Tuesday, January 23, 2007

My Blog Has Moved...

Yes that's right. It's been a great experience using Blogger for the past two months, but no matter what, your own hosted blog can always give you much more power and flexibility. My new blog now has moved to its new location and name: BlogAllAlong.com. I tried my best to move all the posts and comments from here to there, sadly Blogger does not provide a convenient export mechanism, and the suggested work around solutions did not work for me. So please, excuse me for any mistakes on old posts.

I will be writing there soon a full review about my experience in Blogger, and who and why might chose to host his own blog.

Friday, January 19, 2007

iPhone clone already?

LG have announced their new KE850 touch screen only mobile phone, very similar in look to the iPhone. Is this by chance? Is it a tradition that people copy Apple interface? Or is it the other way around this time? No reports seem to have been made so far. What is interesting however is that the new LG phone might beat the iPhone to the market. Whether that is good to LG, or bad to them since Apple fans will keep waiting, we will know the answer soon.

oneCompare has more on the news with a photo of the new phone.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Finally, A Vampyre Story set for release end of 2007

It was a long wait, it was a touch fight, and we are still going to wait. But in the end, I think it's all worth it. The dream of Bill Tiller and his new Autumn Moon studio is coming to reality finally. A Vampyre Story release date in France and United Kingdom has been announced and is intended to be at the end of 2007. I can still recall when the game designer vowed to release the game, even if he had to do so on his own budget.



Well, his efforts seem to have been rewarded and the fans are eagerly waiting for the new 2D style adventure game. The French distributors are now targeting the end of year for the release. You can read the translation of the article here. The original French version is available here as well.

Monday, January 15, 2007

US Console Sales lead by XBox 360 in Dec

The Register writes about the game console sales in US last month, lead by XBox 360 with 1.1m unites, followed by Wii 604,200 and Sony 3 490,700. PS3 is still in the last place, and XBox 360 taking the lead among. This lead is most probably due to the lack of productions units for Wii and PS3. Why is the PS3 also less popular? Well I suggest you browse for the PS3 games and see which game is worthy of buying the $400 console. There is no killer app for PS3 yet, but they should be coming in 2007 or else Sony will be kicked out of this round.

The amazing thing is the sales of the old consoles however. PS2 reached 1.4m, 1.6m for Nintendo DS, and 953,200 units for PSP. How could people still buy the PS2 I wondered, and then I remembered the tag price for new consoles. The total console sales in December rose %59.2 from last year, totalling $1.6bn! Can you imagine. And my dad used to tell me video games are just for kids.

Read the full article here.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Telltale Vs Lucasarts

March 2004, the famous anticipated sequel to the Sam & Max Hit the Road was cancelled by Lucasarts for good, and and all other adventure game plans have been put on hold until further notice. A late comment came from Lucas officials late last year saying they will get back to the adventure games in 2015!

Fans went mad, petitions started on the internet, and even the Lucas employees who were working on the game felt frustrated. A group of the employees heard the cries, quit Lucas and started what's called today Telltale games back in June 2004. They have managed to acquire the license for the abandoned Sam & Max and already released two episodes which were well accepted by the fans.

Now, and after 3 years and a half, I thought of making this comparison between the small Telltale, and the Star Wars fueled Lucasarts. The first thing I tried was how often people Google for one over the other by using Google Trends.


Lucas are still in the lead, but as it is properly called Trend, you can see end of 2006 how Telltale closed up on Lucasarts. This was when Sam & Max Ep. 1 was released. A clear message from the fans to Lucas I suppose. Also, you can see below the difference from Alexa for Reach and Rank:


Daily Reach has still a huge gap between the two, though at every Sam & Max release this gap gets a lot smaller. If we look at Ranking it gets much more interesting. At Nov and Jan, when the two Sam & Max episodes were released, the 3 1/2 years old company, living on the forgotten and leftovers of Lucasarts beats Lucas in ranking! Now that Lucas are out of new Star Wars movies, and Telltale still gathering up their forces, there could be a real turn in situation here. I don't believe Lucas will start losing, no. But their sales may get affected now without new Star Wars fresh movies coming, and may really consider appealing back to the fans they turned their back to.

