When is Java not Java? When it’s JBoss

Software, coffee, and convicted monopolists

Handspring’s last gasp

Laszlo saves Flash from itself

Polluting RSS, the InfoWorld way

Sid Meier returns to the briny deep

The first public beta of the new Battlefield 1942 mod “Eve of Destruction“, which moves the action to the jungles of Vietnam, is finally available. It’s a little laggy, but very atmospheric and a lot of fun to play. Give it a spin if you need a break from Desert Combat 🙂

Archos creates another digital lust object

The latest update (version .35) to the outstanding Battlefield 1942 mod “Desert Combat” adds a sweetener that’s practically addictive: a new map called “Lost Village”. Lost Village addresses the greatest problem with DC to date: how to address the overwhelming advantage in force the “Coalition” (aka Americans) has over the “Opposition” (aka Iraqis). LV’s solution […]

I’ve written in this space about the Half-Life mod Day of Defeat before. DoD is a mod that turns Half-Life into a raging, multiplayer World War Two battle, and does it so successfully that Valve, the company behind Half-Life, has actually partnered with the DoD team to turn their labor of love into a retail […]

Another new entry from the nifty gadgets front: a company called PoGo! Products has announced Radio YourWay, a tiny device they’re calling “TiVo for radio”. It allows you to time-shift radio programming in the same way PVRs do for television; just set it and it records whatever program you want to its internal memory as […]

Oh, man, this is too cool… Anyone who has worked with me knows how much I like to listen to music while I work. It helps me concentrate and block out external distractions, especially when I’m programming. Currently this means I use streaming Internet audio to feed my music jones. That’s great, except it means […]

Here’s another example for the continuing saga of companies using EULAs to give their customers the shaft: Watchfire, the company behind the popular Bobby Web accessibility testing package, is using the EULA for their new Bobby 5.0 release to camouflage a major change to the way the software is licensed, and to deny refunds to […]

After many, many years of stagnation, it looks like Palm, Inc. is finally innovating again — they’ve just announced their newest device, the Tungsten C Handheld, which packs the savory goodness of Palm OS 5 in a package with a feature I have yet to see in any comparable device: built-in WiFi. All for a […]

Anil Dash has an interesting suggestion for how to improve perceived speed on your PC: cache critical data (bookmarks, My Documents, etc.) to a RAM drive. It’s an “everything old is new again” kind of idea: back when hard drives were slooooow, using a small amount of memory as a kind of virtual disk was […]

Looks like Diego Doval is proving that the original promise of Java isn’t dead after all: his nifty Java app Spaces, developed on Windows and tested on Linux and OS X, apparently runs fine on OS/2 as well. That’s right, OS/2, the operating system from IBM that was supposed to give us in 1990 what […]

SnapStream offers software that lets you turn your PC (and — intriguingly — your Pocket PC) into a TiVo for practically nothing — $50 for the software alone, or you can get it bundled with TV tuner hardware for less than $150.

All you Movable Type users out there should check this out: there’s finally a MT Plugin Directory, pulling together all the various MT add-ons into one place. Great idea!

Well, well, well — after making a splashy entry into the Media Center PC market, Lindows is now going after the sub-notebook market as well with its $799 Lindows Mobile PC. You read that right, $799. Admittedly it’s not a smoking PC by any stretch of the imagination, but its specs are competent enough (especially […]

Now, this is interesting. For as long as anyone can remember, the trend with computers has been to get faster and cheaper, but the size has always remained relatively constant. Today, though, now that just about any computer is fast enough for most people, vendors need a new way to differentiate themselves, and many have […]

So Don Park is saying on his blog that IBM’s Sash technology is, well, trash — too hard to install, too bloated, too complicated. Maybe he’s right — I never had the chance to use Sash on a production project, so I dunno. But I have done some noodling around with it, and many of […]

If anybody out there has experience using the Mozilla front-end language, XUL, and its support for localization, I’d love to hear from you — I’ve been working through O’Reilly’s Creating Applications With Mozilla book, and it seems to be riddled with errors in the sample code provided. I can figure out everything except how to […]

This is good news — after a long dormancy, the K-Meleon project is finally back up and running. K-Meleon takes the powerful Gecko rendering engine used in Mozilla and wraps it in a real, native Windows interface, instead of using Mozilla’s slower interpreted interface language. The result is a small, fast, snappy browser that you […]

Over at the Open Source Application Foundation, Andy Hertzfeld (the brilliant designer behind the original Macintosh and the “Nautilus” GUI for Linux) has just pulled back the curtain on “Vista”, the first prototype of OSAF’s new personal information manager. Hertzfeld goes to great lengths to point out that “Vista” is not in any way a […]

If anyone out there has any experience with the open-source Mambo Site Server, I’d love to hear from you — I’m working on a project with it now and I’m running into some significant challenges. If you know how to Mambo, drop me a line and let’s talk!