HL2 Dominos Now this video over at forgetfoo looks just awesome. Someone set up a dominos course with Half Life 2... has to be seen to be believed.

How to Improve Computer Gaming A really nice article called A Gamers' Manifesto. A good read for sure, calling the gaming industry on their BS, and pointing out a lot of the areas lacking in their presentation and advertising.

It's 2005! Give me environments that realistically react to what I do! Yes, it matters."

And a better quote:

Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness.

BDay Greets to Christopher Lee A big happy birthday to Count Dooku and Saruman!

Amazon Image URLs A neat look at how to play with Amazon images through URL manipulation.

Gallery of the Absurd The GOAT, Gallery Of The Absurd - via linuxart.

More GNOME 3.0 Ideas Nigel put up some really neat looking GNOME 3.0 Storyboard. The main ideas are that

• Documents are first class objects
• Search and tagging as the interface

I'm not 100% sure of the whole "open by searching" thing, but it's nice to see some ideas being thrown around.

New Fantastic 4 Trailer Some of the same, some of the new. Fantastic Four still looks good to me, though I'm unconvinced about Jessica "grrr" Alba though, but hey, that's ok, nothing wrong with eye candy :)

The Best of E3 Trailers Random foo has a nice summary with links to the best of E3. Ghost Recon 3 is sure to make Yohimbe happy and there were a couple of others that I hadn't seen before.

E3 PS3 Tech Demos More E3 Goodness.... not HD like the fileshack ones are, but nonetheless, these are impressive. The Unreal 3 demo (very bottom of the list) is probably my favorite, though they are all indicationsof the absolute coolness that'll arrive with the PS3. Via < a href="http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Cool_Gear/ps3">Jimmac.

Joy of Tech on Episode 3 Bwahahahahaha - The Joy of Tech! on Episode 3.

HD Enemy Territory Quake Wars Footage Shacknews has HD Footage of a bunch of games at E3, with the most important to me being the new Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, team/squad based quake game based on the Doom3 engine. Except that it's videotaped, all I have to say is holy shit, it looks amazing. How long till 2006 again? Anyway, not all the HD footage is public, you have to be a mercury member to get it, but the ET:QW video is public (as is the other really important one, the booth babes video :)

Quake 4 Trailer Cool, I found a trailer for Quake IV on the e3 page on gametrailers.com. Looks very sweet!

Life at Skywalker Ranch A neat entry on the Skywalker Ranch. Best of all is this pic of Chewie and his posse. Via jwz.

Help Request - Tomcat with SSL dying Hey all, hopefully someone who reads this can help me out. I've currently got a site with Apache Tomcat 5.0.28 on it, set up with it's own SSL cert (not self signed) and this works properly most of the time. However, sometimes, randomly the SSL connector will die. The website will still be available through http, so the software is continuing to chug along, but the https is dead, so the service has to be restarted. This is getting very frustrating for both myself and the customer because we have no problems with this on other sites, and there's nothing on their server (windows 2000 server) that is odd or different enough that it would cause problems. Anyone have any thoughts?

Some new Id Screenshots So these screenshots make me horny. First up is one from Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, something just announced from the guys who did enemy territory.

�For years, fans have enjoyed incredible battles on the Strogg home planet; but with ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS, we�re taking players back to the war that started it all � the Strogg invasion of Earth � where the choice is to fight with the humans or the alien Strogg in a massive campaign for survival,� said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. �Like all great id Software games, ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS unites bleeding-edge technology, a fantastic universe, and meticulously balanced gameplay to deliver an engrossing and futuristic gaming experience.�

Second is a sexy new screenshot from the sometime when it's ready quake 4.

Most Anticipated Games at E3 IGN picks their most anticipated games coming to E3 this year. The only one on their list that excites me is FEAR, but also mentioned is Call of Duty 2 and the next in the Unreal Tournament series. Well, that and Duke Nukem When^wForever (which quite frankly is nothing more than a big joke at this point I think, kudos to 3drealms for sticking with it (assuming they are), but unless they have something amazing it'll be another Diakatana (IMHO). Of course, they can't throw away what, 10 years of code either....

PVP Does Star Wars This has to be the funniest strip ever.

Nifty Flash Clock Hat tip to Wil who pointed to a pretty cool flash clock thingy. Took me a few minutes to figure out what it was when I first went to the page, then I realized I couldn't move time forwards or backwards by myself (.... yet.... ).

Narnia Trailer Via Ain't it Cool News, a link to the The Chronicles of Narnia trailer! I'm still waiting for it to download, but according to AICN, it's pretty good.

Another Funny Episode 3 Trailer Yet another take on a dream version of Episode III. Very funny :)

HardOCP Test x64 Game Performance An interesting article looking at games running under Windows XP x64 edition on an Athlon 64. The results show that at this point, there's no immediate advantage, but as 64bit CPUs get more common, and drivers are re-written with 64bit code, it definately can't hurt.