Author Archives: daniel

Wiiware not for the lone coders

Back when it was announced, it sounded like Nintendo's WiiWare would let bedroom coders get their games into their Wiis, just like Microsoft XNA lets anybody write for the XBox 360.

Not so. Apparently all the usual NDAs and licence fees apply. The difference is the games can be developed by small teams (within licenced developers) and the games are distributed via Nintendo's online service.

Nintendo snubbing small developers for WiiWare

WiiWare is a lie

I know I was never going to get around to coding any more games, not with my current workload, but all the same, I liked the idea, and it was helping leaning me towards buying a Wii.

Do we need bookmarks?

Do we need to bookmark web sites anymore? Can Google do the job?

With Firefox 3, you can just type a keyword into the address bar and it'll usually take you to the Google “I'm Feeling Lucky” first choice. Most of the time it seems to work, though in some cases (I guess where it's not sure it's what you really want, the first result isn't dominating the rankings) it takes you to the Google search results instead.

I tried a few. These all went straight to the place I was thinking of.

Age — www.theage.com.au
SMH — www.smh.com.au
NYT — www.nytimes.com
Connex — www.connexmelbourne.com.au
Wikipedia — www.wikipedia.org
Metlink — www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au
toxic custard — www.toxiccustard.com
apple — www.apple.com
herald sun — www.news.com.au/heraldsun
bbc news — news.bbc.co.uk
twitter — twitter.com/home

Even, to my surprise, “drive” got me to www.drive.com.au… I suppose me being in Australia ensures I get an AU-skewed result. Or maybe drive.com.au really does dominate that search term.

The only one that landed off the mark was TPN. I wanted The Podcast Network, but it took me to the Wikipedia entry for Total parenteral nutrition.

Searching for my name, and some others terms (eg cameron reilly, geekrant), took me to the Google search results instead.

Some don't work at all. Don't try searching for localhost, for instance! (Not that you'd normally need to.)

And we'll always need bookmarks for private pages, and shortcuts to pages away from the beaten homepage track.

[I think Cameron Reilly wrote on this topic a couple of years ago. Perhaps ironically given the subject, I can't find that posting.]

XBox 360 prices drop

Microsoft has dropped the price of XBox 360 in Australia, to $349 for the base-level Arcade (note, it doesn't run old XBox games because it has no hard drive, and won't provide HD video), $499 for the Pro (what should be called the standard model), and $649 for the XBox 360 Elite.

how do you use kindle on ipadoxworld.com.au/news/new-australian-pricing-revealed-for-xbox-360.htm”>XBoxWorld reports the Arcade can be got from BigW for just $278 at the moment.

Hmmm. $278 to play Pacman Championship Edition. Am I enough of a sucker to buy it?

Comparative RRPs: Nintendo Wii $399.95; PS3 $699.95. (Why does Nintendo's web site include no price information?!)

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Start menu subfolders

Everyone knows this already, right?

To put start menu items into a subfolder, use folder name and backslash.

I use it to try and help keep the start menu tidy, since the most commonly used shortcuts end up on my desktop and/or quick start menu. If I can tidy away Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Kompozer and whatever else that's Net related into an Internet folder, my Start Menu might not grow to take over the whole screen when I open it.

You can also move them around after installation, but that means if you ever remove the application, it won't know where to find the shortcuts and remove them. (You'd hope one day they'd get this fixed in Windows.)

billg's rant

Bill Gates' rant about Windows (or to be precise, microsoft.com) usability:

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

Read all of it here. It's from five years ago, but still makes entertaining reading.

(via Cameron Reilly)

Byebye Google Browser Sync

If you've upgraded to Firefox 3 and are wondering when Google will update Browser Sync to work with it, you'd better find an alternative product.

Google has decided to dump the product.

It appears that for now, Mozilla's Weave might be the best substitute (though it's in beta at present). Or Foxmarks, though apparently it doesn't play well with the Web Developer Toolbar.

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Firefox dictionary WTF (and FF3 is out)

Firefox typoFF WTF — is the AU English dictionary written by volunteers or something? How can it be missing so many basic words? It doesn't know reminds for instance?

Is this fixed in FF3 then?

I saw today is FF3 download day, world record, yadda yadda yadda and jumped over to download it. Bzzt. 10am is too early here. Apparently it's all based around US time. Blargh.

Now it's well after 11pm AEST, and it's still not there. What time does this thing kick off? Even the Pledge bit doesn't work; keeps resetting the region dropdown every time I choose something.

No matter, a post in the forums on spreadfirefox has revealed where the FF3 download is: it's here.

Slow Gmail startup

Is it just me that’s been getting a lot more of this recently?

Slow loading Gmail

It’s not just on slow connections, or even on fast connections when there’s a lot of activity going on. It’s even happening to me on connections where everything is fast, and from a variety of computers (so I doubt it’s a cache problem).

And the Basic HTML view is fast, but missing too many features to be practical most of the time.

Is it Gmail getting too many users per server?

Or is it feature-creep getting into the Javascript? I can think of a few things I’d dearly love to “uninstall” from my personal Gmail experience if I could. I never use the Chat. I turned off the Web Clips. I know the adverts pay for it, so I guess I’ll put up with them. I have turned contacts’ pictures. Perhaps the recent upgrades to speed up the response on the interface is to blame?

I don’t know what it is, but Gmail, especially the initial load, is definitely slowing down for me.

PS. heh. After I ranted, I tried clearing the browser cache. After that it loads up like a dream, very fast. I’ll try it on the other affected machines’ Firefoxen. Maybe some combination of Ajaxy library version clashes did something funny.