Another week, another lawsuit, and some weird soda

Well finals are over and I've gone through my usual end of semester celebration, hooray for random drunkenness. In either case that also means that this my last posting for the year, since it'll be pretty hard for me to post anything else during the holidays, stupid dial up. In either case I've been slacking a bit on my perusing of the happenings on the web but have no fear I've managed to kinda of get caught up thanks to bloglines.

In case your wondering what the hell is bloglines, its basically a web based RSS reader with a bunch of features. Such as the ability to bookmark your favorite articles or save them so that you can blog about them. It's a cool little free service that I've started to use and helps me keep track of my ever growing web surfing addiction.

If you know what file sharing is, odds are that you know that if you do it companies such as RIAA and MPAA are willing to shake the big preverbal finger at you in the form of a nasty lawsuit. Well apparently a college student has gotten one of these things and has a started a website to raise money to cover his settlement cost, around $5,000 dollars. So far this story has gotten a good bit of coverage but I first spotted it on boingboing.net and you can check out the original article here. My whole problem is that the RIAA is just suing everyone they can in the hopes of eliminating file-sharing, which is ridiculous since I think they'd make a lot more money taking advantage of it and creating a business model around it. This is where the MPAA might go with its good standing relationship with the popular peer to peer file sharing application Bittorrent, it may eventually establish a new distribution system that already has a pretty strong user base. Now I know there are many issues to this whole thing like DRM and users rights to the media they purchase. In short I think that they would make a great deal of money without it since, the distribution is very fast and reliable and tends to generate a lot of attention for their media, however, the whole idea of lets stop piracy by attacking the little guy, just seems wrong to me.

It seems Halo fans, are getting a new Halo game this year but just not what you'd think. Halo Zero is a 2D side scroller made by a french developer. I haven't had a chance to play it yet but the screenshots look kind of cool and definitely worth checking out if you need to get your Master Chief fix.

Coca-Cola is going to release a new drink that will mix coffee and soda. The new beverage called Coca-Cola Blak will see a US release date sometime in 2006. Now I like coffee and really love my soda, but I'm not sure if they'd be all that great together, but I guess I'll have to wait and see if its any good but until then I'll continue to be both curious and confused about this new soda.

Well since, I'll be heading home this week my next posting should be after new years, so happy holidays (Merry Christmas .... if you really care) and have a happy new year.

Another week and semester in the books

Ah the last week of classes is always an awesome feeling, until that proverbial thought of "FINALS" creeps into your head. Oh well in any case I'm about to enter my last semester as an undergraduate and all I have to say its about time and thanks for the cookies? Okay so that last part didn't make much sense but don't worry most my college experience doesn't seem to be much better; at least it was still kind of fun. Now on to stuff that I usually ramble on about.

With the holiday season coming up, a lot of us head home to visit with family and friends to celebrate another year and all that holiday stuff. However, for me this also means going back to my parents house that is still powered through dial-up, all I have to say is ouch. Luckily Lifehacker has an article on how to deal with that evil dial-up service, with a great set of tips that include some browser settings to play with, this is pretty much targeted at Firefox users but some of these tips are just a good idea. You can check out the article here.

I've been learning to play the guitar for a little over a year in my spare time, so basically my guitar collects a lot of dust, but for those of you who aren't a lazy bastard like me, can now download little video guitar lessons into iTunes. There are a bunch of short little tutorials that are great if you need some extra help in learning, you can check out the site for the subscription link here; don't worry the videos are just pushed out using feed burner. Thanks to those folks over at digg I have found a new way to get back into playing my guitar.

In an effort to create a better Linux desktop, a bunch of developers have gotten together and formed the Portland Project. The project to be overseen by the FreeDesktop organization, is an attempt to build a more uniform way to develop applications for the the Linux desktop, i.e. if someone was to write a GUI linux app they'd have to write it to work a series of interfaces, depending on the desktop environment. Meaning that in most cases its not worth the trouble, hence a lot of mainstream applications never see the light of day in the Linux world. However, if successful the project would create a series of interfaces for developers to write sophisticated applications for any of the Linux desktop environments. As a developer, I think that this a great idea that was long time coming. This may help developers to port more mainstream applications for the Linux environment. Now I'm not really a fan-boy of any one operating system and think that each brings something to the table that the others don't. As long as these environments keep improving and learning from each other that in the end as users we get a better experience.

