.uk/tkboyd/ele1pp2.htm

, I need to add a resistor to my circuit (around 400 to 650 ohms) to make the LED work. When I used to play with LEDs I didn't need any resistors to make them work, so I figure the modern LEDs operate differently.

The aforementioned site explains how to connect LEDs to a computer's parralel port. That is of great interest to me because I can write software to control the LEDs.

By sheer luck, I read a message someone wrote about dreamhost.com. They are a hosting company who is celebrating their 7th birthday with a crazy sale. The first 777 people to sign up for their crazy domain insane hosting plan can get it for $0.77 a month! I signed up for it a few minutes after checking out the details. It also came with a free domain, I chose sproutpics.com.

So far it's been great. Sproutpics is now running with a simple gallery program I threw together. It's got some pictures I took with my new camera. I have 800 megs of space to play with on there. And I can host up to 3 domains there.

Dreamhost is a cool community oriented hosting company. They have forums, and you can suggest stuff for them to add to their hosting packages. You can vote on what new stuff you want them to add, and they pick favorite hosted sites of the month.

Despite how great I think this all is, I still haven't convinced anyone I know to get their own account. A 4 pack of rechargable Energizer batteries costs more than it cost me to run this new website for the next year.

I just placed an order for a Canon PowerShot S1 IS digital camera. I did some extensive research and settled on this one, mostly for its 10x zoom lens with image stabilization. It also has a movie mode, which will come in handy. I also ordered a 1 GB Sandisk Ultra II compact flash card. These are supposed to write a lot faster than the normal CF cards, so I figured it was worth the extra $20.

When I get my camera, I'm going to go get a Rayovac 15 minute battery charger with it's special NiMH batteries. They can recharge 1000 times, so I might be able to take half a million pictures on one set of batteries. Gotta love technology.

Anyway, in a couple days I will hopefully get my camera and I'll post some pictures I take with it.

The government is phasing out cloverleaf interchanges. They start to slow down when traffic surpasses 1000 vehicles per hour.

Yahoo News

slashdot.org
has posted that Windows Longhorn will be skinable. They are also replacing BMP files for PNG, and this brings up the issue of broken transparency for PNGs in Internet Explorer. Maybe they will finally fix that after 5 years or so of their limited support of PNG.

Oops needed to change my image resize code...

rtre is the most comprehensive interactive rendering solution available for professional 3ds max users, students, and academic institutions. rtre is already in use by some of the World's leading commercial groups including Foster & Partners, ASDA/Wal*Mart, Helmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), Corus, British Airports Authority (BAA), SAS, Jarvis, RMJM, Parkman, Telenor Expo, The Jerde Partnership and Toxic Design Studio to name a few.



rtre is a suite of plug-ins and stand-alone tools that enables integrated real time rendering of very complex 3D scenes. Specifically designed to accommodate the complexity of realistic architectural models and game level design conceptualizations, rtre uses Cubicspace’s own highly sophisticated and advanced rendering engine to deliver a massive performance increase over existing technology. It is able to render millions of polygons in fractions of a second rather than the standard minutes or hours, letting users navigate their most complex scenes smoothly and freely at 30 frames per second. Scene data may also be output as images, video or published into freely distributable interactive scenes requiring no separate client viewer.



“rtre absolutely delivers when it comes to speed and reliable output right inside the 3ds max interface,” states Beau Perschall, Vice President of Publishing at Turbo Squid. “It is amazing to be able to move through highly complex environments in real-time! I’m excited about the technology that Cubicspace brings to the DCP program and what it’s going to mean for the design/visualization and game creation fields. It’s a product that must be seen to be believed.”



“Having an industry proven technology like rtre in the DCP program further validates the goals of our partnership with Turbo Squid and our commitment to the 3ds max community,” noted Chris Ford, Director of Product Management - Animation Products, Discreet. “Whenever you can tell users that you’ve gotten a tool that was rated 10 out of 10 then it’s a win for everyone. We’re thrilled that Cubicspace is part of the program.”

Yay :) PHP 5 beta 4 is out. I love PHP. [php.net]

today's snippet:

/* Database Stuff, do not modify below this line */

$c
or die ("Couldn't connect to server.");

$db = mysql_select_db("$database_name", $connection)
or die("Couldn't select database.");

If you are interested in web development you should go to chami.com and check out HTML Kit, I use it a lot to edit this site. It is very useful. :-S