Pilot tears tail off of Airbus A300-600 by using the rudder!

Wow. This is hard to believe. Some airliners, namely the Airbus A300-600, can have their tail sections ripped off the plane if the pilot steps on the rudder too much. Being a former pilot myself, I know all about safe maneuvering speeds and that landing gear and flaps cannot be used above a certain speed. But not being able to use the rudder above certain speeds, or the tail will rip off? That is just insanity! I swear, I sometimes hate being a pilot when I have to fly commercially. I know too much. Check out the article below from Boston.com about the November 2001 crash of an Airbus A300-600 in a NY neighborhood. Apparently, the pilot kept stomping on the rudder to try to control the plane. Silly pilot, why on earth would you try to control the airplane??? (please note the sarchasm).
Boston.com

Half-life 2 goes gold! Ship date confirmed!

Hey all you fellow PC gamers out there. I heard wind of the news that Half-Life 2 has finally gone gold and a ship date has been announced! Half-Life 2 will be released to the world on November 16th, OF THIS YEAR! Not that I'm really that excited any more about this game, but I think it's surprising to see the game finally being released. For all of you disbelievers out there, read about it here

After my disappointment with Doom 3, I think I will wait on purchasing this game until I've had a chance to read the reviews and possible try out a game demo. I should have posted my reviews of Doom 3, but I found it a big waste of my time so I didn't want to waste more time by writing anything about it. Basically it was a whole lot of nothing. Just a basic shooter. So what the graphics were good. The game blows. I wish I had waited.

These days I find myself playing the multiplayer demo for Tribes: Vengeance. It's a fun and addicting game, but somewhat frustrating to those of us who are used to other FPS multiplayer games like Battlefield 1942 - my favorite game of all time (with the Desert Combat mod of course). Maybe I'll revisit BF 1942. Haven't played it in a long time.

ping: Project Ping Demo

Being an avid PC gamer, I'm very interested in learning more about game programming. The programming language that I am the most fluent in is Java. This puts me at a bit of a disadvantage as pretty much all commercial games these days are coded in C++ and Assembly Language. Since I work day to day in Java I really do not want to start playing around in C++ at home as this will really mess me up while at work as most other developers out there can attest to I'm sure. I've come across a decent beginner's tutorial on game development based on the Java language. I hope to really dig in and experiment with this game as a starting point and hope to get working on some of my own very basic games in the near future. Although, being newly married, a recent home owner, and an avid gamer, I really don't have much free time these days.

Go here to check out the Ping project at java.net.
ping: Project Ping Demo

First official blog posting - Google Desktop Search

Well, this is my first official post to my own blog. I've been pretty apprehensive to get into the whole blog phenomenon although I have been a reader of many other blogs for the past year or so. So here is my own.

Yesterday I tried out Google's new Desktop Search product. I was a bit apprehensive at first, and I still am since it still hasn't finished indexing all my emails and files yet. It's up to about 450,000 indexed documents, most of which are emails. It is a pretty nice concept. Every time you search the web with Google, matching results from your own machine will appear at the very top in a special section of the search results (much like local directory results show up, or spelling corrections) in addition to the normal web results.

Being a software engineering, I naturally am curious as to the technology involved. I haven't tried to dig in yet, but I'm not sure what I'd be able to find out. Here's a link to dowload it and try it yourself: Google Desktop

While on the topic of searching, I also tried out a new product called SearchBlox 2.0. For those Java developers out there, this product is essentially a commercialized version of the Open Source Lucene full text search engine. Lucene is a great API, but it has a very high learning curve in my opinion. I don't personally have hours and hours to write my own document indexer just to get it to the point where I can actually run a search on something, although I will some day I swear! Anyway, SearchBlox is pretty sweet! They have a free version that allows you to index up to 1000 documents (HTML, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, TXT, etc). It has built in indexers for all these document types and can crawl using HTTP or the file system. So far, HTTP crawling has been, understandably so, MUCH faster than file system crawling. I love it so far. If this is the power of Lucene, I'm going to have to check it out. Go here to check it out.