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.

In the ensuing time since I’ve fully gotten into the acting of Twittering (or should that be Tweeting?) the population and use have both changed to make this medium a lot more relevant to me. Of greatest interest to me is the number of celebrities that have made their way onto Twitter and are active in keeping everyone appraised of their daily activities.

For me, Twitter has taken the role of the Shorts or Asides part of the blog that I used to contain small stories or links that didn’t warrant a full entry. This has allowed me to write longer, and hopefully more meaningful entries while using Twitter as a way of firing off quite entries. I did try to use Tumblr for that purpose but found that it was more work than to quickly fire off something to Twitter with my iPhone.

But, returning to the topic at hand and the celebrities. The first that I came across was Stephen Fry, a British actor and comedian (are they two separate things?). I was first made aware of Mr. Fry through an episode of Bones that piqued my interest. When I found Mr. Fry’s twitter feed, I quickly became a follower and was taken along for a ride that involved a trans-Atlantic trip to Los Angeles to shoot an episode of Bones followed by a Asian tour all the while being indulged on his fancies and luxuries. The pictures of the seat on the airplane had me quite envious.

Though having no personal connection to Mr. Fry, just eavesdropping on his thoughts as he traveled the world and around London gives quite a interesting view into the goings on in his personal life while his appearance on TV provides the professional aspects. The most intriguing part is the direct connection to those that are only visible on the television or big screen and being able to converse with them just as you might your friends.

This level of access, both for the celebrity and the public, is quite unprecedented.

So be sure to follow Mr. Fry and let me know of other interesting people in return. Oh, and you can follow me too if you wish.

Cheers

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.

One downside of the constant evolution of games are that for the average user, the latest and greatest games are the single piece of software that will attempt to utilize the full power and potential of their PC. This usually means that to play the latest game at a high rate would usually require newer hardware to go along with it. This need to constantly upgrade the PC to fully enjoy all of the advancements in the games is what converted me to a console gamer.

With consoles, gamers can once again return to not having to worry about the specification of the hardware but rather focus on the game content and what it has to offer. The Microsoft XBOX 360 and Sony Playstation 3 employ online networks that allow game developers to release demos of their games to entice customers to purchase the full game. I can’t speak much about the Nintendo Wii having not played with it.

However, not very game is accompanied with a demo to allow gamers to preview it before sinking the significant amount of money into a game that they might not like. Review sites do their job in guiding the buyer, but there’s nothing like playing the game for yourself to see how you like it. Game rentals fill this market need ideally and vendors such as Gamefly allow gamers to rent games to avoid spending money on games that they might not end up liking. Even for purchasing gamers, renting sometimes makes more sense since it allows the gamer to play the game through and then return the game in exchange for others in the queue. Unless a game has a large re-playability value, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay the premium price for a single play-through.

With the introduction of OnLive the gaming industry is ready for it’s next paradigm shift in the way gamers play games and most importantly interact with other gamers. OnLive brings the ever present concept of social networking to the gaming world is such a cohesive way that it aids rather than hinders in the whole gaming experience.

To qualify as a paradigm shift in the way gamers consume games, OnLive had to deliver something truly unique and ground breaking and their server-based game delivery to the PC browser and to your TV through the MicroConsole does just that. The games are housed entirely within OnLive’s servers and all processing is done there with hardware capable of scaling to meet the games need. The only requirement on the user’s side is a broadband Internet connection that will stream the game.

By off-loading the games hardware requirements to OnLive’s servers, the users PC or Mac doesn’t necessarily have the most expensive hardware available today and with the MicroConsole, the console gaming experience is preserved. Additionally by housing all of the gaming content on the servers, OnLive allows a variety of social networking functionality unforeseen before like the ability of users to be spectators on other ongoing games on the server. Additionally, gamers can now quickly join in ongoing games with multiplayer capabilities.

To truly appreciate OnLive’s offering, it is necessary to view the demo shown at GDC ‘09 below. Once seen, you will also agree that OnLive is poised to take gaming to a whole new level and spread it to an even larger mass.

