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May 08 2010

Mac Virtualization

category: Perspective,Technology author:

I gave up using Windows on my home machines not long after I stopped being a PC gamer. I owned a copy of Windows XP that required help to operate on any recent machine since it was missing the necessary SP3 to make it functional.

When I built a new PC some 3 years ago I decided to just stick with Linux and after much experimentation my distribution of choice was Ubuntu. Once in a while however, I found that I needed access to a Windows machine for something that couldn’t be accomplished in Linux or through Wine. So I downloaded VirtualBox and installed Windows within the VM and used it whenever needed. This surely was way faster than dual-booting since I was most often in the OS my choice and was loathed enough to deal with Windows that having it operate at a sub-optimal rate through the VM was fine by me.

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Jul 30 2009

Accessible Celebrity

category: Technology author:

twitter_logo_headerMicroblogging sites like Twitter have really taken off in the past couple of years. There are other similar sites, but Twitter seems to be king. This post, however, has less to do with Twitter and it’s use and more to do with the people that are on there.

When I first heard about Twitter, people were using it to keep friends up to date about their daily ventures both interesting and mundane. As appealing as this was initially, that model had little use for me as many of my friends weren’t on Twitter and weren’t using it for that purpose.

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May 20 2009

OnLive – A New Gaming Paradigm

category: Gaming,Technology author:

OnLive: The Future of Video games

OnLive

The gaming arena is in constant flux with innovations on all fronts to produce games that are visually captivating and reach a large base of gamers. Having been a gamer for nearly two decades now, I remember the days of games arriving on 360K floppy disks to the more rigid 1.44MB 3.5″ floppy disks. Apart from the storage media, the graphics and sound capabilities evolved from CGA, EGA, to VGA and from the Adlib music only adapters to full speech with Sound Blaster.

With the arrival of CD-ROM to the gaming world, the games not only included some high quality graphics but also fully spoken dialogue that engrossed the gamer. The adventure genre really benefited by these advancements and performed exceptionally well.

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Apr 10 2009

One Billion iTunes Apps Contest

category: Technology author:

iTunes App Downloaded Counter

The success of the iPhone and iPod Touch is unprecedented and nothing exemplifies that like a counter of the number of applications downloaded to these two devices. Apple, recently announced that nearly 25,000 applications were hosted on the App Store, and now with nearly one billion of those apps have been downloaded.

To commemorate this amazing feat, Apple is hosting  a simple contest with some killer giveaways, simply download an app to your iPhone or iPod Touch or fill out a form and you’re all set. Enter often and daily and good luck to us all. :)

UPDATE: Looks like we’ve reached a billion downloads since I took the capture some 13 days ago. The expectation was that one billion downloads would be reached by Friday the 24th, but turns out it was reached a day sooner. Now the wait to see who the lucky winner of the cool prizes is.

Cheers

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Jan 30 2009

Gears of Wars Expires on the PC

category: Gaming author:

Gears of War

Gears of Wars PC Edition

Owners of Epic’s Gears of War were in for quite a interesting predicament when they tried to play the game on January 28th. Turns out that the DRM that came bundled with the program had a digital certificate that deactivated on that date and thus rendered the game useless.

If we’ve learned anything from the debacle that was Spore’s DRM, which limited you to only 3 activation of a single copy of your game, is that unrealistically restricting customers who spend their hard-earned money on your software is usually a bad idea.

To this day, there are games that I purchased in the late 90′s that I will install and play just for the nostalgia or to relive an absolutely wonderful story. I paid for the game so why would anyone restrict me as to when and how far apart I play the game?

This obviously begs the question as to why Epic would put an arbitrary drop-dead date about 3 years after the release of the game. I know that Gears of War is a trilogy and the second installment is available for the XBOX 360, but this is surely no way to forcing paying customers to grab the second installment.

These kinds of boneheaded issues is why I’m a wholly converted console gamer now.

Cheers

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Jan 20 2009

Barack Obama Inaguration, The World is Watching

category: Politics author:

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Jan 17 2009

Windows 7 Beta

category: Technology author:

Windows 7 LogoMicrosoft decided to unleash their Beta of Windows 7, the successor to the abysmal Windows Vista last week. After the initial hoopla caused by the arbitrary download limit of 2.5 million which cause the servers to crash, Microsoft wisely decided to remove the limit and allow one and all to download the Beta.

I grabbed the 2.4GB ISO and managed to download it in about 25 minutes. As I run Ubuntu at home, I wasn’t about to bother burning the DVD and doing an actual installation. I did, however, create a virtual machine within Virtualbox to see what Windows 7 has to offer.

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Dec 31 2008

My iPhone 3G

category: Technology author:

Apple iPhone 3G

My iPhone 3G is finally here and I’m having a blast using it. I was able to move the SIM card from my previous Nokia phone into the iPhone and get going immediately.

Cheers

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Nov 04 2008

Vote Today

category: General author:

Be sure to vote today to make your voice heard during this historic election.

Cheers

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Oct 31 2008

Blog Scraping

category: Rants author:

For the uninitiated:

Blog scraping is the process of scanning through a large number of blogs, usually daily, searching for and copying content. This process is conducted through automated software. The software and the individuals who run the software are sometimes referred to as blog scrapers.

Scraping is copying a blog that is not owned by the individual initiating the scraping process. If the material is copyrighted it is considered copyright infringement, unless there is a license relaxing the copyright. The scraped content is often used on spam blogs or splogs.

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