Monthly Archive for October, 2004

Halo 2 smashing records

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 19/10/2004
in Technology
. 1 Comment

I see the BBC has a report that Halo 2 has broken all video game records, with pre-orders for more than 1.5 million copies of the game in the US alone.

“We’ve even heard rumours of fan anticipation of the ‘Halo 2 flu’ on 9 November.” said Xbox’s Peter Moore.

I don’t think this is an exaggeration. I know several people who have pre-ordered Halo 2 and will be staying away from work on the 9th to try it out. And this is guys in their 30’s!

Roll on the 9th.

Halo 2 Limited Edition CoverClick to buy on Amazon.Halo 2 Limited Edition is now available to pre-order on Amazon. I have already pre-ordered it and am having a hard time having to wait until November for it to come!

Google Desktop Exploit

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/10/2004
in Search Engines
. 1 Comment

Jon Hanna mentioned in a mailing list that I am on that there is a published exploit of Google (a script insertion flaw) and worse, this exploit also affects the Google Desktop Engine.

In light of this, I would strongly advise against installing the Google Desktop Search until this has been resolved satisfactorily.

Online CSS tutorial

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 16/10/2004
in Technology
. 3 Comments

Since I created this site, I have been hounding my good friend Frank P, for help in ways to improve it. He helped me edit the CSS to add the borders around the navigation on the right, he helped me get it xhtml compliant, and he helped with numerous other tweaks to the site.

Feeling guilty about how much of his valuable time I was wasting with my silly questions, I went in search of a good online CSS tutorial and I came across W3Schools CSS Tutorials. The CSS tutorials on this site are comprehensive, reasonable interactive, free and can lead to certification, if you so wish.

If anyone knows of another good site for CSS tutorials onlins, I’d love to hear of it. In the meantime, I’m back to (W3)School!

By the way, W3School also has free online tutorials on HTML, XML, Server Scripting, Browser Scripting, .Net, etc. - well worth checking out.

Google Desktop Search

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 15/10/2004
in Search Engines
. 0 Comments

Google launched yesterday the Google Desktop beta - this is a search application which you install on your PC (PC only) and access through your (Internet Explorer only) browser.

It has the familiar Google appearance but there is a new button to allow you search the desktop or the web.

Google Desktop Search
Click image to enlarge.

The app has a number of shortcomings - it is Internet Explorer only on Windows XP or Windows 2000 (SP3+) only. Also, the search doesn’t index PDF files yet.

In fairness to Google, when I tested the app on my Virtual PC, it worked a treat - finding relevant documents in both the filesystem and the web cache quickly! Google also say in their About page that “If there’s a format you’d like Google Desktop Search to be able to search, please let us know”

I have a few suggestions I’ll be making to them and will watch this app’s development with great interest.

UPDATE - Google Desktop Search is IE only for its installation. Once it is installed, you can use it from Firefox just as well as IE - just go to the Google website in Firefox and click on the Desktop button - simple as that.

Birthdays

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/10/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

Belated birthday wishes to Netscape and OpenOffice - Netscape was launched as a Beta 10 years ago yesterday and OpenOffice source code was released by Sun 4 years ago yesterday.

10 years ago, eh? Back in the days of lightening fast 14.4 modems, if you were lucky! I was in UCC around that time and I distinctly remember John Murphy of the Computer Centre telling me of a browser called Mosaic which could display images as well as text. Naively my next question was - what is the point of that!

10 years ago the PowerMac 6100 - the first PowerMac was launched. This had a 60mhz PowerPC 601 chip, 8mb of ram and a 160mb hard disk! Power to burn!

Ah yes, nostalgia - not bad now, but it used to be so much better!

PCs to get ability to run Mac software?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/10/2004
in Technology
. 2 Comments

I installed Virtual PC on my Mac early on - it is a very handy little app which allows me to run PC-only apps on my Mac (i.e. I have MS SQL Server Enterprise Manager running on my Mac connected to several remote databases).

Now a Hawaiian company called MXS has announced the release of their CherryOS which, it claims, allows PCs to run Mac OS X in emulation. If this is true, Many PC owners could use Apple’s superb Mail app to read their email in a far more secure manner than if they were reading it in Outlook. Also, they could use Firefox for Mac to browse, again far more secure than IE on the PC.

There is a lot of speculation, though that that this announcement is a hoax. Watch this space for updates.

Virtual PC 7.0Click to buy on Amazon.Virtual PC 7.0 - if you need to run Windows programs but want to treat yourself to a computer that is a joy to use - Virtual PC allows you to run Windows programs on your PC! I run Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Manager on my PowerBook to manage several remote SQL Server databases and can still enjoy my computing experience!

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