In the battle of Okinawa, a small island in the Pacific ocean, over 12,000 Americans died and another 38,000 were seriously wounded.

Mind you, this was to take an island that was tiny and had a population less than part of Baghad. And we're still there today.

Luckily, Americans were a little bit tougher of skin back then.  We didn't shirk or slink away from paying a high price to do things that were important in a larger sense. 

2,000 Americans have died in Iraq over the past 3 years.  That's 1/6th as many people who died -- within the span of a few days -- in a single battle on a single island in World War II. 

Those Americans gave their lives in a cause they believed in.  In a cause that serves our country and even the rest of the world even if much of that world (those ironically many of whom were either our enemies or sat on the side-lines back in World War II) doesn't appreciate it. 

Those Americans were not sent there to find "WMD" or for "oil".  They were sent there to topple an evil, corrupt regime that had twice attacked its neighbors, had used whatever weapons it had at hand in war, was violating the cease fire from the previous war with the coaliation, and quite clearly was working its way through the so-called "Sanctions" to the day when it could restart programs to gain for itself horrific weapons to use or distribute to enemies. 

Those Americans were sent to a country that is literally in the middle of a region that is formenting people who want to exterminate not just every single American but the entire western way of life. 

Those Americans gave their lives to help put in its place a country that we hope will become democratic and representative but at the very least won't harbor terrorists who can plan at their leisure further attacks on this country.

Those Americans gave their lives as a part of a broader war on Islamic terror.  And while some don't see the connection between Iraq and Islamic militarism, the same could be said of not seeing the connection between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US invasion of French North Africa.

Luckily, the greatest generation of Americans were made of sterner stuff than what today's Americans are apparently made of. They rolled up their sleaves and went to work and made possible the world we have today where we have the luxury to hyper-analyse every combat death that occurs in the name of securing freedom and security both there and at home.

The families and friends of those 2,000 men and women can hopefully take comfort that they gave their lives in a cause that was as noble and true as any cause that warriors have fought and died in.  As an American, I want to express appreciation for their sacrifice that has helped make all of us a bit safer and helped make the world a better place.

We are hoping to sqeeze in the Metaverse support into beta 4.  Originally this was going to go in December but because we have to submit the game for ESRP rating prior to December 1, we had to get this part going sooner. So you may be able to play the game via the Metaverse right off in beta 4.

There is a pretty good chance, however, that Beta 4 will get delayed until this upcoming Tuesday to give us a little more time to tweak things and fix bugs.  There's a lot of new things coming together in this beta and it won't do anyone any good if it's unplayabily buggy.  Most of the issues are very easy to resolve, it's just the typical result of moving in big modules into place and having to deal with how they interact with others.

For instance, this week we've put a lot of time (and continue to) to deal with the computer AI building fleets.  This in turn seems to make the game unstable after awhile since the AI tends to build and eliminate fleets a lot more often than a human would.  So these are the kinds of things we have to resolve prior to beta 4.

Galactic Civilizations I didn't have many hot keys.  This time around, we want to have lots of them.

Here are some of the preliminary ones (and if we have time, we'll make this configurable -- maybe for the bonus pack).

F1 through F4 are different views of the map.

• 1 Ship List
• 2 Planet list
• 3 Research Screen
• 4 Domestic Policy
• 5 Foreign Policy
• 6 Galactic Census
• 7 Ship Design
• TAB Find next ship
• SPACE pass on current ship (give up moves)
• ENTER end turn
• ` Toggle grid lines
• Delete delete current ship
• ' Find your toughest ship
• ; Find your most powerful fleet
• G Open up Goto panel to send ship to a given destination
• X Enter Rallypoint mode
• R Bring up list of Rally Points
• P Bring up most powerful planet in your civilization
• B Build starbase with currently selected constructor
• S Sentry currently selected ship
• G Set current ship to guard
• D Bring up details for currently selected ship or the details screen on selected planet.
• + zoom in
• - zoom out
• Keypad + zoom in on mini map
• Keypad - zoom out on mini map
• Backspace toggle screens that have fold in UIs.
• Esc Options screen
• Ctrl-S Quick Save current game
• Ctrl-1 Bring up negotiation screen with Humans
• Ctrl-2 " with Drengin
• Ctrl-3 through 0 bring up negotiation screen with corresponding player
• Home brings up home planet of currently selected ship. If no ship selected, brings up your capital world.