Apparently the XBOX 360's Japan launch isn't going so hot, it seems that Japanese gamers aren't sold on the new platform, since there is no new RPG titles out for the 360 or a new Dead or Alive game. Even reducing the price didn't seem to cause as much hype about the system as it did else, where looks like Microsoft still has a lot to learn about the Japanese gaming market, you know like putting out games with the console that they want to play. Personally I won't be getting a 360 until they start pushing games that I've just got to play, like Halo 3, I will probably be in line for that one but right now I think I'll wait until later to see if the 360 is in my near future.

Another semester down

Well in another week I will be one semester away from receiving my first degree in Computer Engineering. The only thing is that apparently I've been studying about it for four years and know one really seems to know what the degree is all about. I mean seriously Electrical Engineers are normally hardware troubleshooters/designers and Computer Science majors are either developers/testers, so you'd think that Computer Engineers are the happy middle right? Well after going through the motions all I have to say is that is damn good question. I know a lot of people who are about to graduate as Computer Engineers and have no idea what their going to do or what company really needs a Computer Engineer. I think of all the majors this seems to be one of the more vague degrees one can get but you do straddle the line between Electrical Engineers and Computer Science majors often, but you never really focus on anything specific and the only scary thing is that when applying for a job your not sure what the hell your suited to do, at least based on your degree. In any case I got lucky and decided to specialize in software which took a lot more effort than I wanted. The only kind of sad thing is that for those who don't know what to do right away may be forced into graduate school. At least until they figure out what the hell they want to do, what an education system, its not like I have anything better but that's just my two cents.

This week ... holiday shopping, scratch proof CD's, and a new firefox

Hello well the aftermath of black friday and the Xbox 360 release is now behind us and as the dust starts to settle, one can only notice the craziness that is the holiday shopping season is in full swing. The concept seems nice enough, go out and put some though towards someone in your life and buy them something they might like but instead we get crazed shoppers hunting for the next bargain of some randomly color item that their convinced is a must have gift. Normally this isn't so bad but it makes driving in Florida that much more dangerous, for those of you who live in the state should know what I mean, seriously I doubt the guy a head of you wants a concussion for the holidays. Well now that I've vented a bit of my road rage rant on to this weeks top topics.

Firefox the popular open source web browser officially released version 1.5 this week with a bunch of fixes and improvements. Personally I like Firefox, mainly for its extension functionality; however, the new release seems to offer a good amount of new features that were really needed. You can finally re-arrange your tabs and its gotten a pretty decent performance boost. Along with the new version launch mozilla.com has gotten a make over and looks like its gonna to start promoting Firefox to gain more of the web browser market share. I would post links to the tech sites that covered this but its pretty much the usual places like digg.com, Slashdot, and other tech related sites.

Apparently they've finally started to make Blank CD's that are "scratchless" meaning that it should be much harder to screw up your backup CD's now. The discs feature bumps to keep the data side from coming into contact with anything along with a protective coating to protect your data when something does touch the wrong side. The post was originally found on boingboing who links other sources. All I have to say is that's awesome news that I can now protect my image CD's from getting scratched up but it seems to have taken long enough, but I guess we should be happy that they're making any at all.

In other happenings Prince of Persia 3: The Two Thrones came out this week and the verdict is that it's seems to be a pretty strong game. I've kinda been watching a few people play it and have to say that visually the game is pretty much on pare with the second game but seems to have more of the "toony" element more prevalent in the first game POP: The Sands of Time. The new game brings back a few characters from the original and adds a few more crazy acrobatics to the mix, but I won't have a full review until I get a chance to beat it. However, so far this seems like a pretty good title to pick up if you liked the other games.

----Update
It seems that the creator of the google maps based risk game has been ordered to take down the game due to copy right infringment. It seems that Hasbro has a lot of copyrights on the old Risk board game. The site ashotoforangejuice.com got a lot of attention from sites like Digg and Slashdot for showing the power of the google maps API, but it seems that the fun is over, I guess its back to websurfing in between classes. You can check out my previous posting here.