STG's

I've always liked e-books with eReader's DRM - it's based on Name+Credit Card Number, and thus device independent. As long as you keep a list with your previous CC numbers you used for buying e-books, you should be fine. I've had a bit of a problem figuring out how they used my name *exactly* - sometimes it's all in caps, sometimes without middle initials, etc. However, since I bought a Nokia N95 a couple of weeks ago, I was bit disappointed to find out that their Symbian version won't work for it, and that they don't have any versions for Symbian S60 3rd edition. Mobipocket does work, and although the screen *is* a bit small, it's pretty neat for reading while waiting for anything, since unlike my Palm I carry it everywhere I go. As is usually the case, the eReader DRM e-books only work with eReader. Today I wrote to eReader support, and within a couple of hour they answered - which I found quite surprising (even as I myself sometimes answer support e...

I've recently started using Mozy.com for on-line backups - it's pretty neat. The background operation allows it to have very current and very granular backups. I don't really trust their encryption though, so I'm using my normal backup program to a folder, with incremental backup on and fully encrypted and synchronizing THAT folder. It works, although it is very inefficient compared to normal operation, of course... For less important stuff I use the built-in (LOCAL!) encryption. The price seems pretty good if you use the free or personal version, too.

I've been playing it since yesterday - bought from Steam, as usual. I had heard a lot of positive comments, and since playing, I have to agree with them! It's pretty awesome. I miss not having real vehicles sections (at least so far), instead of the "on rails" sequences where you just aim, but these sequences and the plane and chopper carnage where pretty great.

Vernor Vinge is a great author. I've loved all of his books I read, and Rainbows End is no exception. Even better, it's free on the web, posted by himself. It's in HTML format but it's trivial to convert with Mobipocket Creator if you'd prefer to read it on a Palm or another device that supports Mobipocket.

I've recently finished Portal. It was much better than I expected! Well worth the price and time. Half-life Episode 2 was great too, but very short - and that was a somewhat revolting ending...

I've blogged a few days ago about the Quake Wars demo, which I really liked. Since I got the demo from Steam, I expected it would be available there and was checking every day after the boxed release (October 1th in the US, September 27th on Europe). Great news: it's now available for pre-purchase. The bad news - it's only going to be released October 9th! I imagine they are giving the stores a chance to sell the boxed release :-( Not much danger in my case - it probably will take for it to be available in Brazil. I already purchased it on Steam.

Just today I got the new LMD VCL Complete, their pack that includes everything. Since I previously had both ElPack and LMD Tools before, the actual components don't have that much of a change. The source delivery system is a different story - it's now available through SVN. That means you can get the latest development or tested releases very quickly, and then just use an included utility to assemble the packages. It's a large advantage versus the large numbers of downloads you'd normally need, although their server's speed was very nice today (topping at about 300K/s, which is MUCH better than I usually get at other components sites such as Developer Express or TMS). In theory updates should be tiny since they'd only include the actual source changes. It's not all perfect, though - demos and help aren't included, so there is a lot of stuff to install yet (Elpack, LMD, both for VCL and VCL.NET as well as some extra stuff). And for some reason (I'm pr...

I seem to never get around to posting, but since I'm already here... I got the demo for Enemy Territory:Quake Wars from Steam last week. It's a FPS with vehicles in the Battlefield style. So far, I've played it for several hours, both with bots and multiplayer. Bot performance seems to be much better than Battlefield's (where it seems more like an afterthought), and the gameplay is much better. I hope (and expect) that it will be offered through Steam - I will buy it as soon as it is available. I've also played the beta of Team Fortress 2, but while it isn't bad, it seems pretty simplistic in comparison to Quake Wars...

I was interested in getting the latest version of Delphi, either in the form of Codegear RAD Studio 2007 or the latest update of Delphi 2007 (my latest Delphi is BDS 2006). And I would already have if I could just buy the downloadable version. The US store won't sell to Brazilian users, and the local version of BDS 2007 is 71% more expensive, while Delphi 2007 had a 40% increase. Adding to the mix the dropping of Winforms support, Visual Studio and .Net never seemed so good... :-(

I've just finished reading Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. It's a pretty good coverage of the best practices on design of dashboards, including type of graphs and media and how to emphasize and de-emphasize items. This is a topic I'm interested in due to my intention of having a dashboard in the Pro or Enterprise version of STG FolderPrint Plus... More to follow in that subject in the future. :-)