This was the first games expo I’ve attended but I must say that it was largely what I would have expected: various game companies pushing their latest games and consoles (Sony and Nintendo doing the lion’s share), various tertiary education institutions pushing their games-related courses (sadly Melbourne Uni hasn’t caught on) and various vendors trying to sell you stuff. Still, overall it was quite enjoyable and great to be able to check out the latest games without having to, say, buy a PS3. Following are some of my highlights from the event and my general review.
Archive for November, 2007
In case you’ve been living under a rock - or simply don’t care about mobile development - Google recently released a public preview of Android, a new platform for mobile devices built on top of a Linux kernel. You may have heard of it before as it turns out that Android is the thing everyone assumed to be the Google “gPhone”. Well, they’re not releasing a phone but with a ton of device makers on board to use Android (sounds like everyone except Apple, surprise, surprise) I don’t think anyone is going to mind.
The eGames & Entertainment Expo for 2007 is set to start next weekend at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. It sounds like it will be a decent weekend of gaming goodness so I’m quite keen to go. Any readers thinking of attending?
Now that Leopard has been released a few people are commenting on the usability of Time Machine as a backup system for “ordinary people”. As is usually the case, what Apple have done here is slap a GUI on functionality that Linux and UNIX systems have had for years. Naturally though, because Time Machine looks so pretty and is grabbing more headlines that the humble rsync, there are some efforts to bring a similar system to Linux.
A guide to metric time. An interesting concept but I think an even better implementation will need to be worked out - “Anglo-Babylonian Time” is just far too ingrained into everyday life, even more so than measures of distance, temperature, etc (interestingly, many SI units inherently depend on the second as well).
I recently discovered eXtplorer, which is a Javascript and PHP file manager. The system looks very impressive and the feature list sounds great for allowing less technical users to manage their own websites (rather than requiring an FTP program). However, from my admittedly brief examination of the software I found that many of the things simply didn’t work or there were enough minor issues to make using it rather annoying.