Category Software

Hacking the Original XBox

Here is a truly fantastic Google eduTalk on the original XBox security system by the founder of the Xbox-Linux project. If you were or are casually interested in hacking this is great eduTainment. Don't miss it.

Opera Mini 4 β

I was never a fan of Opera browsers. They always seemed clunky and weird, despite their impressive performance and innovative features. The latest β release of Opera Mini however, version 4, is an exception. Opera Mini is a midlet browser for phones supporting MIDP (almost all of them nowadays). And --- to my surprise --- it is by far the best mobile browser I've used (and practically the best I've seen, after Safari on the iPhone). Oh, and it's free. If you have a Java-enabled mobile phone, give it a try.

VMWare Workstation 6.0

Back in 2005 I needed VMWare to be able to test a piece of software on multiple separate installations so I went and bought VMWare Workstation 5.5.x for Linux. One of the annoying things with Workstation 5.5 was its complete lack of support for USB 2.0 and somewhat arcane configuration which occasionally necessitated ini file […]

Like many successful revolutions, this one might come from the bottom.

John Gruber writes about the iPhone's support for Open standards and the reality of enterprise email that's still predominantly based on proprietary solutions by a handful of companies. 'Revolution' is a strong term for what's at stake here, but It will --- nevertheless --- be interesting to see if this will another case of the people forcing corporations to embrace/promote/develop superior, Open technology. Given the iPhone's appeal to the relevant demographics, I guess it might be easier than previously thought.

The death of SimCity

I still remember clearly the first time I saw SimCity run on a friend’s computer, back in 1990. It is hard to describe the feeling, but it was more or less one of the most impressive pieces of software I’d seen, not for what it was as a game, but for what it represented: a […]

Νέα έκδοση του HRDL Widget

HRDLΑπό τη διάθεση του στο κοινό στα τέλη Μαΐου, μέχρι σήμερα το HRDL 'κατέβηκε' αρκετές εκατοντάδες φορές! Σας ευχαριστώ πολύ όλους για τα καλά σας λόγια και χαίρομαι ιδιαίτερα που το βρήκατε χρήσιμο. Αρκετοί από εσάς ζητήσατε ένα πιο ολοκληρωμένο Whitepages Widget. Υπομονή... έρχεται :) Τώρα στα δυσάρεστα: Το Safari 3.0 Public Beta σε Tiger που μόλις κυκλοφόρησε 'σπάει' το Hellenic Reverse Directory Lookup Widget όπως και πολλά άλλα (για διάφορους λόγους)! Το πρόβλημα με το δικό μου widget έγκειται στο search input field και το γεγονός πως επέτρεπα saved searches (υπάρχει το drop down μενουδάκι στα αριστερά που εμφανίζεται μόλις κάνετε κλικ στον μικρό φακό). Δυστυχώς με τη νεα προ-έκδοση του Safari η δυνατότητα αυτή δε λειτουργεί όπως πρέπει. Γι'αυτόν τον λόγο, εαν χρησιμοποιείτε τη β του Safari 3.0 κατεβάστε την έκδοση 1.01 του HRDL Widget από τη σελίδα λογισμικού.

'Leftovers' can be oh-so polished.

Yes, you guessed it. The most visible highlight of this year’s WWDC keynote is a brand spanking new web site for Apple.com. That’s it folks. Nothing to see here. Move along now. Or is it? More seriously, I bet the average Mac user is going to be baffled, still waiting for those über-features that were […]

ZFS for Leopard according to Schwartz [video]

That Leopard would support Sun Microsystems' ZFS was known for several months, since a screenshot from an earlier α release of the upcoming version of OS X was leaked late in 2006 showing support in the Disk Utility. At the time of that leak, several developers reported that 10.5 did not support ZFS as its default filesystem, meaning it could not boot from it or use it for the system partition. Well, now it can. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO claims that ZFS is going to be the default filesystem on Leopard replacing the ageing HFS+ Journaling. Great news for the Mac and further proof of the value that Open Source software adds to commercial products. [P.S.: Schwartz's video is quite interesting for FOSS and Sun customers too. I'll have to revisit the topic of Sun Microsystems and its relationship with Open Source in an article some time.]