Just got back from Las Vegas this weekend. Spent most of the time there walking around the strip, trying out different restaurants, and chatting with friends.
I'd have liked to attend DefCon, but I was only there for one day of the actual proceedings, Friday. Not worth the $125 for one day. I'll get notes from one of my friends who was there.
It's been interesting watching the news stories generated by the conference - the French journalists who hacked the wi-fi (probable use of cache poisoning) and the injunction against the Charlie Card presentation. The ironic thing was that after the injunction, the confidential PDF showing the presentation's findings was linked in the news feeds. I just read over it. It would have had a much smaller awareness footprint without the injunction.
On a different subject, I've been learning about Java Monkey Engine (JME) recently. A combination of that and Blender seems to be the proper toolset to get me into making simple 3D games. I've been monkeying around with the blender exports, trying to get models of different formats loaded into JME, only to find that python support isn't currently in my Blender install. Bother. Only figured this out after trying to run some code I pulled off a forum that loads multiple formats using one class. Ran it around ten times, putting in various error output statements, before realizing that the problem wasn't in the code, but in the blender export.
JME is extremely fast/efficient, which is tremendous in regards to the fact that it was written in Java. In the past, everything I've tried with 3D programming and Java has been painfully slow.
In any case, hopefully I can get past all the initial tutorials and familiarizing myself with the basics. I've got high hopes for JME, the license doesn't seem draconian, the source is open and easily downloadable from cvs. It's got a companion physics system and should be easy to integrate with the DarkStar networking project.
