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Sunday, December 29, 2002 |
Command Prompt.NET
Saw this on Slashdot. Microsoft is looking for people to work on a next-generation command shell based on .NET:
To be delivered in the next release of Windows, it will include the attributes of competitors’ shells (e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution) plus rich features based on Windows and .NET (e.g. command discovery via .NET reflection API’s, object-based properties/methods, 1:many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete).
I occasionally daydream about what such a shell would look like, wonder what they'll come up with? Think if you type cd you'll get a drop down of directories?
10:30:46 AM 
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Wha the world needs now is a managed demoscene
Am I the only developer left who remembers Future Crew, Purple Motion, the MOD file format and Dope by Complex winning 1st place at the Gathering in 1995? Okay for those of you who have no clue I'll try to summarize. In the ten years between about 1986 and 1996 personal computers weren't quite fast enough to do lots of whizzy 3d effects. In this timeframe the demoscene emerged - hackers going straight to the metal to render polygons and other effects set to funky techno music. The advent of fast computers and 3d video cards pretty much killed the scene (Nowadays instead of having to learn all this you can just say RenderState.ShadeMode = ShadeMode.Phong). Today many of those old demos can't be run unless you have access to a 486 with a Gravis UltraSound (the preferred sound card of most demos) and sometimes a tweaked DOS boot floppy. That's too bad, because the demoscene was a really fun mix of hardcore development techniques. friendly rivalries, one-upmanship, and pure entertainment. The release of Managed DirectX 9 makes me think maybe we should try to revive the idea, and have a managed demo contest. Anyone interested? Maybe have a Managed Gathering 03? The obvious rule - your entry must be written in C# or some other managed language. Who's up for it?
1:47:31 AM
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Maybe they need to roll +5 bravery...
A few days ago I finally got to see The Two Towers, and enjoyed it, etc. etc. Tonight I was perusing a fun site www.movie-mistakes.com which has loads of trivia about various movies. There was a bit on The Two Towers that's at least tangentially related to developers:
When filming the battle of Helm's Deep the makers used a computer programme called Massive, where each person has its own "mind", making it far easier to generate huge battles, because each person can be allocated a "side", and will then react/fight accordingly, in a variety of different styles (depending on the circumstances they find themselves in), rather than having to create/program each army member individually. The first time they used this for the battle of Helm's Deep, the defenders of Helm's Deep ran away.[movie-mistakes]
1:01:31 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jason Whittington.
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