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Lively, currently in beta, is Google’s answer to Second Life. The downloadable application allows you to create rooms, decorate them to your liking, then make and invite friends over. Of course, you’re far better off actually doing these things in real life, but if you have poor personal hygiene and/or no friends you’re sure to find it very rewarding.
If you’re a fan of Sporting Apostrophes, the world’s most successful football team, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to download the OFFICIAL Sporting Apostrophes Mac OSX Dashboard Widget.
Microsoft is urging developers to tag websites in preparation for the release of IE 8.
According to a post made on an MSDN blog, a public beta of IE 8 will be available in the third quarter of 2008 and it threatens to “render content in its most standards-compliant way by default”. As this is the first time Microsoft has stooped to such murky depths, we are warned that this will play havoc with content written for IE 7. The advice: to implement a specially created meta tag instructing IE 8 to render the content as if it were IE 7.
This is all a lot of fun, I’m sure you’ll agree, and it does seem to offer a pretty straight-forward solution for achieving backwards compatibility. However, given that the two rendering engines are so markedly different, the most excitement will surely be reserved for the future hours spent hacking IE 8 content to display correctly in IE 7. I, for one, can’t wait for that.
The new version of Director is available for pre-order. A few years ago I’d have been ever-so-slightly excited at the prospect of a new version of what was once my favourite application, but really, who the hell in their right mind would burn $1,000 on this pointless application?
The CD-Rom is dead, the Shockwave plug-in is redundant, and, unbelievably, there’s still no Intel Mac version available.
Oh well… it was good while it lasted.
It’s been a busy year for the Include Digital SlimServer jukebox! Feast your eyes on the top 5 uber-tunes:
The internet radio stations that have been aired the most:
WeFunk - lots of great funk, but too much angry rap
Canora Radio - a recent find - tasty!
SwissGroove - good, but perhaps a little bland at times (too much self-indulgent “smooth” jazz)
Dinner Jazz Excursion - very nice, comfortable as your grandad’s pipe and slippers
Carl Davis - he has all his digits, and he’s justifiably proud of them.
Stevie’s nadir, McCartney’s shame - this tune single-handedly brought racial harmony to the entire planet which survives to this day. Cleanse your mind of this filth with some proper Wonder.
Life is full of bad ideas that should never see the light of day. Unfortunately, 3D Mailbox, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest email program” has pooped its head out from the sphincter of the idea fairy.
The idea is so implausible it sounds like an April fools gag:
Think of 3D Mailbox as email meets videogame. It’s e-mail for the visual generation. 3D Mailbox turns your emails into people: beautiful models represent good email, and goofy Sumo guys represent spam. Chill with your email poolside and in private cabanas, and feed your spam to the sharks! The beautiful locales and Brazilian background music make you feel like you’re on vacation any time of the day.
Right… so each of my emails is represented as a person, and I can “chill” with them poolside?
I can then arrange them into cabanas (mailboxes):
If the bouncer (spam filter) can’t decide if a person (email) is legit, they’re forced to skate around naked at the ice rink:
Genuis!!! To think I’ve been wasting all these years using Entourage.
smbclient, a command-line client for accessing SMB/CIFS servers, is a great tool for shunting large quantities of data between servers on a local network. Unfortunately, the man page for smbclient is a bit of a chore - it doesn’t offer any useful examples, making it unnecessarily difficult for the first-time user to make any progress with the software.
To copy from one server to another, SSH into the destination box then make a connection with the following command:
smbclient //your_ip_address/name_of_share -U your_username
Upon connecting:
smb: \> recurse
smb: \> prompt
smb: \> mget *
The recurse command toggles directory recursion; prompt toggles confirmation prompts (you’ll want this off if you’re copying thousands of files!). The mget command will now copy recursively from the the target smb resource to the current directory of the destination machine. To change directory, simply CD as per usual; for a list of available commands type help.
Yesterday Apple announced the release of the Safari 3 beta for both Mac and PC. Rumoured to be faster than Linford Christie after a nandrolone binge, how does it fare?
As with the PC iTunes installation, Apple forces you to install Quicktime as part of the installation process which is a mild irritation - having disabled Quicktime’s tasktray process from a previous installation, I now have it running again. I suppose you have to chuckle at Apple’s little jokes.
Once installed it looks… a little out of place. With OSX scrollbars and form elements, it feels a little like a deviant, cross-dressing browser; a PC application in Mac getup. Like its Mac counterpart, it lacks a homepage button which is alarming, irritating and surprising in equal measure. I’m struggling to think of a single reason for its omission.
My PC browser of choice is, like many people, Firefox. It’s not perfect, but its many little add-ons and shortcuts make it a cut above the rest. In highly unscientific tests of uncached page loading speeds however, Safari 3 doesn’t seem to be the speed demon it claims to be. It actually seems slower than Firefox, a fact that is emphasised by Safari’s preference for loading the entire page before displaying anything at all. I’ll be trying out the Mac implementation soon to see whether its blistering pace is evident on OSX.
One very welcome feature of the new Safari browser, however, is the beautifully anti-aliased HTML text. Why PC users have been made to suffer without this feature for so long (save for IE7’s poor ClearType implementation) is a question even the wisest of wise men would struggle to answer.
So overall, it’s nothing to write home about. A browser like any other (minus the home button), with nice looking text but out of place looking form elements. I’ll stick with Firefox I think.
Adobe has today announced its plans to release the Flex source code under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, giving developers the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing development of the framework.
The strategy will mean a closer working relationship between the development team and end user which, in turn, Adobe hopes will attract new developers, improve the framework architecture and lead to opportunities for collaboration with other open source projects.
Adobe will continue to offer a commercial version of the Flex SDK.
More information on the move can be found in the Adobe press release and on the Adobe Labs pages.
