Here is a summary of the update made:

Final, June 1, 1999
-------------------

Egads, how rumors fly so quickly and brazenly.  And how scary that they are
often so close to the truth and yet so far. :-)

To make a long story short, I'm leaving id.

My work at id has been a pivotal and important part of my life.  I've learned
a lot about programming, team work, and dealing with being in a position of
high visibility.  Even better, I've made some really good friends.  The owners
here have given me a great opportunity to advance myself both professionally
and personally and they've rewarded me far better than expected in the process.
This is a once in a lifetime gig, and will mark one of the most significant
periods in my life.

For all these things and more I am hugely appreciative to Kevin, John, and
Adrian.  I cannot emphasize enough what kind of a privilege and learning
experience it has been working here and, specifically, working with John.  The
type of talent, genius, and hard work he has demonstrated is the kind of thing
you see once in a generation, and I feel privileged to have been able to
work with someone of his caliber.

The team here consists of some of the most talented people I have ever 
worked with, and it was one hell of a ride working with so many people that
simply will not accept anything but the best from you or them.  These
guys have done a stellar job with Quake2 and Quake3 -- which will OWN the
first person deathmatch market -- and going forward, I expect even bigger
and better things from this crew.

And of course -- the fans.  You guys and gals rock.  I may have had my
disagreements with some of you in the past, but most of all, if you're
flaming at me, it's because you care, and I'd much rather have you folks
argue with me than not give a damn.

Crap, I'm getting all teary eyed and shit, so instead of turning this into
some James Cameron acceptance speech, let me wrap up.

I will probably remain here another week or two cleaning up loose odds and
ends, getting things transfered over cleanly, and saying my goodbyes.  For 
business stuff, if you are an IHV your interim point of contact will be 
Graeme (zaphod@idsoftware.com).  I expect that I will continue to receive 
e-mail here for a bit, so I will start forwarding relevant e-mails to the 
appropriate parties.

There is no sinister reason for my departure, it's actually an age old 
story: I got an offer from another company that, quite simply, I could not
refuse.  Later this week a press release will be issued announcing my new
position, and I'm sure some of you will not be surprised when you see where
I've ended up. :-)

Signing off,

Brian Hook
 

QERadiant is FREE. It is based on the source code released by id software for QE4 (the editor they used to make Quake2).

Now I'm a BSP junky myself, but they say QERadiant is a good mapping toy.... Check out to see yourself: http://www.qeradiant.com/

The Australian Broadcasting Authority will investigate complaints from Internet users about Web sites and order Australian content providers to take down illegal, violent, pornographic or offensive pages. 

If pages are hosted overseas. Internet service providers (ISPs) will be asked to block access to the pages if "technically feasible". Fines of up to A$27,500 (US$17,919) per day will be imposed on ISPs if they do not remove access to illegal or highly offensive material on their service. 

Read more here: http://singapore.cnet.com/briefs/news/asia/19990528bo.html

Sounds good to me...  Hit the Generations page for more details and downloads. http://www.planetquake.com/generations/

While Id has been supporting linux since the Doom days, I have not personally
been much of a linux user -- it was always ddt or zoid doing the actual coding
and testing.  Every year or so I would install a linux distribution and play
around with it for a few days, but I would always leave feeling that it was
still pretty crude (UI wise) compared to the NEXTSTEP UI I was used to, or
even what I had used on other commercial unix workstations and windows.

There have always been a ton of reasons to like linux, but the user
interface was enough of an issue that I couldn't buy into it completely.

The gnome user environment in Red Hat 6.0 is finally at a level that I
consider it a valid alternative to commercial desktop environments.  Overall,
its still not as smooth, consistant, or complete as windows or the mac, but
is does have its strong points, and things seem to be progressing quite
rapidly.

Its still not something you would give to a purely casual computer user,
but I won't be surprised if even that changes in a couple years.

CodeWarrior for linux is also a significant aspect of my enjoyment.  Its
a sort of crappy 1.0 port with a lot of little issues, but the editor works
well enough, which is the important thing for me.  I have never been able
to stand vi or emacs for long enough to become proficient in them.

The code that I have been playing with most is the matrox g200 GLX driver.

Matrox is the first of the major 3D chip vendors that has had the guts to
publicly release register level documentation for their 3D chips.

An accelerated X windows OpenGL driver has been put together with this by
building on top of the existing Mesa and GLX projects.

The cool part is that this driver is completely open source.  I downloaded
the project code, browsed through it a bit, and changed two lines of code to
fix the bug.  That RULES.