More Doom 3 news; (yes, I know it's sad to be this excited over a game, but I'm not the only one...).

id Software have generated some official Doom 3 benchmarks which show framerate data for high end graphics cards. But for me, that's not the really interesting bit; this quote is:

As of this afternoon we were playing DOOM 3 on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card and having a surprisingly good gaming experience. Even a subtle jump to an AMD 2500+ with a GeForce 3 video card that is two years old will deliver a solid gaming experience that will let you enjoy the game the way id Software designed it to be. That fact alone should let many of you know that you will not be left behind in experiencing DOOM 3.

This just sounds too good to be true! So, am I going to be able to stick with my GeForce FX 5700 Ultra for the time being? Much as I'd love to go out and get a 6800 Ultra, finances just won't stretch to that at the moment.

Bec and I managed to palm our kids off with grandparents for a weekend, so we could get away and enjoy ourselves for probably the last time before offspring number three makes an appearance.

Bliss.

After dumping kids off early in the morning, we drove into London and after leaving the car in Notting Hill (relatives with parking spaces in London are gold dust!) we started by heading to the Golden Dragon in Gerrard Street for enormous quantities of Dim Sum.

An enjoyable afternoon of pub-hopping followed (something we've not really been able to do since our first arrival).

Later though, after checking into our hotel, we ended up at The Glassblower. I'd booked tickets for the comedy evening earlier in the week - not a clue who was going to be performing, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And what an idea it turned out to be; some of the most pant-wettingly funny comedy I've seen in a long, long time.

First impressions of the venue were not great. The comedy club is held in the upstairs bar, with enough seats laid out to seat about 100 people. Bec and I were in the very front row on a sofa, which was great for us seeing as a) Bec is getting larger before her impending crash diet, and b) I had room to stretch my legs. In the end, the small venue was perfect for the evening, giving a really close feeling to the acts.

The evening consisted of three comics (Hal Cruttenden, Marc Lucero and Stefano Paolini) with an MC (Eric McElroy). Three completely different styles, but higlights included Hal's uncanny Tony Blair impersonation (the conference speech was a masterpiece) and Stefano's incredible beatbox (the Brixton ice-cream van jingle had me in stitches).

Anyway, even though it was only one night away it was a good break for the both of us, and yes it has to be said that it was great to see the kids again last night.

Gawd bless 6Music and the marvellous Andrew Collins.

Once again I've won a stack of CDs from them for answering a ridiculously easy question - how cool is that?

This time around they've sent me:

• Incubus - Megalomaniac [Promo]: Only the single track on this one, but an absolute corker. Sounds like I'm going to have to invest in the album when it comes out.
• Razorlight - Stumble & Fall [Promo]: I'd never heard of this band before, but from the single track on this CD I'll keep a look out for them.
• Lambchop - Selections from the albums AWCMON and NOYOUCMON: Absolutely brilliant stuff. It's a bit different to 'Is A Woman' - the sound is much more expansive and string laden. If the rest of these two albums match the quality of the six tracks here, they're going to be classics.
• The Bumblebeez - Red Printz EP: I don't know quite what I was expecting with this one. I suppose with track titles like "Pink Fairy Floss" and "Fluffy White Rabbit", something from the Warp stable sprang to mind. Unfortunately its not. Messy, incoherent sub-par pub band stuff.
• Paul Jackson & Steve Smith - The Push (Far From Here): Obviously produced on a shoestring, this seems to be an attempt at an indie/intelligent dance crossover. Not half bad.

Right, now lets see if there are any more competitions to win...

OK, it's official. This is the best Marble Madness inspired game ever. Truly awesome!

One of the threads over at www.remakes.org has a link to the beta version of Hamster Ball which I tried out last night; jesus it's addictive. Do yourselves a favour, download the beta version and give it a try. You won't regret it.

It's all happening today; my new FX5600 Ultra card has just decided to give up the ghost. Great.

Luckily I've still got my old Ti4200 card that I hadn't got around to selling on eBay just yet, so I'm still up and running. Hopefully the FX5600 can be repaired/replaced in time for Half Life 2...

Bec just called me to say that Zak has just taken his first steps on his own. Why is it that things like this always happen when I'm not around? :)

I hope to God that Don Box isn't suggesting that he's going to be coding in his birthday suit in public!

I've come across an absolutely fabulous vertically scrolling shooter called Warning Forever which you can find here: http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/index.html#wf

The site is in Japanese so I've absolutely no idea who's written it or why, but it's a really addictive and simple game with some gorgeous effects. Class stuff.

