boogdesign links

Link: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39223872,00.htm

While it's always nice to see the mighty Microsoft hung by their own patent petard, I can't help thinking that, in general, the web would be an easier place to work if the evil empire were allowed to win this one.

Link: http://mozilla-themes.schellen.net/firefox.html

This was (and still is) my favourite theme for the Mozilla suite - I only found out this week it's available for Firefox too!

Link: http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2005/05/10_bad_project_warning_signs/index.php

All stuff worth bearing in mind...

Link: http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050606

In something of a surprise move, Debian have finally got a release out (the last one was in mid 2002). I've never successfully managed to get Debian to work satisfactorily but, following my experience with Ubuntu, I suspect it might be worth the effort in the long run.

Link: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,67749,00.html

Something of a shock to the Mac community - to the extent that most thought it a practical joke at first. Personally I don't like the sound of all this DRM hardware, though I'm fairly comfident someone will figure out how to subvert it within a few months of release (because after all, region locked DVD players - that was such a successful strategy, it's bound to work again if we just make the hardware more complicated...), but the interesting possibility this does raise is that you might end up being able to run Mac OS on commodity Intel hardware instead of Windows (or Linux). You're probably going to need some sort of DirectX emulation layer to run Windows games (like Cedaga on Linux), but this could happen fairly quickly for a commercial OS, and it may lead to games being written in a more cross platform manner to start off with (because it will be relatively little effort to be able to target a larger pool of users).

Link: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/download/search_engine/

I've been doing some work on my employer's website recently, we have a big Flash movie on our front page which I figured wasn't attracting much search engine attention, even though Google can now index Flash movies. I downloaded this tool and my suspicions were confirmed - very little useful text in the movie - so I added some boilerplate 'this is what our company does' text. I also checked all our search engine rankings for some key terms, will be checking again in a few weeks to see if there's any improvement.

Link: http://www.ubuntulinux.org

Ubuntu have released their newest version this week. It should be possible to just update your apt.sources list, replacing 'warty' with 'hoary', do a dist-upgrade and reboot. I'm trying it now on my laptop - just waiting for 775Mb of packages to download...

Link: http://www.stanford.edu/~fenn/linux/radeon.shtml

Got a new graphics card today - a Radeon 9800Pro. Spent some time trying to get it working on my FC3 box, in the end I ignored the livna RPMs mentioned on the page above and installed the stock ATI RPM to get things working, but the rest of the instructions were pretty good.

Link: http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2005/02/07/monowindows.html

How to build Mono from source on Windows.

Link: http://www.little-gamers.com/index.php

No I've not been overrun by spammers (yet!), this is an amusing online comic strip.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx

A useful document for concerned parents? Notice how they don't actually specify who is performing the illegal activity. Parents, if you spot your children using these terms, please remember to ask them if they've been involved in illegal abuse of their market monopoly position or know of anyone who's been taken to court and convicted of the same.