Any others you can think of?

 

 

"

We are doing some server maintainence.  One of our non-TotalGaming.net related servers had problems yesterday so we're going through and cleaning that up.  You may see some "weird" stuff on the site today.

Last night the master database became corrupt and one of the machines had a catastrophic failure.  I kind of "perfect storm" of failure -- two bad things on two seperate servers.  For a few hours, JoeUser ceased to exist. It was the worst case scenario.

However, LUCKILY, we do daily backups on all your blogs. So this incident can at least provide some assurance that all your hard work, your thoughts and written record are being treated with respect and care.

It does mean, however, that everything from yesterday is lost.  Which is ironic since I wrote a number of blogs yesterday.

Update: Most articles from yesterday have been restored thanks to T-man!

Yesterday we had a total melt down of one of the machines and the FULL master database on another machine.  In short, everything was lost. 

Luckily, we do daily back-ups.  Had there been no backup, there'd be no more WinCustomize or forums or JoeUser. It was the most serious system failure we've ever had.  The daily backups of course mean we lost everything that happened yesterday -- orders, posts, skins, you name it. 

It's also another reason why WinCustomize subscriptions are so important.  Thanks to subscribers, we have the extra hardware to do those backups.  If we had even more subscribers, we could do real-time mirroring of these kinds of things and the melt down would not have even lost anything.  But last night, the end of WinCustomize as we knew it came very close. Thank you subscribers for having provided the funds to have the extra hardware for us to be able to do daily backups and be able to quickly bring the site back.

In the meantime, you will find that there are weird errors as some indexes are wrong and that kind of thing. We'll be trying to address that in the coming days.

Civilization IV is due out this week.  If you like Galactic Civilizations, you'll almost certainly like Civilization IV. 

IGN has some screenshots of Galactic Civilizations II beta 4.  In it, you can see a few shots of when you play out battles.

I miss summer.  I mean I really miss summer.  I didn't spend enough of it outside. But with Summer over, at least there's October. I like October because of Halloween. And in Michigan, which is where I live and work, the leaves are coming down. 

October is traditionally the start of "Skin season".  I don't know what that is. But ever since I got into skinning, October seems to be the first month where the number of cool new skins really starts to spike.  Maybe it's because people are starting to go back indoors and they unleash their creative energies.  This October has been a great time for skinning.

For example, Pixtudio is back and stronger than ever.  Alexandrie of Pixtudio releaed Noire, one of the best skins I've ever seen. Seriously. You should use this. On the same day, rising star JJ Ying released Azenis. It's a dark skin and while most dark skins are not terribly useful, Azenis is quite usable and looks fantastic.  These two skins show off the international nature of skinning -- Alexandrie is from Canada, her partner at Pixtudio, Treetog, is from Brazil, and JJ Ying is from China.  It just goes to show when we humans are working together regardless of location amazing things are possible.

Speaking of international skinning, danilloOc from Brazil released a slick little suite this month called Anion.  Pixtudio also released a very complete called Rusty Rooster. I can't remember so much cool stuff coming out in a single month since maybe the last GUI Olympics.  As I walk around the office of Stardock I have seen a lot more "new" stuff than I've seen in quite a long time.

I mean look at these icons:

They're incredible! It's just been a good month and then of course we had the big news: WindowBlinds 5 finally went into beta.  It's hard to believe that WindowBlinds 4 came out almost 3 years ago.  It's only available on Object Desktop right now but we hope the final version will be out before the end of the year.  The biggest new feature is that it can do per-pixel alpha blending on nearly all of its controls including title bars, menus, and the Start bar.   There have already been some very cool skins that have come out that take advantage of it:

StealthOS

Arrow

Rusty Rooster WB5

Azenis_SE

BlindSpot

Thunder Storm WB

Dream Land

Caprice

And that's just in the past week or two.  Now, per pixel alpha blending doesn't just mean having skins that are glassy or semi-transparent.  It can be used to have smoother looking skins. There are many types of skins in the past that simply couldn't be done because they'd look very "jaggy".  For instance, title bars that are irregularly shaped now become possible to do.  WindowBlinds 5 is still in beta and more skinning features for alpha blended borders are in the works.

