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July 2009 Archives

San Diego Comic-Con '09

I spent all day Sat­ur­day in the San Diego Con­ven­tion Cen­ter, at­tend­ing Comic-Con with my brother. Once again, an amaz­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.

The first thing we did was make a bee line to the SAE/FSM booth, where I picked up a copy of the Bat­tlestar Galac­tica Sea­son 4 sound­track. After that was done, we took a quick walk around the rest of the ex­hibit hall. This is a pretty damned big ex­hibit hall, span­ning the en­tire bot­tom floor of the con­ven­tion cen­ter. With all the peo­ple there to push through, it takes about 10 min­utes to walk from one end to the other.

While walk­ing around the hall I hap­pened to find Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, with cover art done by friend Cyril Van Der Hae­gen. I men­tioned this to the guy be­hind the counter, but he just feigned in­ter­est hop­ing I would buy it! Oh well.

After that I went look­ing for the Oni Press booth, where I bought my brother the first Scott Pil­grim book. He fin­ished read­ing it be­fore we left (he was not so in­ter­ested in Ray Brad­bury) so we went down to the floor again and he bought him­self the next few books in the se­ries. With any luck, I'll have got my brother hooked on graphic nov­els! I also went to the Top Shelf booth hop­ing to pick up a copy of Blan­kets but they were all out.

The first panel we at­tended was for Dune, with Brian Her­bert and Kevin J. An­der­son. They were dis­cussing their lat­est novel The Winds of Dune and com­ment­ing on the process of mak­ing a new book every year. I must admit, I have read many of the new Dune books and al­though they aren't Frank Her­bert ma­te­r­ial, I have en­joyed most of them ( Sand­worms of Dune being a no­table ex­cep­tion for hav­ing a very shal­low plot and in­vok­ing sev­eral dei ex machina).

After that we headed back over to the SAE/FSM booth to get the CDs signed by Bear Mc­Creary. We were first in line! At the same time, Bryan Lee O'Mal­ley (au­thor of Scott Pil­grim) was sign­ing at the Oni Press booth—we went over there af­ter­ward but the line was so long that we didn't care to try for it. The Bioshock 2 booth was small—ba­si­cally a small veiled closet with a game­play trailer play­ing for 5-6 peo­ple at a time. But that trailer made the game out to look pretty awe­some. You play the first big daddy, the only one with free will. You can take air­locks to go out­side of Rap­ture into the ocean. You now make the choice to ei­ther har­vest or adopt lit­tle sis­ters. Adopt­ing them seems to store them in­side your suit some­where, it wasn't too clear on that. You can take them out to have them har­vest adam from cer­tain bod­ies. While har­vest­ing, you need to guard them from hoards of splicers. Then comes some­thing new—your lit­tle sis­ter says "Uh oh, I don't think big sis wants me to play with you any­more", and in comes the big sis­ter—these are very quick, su­per-ag­ile en­e­mies that pos­sess telekine­sis.

The sec­ond panel we at­tended was that of Ray Brad­bury. He talked of his fas­ci­na­tion of space ex­plo­ration and walk­ing on the moon for the first time. Per­haps most in­ter­est­ingly, he claimed to have total re­call of his en­tire life. He said he was a 10 month baby, and de­vel­oped hear­ing and sight within the womb. He claims his mem­o­ries go back to being in the womb and after birth.

The final panel was for Human Tar­get, the new TV se­ries from Fox. In the show, our main hero (Christo­pher Chance) gets hired by rich peo­ple to solve any prob­lems or threats against them. He is a very in­tel­li­gent de­tec­tive, im­per­son­ator, and all-around body­guard. It stars Mark Val­ley as Christo­pher Chance, Jackie Earle Haley as Guer­rero, and Chi McBride as Win­ston, with the score done by Bear Mc­Creary. We got to screen the pilot be­fore a short Q&A with the stars and pro­duc­ers.

Human Tar­get has some pretty awe­some ac­tion scenes, pretty sim­i­lar to the Bourne se­ries. It is some of the best ac­tion I've seen on TV for as long as I can re­mem­ber. The act­ing is stel­lar, and the score sounds some­where be­tween Caprica and The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles. The char­ac­ters have a light quirk­i­ness sim­i­lar to Push­ing Daisies. The show is being billed as a pro­ce­dural with a light sprin­kling of se­r­ial, which is pretty typ­i­cal for Fox. They want to give you a new ac­tion movie every week. Un­for­tu­nately, the pilot had a lot of faults that I hope they steer clear of in the se­ries.

