Morrowind, such a great game, and it was the definitive RPG for the Xbox. I mean Fable is fun and the whole "turn evil before my eyes" thing is cool, but it just can’t compete with the amazing scope of Morrowind. Example: in Fable you can search bookcases for things to steal. In Morrowind you can steal every single book of the shelf, and read them, some with dozens of pages of history, stories and tutorials.

There’s been a few teasers for Oblivion, the next in the series, but someone leaked a whole bunch of screenshots to a forum. Gaming-360 picked them up and had them on display for a while, until Bethesda asked them to take them down. Fortunately they were grabbed by other people too, and someone has posted them on photobucket for all to see. Have a look quick before the cease-and-desist letters start flying.Too late, they’ve been taken down

Oh, and one more thing: in-game rideable animals. Yay!

It’s RMS news week!

Richard Stallman was at the UN World Summit on the Information Society and part of the security was that everyone had to wear an RFID tag to get through the security checks. Stallman’s privacy hackles were raised by this and he proceeded to wrap his tag in tinfoil and encouraged others to do likewise. This really annoyed security, enough that eventually they refused to let him exit a room.

UN Security eventually let him out, and then would not allow him to enter the room where he was appearing on another panel.

I got to the room just as the panel was about to start, at the moment that the problem suddenly evaporated and Richard was allowed to enter. No doubt some of our UN hosts had been dealing with security during those two hours, and eventually got an order from a high-enough officer or something. We’ll probably never know who, but imagine the headlines: Kofi Annan frees Richard Stallman. So, I walk in and Richard relates the entire situation to me in front of the audience present, including more than one government minister, and other folks arriving for the panel. I humorously remind Richard that he and I both have immunity as delegates, and he responds “You mean, I should have shot that guy Kramer?”. Kramer is the CompTIA representative who comes along to these things to relate an pro-software-patenting and generally anti-Free-Software viewpoint which gets Richard very steamed up. There’s a laugh, and I explain that our immunity probably doesn’t go that far. Richard goes on to say that he wouldn’t really kill anyone, but no doubt UN Security has heard this entire exchange too.

Google has connected the Google Talk network to the public XMPP network.  What this means is that Google Talk users can now communicate with users of any public Jabber network.  To make it work you just need add the address (ie user@jabber.org.au) of the jabber user into the ‘add friend’ link (it used to be the ‘invite’ link).

I just added myself to my Gtalk list and it worked fine (messaging yourself is kinda lame though).  The only restriction is that the Jabber server that you’re connecting to must use the dialback protocol.  Aparantly all the servers listed on the Jabber site work, so that’s a good start.

The new draft for the GPL is up, and it now specifically excludes any form of DRM on GPL licensed code:

Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users’ freedom; therefore, the GPL ensures that the software it covers will neither be subject to, nor subject other works to, digital restrictions from which escape is forbidden.

Technorati Tags: GPL, DRM, GNU, licensing

Nick Bradbury has released the 2.0 beta for FeedDemon. There are a bunch of new features, but my favourite, the one I’ve been waiting for, is the new tree structure for the folders list (think the folders list in Windows Explorer).  This means no more switching between folders, I can have multiple, or in fact all of my folders open at once, showing what’s new and what isn’t.  By default FeedDemon 2.0 is set to auto-collapse folders as you expand a new one which, for me at least, defeats the purpose of the exercise.  So to turn this off go to ‘Tools’ -> ‘Options’ -> ‘Reading’ and untick ‘automatically collapse folders’ then click ‘OK’.

Clicking on the top of the subscriptions tree also gives you a nice list of all feeds with unread items, and a collation of your most and least visited feeds.  The only thing that I can see that’s missing is the ‘blog this item’ tool, which automatically send the contents of a news item to your blog post window.  This was handy, but maybe it’s just turned off in the options & I’m not seeing it.

Anyway, I’m pretty darn happy with this new version, the speed especially is great, it switches between feeds almost instantly. As always, great work Nick!

Technorati Tags: feeddemon, rss

Well clearly I had them fooled long enough to get back in again, so head on over to pixelZion’s latest podcast to hear me on the (virtual) airwaves again. We discuss the merits of AJAX and Flash in design and usability. We had a good discussion about where it’s appropriate to use Flash and AJAX, with some clear consensus being reached.

Then they go on to discuss something else. Apparently there was some Expo about raincoats on. I don’t know why they wanted to discuss that, but anyway, have a listen.

Props to the great guys over to pZ for inviting me back on.