Day: April 27, 2004

Fractal Terrains Pro

One of the things I don’t write about often here is my obssession with world building — creating fantasy worlds and obssessively filling in the details. One of the favorite software products I use is ProFantasy’s excellent Fractal Terrains Pro which was recently upgraded to include a number of long asked-for features.

Fractal Terrains is designed to make it easy to create realistic pseudo-Earth like planets. The old version was pretty cool, but the new version takes it a step further. The software now allows users to export maps in several new formats (hey, everyone should have a 6 way sinusoidal projection of their fantasy world!).

It also finally does river networks and allows for simulating planetary bombardment from extra-terrestrial objects (think craters).

And, of course, everything can be exported so that it can be used in ProFantasy’s line of mapping tools centered around Campaign Cartographer Pro.

Toshiba’s 100gb 2.5″ Drive

Toshiba apparently is going to be first to market with a 100gb 2.5″ drive. Not only will that be the largest capacity 2.5″ hard drive, but apparently the drive will also be significantly queter, use less power and have increased shock resistance compared to current 80gb 2.5″ hard drives.

That should be impressive, as my ears can barely register any sound from my 2.5″ 80gb hard drive when it’s going full bore.

Still, it’s frankly disappointing to see how slowly 2.5″ drives are increasing in capacity. It’s nice to see 100gb drives, but how long am I going to have to wait for 200gb 2.5″ drives to become available?

Of course since desktops have dominated computer sales, R&D has tended to focus on improving 3.5″ drives. But with laptop sales taking an increasing chunk of computer sales, that could change and spur more development into 2.5″ drives.

There’s an article here speculating about companies producing enterprise 2.5″ hard drives, specifically SCSI implementations of such drives, but there higher capacities tend to be not as important as other factors.

So it looks like the 200gb 2.5″ drive is going to take a while to make it to market.

Mozilla/Gnome Alliance?

Seth Dillingham observes that Mozilla and Gnome are considering an alliance/merger/whatever. Like Seth, I think this is a fascinating idea.

I’ve been thinking a lot of the future of open source software in general lately. If you’d asked me a couple years ago, I’d have dismissed the idea of runnig Linux — that’s the Unix OS that’s for uber geeks, not average users. But then I woke up recently and realized that Open Source software has overtaken most of my major software tasks. I’m running Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, Miranda for IM, etc.

So I’m running all this Open Source software on top of Windows XP when the obvious question hits me — how much longer until I can run everything on top of Linux?

Unfortunately, the answer is still probably “not very soon,” but that day appears much closer than it did just a couple years ago.

Burn Bush in Effigy — That’s Foot Stompin’ Funny

Leave it to Dave Winer to make an bizarre post finding humor in burning George W. Bush in effigy,

This evening after Rebecca’s talk, a bunch of us got together to laugh about burning George Bush in effigy. Actually I did most of the laughing. We thought that might play well on Al Jazeera. See, not everyone in America is crazy. Some people are rational. I know that Hannity will be there along with Rush Limbaugh calling us liberals. I anticipated that. I’m going to get a hard hat and a baseball bat and kick some reactionary butt. We’re going to chase them down the street until they admit that we’re bigger and stronger than they are. No more Mr Nice Liberal Guy.

Oh yeah, Winer’s quite the example in rationality there.

Brian On War

Interesting — I received an e-mail earlier today from a publisher interested in reprinting this article in a volume of opposing essays about war. That’s the second or third time that’s happened to me, and it’s always some article that didn’t make much of an impression on me after I wrote it and that I’ve long since forgotten about (I had to re-read it just to remember what the heck I was thinking back that far).