For one thing, the char­ac­ters are too flaw­less. The main char­ac­ters—all an­ti­heroes it seems—al­ways know ex­actly what to say, have a per­fect plan, and im­me­di­ately know ex­actly what to do to keep the plan on track (pun!) from any curve­balls. Not once did it show an im­per­fec­tion, and I had a hard time be­liev­ing or re­lat­ing to them be­cause of it.

An­other prob­lem I saw was with Guer­rero—he had no in­tro­duc­tion, and just sort of im­posed him­self on the story. He is a com­puter hacker, but it never re­ally showed that process. Most of his scenes were just quick cuts to him re­veal­ing some new in­for­ma­tion that he hacked off screen.

I had planned to meet some friends while I was there, but that was a pretty big fail­ure all around. One didn't pick up his phone. An­other didn't wake up until re­ally late and my phone died in the mid­dle of a con­ver­sa­tion with him. The one guy I was able to meet I didn't do any­thing with be­cause he spent the whole day play­ing D&D.

The BBC Amer­ica booth fea­tured a lot of Doc­tor Who trin­kets and ap­parel, with lots of ad­ver­tis­ing for the new Torch­wood mini-sea­son Chil­dren of Earth(which is pretty good, by the way—go watch it!). There was an awe­some life-sized Dalek on dis­play.

We spent the two hour ride home lis­ten­ing to the Bat­tlestar CD, and it didn't dis­ap­point!

Windows 7 is RTMed

After a week of spec­u­la­tion, it's fi­nally been con­firmed. Today, 7600 was signed off as the final RTM build for Win­dows 7.

Fea­ture-wise, Win­dows 7 is a com­pelling evo­lu­tion. It fixes a lot of the is­sues peo­ple had with Vista and adds in a num­ber of great user-, it-, and de­vel­oper-fo­cused fea­tures. Things like Di­rec­t2D and GDI im­prove­ments, User Mode Sched­ul­ing, im­proved NUMA sup­port, im­proved con­cur­rency, SSD sup­port, and im­proved power man­age­ment will all work to­gether to pro­vide higher per­for­mance com­pared to pre­vi­ous OSes. Li­braries, greater mul­ti­me­dia sup­port (such as AAC and AVC), mouse ges­tures, Media Cen­ter, and a com­pletely re­designed taskbar pro­vide a greater user ex­pe­ri­ence. I think this is def­i­nitely the best Win­dows to date -- bet­ter than XP, and bet­ter than Vista.

Test­ing Win­dows 7 was a very frus­trat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. In con­trast to pre­vi­ous betas where we got a reg­u­lar stream of beta builds to test, in Win­dows 7 we got only two builds, Beta 1 and the RC. A lot of us ex­pe­ri­enced our bugs being set as not re­pro­ducible in in­ter­nal builds, with no way to test if that were true. Worse yet, shortly after the RC came out many of us had a lot of bug re­ports dis­ap­pear when Mi­crosoft told us to not re­port any bugs that didn't cause the OS to blue­screen or fail in­stalling—so there may well be a large num­ber of un­fixed cos­metic and us­abil­ity is­sues in the RTM.

In­stead, Mi­crosoft cre­ated a much smaller team of spe­cial testers called Test Pi­lots who, along with TAP part­ners, would be the ones to get intrim builds and pro­vide the ma­jor­ity of the use­ful feed­back. I'm not sure who this team was made up of, but I would guess they are testers from past betas who chose to de­vote most of their wak­ing hours to test­ing.

This trig­gered some­thing I'd never ex­pected to see—some­what of a re­volt among testers who felt that their feed­back was doing noth­ing. Morale went down, bug re­ports stopped com­ing in, and a lot of heated dis­cus­sion hap­pened be­tween testers. Even the die-hard testers re­al­ized some­thing was wrong, some of them feel­ing the need to mark their dis­cus­sions to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them as a "proud" tester.

Some be­lieve Steve Sinof­sky (who re­placed Jim Allchin as the head of the Win­dows di­vi­sion) is the rea­son for this total re­struc­tur­ing of the Win­dows beta, but as far as I know noth­ing of the sort has been con­firmed. Ei­ther way, with Mi­crosoft seem­ingly frus­trated at our per­for­mance and our frus­tra­tion at not being able to test prop­erly, it feels like we were of lit­tle use this time around de­spite sub­mit­ting a large amount of bugs. I would not be sur­prised if the tech beta gets scrapped en­tirely for Win­dows 8.

