STG's

Vernor Vinge is a great author. I've loved all of his books I read, and Rainbows End is no exception. Even better, it's free on the web, posted by himself. It's in HTML format but it's trivial to convert with Mobipocket Creator if you'd prefer to read it on a Palm or another device that supports Mobipocket.

I've recently finished Portal. It was much better than I expected! Well worth the price and time. Half-life Episode 2 was great too, but very short - and that was a somewhat revolting ending...

I've blogged a few days ago about the Quake Wars demo, which I really liked. Since I got the demo from Steam, I expected it would be available there and was checking every day after the boxed release (October 1th in the US, September 27th on Europe). Great news: it's now available for pre-purchase. The bad news - it's only going to be released October 9th! I imagine they are giving the stores a chance to sell the boxed release :-( Not much danger in my case - it probably will take for it to be available in Brazil. I already purchased it on Steam.

Just today I got the new LMD VCL Complete, their pack that includes everything. Since I previously had both ElPack and LMD Tools before, the actual components don't have that much of a change. The source delivery system is a different story - it's now available through SVN. That means you can get the latest development or tested releases very quickly, and then just use an included utility to assemble the packages. It's a large advantage versus the large numbers of downloads you'd normally need, although their server's speed was very nice today (topping at about 300K/s, which is MUCH better than I usually get at other components sites such as Developer Express or TMS). In theory updates should be tiny since they'd only include the actual source changes. It's not all perfect, though - demos and help aren't included, so there is a lot of stuff to install yet (Elpack, LMD, both for VCL and VCL.NET as well as some extra stuff). And for some reason (I'm pr...