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 1

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 2

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 3

OnLive Developer Walkthrough Part 4

Cheers

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

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

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.

I’ve been playing with Windows from the old 3.0 days and having installed every version of Windows except Vista I’m quite familiar with the installation process. The first thing that struck me with Windows 7 is the utter lack of options. I was shown the hard drive and given the option to create a partition with the size of my choosing. My only next option was to install Windows, which I chose and after a automatic restart I was begining my customization.

Once past the customization, I was looking at the new desktop with quite an impressive background image. The first thing that greeted me here was a Action Center message that I had no anti-virus software and was vulnerable to attack.  No big surprise there I guess, but it was interesting to see that I could grab a preview version of Kaspersky (Norton and AVG are also available) that works for a couple of months while I evaluate Windows 7.

With the latest Windows updates installed and Kaspersky protecting me from the evils on the Internet, I was asked to reboot and came back to a familiar Vista login page. Once I successfully logged back in the first thing that struck me was the change in the familiar Windows taskbar. The Start menu is very similar to the one in Vista from what I could tell with my limited playing around.

The gadgets you see on the right of the desktop are a straight carry-over from Vista. My experience with Vista was limited to a laptop that I had access to for some 2 months and so I don’t claim to be an expert with that OS, but Windows 7 to the untrained eye surely looks a lot like Vista. In general, it looks like Windows 7 hides a lot of the complexity associated with settings that were readily available in XP. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

My Virtualbox virtual machine is configured to provide 768MB of RAM to Windows 7 and I found that it works quite well with the resources provided. More exploration is needed to see what goodies this OS provides, but so far I’ve found the new games.

Cheers

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

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

Cheers

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.

This is something I’ve not had to deal with in the past. I guess my blog wasn’t useful enough or interesting enough to scrape. That changed recently when I saw a pingback awaiting moderation. I’m always curious to see who is linking to my site.

The majority of links are usually related to the plugin I’ve written for Wordpress. However, the pingback in the moderation queue was bizarre as it contained my post in it’s entirety.  Turns out that the site, which I will not list to increase their link count, has blatantly copied the content of my posts and put it on their blog. The original link to my post still remains, thus the pingback.

A quick run through the other entires on this site seems to show that they’ve been scraping numerous other blogs and post the content surrounded by Google ads.

Blogs are copyrighted material and re-publishing it without my express consent and permission is at the least an unethical thing to do and at some level illegal. Furthermore, the other posts that’ve been scraped are all an unrelated jumbled mess of posts that have nothing to do with each other.

As flattering as it might be to have my content stolen, the fact that it ended up being scraped without permission and only spammy blog irritates me.

Cheers

Recently, I came across an item of interest and took the usual first step in contacting the seller to inquire if the item was still for sale, to get some details of the items and also any pictures that might be available. After waiting for a day or so, I received a reply from the seller and what I received was lacking any answers to my question. I was greeted with the response..

I dont sell to muscleheads

Needless to say, I was quite confused by the response and so I tried to clarify what exactly I’d asked to illicit such a crass response. The response to my second inquiry was even more puzzling.

I sold it already, what are you doing for work now? the supplement shop closed down huh?

This second response irritated me, the seller obviously assumed that he knew me. I responded that he did not, in fact, know me and was coming off as a complete and utter jerk while attempting to sell something. This third and final response was the most annoying response.

oh you have the same name, as my buddy, so take it easy, go design some software and buy this piece of shit somewhere else

It is true that there are many people who have the same first name as me, and many may have my last name, but the combination of my first and last is a little unique because of the origins of it. So it is entirely unlikely that this seller has a buddy with the same name as me, as I definitely do not know this person. Being the geek that I am, I promptly entered the seller’s name into Google to find his Facebook and MySpace pages and after seeing his pictures I guess I’m not totally shocked by the responses I got.

All of this brings me to the crux of this post, is it too much to ask for people to display some civility in business dealings? As informal as Craigslist might be, as a seller you are still engaging in a business proposition and countless buyers might contact you with interest and to make such ignorant and asinine remarks is just ridiculous.

Cheers