C++1x loses Concepts

Bjarne Strous­trup and Herb Sut­ter have both re­ported on the ISO C++ meet­ing in Frank­furt a week ago, in which the much-her­alded fea­ture "con­cepts" were re­moved from C++1x.

Con­cepts are a pow­er­ful fea­ture aimed at im­prov­ing over­load­ing (ba­si­cally, re­mov­ing the extra work in using things like it­er­a­tor cat­e­gories) and mov­ing type check­ing up the lad­der so that more rea­son­able error mes­sages can be pro­duced when a de­vel­oper passes in the wrong type (think a sin­gle error line in­stead of mul­ti­ple pages of tem­plate crap). Ap­par­ently the fea­ture was a lot less solid than most of us thought, with a huge amount of in­ter­nal ar­gu­ing within the com­mit­tee on a lot of the fun­da­men­tal fea­tures of it. It seems that while most agreed con­cepts were a good idea, no­body could agree on how to im­ple­ment them.

I'm def­i­nitely dis­ap­pointed by this, but I'm also glad they chose to re­move con­cepts in­stead of fur­ther de­lay­ing the stan­dard, or worse putting out a poorly de­signed one. In­stead, it seems like there is hope for a smaller C++ up­date to come out in 4-5 years that adds a more well thought out con­cepts fea­ture. There are plenty of other C++1x lan­guage fea­tures to be happy about for though, like vari­adic tem­plates, rvalue ref­er­ences, and lambda func­tions!

You may no­tice I've been say­ing C++1x here in­stead of C++0x—that's be­cause it's pretty ob­vi­ous to every­one now that we won't be get­ting the next C++ stan­dard in 2009, but more likely 2011 or 2012. Just in time for the end of the world!

Street Fighter IV rocks on PC

Street Fighter IV came out a few days after I left to visit fam­ily and I've been chomp­ing at the bit to play it ever since. I came back home yes­ter­day, and it was the sec­ond thing I did after step­ping off the plane (the first being grab­bing some fish tacos at El Siete Mares).

Hav­ing played the ar­cade and 360 ver­sions, I knew what to ex­pect. You get a lot of your fa­vorite old char­ac­ters, in­clud­ing all the orig­i­nals from Street Fighter II and in­tro­duc­ing four new to this game. Game­play is a lot like Street Fighter III, with a big focus on strat­egy and the abil­ity to pull off dev­as­tat­ing but fin­ger-twist­ing com­bos. A new fea­ture I re­ally like is a chal­lenge mode that teaches you the spe­cial moves and com­bos your char­ac­ter can do, which re­ally helps when you're try­ing to learn how to use one of the new char­ac­ters or just re­fresh­ing your­self on an old one.

The only part still miss­ing is the World Tour mode of the home edi­tions of Street Fighter Alpha 3. As you fought through the ros­ter, the points you get would let you level up. This let you up­grade your char­ac­ter to shift be­tween a focus of power or de­fense, and let you se­lect power-ups that let you do longer and more com­plex com­bos. It cre­ated a more un­fair form of game­play com­pared to Ar­cade mode and prob­a­bly would have been too un­bal­anced for com­pet­i­tive game­play, but it was still a lot of fun and would have been great to have in IV.

One thing I was wor­ried about was how good the game would run on my sys­tem—from past ex­pe­ri­ence, games ported from con­sole to PC tend to run amaz­ingly slug­gish. With a sigh of re­lief, I put those wor­ries to rest when I saw the game not skip a beat when run with all the set­tings maxed out. The game even has a spe­cial PC-spe­cific set­tings screen with loads of ren­der­ing tweaks in­clud­ing the new Ink, Wa­ter­color, and Pos­ter­ize vi­sual styles.

I've been hav­ing a lot of fun in IV be­tween all the var­i­ous modes of play. It doesn't top Alpha 3 as my fa­vorite of the Street Fighter se­ries, but it's up above every­thing else!

I'm still alive

Flu cleared up ear­lier this week. It did a real num­ber on my lungs but oth­er­wise I'm all set for Comic-Con in a week!

Swine Flu ftl

Yes­ter­day I went to to the doc­tor's of­fice and was di­ag­nosed with the flu—re­ally sucks, es­pe­cially since I am away from home vis­it­ing fam­ily.