I can't take any of the credit for the latest updates to Repton.NET; I've been totally snowed under with other work, and therefore haven't been able to do any development for the past month or so. Chris on the other hand has been doing sterling work on the project, and has implemented a large number of the things that were missing. The game is now essentially playable, with the notable exception that the Fungus doesn't 'grow' in the maps at the moment.

A word of warning however; don't attempt to enter a password - you won't get very far!

This is great news; hopefully we'll now get some decent refactoring tools available in VS.NET (something that the current IDE is sorely missing).

I knew I shouldn't have bothered. Everything that could have gone wrong last weekend went wrong (PC wise that is). My domain disappeared, I managed to screw up the DirectX rendering code for Repton.NET (just how do you screw up something as simple as that?) and then to top it all off, I installed Steam.

Whoo boy, now that was a mistake.

I fully appreciate the reasoning behind Steam, and applaud Valve for attempting to introduce an integrated patching system and so on and so on.

What I don't appreciate is an application that is clearly in the early stages of Beta development being foisted on us as though it's a completed 1.0 product. Like hell it is.

First off, I downloaded the ~600k installer and ran it. All good so far, it created a new account for me, found the existing installations of Half-Life, Counter Strike, Opposing Forces, Deathmatch Classic and Ricochet and asked me if I wanted to migrate these applications over to Steam. Well, not wanting to waste over 1Gb on repeated stuff, I said yes. It told me it was converting files, and that this "might take a few minutes". So I waited.

I got bored waiting, and put the new bunk bed together with the help of my brother in law in India's room. Oh, and nipped out for half an hour to get some replacement bolts ('cos half of them were missing).

Still waiting.

So, I went out to do a gig with the Shirley Temple Pilots in Bournemouth. Great gig, bar a slightly foreshortened version of "Sad But True" (nice one Steve!), get home at 1:00 AM (slightly pissed) and quickly look in on Steam. Still processing.

In the morning I decided that enough was enough and killed the process. I re-ran the installer, but now I'm not even being given the option to migrate all the existing files over to Steam, I'm gonna have to download each package. Bollocks. Off to FilePlanet to download the full HL+CS Steam installer. Completely remove the existing Steam install, and install using the new version. Great.

So finally, I've got Steam installed with the complete Half Life and Counter Strike files. So I went to play Half Life and.... wait for 30 minutes for even more patches to be installed. Aaaargh!

Hopefully Valve will listen to those of us who are having issues with Steam - it's too slow for a start; it has a habit of just stalling without letting you know what on earth it's doing. And please, if you're going to produce a skinned application, can you at least make sure the underlying application works first!

Is it just me, or is this the most pointless addition to memory modules yet?

Don't forget kids, the South West's most dreadful rock covers band is coming your way on Saturday 13th September. Get to The Gander in Bournemouth and be prepared to hear all your favourite songs well and truly massacred by the Shirley Temple Pilots.

If Wily E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that crap from Acme, why didn't he just order a takeaway?

Standing in a church every Sunday makes you a Christian as much as standing in a garage makes you a car.

I lifted the following paragraph from the Apache site:

On September 1st the European Commission is going to vote a revised version of the European Patentability rules. The proposed revision contains a set of serious challenges to Open Source development since regulation regarding software patents will be broadly extended and might forbid independent development of innovative (Open Source and not) software-based solutions.

It's vital for all of us in the software industry to support these petitions, whether you're in the EU or not - this sort of lunacy cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.

Please register your support with http://swpat.ffii.org/ and http://petition.eurolinux.org/.

This just has to be one of the coolest things I've seen on the 'net for a long time. Lemmings, implemented entirely in DHTML. You'll find it here. Thanks Seb for letting me know about this one!

I saw this posted over at Lambda, and had to link to it myself. Let's face it, this is the sort of rubbish the internet is great at!

It's a Flash quiz that simply asks if you can identify from ten mug shots programming language creators or human life decimators. You'll find it here.

I scored 7 out of 10...

I finally got around to taking the Flying Lesson that Bec gave me as my Christmas present. I'm glad that I waited until now, because the conditions today were absolutely perfect for flying - the horizon was visible and there was very little wind around to spook a newbie!

I flew from Compton Abbas and went down towards Bournemouth. The pictures below were taken from inside the Cessna 152 looking towards Poole Harbour - OK, they're not the best quality in the world, but I was having too much fun to worry about framing the images correctly!