Archive for February, 2008

I just found out about Perl 5.10, which has been out for some time now (released on December 18 … how did I miss this?). The perldelta documentation goes into detail on what’s new, but here’s a brief overview of some of the features I find most appealing:

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Another game I finished recently is The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS. This game took me quite a while to beat, mainly because there’s so much to do (and I didn’t do everything). I thought I’d write up a few thoughts I had.

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Slashdot is running a story on how Time-Warner is considering moving to a per-gigabyte service fee. According to them, 5 percent of their customers use over 50 percent of the network. So, because of these few “bad apples,” they’ll make everyone pay more. Steven Levy of the Washington Post has an interesting theory that Time-Warner is trying to hobble movie rentals via iTunes (trying to keep their pay-per-view stuff alive in the process).

I hope above anything else that this ‘idea’ of theirs never sees the light of day. Capping folks at 5-gigabytes (which is their current idea … can you believe that?) is incredibly poor judgment. This kind of thing will single-handedly destroy the online viewing capabilities of Netflix, it will ruin online gaming, and it will make MSDN subscriptions irrelevant.

And that might just be Time-Warner’s ultimate goal. Let’s hope they fail in every way possible.

Last weekend I finally finished Metroid Prime 3. Here are some quick thoughts I had on the game:

What I Liked

• The “Morph Ball” mode is incredibly fun. In essence, you become a pinball and get to roll through a number of tracks. There were plenty of puzzles that used this gameplay, and it ended up being my favorite part of the game.
• The Wii-mote and Nunchuck controls work surprisingly well. This is the first FPS experience I’ve had with the Wii, and I was quite pleased.
• Backtracking is well used in the game. There are plenty of areas that are inaccessible until you get certain powerups, forcing you to really explore every nook and cranny of every map.

What I Didn’t Like

• Loading times aren’t what they should be. Levels are loaded in an on-demand fashion, and there are some times when the delay gets in the way.
• The game feels a little too easy. Firefights end up being “how fast can you pull the trigger.” Weapon powerups are obtained in a few places, but they never feel more powerful.

All in all, I highly recommend this game; it’s a strong A in my book.

A new build of Paper Plus is now available. Here’s what has changed in this release:

New Features

• Drag and drop support is now available for adding files to the current list

Bug Fixes

• The “Add Files to List” action could incorrectly add file entries that were already in the list (causing duplicates)
• Files with a “jpeg” extension weren’t always being handled correctly
• The “Globally Set Position” dialog box did not have an appropriate access key for the drop-down menu

Miscellaneous Fixes

• When removing a file from the wallpaper list, the next item in the list is now automatically selected
• The accelerator for applying the selected wallpaper is now the Enter key instead of Ctrl + A
• The “Save wallpaper list automatically on exit” option is now disabled by default
• Changed the default button in the “Recycle File” confirmation dialog to “Yes”