Thursday, December 29, 2005

Patent trolls

Ars Technica points out a patent troll who has set their eyes on Google. This is worst then the other company who tried to get Google to pay for the use of the gmail name in the UK since this company does nothing but to sue companies hoping that those companies would settle.

DVD burner

I went shopping for a DVD writer yesterday and came home with a Plextor drive for about $80 (with $20 rebate). It's amazing how cheap these drives have gotten in a couple of years. I remember them used to cost $400+ (discs themselves also costing a fortune), but now many notebooks have it as a standard option. With ever growing storage requirements, CDs are definitely getting feeling the space pinch. Even linux distributions are now coming on 3-4 CDs!

Installing the drive was straight forward. I changed the setting for the drive to be a slave on the secondary IDE since I already had a CDRW/DVD combo drive as the primary then slide the drive into the bay. This was the first time I've opened my desktop since I bought it, so I took some time to clean out the dust that has accumulated in there. Things has sure gotten easier. Just slide in the drive into the mounting bracket and turn it on. I remember in the past having to make sure the cables reached then making sure to download the correct drivers before the OS will recognize it.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Windows on USB

For linux (and windows too), there is Knoppix, but I ran across this article about getting Windows XP to boot off a USB flash drive. I haven't tested it yet, but might be worth having around.

SCRUM in Gaming

I didn't expect an article in Business Week to talk about programming methodologies, so I found this article to be interesting.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Yahoo...

I took a look at my blog and realized how many recent entries have been about some new Yahoo! annoucement that I found to be interesting. Urgh... I need to branch out more! What's Google up to lately? :-)

Wordpress on Yahoo!

Following the news that Moveable Type will available on Yahoo! Web Hosting, Wordpress will now also be offfered.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Moveable Type now on Yahoo

Came across this somewhere that Yahoo will now host Moveable Type blogs.

Yahoo! Widgets 3.0

Yahoo! released their Widgets Engine 3.0 (formerly Konfabulator) for Windows and Mac. There's been some changes and a bunch of new widgets so it might be worth checking out. The list of changes can be found in the version history file (which I wish was easier to find).

Sunday, December 11, 2005

King's Quest

One of the classic video game series was the old Sierra Online adventure game, King's Quests. I loved those old adventure games where you solved puzzles as part of the story. Apparently there are a lot of fans out there who don't want to see these types of game die out so they've taken it on themselves to keep the series going. However, the tricky thing is that these groups don't own the rights to the series or characters and that puts them in dangerous legal waters. For the team working to extend the King's Quest series, this annoucement is very good news.

Friday, December 9, 2005

del.icio.us @ Yahoo!

As announced by the Yahoo! search team, Yahoo! have purchased social bookarking site, del.icio.us. This follows a similiar purchase of Flickr, an community photos site that really brought the concept of "tagging" into widespread use.

Thursday, December 8, 2005

Yahoo! Answers

Although it's been out for a few days, I finally checked out Yahoo! Answers. It goes a little against the current trend of more multi-purpose sites that can be used for many different purposes. Instead, it is very clear about what the site is meant for. Go there to post questions and get answers from the community. This seems to be a good idea for Yahoo to try and see how well the public might take this approach of offereing easy-to-use and specific purpose tools.