STG's

I've just finished The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown. It was quite enjoyable, and with the usual cool symbolic explanations throw all around. As usual, a couple of silly technical misconceptions, but nothing new to Dan Brown books (a hacker surprised that a traceroute fails?!?!).

I've recently got my pre-order of Red Faction Guerrilla. The game looks wonderful, and the building demolition is awesome. Too bad it locks up constantly and has severe audio stuttering problems. I couldn't possibly recommend it as it is now. I'd give it a 2/10. I'm hoping there will be patches soon.

I just watched the new Star Trek movie, after a Trekkie friend mentioned how much she liked it. It was awesome! I liked pretty much everything about it, the new actors were great, the plot gimmick to create a new timeline where everything goes, the visuals... I particularly loved the new interfaces, it was wonderful to see them, after the silly 60s look from the original movie and the LCARS style of the later series. I'd love if it became a new TV series. I don't think it will though - it's much easier to get good returns on movies, AFAIK.

Looks awesome ! I understand that some Matrox cards had some support for this - but I seriously doubt they were capable of this kind of game performance at this resolution, and it's pretty hard to find good Matrox card at a reasonable price in Brazil.

QuantZ is an interesting take on match-3 - it is done on 3D on a cube, and the spheres are subject to physics, so that as you rotate the cube, they move around on their cube faces, to other cube faces or off the cube (just for an instant, they are attracted back). As usual, there is a launcher of other colored spheres, which you must try to match. Graphics and music are great. I wasn't crazy about the gameplay, but it's worth a try if you like match-3 games.

Nation Red is a 3D top-view, zombie killing fest. It is very similar to Crimsonland , which is clearly inspired by Robotron. The 3D graphics look awesome, but I have to say I still prefer Crimsonland. The movement doesn't feel as fluid, and I found the reduced field of view to be very, very annoying. The enemy variety of Crimsonland felt better.

Broken Angels, by Richard K. Morgan, was my latest read. It is, so to say, a sequel to Altered Carbon. As someone mentioned on my blog review of Altered Carbon , the style of the book is quite different, but it does take place in the same universe, and with the same main character, Kovacs. It wasn't a bad book, but it was nowhere as good as the first. The military hardware and the action was interesting, though. The extended exploration of the Martians theme was entertaining, but it feels like their part on the story wasn't as good as it could be.

As a software author, one way to expand your user base is getting your product and/or site translated into other languages. I have done that in the past by having users translate my language files, and also by getting my main program and help translated by a professional, as well as my web site. While hard data is hard to get - it's difficult to know if a German user would have bought my software if it was only available in english - I feel it was a great investment. Changes are small over time, so the translation I paid for years ago still helps sales now. However, getting it done was quite a bit of work, specially the help files, which are surprisingly brittle after exported out of my help authoring software of the time - Helpscribble. One interesting option is ICanLocalize, which has amazing tools to help. After reading about the release of a new Help & Manual importer tool, I got around to trying their tools to translate my web site to Spanish. I'm quite impressed. Whil...

Yesterday I finished Timeshift, for PC (as always). I got it at a discount at Steam - it looks like never got to be very popular. It's easy to see why - I think they terribly fumbled their presentation of the story, not to mention the weird way the story goes. The basic story is that you are using a Quantum Suit. It not only protects you, it also allows you to travel in time at the beginning of the game, and during the game, you can slow time, stop it, or travel slightly back (time rewind). And you are going to use it to fix the timeline, which was messed up by the guy with the other Quantum Suit who decided to use his advanced tech to rule the world in the past. The suit also has an AI that monitors your environment and gives you helpful hints when danger comes - a very nice plot device. It also chooses which of the functions will be the default, so that you know what you use to solve the time puzzles. That did make some puzzles look incredibly arbitrary, being clearly made so tha...

I've just finished Implementation Patterns, by Kent Beck. It covers how to create code that costs less, is easier to modify and clearer in many everyday situations. Of course, as a Delphi programmer not every suggestion seemed useful, but overall it was quite an interesting read.

Following my read of Cybermancy, I read MythOS, by Kelly McCullough. (anyone who knows the series might notice I jumped over the 3rd book - it was only available on Mobipocket format, which is much more restrictive than eReader) It continues the stories of Raven, except that this time all of the story passes on another universe, where the gods are from the Norse mythology. Again, a very enjoyable read.