On the other, I take off my hat and salute all the people at Telltale for their continuous and hard working efforts that really seem to be paying off. They have won the fans heart and loyalty in a way that with every release, we customers face serious issues launching the game, and can still feel the sense of humor between fans and the company. How could a company like this fall I wonder?

Google Top iFrame not appearing

Today I noticed when I Google for any word that has results, there is an iFrame above the results that results in 404 Page Not Found. I thought in the beginning it's only my slow connection timeout, but I keep getting it in both Firefox and IE7. Opera did not have that iFrame for some reason. At least I didn't see it. See below the image.


Does anybody else have the same thing?

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Yahoo doing Evil against Google?

Marketing Pilgrim are posting the incident of an individual who download Yahoo Messenger, and upon installation, he got an innocent vague looking auto-update option, which he normally assumed it's Yahoo Messenger related update and decided to keep it. What he found out later is that the update downloads the IE7, sets it as default browser with Yahoo as the main page, and not only that. It changes the default search engine to Yahoo from what it was, Google.

This is a very strange incident to be, and someone already mailed Yahoo for comments. Read more and see snapshots from the original post.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Google brings live stock price!

Google have been in discussions, and are moving on with the SEC, NYSE, and NetCoalition about what seems to be not a desperate attempt to bring the live stock market prices through all various Google services, including but not limited to Google Finance, Google Mobile, and Google Personalized Page.

The negotiations are still going on very well as it seems from Google Blog's tone and if it happens, this will give them a jump ahead over Yahoo, who have their prices delayed for at least 15 minutes. But in the meantime, Google Finance has all it takes of a stock market site, from searching quotes with on the fly suggestion, related news, share holder info, and now your can create your Portfolio to track your favorite stocks, mark down the shares you have and track your gain/loss over time.

Basically, Google Finance now has it all except for the live quotes. Could we see Google soon turning into an online stock market as well? I am eagerly waiting for that to be honest. Since the launch of Google Finance, I hardly see my self going to any other financial site, which is not healthy ofcourse.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Apple comes with iPhone, Cisco fires back in the court

Apple's Steve Jobs just introduced the long awaited and rumored iPhone to the fans.
Fans are happy and crazy about it
Apple stocks raises up
Cisco files a lawsuit against Apple for using their iPhone trademark which they got by acquiring infogear back in 2000.

Funny thing is that Cisco surely knew all the time that if Apple comes with it's phone, it sure is going to call it iPhone.

Also to come, is the Apple TV in February. Next few months are going to be really interesting for Apple fans.

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Best 100 Companies to Work for in US, Google Tops Them

CNN Money have compiled a list of the best 100 companies to be working for in the US for 2007, and Google fairly tops the list. Competitors Yahoo and Microsoft came in the 44th and 50th position accordingly. Is it a coincidence the order is inversely proportional to the company age? And that with time and as Google grows bigger it will become more vertically structured oriented and start to lose it's advantages? Possible, but still avoidable.

Click here for the full list.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

IE6 was unsecured for 284 days in 2006

Slashdot posted a link to a washingtonpost article compiling the number of days IE6 had open exploit code with no fixes from Microsoft. The result is more than 9 months (284 days) of the year, the IE6 browser had known unpatched security flaws. There was also another 98 days without fixes to IE flaws that criminals were using to gain personal and financial data.

Could a customer sue Microsoft over his losses because of the lack of support for the browser? While Microsoft enforces Internet Explorer as the default browser in all it's operating systems, this causes the majority of people to go with the crowd and use what's already there. And with the results given from the article, I think Microsoft should be held legally accountable for the loss of millions of user data, and in the future, they have a choice of either removing IE from their system, or showing one of those scary warning signs they have to the user saying "We do not guarantee the confidentiality of the information you send and receive over the internet if you use our Internet Explorer" Just like what they did when they lost the lawsuit against Sun for licensing their own modified JRE.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

Windows Vista did not steal Mac interface...

From the begin of the Windowing systems, people claim that Bill Gates copied Apple interface and credited it for him self. Now with Vista soon going in for public, many are also saying it's a copy of Mac OS X, while the Microsoft fans are talking in pride about the innovative Vista interface.

New York Times have this video demonstrating the clear differences between the two, for you to watch and judge. Click here to watch it. Enjoy.

