E3 News, RSS Po'tal

by Mike Shea on 15 May 2003

Lots of E3 goodness. Slashdot has been keeping a good log of the hot games they got their hands on. Here's some reviews of Xbox, Playstation 2, and Game Cube games.

With the release of the new Playstation 2 including networking and progressive scan output coming in June, the current PS2 is being sold for $180. In response, the Xbox also dropped its price to $180. A better move would be to include the Xbox Live headset and a year of play for free along with two live-enabled games. They should do this before the Christmas season.

Doom 3 was confirmed for Xbox for about the fiftieth time. There are trailers of Doom 3 floating around but they're hard to get a hold of with all the network traffic.

Matrix Reloaded starts today. I've kept away from just about all the spoilers I could and have tickets for a 3pm show. There is already a review by Ebert with 3.5 stars. Enter the Matrix is also getting released for Xbox today as well.

I built a new RSS based portal perl script called "po'tal". You create a list of RSS files to watch, it builds a page out of them. The page self-caches and reloads any feeds if they are over 30 minutes. This is a more efficient method than a cronjob that keeps feeds up to date whether people read them or not. It is a single file with very little configuration and no database needs. Just some Perl modules including CGI, XML:RSS and LWP::Simple. I'm still dorking with it so I can't guarantee the link will always work.