Technology

It’s no secret that my birthday was last weekend. My parents were nice enough to get me several gifts. I got a Waterfield Powerbook sleeve, Medal of Honor: Breakthrough, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. You can look forward to a full length review of the bag and a short review of Breakthrough. In the mean time, you can get a review of Breakthrough from Inside Mac Games. However, I soon discovered to my own displeasure that Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) ran rather poorly on my Dual 1 GHz Powermac G4 with 1.25 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 Pro video card. The very first scene (which is a simple tutorial) stuttered. If the game weren’t turn based, I wouldn’t have been able to play it effectively. The problem only worse when I got to the game’s first cantina. This isn’t a very intense scene (unless you count the moderate amount of people as intense). This Powermac has handled all the other games I’ve played on it (Halo, Medal of Honor series, Call of Duty) expertly. I was so disappointed that I decided to put the game away for a little while and go back to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. ...

The WordPress Development Blog has been updated with information about WordPress 1.3. It looks like they’ve been making some great strides and good improvements, but consipicuously absent from their goal list is per-post formatting support. This makes me very sad.

Some may have noticed the Blog Change Bot button I added to the sidebar some time ago. It was part of an experiment to see how well it worked. Until recently, it simply didn’t work at all. Sure, I could IM it at blogchangebot. I could even send commands. It even seemed to recognize my subscriptions and list their last modification. The problem was that it never notified me of changes (and I’m online more often than not). I was just about to remove the button and link when, this morning I actually got an update notification from blogchangebot8. Recently, I noticed that the bot had gone down frequently and I’m guessing that the developer was having scalability issues (though you couldn’t tell this from the website). ...

Phishing (which is explained at Wikipedia) has become very commonplace, particularly on the Internet. It even happens over the phone. Up until this morning, I thought only morons became the victims of these scams because they were so obvious. However, this has changed somewhat. Not only has it become much more common (hell, more than half of my spam is phishing attempts), but they’ve hidden themselves very well. My father received an email this morning from Amazon.com supposedly asking to verify his credit card information. Yesterday, he had placed an order for him. The email even had an “@amazon.com” return address. It contained a link that was of the structure: {http://[email protected]//exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/102-9382243-7140932}. Looks like Amazon, right? Wrong. Everything preceding the “@” is considered a username for the domain that follows, which is our scammer. ...

I don’t care what you are doing tomorrow. You’re going to make the time to get Firefox 1.0. Places that will most likely have download links: Mozilla Mozillazine Spread Firefox Get Firefox Slashdot It’s likely to be a bandwidth bonanza, so be sure to find a mirror or BitTorrent feed.

As reported on MacCentral, MacGameSeed is starting to distribute Mac game files via BitTorrent. Blizzard has been doing this a little while now (primarily with the upcoming World of Warcraft beta). It’s good to see more companies embracing this content distribution model (with 35% of the traffic on the Internet coming from BitTorrent). What I am surprised by is the lack of attention companies like Akamai have paid to it. Instead of paying these companies for mirrors for new files, they can simply set up a BitTorrent feed with a few seeds and let it rip. It may be that because BitTorrent is still a little rough around the edges for novice users (who don’t know about opening up ports to facilitate greater speeds, etc.) gives them reassurance. However, this will change (and already is, as Azureus has made some incredible strides into diagnosing performance problems for newbie users).

I recently dumped Safari on my Macs in favor of Firefox. Nearly everything worked as I wanted, but one very important function was still misbehaving (at least as far as I was concerned). Every, and I mean every, link I clicked on in an external program would open a new window. This was slightly annoying at work with Windows, but it was a genuine PITA on my Macs because Firefox would attempt to offset the new window, inevitably resulting in part of the window being off screen. ...

I’ve been preaching about Firefox for some time now. Most everyone I know has switched from Internet Explorer and loved the change. With the Firefox 1.0 release fast approaching, Spreadfirefox.com (caution, it’s currently being slashdotted, so you may not be able to get the page) is raising money for a full page advertisement in the New York Times to gain even more users. $30 will get your name in the ad (only $10 for students; I’m looking at you Dana, Katie, and Scott). Donate here. ...

Picasa and Hello! are cool!

The author of PithHelmet recently wrote a short piece on shareware fees and software update site feedback. It’s disheartening to think that this is becoming increasingly common. Mike worked very hard on PithHelmet 2 to make it far suprior to the open-source, free PithHelmet 0.7.3. He added quality features like Machete (which allows you to filter web pages through a perl or Python script) which I have not seen on any other browser. He continues to distribute 0.7.3 for free, but apparently that’s not good enough for some users. ...