Only in Texas

I’ll give you a minute to let the full majesty of this small shopping center sink in. That’s either that safest daycare in the world, or the worst place for an insurance agent ever.

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Nice

I rarely extol the virtues of giant computer companies, except perhaps, when they give out delicious candy for free in the way nVidia has. Being a supporter of their brand of graphics cards over their competitor, ATI, when I built my last PC I opted for the then top of the line GeForce 8800 GTS 512. Time passes and nVidia buys physics card maker Ageia and their line of PhysX products. That was nice, I assumed that in the next generation we’d see integrated GPUs and PhysX chips working together. Apparently, all PhysX chips are are regular old GPUs with drivers meant to support physics rendering. Why? Because nVidia, through a driver update, just added PhysX features and support to their already existing line of cards. If you own a 8000, 9000 or new GTX 200 series card, you’ve already got the capability of having really cool physics acceleration.

nVidia released a whole host of stuff which you can find here. They’re calling it their “Force Within” pack. We get a new Forceware driver (v177.83) plus a couple game demos, fluid physics tech demos, the UT3 physics upgrade pack and a full game called Warmonger.

Like I said, I’m not one to usually heap praise on big companies, but this is pretty cool. nVidia said they were going to fully support PhysX, the gaming community and more and it seems like they’ve actually delivered.

So, if you’ve got a graphics card from the past two years, check it out. Just thought I’d pass it on.

Matt out.

The Best Part

The best part about being in charge of a whole slew of photo gear is that, should the mood strike me, I get to use said photo gear. It’s Friday, 5pm, and that means that the camera is coming home for the weekend. I’ve just got to try out that 10-22mm wide angle. Can anyone say “Skate Park”?

Muwahahaha!

Now I Know

Over the past few days I’ve installed and tested numerous CMS systems for a potential project down the road at work. Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo, SiteFrame, Typo3 and Xoops. They all fall pathetically short of WordPress. It’s not a very complicated project. A simple site that I need to make weekly updates to. Probably about 10 static pages total. There’s also the potential of a second, far more in-depth and advanced site later on. That’s why I was searching for a CMS system. It’s really pathetic that WordPress is so great in the areas of content managment, theme creation and ease of use that I’m willing to mess with more advanced plugins for that system rather than try to use one of the other systems that are designed for more “enterprise” type sites.

My problem of course is convincing hardened developers that WordPress is a viable CMS and not just a “little blog toy” as one of them tried to point out. It’ll all come back to what the client actually needs in a website in the end, but I’d much rather push for a free WordPress install with some heavy-duty plugins than a $20,000 piece of enterprise grade CMS software that no one can work with. I don’t have a staff of 100 web guys to work on something like that. I need to be able to develope a site, roll it out and make updates to it without pounding my head against a wall every time I try and publish a page.

What I really need to do is find BIG sites that run just fine off of WordPress. Something really complicated, with interactive stuff, shopping carts, photo galleries, all that stuff. If I can find a couple examples like that, then maybe I can push for WordPress when the time comes.

I should probably dig deeper into creating a theme as well, but that’s a whole other ball of wax.