I mentioned Super Elf Bowling a few entries ago. Yeah, that's fun but the game I keep coming back to is Santa Balls 2 from KewlBox.com. I thought the elf in this game was eerily similar to the elves in the bowling games. Well, apparently these guys are the authors of the original bowling games over at NStorm which, word has, they sold back in '99 and started up KewlBox.com. I gotta try some of the others: Adventure Elf and Spank the Frank to name two.
(Thanks, Dan!)
The San Jose Mercury News yesterday had this opinion column on the new Mirra personal backup server. For $399 you get a file server with an 80G disk that, according to the "review" is incredibly easy to setup. There's an app you must install on your target machines and then click to select the files you want backed up. Mirra backs those files up and constantly monitors them for changes, backing up the changes once you've made them. You can access the files stored there through the installed app and you can make them available over the Internet, again through the app. A good rundown of its features is available on the Mirra site. Langberg's opinion column seems to be more of an "oh boy, someone's finally done it!" rah-rah than a serious review. He doesn't seem to view the need for the app, for instance, as a stumbling block, maybe because Mirra's promised to remove the need for it in the future. I'm also not too sure that sharing the files over the Internet is actually a good selling point. Opening up your firewall and exposing your most valuable files isn't something that should be taken lightly, SSL and authentication notwithstanding.
A friend sent me a reference from today's Standard Edition LangaList -- he'd apparently just discovered the Daily Rotation. Well, check out my weblog entry from June 24, 2003 with the title "News, news and more news and updates and news and ..."
I didn't realize I was that far ahead of some folks.
:) :) :) :) :)
The San Jose Mercury News had a story today that LinkedIn purchased a patent, 6,175,831 that was filed by six degrees, inc. back in 1997. Unfortunately, the article didn't go into any detail of the patent itself. With the above reference, you can see for yourself.
Just came across freewebs.com today. Looks interesting. I'll have to check it out and report back.
I've first encountered Cygwin back in 1995. It's now a nearly complete Unix environment that runs on a Windows machine without replacing Windows or dual-booting. You can install a complete X11 server (XFree86), SSH, shells like bash and zsh, telnet ... pretty much whatever you might need. If you need Unix capabilities on a Windows machine it would be worth your time to check it out.
Today I received announcement of a 3270 emulator, suite3270. For those that don't know, 3270s are CRT devices that are often used on mainframes. They typically consist of a keyboard and a monitor -- no mouse. For old mainframe jockeys like myself, 3270s were a godsend, allowing us to break away from punch cards.
Secunia reports this flaw here. It's another failure that's related to use of an ActiveX component. Secunia's advice: remove the offending DLL.
I spent quite a bit of time over the holiday catching up on news and such. I've got a couple of computers here at home and Bloglines came in so handy that I've gotta plug it again. If you use multiple computers like I do then there's really no better way to stay in touch with your subscriptions. Since Bloglines is a web-based service, all of your subscriptions are maintained on their servers, allowing you to see the latest from any machine that's connected to the Internet.
And for those of you not on the RSS bandwagon yet, c'mon, get with the program! If you visit a site at least once a week, RSS can help. Look for the little orange XML tag or for something labelled "syndication" or "RSS". Grab that link and give it to Bloglines and it'll automatically hit the RSS feed about every 30 minutes looking for updates. When it find one it'll store it away for you to look at. And if your favorite sites don't do RSS, check out NewsIsFree.com and Syndic8.com. Besides that, just about every weblog has an RSS feed and you can find list upon list of those at places like weblogs.com.