* A "Track Urls" option is added to the System menu in Channel/Query windows. This option auto-opens websites as they are mentioned in a conversation in those windows. 
* Your away status is now shown in the Status window titlebar. 
* The date logfile names option now uses the full 4-digit year. 
* The line "Session Time:" is now output to log files at midnight as marker for log files that are open for a long time. 
* You can easily ignore specific file types with a new option in the DCC/Options dialog. This makes mIRC ignore any DCC Sends which match the specified filenames/types, like *.exe, *.com or *.ini files.

* A new "Lock" section is added in the File/Options/General dialog. It allows you to lock mIRC, disable various features, etc. If you hold down the Control key when you minimize mIRC, it will ask you for a password when you try to restore the window. 
 
* The message highlight feature is highly improved. It is now possible to add individual highlight matches each with its own settings. You can specify the highlight colour, add sounds, and add a flash message.

Hit the mIRC page for more information and downloads: http://www.mirc.com/

id was a great experience for me, and I cannot emphasize that enough. But at id I had a specific role to play, and that was as a supporting programmer to John Carmack. There is nothing wrong with this, since that is what I was hired to do, but at some point a programmer really lusts to be in a position where they can exert more influence on the technical direction of a company. In effect, I wanted more responsibility, and at id asking for that kind of responsibility would have been like playing for the Chicago Bulls and bitching at Michael Jordan to pass the ball more. John Carmack is, quite simply, the most complete and competent game programmer of our generation. End of story. There wasn't much room for me to grow comfortably in that environment. At Verant I will be able to contribute immediately, and with a bigger impact than I ever had at id. 

Tis a sad thing, but I still won't play Everquest till it's free...

As of June 7th 1999 I will be working for Ensemble Studios.  If anyone cares to reach me there i assume my email addy will be murphy@ensemble.com.
Otherwise, this is my farewell to the "Quake community" and first person shooters, plan files, and whatever else it all entails.  Dont' talk about me when i leave the room.......

Okay.  Wow.  The Linux community has far exceeded any kind of expectations I had on feedback!  I've been blown away.

Mike Warfield and Mark Hazen helped me out on the Samba timestamp problem.
It seems RH 6.0 is compiled with a special fix for mounting Win95 drives,
but that causes issues with NT and Win98 drive mounts.  The solution is to
recompile the kernel.

Several people helped me out with the compile of smbmount.c, and in the end
I got that going by adding a #define NR_OPEN 1024 at the beginning of that
code.

On the email front, and I think this is one of the ongoing gating issues to
true corporate use of Linux.  A lot of people use VMWare to run Win32 apps
that have no equivalent in Linux land yet.  Out of them all, XEmacs + VM
seems to be the most stable/complete solution, and perhaps that will make
it's way to my desktop, but I don't see that making it way onto everyones.

It seems to me that if someone wrote a bunch of Java apps using the Swing
UI we could have very nice cross platform tools that worked in every
OS we had to boot in the office.

More than anything, I'm just blown away by how positive the community is.

Some reasonable messages have convinced me that a single immediate jump after landing may be important to gameplay.  I'll experiment with it.

Strafe jumping is an exploitable bug.  Just because people have practiced hard to allow themselves to take advantage of it does not justify it's existance.  When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way.

In the absense of powerups or level features (wind tunnels, jump pads, etc), the game characters are supposed to be badasses with big guns.  Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sigourney Weaver don't get down a hallway by hopping like a bunny rabbit.

This is personal preference, but when I play online, I enjoy it more when people are running around dodging, rather than hopping.

My personal preference just counts a lot. :-)

btw, here are the current weapon effects:

* gauntlet: 50 pts, 400 msec / punch
* machinegun: 10 pts, 100 msec / shot
* shotgun: 11 pellets of 10 each, 1000 msec / shot
* rocket launcher: 100 pts direct hit, or 100 pts splash damage falling off over 120 world units, 800 msec / shot
* plasma gun: 20 pts direct hit or 15 pts splash damage over 15 units, 100 msec / shot
* railgun: 100 pts, 1500 msec / shot
* lightning gun: 8 pts, 33 msec / trace, max range 768 units
* grenade launcher: 100 pts direct hit, or 100 pts splash over 150 units, 800 msec / shot.
* bfg: 40 pts instant splash damage over 100 units, 100 msec / shot
* flamethrower: to be determined, but short range / wide angle

Splash damage is calculated from the edge of the player's box, unlike
quake1, where it was calculated froom the player's origin.

Oh come on John, a direct hit from a Rocket and Rail doing the same damage??? Why the hell would anyone bother to even use the Railgun?

2).  Jose has 2 ounces of cocaine. If he sells an 8 ball to
     Antonio for $320 and 2 grams to Juan for $85 per gram,
     what  is the street value of the rest of his hold?

3).  Rufus pimps 3 hos. If the price is $85 per trick, how
     many tricks per day must each ho turn to support
     Rufus's $800 per day crack habit?

4).  Jerome wants to cut the pound of cocaine he bought
     for $40,000 to make 20% profit. How many ounces
     will he need?

5).  Willie gets $200 for a stolen BMW, $150 for stealing a
     Corvette, and $100 for a 4x4. If he steals 1 BMW,
     2 Corvettes and 3 4x4's, how many more Corvettes must
     he have to steal to have $900?

More to come!

Being from S. Florida....this test sounds all to familiar....right John M.?

Good:     Your wife's not talking to you
Bad:      She wants a divorce
Ugly:     She's a lawyer

Good:     The postman's early
Bad:      He's wearing fatigues and carrying an AK47
Ugly:     You gave him nothing for Christmas

Good:     Your daughter got a new job
Bad:      As a hooker
Ugly:     Your coworkers are her best clients
Way ugly: She makes more money than you do

Good:     You're son is dating someone new
Bad:      It's another man
Ugly:     He's you're best friend

Good:     You're wife is pregnant.
Bad:      It's triplets
Ugly:     You had a vasectomy five years ago.

Brian is leaving, and I just want to wish him well.  He shall be missed.  We're
not going to be bringing anyone else in during Quake3 development.

Since then I've shifted to Linux (RedHat 6.0) as my major desktop.  No more
Win32!  My questions to the techies amongst you are:

        - we've had issues with Linux machines randomizing timestamps on Win32
          filesystems when we use smbmount to mount NT servers.  How do we fix
          this?  I'm unable to get smbmount to compile in the Samba 2.04b (it
          errors out with a bad identifier -- NR_OPEN).

        - the email client situation is not quite on par with Win32.  Netscape
          seems the nicest, but KMail, Balsa, and others I've looked at seem
          to be in active development and not quite ready for solid use.  Is
          this the case?  I like Outlook type interfaces over Pine type 
          interfaces.

I looked online, usenet, and other misc. mailing lists, but wanted to see
what real world people out there are using and doing.

The most up-to-date info about me, games, cool toys, etc can be found at http://www.onethumb.com/

* From Betanews:
They want a windows clone distribution and OS. I do not. They don't believe users really count - corporates and "partners" count and what they percieve as the "business world that wants an exact windows clone" counts.

The Enlightenment site: http://www.enlightenment.org