Google's Froogle, the "Any Store, Any Thing" Wishlist
Froogle is Google's massive search engine applied to shopping. You look
for an item, and google turns up hundreds of stores and lets you
compare prices.
I've done Amazon wishlists in the past, but I'm always thwarted by their
lack of products outside of books, dvd's, and games.
So I give you my Froogle
Wishlist, which is full of, well, books, dvd's, and games,
ironically.
Want one of your own? Just go to Froogle,
search for a few things from thousands of online
merchants, and click 'Add to list' for any item you want
to add to your Shopping List. You'll need to sign in to
your Google account or create one if you haven't already
(if you have a Gmail account or Groups 2 login, you
already have a Google account). If you want to share
items, just click the 'In Wish List' checkbox and whammo,
you now have a web page of your holiday wish list to
share with friends and family
Go make your own list! Be sure to click "show on wish
list" for each item once you've put it on your personal shopping list.
Stolen from the Google
Blog
3:43 pm | permalink |
/technology/web |
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A Link to the Past
KDE
2.0. Remember when it was this ugly?
I
started work at
Common Ground
just over two years ago, and one of the
first things I did was install a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP)
Intranet
server running
PostNuke.
Until
last week when I took the server down to put a new harddrive in, it had
never been rebooted. It had run for 465 days without crashing. Hell, it
had run for 465 days without being touched.
Logging into the desktop was strange. KDE looked ugly, Mozilla took
forever to start, and the Redhat Package Manager desktop app crashed
more than it
ran. The fonts were jaggy and applications seemed boxy and
mismatched, and it just generally looked like crap. I
remembered, briefly, what Open Source used to look and feel like, just
2 years
ago.
I'm an Open Source advocate. I say that freely and without hesitation,
but that does not mean I am an Open Source zealot. As an IT
professional, I've been keenly aware of what the
problems are with Open Source applications and Linux, and what strides
we needed to make.
When I first experimented with Linux back in 1999 (on this very machine
serving
Glitchnyc.com, no less) "Open Source" was synonymous with a web server,
an OS for
servers and supergeeks, and a clunky browser with too many parts. I
remember when downloading an Open Source solution meant you probably had
to put up with a crappy interface, half-there functionality, and lots of
compiling and hand-tweaking.
In just the past 2 years, I've watched the open source software
landscape
mature so quickly it's almost unbelievable. The Gimp finally got GTK 2
support and
went from a quirky, ugly tool to a slick, pro-level photo-editor,
both on
Windows and Linux. The two major Linux desktops, KDE and
Gnome, went from interfaces
that looked like windows
98 on a bad day to rivaling XP and even Mac OS X in sheer sexiness.
Installing and upgrading programs has gone from has gone from
./configure && make && make install (and
pray
you've got the right libraries installed) or rpm dependency hell to point-n-click
with
apt and synaptic.
Mozilla has completely reinvented itself and stripped
the browser down to the 4 meg work of art that is Firefox, and Thunderbird,
its solid mail counterpart.
The list of amazing applications continues to grow:
Scribus gives desktop publishing
apps such a run for their money that
*someone* is
quietly
trying to squash work on the win32 version.
Audacity handles audio
like
a pro, and is getting multi-track support the upcoming version.
OpenOffice.org is pushing
Microsoft
out in more installations than anyone
cares to talk about, and Inkscape
is far and away the easiest vector drawing
tool I've ever used.
Do I think Linux is ready for prime time? I don't know. I think there
are
a lot of hurdles there, but I do know this: Open Source software is
ready for prime time. The Desktop application stack is here, and it's
cross platform. I'm using the same programs on Windows at work and on
Linux at home, and I
love it.
Pretty soon, what OS you're running just isn't going to matter, because
you'll know all the best applications in both places.
2:12 pm | permalink |
/technology/opensource |
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Great Open Source Games
I've just completed a long article on the current state of open source
software in general that will post tomorrow morning, but I wanted to
split this small piece on games out into a separate post. Without
further ado, I give you 4 great Open Source games which play on Windows
and Linux.
- Battle for Wesnoth
- http://www.wesnoth.org
- The
Battle For Wesnoth is a turn based strategy game. Aside from
the default quest being quite entertaining and extremely
challenging, there is also a lively community producing tons
of downloadable quests and additional graphics.
Game-play is straightforward and fun, and figuring out how many
troops to recruit, how to use them, etc, has kept me up late
quite a few nights recently.
- Liquid War
- http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/
- This
one is the most original games I've played in years. You really
just have to play it to understand it, but you control an army
of tens of thousands of units, which move towards your cursor.
Lead them in the right direction, and they'll surround the
enemy and win. Leave their back or flank open, and you're in
hot water. There's so many troops, they really do flow like
liquid.
- JDuplicate
- Neverball
- http://icculus.org/neverball/
- Neverball,
which is a clone of Super Monkey Ball. If you've never played
it, it's like Marble Madness + one of those wooden labyrinth games
you had as a kid on speed. Very addictive. Be warned that this
is 3D on SDL, which means you'll need either a modern graphics
card or a really beefy CPU to make it run well
1:22 am | permalink |
/technology/opensource |
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