Nintendo has done a deal with Telstra to give DS owners free access to Telstra Wireless hotspots all around the country.

Nintendo Australia, in conjunction with Telstra, is pleased to announce that Nintendo DS users can now enjoy Wi-Fi service to Nintendo DS at over 1,000 Telstra Wireless Hotspot destinations across Australia.  Destinations include McDonald’s Restaurants, Starbucks Cafes, airports, hotels and city hotzones throughout Melbourne and Sydney … When a user brings a Nintendo DS unit and a Wi-Fi-enabled game into a Telstra Wireless Hotspot destination, the user simply launches the game in Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection mode. No setup is required.

Very nice.  This is the sort of cross-promotional thing that will start to get wireless internet access into the mainstream. Australia really needs to do some catchup in this area, the quality of broadband internet access in this country is really lagging behind most other developed countries.

[via AusGamers]

JetBrains have created a dedicated blog for TeamCity, their continuous integration and build management tool. I downloaded the 2.0 beta for TeamCity last week and set up an integration build for the Drive web solution.  It’s brilliant, so simple.  It automatically watches the subversion repository and rebuilds on each checkin, showing all the changes in the files with a side-by-side diff screen.  It can auto-run unit tests and report build status to either email, a system tray app or even a Jabber account!

From the looks of the application, once it gets released to production it could handle our whole build cycle from development all the way to deployment, because it can not only build Visual Studio solution files, but also run NAnt scripts or even just a command line app.  The build processing is ingenious too.  Rather than having to do all work on the server, you can install a client app on multiple computers that connect to the server which can be used to do builds, so that multiple builds can be happening at once.  The diffent builds can be done on specific clients depending on platform and other environment variable targets that can be setup in the build, so you could have a Windows 2003 build and a Linux build running off the one server but they will be built by the appropriate client machine at the time specified (either on check-in or scheduled).

TeamCity costs US$199, which will include the 2.0 release.

The Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta will go live on May 16th at 12:00 AM PDT and run through June 6 ^th at 11:59 PM PDT. That means that folks who purchased specially marked copies of Crackdown, or won a spot in the Beta through the “Rule of Three” or other regional promotions, will be able to log into their Xbox Live Gold accounts, download and play the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta and enjoy an early peek at the multiplayer aspect of the game.

…

The Beta itself consists of three maps – Valhalla, High Ground and Snowbound – graphically improved since our first MP screenshots – and all three will be playable in Matchmaking only (that is after all, what we’re Beta testing here). All three maps are suitable for a wide variety of gameplay types, and you will have the chance to try all manner of game types, familiar and new.

There are a number of new features you’ll get to test out – including a new grenade type, a completely different class of weapon and some of the enhanced online functionality we plan to bring to the game – but it should be noted, a lot of secret features are hidden in this Beta. We’re keeping a lot of our powder dry for Fall. In May, when your firing the Spiker, sniping vehicles with the Spartan Laser and sticking fools with the Brute Spike grenade, remember that it’s just a peek-a-boo fraction of what’s to come.

Bungie.net: Multiplayer Madness!

Check out the “Is Quisnam Protero Damno!” vidoc too.

Hope everyone had a great Easter long weekend.  Mine was especially good as I had the Thursday off too, 5-day weekend!  I decided to ban myself from the internet for the whole weekend and just focus on family time, so I’m catching up today.

• Google released My Maps, which is really going to annoy all those people who have spent ages constructing exactly the same functionality with the Google Maps API on their own site. It’s pretty darn nifty though.  If any readers have created a map, please leave a comment to let us know.
• You want to read this Washington Post article.
• Dean Peters has finally emerged from wherever he was hiding to start teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design again. He opens up with some links to ILoveJackDaniels.com’s excellent cheat sheets and then gets straight back into the action.
• I’ve done a bit of housekeeping here.  I noticed a bunch of common 404 errors showing up which were just out of date or typo’d links, so I’ve updated my .htaccess file to redirect them.  This includes a whole lot of requests for atom.xml and index.rdf, which I’ve now redirected to my FeedBurner url.  It will be interesting to see if these were valid unique requests.
• As well as this I realised that my 404 page was completely broken.  The page hadn’t been updated since I last changed my design here, so I’ve created a shiny new 404 not found page that has a bunch of (hopefully) helpful links, and an intuitive search box that looks at the referrer and tried to guess what the person was looking for. Here’s a fake URL for your testing convenience.
• I now know I’ve made it as a .NET blogger, I’ve been linked to by Jeff Atwood! (Scroll down to the bottom of the comments.  Yes, OK, so it’s in a comment on a post from over a year ago, but it’s still a link dammit!)

later!

So amazingly funny

Our support team just received an email from a FeedDemon user which contained a screenshot of an error he was encountering.  Clearly visible in the screenshot is a RAR file which contains a crack for FeedDemon.

Yep.  Not only did he contact us despite using a pirated version, but he also included a screenshot which proves he’s using a crack!

Unbelievable.

Seriously, why do people still insist that they have a God-given right to have whatever they want for free? And then to expect Nick & his support team to spend their time supporting them?!