Category: Software

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ScummVM

ScummVM is a great open source project for running old quest games like Simon The Sorcerer, King’s Quest, Maniac Mansion, Day Of The Tentacle, and… I can go on with the list forever. Basically, this project was created to run old Sierra games, but since then has been developed to do a lot more than that.

Note that ScummVM is only the runtime engine for the games. To play an actual game you have to find the files on the Internet (this is due to legal issues). It’s not that hard, eh hem eMule eh hem… excuse me, I had to cough ;-)

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Introduction To Tagging

Tagging, also known as labeling, is a pretty new concept in software. This concept is so simple, it’s surprising that it took so long for it to become popular.

I’ll explain what tagging is by example. Assume you send an email to all your friends about a party you’re throwing. In your email program you created a special folder for the party. You already have a folder for each of your friends, where you store emails you previously got from them. Now you start getting replies from your friends about the party and you have a problem – should you put the emails in the party folder or in the folder designated for each and every friend? Or maybe you should save a copy of each email message in both folders?

What if you could do both without copying the email message? Using tagging, instead of the traditional hierarchical concept (like the folder tree structure), you can apply the tags “Bob” and “Party” to the only copy of an email message. You can think about it as if the email message “belongs” to both “Bob” and “Party” categories.

Tagging has become very popular lately. GMail, Google’s mail service, has labels instead of the traditional folders. It takes a while to get used to it, but later on you realize how much better labeling is. Another example is the website del.icio.us, which not only lets you store bookmarks (aka favorites) to access from anywhere, but also lets you tag them. What’s especially nice about this is that you can see how many people have tagged a certain link, like the links tagged “programming”.

There’s more to tagging, but I think that’s enough as an introduction.

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IM Waiting

I’ve been using IM (instant messaging) software for years. Currently I have 55 contacts in my MSN Messenger list. Generally speaking, at any given moment around 15 of them are online. One of the things that keep happening to me is that days can pass by with no one talking to me and then, all together, three of my contacts will start a conversation.

Personally I can’t handle three conversations at once. Actually I can, but I don’t stay as focused as I would like to be, especially if any of the conversations has any emotional value to me or to the other party and requires my full attention.

My idea is to have a call waiting feature for IM software. You define how many conversations you can handle and, assuming you’re already having that number of active conversations, when one of your contacts tries to send you a message she gets a message saying that she’s “IM waiting”. Just like phone call-waiting. Naturally, you will be notified that you have an IM buddy waiting for your reply, so you will have the choice of talking to her.

Note that this is different from having an “on conversation” status (or an automatic “busy” status, for that matter). This kind of status would let people track your talking habbits, so it would be the wrong solution.

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Microsoft’s Next Generation Shell – Monad

Monad Shell (MSH) is Microsoft’s next generation shell for Windows. It’s a new scripting language, which is based on the idea of small commands that can be used together to create powerful scripts.

The shell is very impressive by itself. However, as part of their .NET strategy, Microsoft lets you import .NET libraries and use them from Monad scripts, which gives the programmer a lot of power.

ArsTechnica has a guided tour of Monad. It’s lengthy, but worth the read.

(For the computer language geeks among you, I will say that the new language is mostly procedural but also has functional properties, which makes it even more attractive.)

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Open Office 2.0 Is Out

Open Office 2.0 has been released, in case you didn’t know. I installed it and played with it a little, and I must say I’m very impressed. Unfortunately, I have little use for Office-type applications, so I didn’t test it thoroughly.

Open Office 2.0 has many interesting features, like importing Microsoft Office documents and exporting documents as PDF. In general, Microsoft Office users will feel pretty comfortable using Open Office, as the menus and toolbars are organized pretty much the same.

Hebrew support is very good, although Open Office doesn’t come with a Hebrew dictionary out of the box.

And the best thing, of course, is that Open Office is free.