Meanwhile, over in DesktopX land, things continue to grow there as well.  2006 is going to be a very interesting year for the whole desktop-eXtension world.  Yahoo bought Konfabulator and so its future we can't predict.  Great widgets keep being made for it. But it seems to be suffering the same problem that DesktopX, Kapsules, and the other widget-enablers have -- it's the same widgets over and over.  Simply put, there are only so many simple things that can be made. That is, the typical content creator is only going to put X amount of time into something that requires the user to go out and download another program in order to use.  The typical new Konfabulator widget gets around 4,000 downloads in its effective life time. That's 4 times more than DesktopX widgets typically get (so it's doing better than DesktopX is at this point).  On the other hand, a typical WindowBlinds skin of similar relative popularity will see 20,000 downloads.  Content authors, in my experience, do keep track of this stuff to a certain degree. As a skinner, I want people using my stuff.  WinCustomize puts a lot of energy into trying to have accurate download counts (some sites count views as downloads for instance).  We want to know how many people are using our creations.  Not all skinners are driven by downloads, each person has their own motivation -- the drive to simply create interesting things for oneself can be strong. 

But as with all things, there comes a point where it's work.  That's the problem widgets face.  Widgets are cool, I use them, but there's roughly only 20 different widgets (really less but being generous).  The rest are different skins on those same 20 widgets.  To go to the next level, you have to put a lot of work.  That's where gadgets come in.  Gadgets don't require a user to go and download another program.  They're stand-alone.  And with Microsoft supporting gadgets in Windows Vista (and they've promised us they will support XP too) that means gadgets could provide the opportunity for new types of things.  Or gadgets that take a popular widget concept and add immensely useful features such as the DeskNotes Gadget.  But it was in October that DesktopGadgets.com got started.  Stardock is working on a number of pretty sophisticated gadgets.  Don't expect to see dozens and dozens of gadgets on DesktopGadgets.com, while we're averaging about 15 to 20 gadgets being submitted each week, we're rejecting nearly all of them on the basis of quality or content (i.e. if they're essentially just widgets in terms of sophistication then they should just be released as widgets here on WinCustomize).

ANYWAY...

While widgets may indeed be a marketing phenomenon as opposed to being truly popular, there's no doubt that alternative desktops are popular.  Gef's Dark Professional DesktopX theme has gotten over 100,000 downloads and is the second most popular thing on WinCustomize this month.

The popularity of full-blown saved .desktop files over widgets (of all sorts) does beg the question -- do people want to download individual widgets or is the ideal desktop one in which someone has taken several of those 20 unique widgets and created a consistent, themed desktop with it that would then be part of a WindowBlinds visual style and an icon package?  For instance, I used Aero's Revenge and it is really quite slick. It's not just pretty, it's functional.

Meanwhile, over in icons, while the summer wasn't a great time for icons, the Fall has brought some renewed interest.  Next time I'll cover some of the cool icons that have come out.  It's been a pretty good month for icon packages for IconPackager as well!

The Detroit News just had an article on how the United States, and Michigan in particular, is starting to fall behind in terms of being able to produce enough qualified people with technical degrees (Physics, Math, Engineering, Computer Science, etc.).

When combined with the very restrictive H1B Visas to bring in good candidates from overseas, companies are finding themselves increasingly outsourcing for these key future markets.  We're not talking outsourcing guys to India to work in IT or in sweat shops.  We're talking core R&D, product development, etc.

Here's the article:

http://www.detnews.com/specialreports/2005/math/index.htm

Here's my little part:
http://www.detnews.com/2005/project/0510/23/S17-357568.htm