Links for 21 Dec 2005
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Monthly Archives: December 2005
Kings Quest IX given the royal blessing
Kings Quest IX: A Silver Lining, a fan game inspired by the old Sierra Kings Quest series has been in development by Phoenix Online Studios since 2002. They were due to release it this month, but in September Vivendi, who now own Sierra, responded in the way most corporations do to their most fanatical fans: they sent them a cease and desist letter. So the Save Kings Quest IX campaign was created, and, surprisingly enough, Vivendi found a clue and has said they can release the game.
So, kudos to Vivendi for responding so well. Obviously what happened is that some middle-manager with delusions of legal competence sent the original cease & desist letter to Phoenix. When the SKQIX campaign got underway and the petitions started appearing in the Vivendi forums, upper management got wind of it and realised that ticking off your fan base isn’t really a good idea.
So I’m looking forward to the 1st release of this early next year.
Penrith is on the map
Google Earth has been updated and now includes hi-res shots of Penrith & surrounding areas. Google maps has not been updated yet, in fact the Sydney CBD is still low-res on there.
The high-res photos of Penrith are fairly out of date. The Krispy Kreme donunts in the carpark of Panthers isn’t built yet on the photos, and the Penrith Homemaker Centre is still under construction, which means that it’s at least older than 2003
Doesn’t matter though, finally, I can see my house from here!
Gmail deletes trash
Gmail has had an update, which doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot. They’ve added a Google Talk advert on the left under the menu & renamed the ‘Move to trash’ drop-down menu item to ‘Delete’.
Also it seems that now, when you’ve ticked a mail item, the drop-down menu only displays the options available, rather than just disabling the ones that you can’t use (eg. If a mail item doesn’t have a star the “remove star” option isn’t there, whereas before is was just greyed out). If you have no item selected, all the options are in the menu, greyed out.
I know Google likes to roll this stuff out incrementally, so is anyone else seeing this?
I understand the removing of the disabled menu options, it un-clutters the interface, but as for the renaming of ‘Move to trash’, it also begs the question "Why?" I know some people found having to select a menu item rather than clicking a button annoying, and I imagine that Google is aware of this, but how does renaming the menu option help? I just found it momentarily disorienting as I searched for ‘Move to trash’ and couldn’t find it. (Only a brief moment mind you 
) I can imagine how less tech-savvy users are coping (remembers back to ISP help desk days. *shudder*).
Archaeological Anomalies
Great archaeological photoshop contest. There are some seriously talented people out there.
This one is my personal favorite
Video Skype
Skype version 2.0 beta has been released. There’s a whole bunch of changes and fixes in this new major version, but the only one anyone will be talking about is the video call feature. While this is nifty, and a nice marketing feature, for me the more useful new feature is the contact grouping. This is something that’s been available in all the major IM clients, and it will make life easier now that I can group all my work, family and friend contacts separately.
Video talk’s still cool though
Standard yadda yadda about this being a beta-preview, YMMV, etc.
Oh, the user interface is all shiny and updated too.
Links for 3 Dec 2005
Good customer relations
Last.fm had some server problems this week, and they lost data from some users, myself included. Nothing serious, just any tagging done in the last 3 weeks would have been lost. Annoying for some people who had tagged a lot of songs, but seeing as I don’t pay for the service, I can’t complain. But what is impressive is their response: all the users who have been affected have been given access to all the paid subscriber services until the end of the year.
This is a great example of positive response to service problems, made especially amazing as this is a free service. This also has the added bonus of allowing me to demo the paid services. I imagine they’ll get a fair few new paid subscribers from what will have little expenditure on their part. Kudos to the Last.fm team.
Quote of the day
In reference to the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq document released yesterday:
"Our mission in Iraq is to win the war. Our troops will return home when that mission is complete." It’s kind of sad in a way that that’s the sort of sentence that has to be spoken out loud. It’s like something you’d say to a child. "We’re at the grocery store to do the shopping. We’re going to stay here until all the shopping is done. We’re going to shop until we’re finished; then and only then will we go get ice cream."
The Shape of Days: Thoughts on the ‘National Strategy’
What’s sad is that I know I’ve uesed that exact phrase with my kids on more than one occasion (the ice cream one, not the Iraq one)
Half Life 2 Survivor Arcade System
Half-Life 2 Survivor was recently shown off in Japan. It features a right hand joystick for movement, a left hand joystick for aiming and shooting, a left foot pedal for ducking, and a right foot pedal for jumping. It also has an IC card slot where you can insert a memory card to record your game progress.
Pity that there’s 0 chance of this coming to Australia any time soon.