Friday, January 5, 2007

Sam & Max episode 2 out today


Technically, it's the 5th of Jan in many areas of the world, and fans have already started spamming telltale blog with complains and funny comments about why the game, Sam & Max episode Situation: Comedy is not out yet. The company PR and officials are sharing the laugh as well, saying it's still not 5th in California.

The episode is the second of 6 as a whole that will end up the first season of Sam & Max Adventure game series. Sam & Max started as a comic in the 80s, and was later turned into a PC adventure game in 1993 called Sam & Max Hit the Road, and it was really a hit. You can see the intro cutscene below. Around 1998, TV Series for the dog and rabbit comic started before it was soon stopped. Fans kept looking for more of the funny two characters, but all hopes were gone when Lucasarts stopped the production of the Sam & Max Freelance Police game.

As the news came out, it was a clear message Lucas are no more into adventure games, and have set focus on purely Star Wars sequels. Mass petitions started, and lots of people cried for help. A group of Lucas employees listened to the crowd, left the company to start their own. To be able to fuel their on going expenses, they made the games into short episodes, and it seems to be turning out good.

For now, enjoy the the two clips below:


Sam & Max Hit the Road (2003)


Sam & Max Freelance Police (2004) - Got cancelled

Thursday, January 4, 2007

Best SEO Blog of 2006

SearchEngineJournal have revealed the results of their competition for the best SEO Blog for 2006. You can see the results here and find use of the top blogs.

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Aljazeera Voting System fake?

I don't post usually about politics, but it's a special occasion where the responsible for death of millions over the past 3 decades, and even after his death, has been hanged to death. Not every day you see a president sentenced to death. Many philosophical minds start to argue now, and talk about human rights and nobles. How could the president be hanged, it was not a fair trial, and even the execution was a revenge.

I say to them, what do you expect? No heart feelings. All is well, we will just hang you because the judge said so. We forgive you for spraying halabcha with chemicals, invading Kuwait, taking on Iran in one of the most tough battles mankind ever knew, just when Iran was healing from internal revolution. And the hundreds of Islamic Shite leaders you murdered all forgive you as well. I will not say it was right how the US entered Iraq, and neither it's OK for people to shout loud during the execution, but then name me one reason why Saddam Hussain should be treated fairly? There are hundreds of bodies laying in iraq waiting to be dig out, if ever. Body of my relative was brought to Kuwait last year from the Iraqi captivity during invasion of Kuwait.

Aljazeera now has a poll on whether you agree to Saddam being hanged, and before I even see the results, I knew it. Result is NO! It's always the mentality of Aljazeera to take on sides. Anyways, I did my vote BIG YES, and just to test the trustworthy of the vote, I wrote a small script to post a 100 vote for YES. Not surprisingly the results didn't change a bit. Percentages are exact the same, and number of votes didn't change accordingly. I tried manual votes and View results. Within minute you sometimes see number jumping from 47250 to 47330, and then another refresh in a new browser shows lower number of votes again. I tried to refresh two sessions at the same time, the first was higher in number of votes than the second by 2!

Nevertheless, the difference in percentage is always the same. Lets do a simple math here to see why. With total number of votes 47300, and the percentage is of 3 digits, e.g. %37.8, it means that it needs another 50 votes for the change to take effect, which apparently it has. But still, the results remain the same. Either it's a total game from Aljazeera site, and we have seen many posts with strange results in the past, or their posting solution is still in Alpha testing phase, so I suggest you keep away from it.

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Bone Director's Cut


Following the release of the first two Bone episodes, and while the fans were busy playing and more often discussing the Sam & Max season, Jeff Smith and his team have had their hands full working on new updated versions of the two Bone episodes. Updated version is available for FREE to people who already purchased the game, and include:

1- New "Prophecy" cutscene at the begin of Out from Boneville, that will be related to the remaining of the episodes
2- Better and more clear ending of the first episode, as Mr. Jeff believes they rushed in the release and didn't make the ending as good as it should.
3- improved Thorn look and voice.

Rarely we see people revisiting their sold work to enhance it again, which shows to what degree they are taking care of the details of their story. Read their official post, and interview with Jiff Smith here.

Monday, January 1, 2007

Top 10 anticipated Nintendo Wii games

Here you will find a lits with some YouTube videos of the top 10 most promising games for Nintendo Wii in 2007. Enjoy!