Archive for February, 2008
South Carolina Real-Estate Revisted
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
A quote from a post dated Sept. 2007 –
“Check this house out – The listing is for 790K. Built in 1910, with 4200 sq. feet, 5 bedrooms, 3 baths, fully refinished and sits on 1 1/2 acres in the heart of a small ‘historic’ town about 50 miles outside of Charleston. Sweet.”
Now going for the low low price of 649K. There are 6 new properties in the area since the last time I checked. I wonder what the price will be in a year?
Singer Songwriter Must Haves
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
Brenda Kahn’s – Hunger (1999). This and Epiphany in Brooklyn (1992, one of my favorite albums of all time) are must haves in my opionion. Hunger is deep, emotional and features some great spoken word too. Highly recommended. The album is out of production, so you’ll have to pick it up on eBay or through Amazon’s used sales. I found a copy (signed by the artist even) on Amazon for about $20.00 from a book store in Ohio.
QOTD
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
“One interesting result of socialized medicine is that makes it in the government’s economic interest for people to die early.”
Zune / 360 Games
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
The XNA Community Games Platform team is delighted to offer you a sneak peek at our first major feature for XNA Game Studio 3.0: The ability to build games for the Zune platform! This will let you write one game and deploy it to all three platforms that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support: the Xbox 360, Windows, and now the Zune. While the Zune lacks the 3D graphics horsepower to drive high-end games like you can on the Xbox 360, we’ve taken extreme steps in making sure that you will have the broadest access to the XNA Framework APIs possible, allowing you to create fun Zune games while still letting you integrate carefully with the overall Zune media experience. That means that XNA Game Studio 3.0 integration includes discoverability/access to the user’s music – allowing the user to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations at their discretion. In addition, the XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the ability to have multiple Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc gaming experience (think of the possibilities!).
Our current planning is to offer a preview release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 in the Spring 2008 timeframe, with a final release scheduled for the holiday 2008 season. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what kind of amazing games you can create for the Zune!
One other choice tidbit – revenue sharing with developers or the option to give your game away for free. The details of this are not out yet.
I hadn’t looked at XNA much until this announcement – it’s pretty sweet. Development environment – Visual Studio, language – C#, runtime – optimized version of the CLR, framework – XNA gaming framwork plus the .NET compact framework for mobile devices. Wikipedia has a nice writeup.
Star Wars
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Update – video. Neat.
Zune Gets Its Game On
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Little is out yet, but so far –
- it’ll be open to developers
- based on XNA, Yow!
- wireless multiplayer gaming supported
- full touchpad input
- Gen 3 Gen 2 will support it and Gen 1 may well too depending on the controls used in the games.
- SDK to be released this spring
Definitely one piece of Microsoft’s Unified Gaming Network (yes, my predictions do occasionally come true). Sweet. I love the fact that they went with a Galaga type game for their first release. Classic. I wanna write a game for my Zune!
Update – I meant Gen 2, sorry, no Gen 3 detail out yet but naturally it will support it too.
Tech Safe Haven
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Tech – a safe haven during a recession?
Meh, not so much. Note the overall lifecycle point of these three companies represented in this graph.
Side note – Yahoo recently released some mini-interactive charts off My Yahoo – really nice. They now have smaller, quicker interactives plus the full blown full screen interactive charts they released a while back. I wouldn’t mind if they replaced the default static graphs on stock pages with this.
Google Maps Mobile
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Pros –
- The interface is wonderfully designed and simple to use. Dragging maps around with your finger is just too fun.
- My Location is pretty neat – no need for GPS.
- Nice integration with contacts manager
- Localized search is just fantastic. Zoom in on a general location and search for something by keyword finds what you’re looking for 90% of the time. More general searches for things like “sushi” or “pizza” really work well too.
Cons –
- Due to a lack of data network coverage, places where you can’t connect to the net don’t work, forcing you to pull out the old Rand McNally. It would be nice if Google added a feature where the maps along an entire trip could be cached, so they’d be available all the time. The lack of a map caching feature totally kills the usefulness of an app like this because you can’t count on it.
- My Location doesn’t work 99% of the time. The only time I’ve been able to get this to work was in San Fran. Outside of that area though the service isn’t available.
- No favorites functionality. I’d rather not add locations (a restaurant for example) to my contacts to save them. It would be nice if Google added some sort of “quick links” feature independent of your contacts.
You can download Google Maps Mobile for Windows Mobile here. I should also point out, I’ve also tested Windows Live Maps Mobile – which just plain sucked. Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do in this space.
OSX Fact
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
By hiding system level services from 3rd party developers Apple gifts competitive advantage to applications they author. This is something Microsoft has been criticized for in the past.
Balanced
Monday, February 11th, 2008
From The Economist. Too funny.
