Month: October 2005

http://www.bitlaw.com/index.html

Came across this online resource on technology law and thought I’d post a link to it here so I can look it up later on and in case other people wanted to check it out.

Not sure how useful it may be.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US…-gamercards.htm

I was reading about My Xbox, Microsoft’s plans to integrate the Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and Xbox.com.

The article I was reading provides details in the form of a dialogue between Clinton Fowler (the Program Manager for My Xbox) and Trixie (presumably the author of the article). I think that they’re trying a little too hard to appeal to their intended demographic.

Choice quotes:

• “if you’ve already got your gamertag linked to a .NET Passport, you’re golden”
• “what if I’ve been a bad little monkey and haven’t gotten around to linking my gamertag yet? Am I hosed?”
• “What’s that “My X80x Rocks” thing?”

A few final thoughts. Firstly, I get the feeling that they expect “gamers” will be more comfortable with My Xbox because the Project Manager is an Xtreme downhill mountain biker, or BMX rider (… do they still call it BMX?), or whatever he is apparantly doing in his profile image.

Secondly, I’m not sure that I want to know about the “secret sauce of Xbox 360”. It just sounds icky and… ewh.

Just a few one liners:

• Advance Wars: Dual Strike (NDS): Teh best game evar.
• Kirby Canvas Curse (NDS): Innovative and fun… but like with most kirby games… I’m not sure why.
• Meteos (NDS): Cool (like Rez + Tetris + Smash Brothers) but gameplay is let down by the fact that there is a “cheap” way to play that is very effective; It’s almost like a fighting game in which button bashing pays off.
• Resident Evil 4 (GCN): Excellent, but voice for the guy who sells you stuff is really corny “so, whatcha buuuyyin’?”
• Killer 7 (GCN): … yeah… I don’t really get it… but I haven’t played it much yet.

I wanted to check out the current work on Antiquities and had to go through a few hoops to get the J2ME Wireless Toolkit (J2ME WTK) working on my home machine (Ubuntu, Hoary). I figured that I’d post a (very) brief run-down to save everyone else some time.

Ubuntu is a debian-based distribution and Java support is hampered due to the restrictive Java license. There is some support for older versions of Java (1.1), but not for the more recent version we need in order to use the J2ME WTK.

The most recent version of the J2ME WTK available for Linux is 2.2. You will need to have the Java2 Standard Edition (J2SE) SDK installed before you can install the J2ME WTK. The most recent version of J2SE available for Linux is 5.0, but it is incompatible with the J2ME WTK 2.2. Rather, you need to install 1.4.2.

I found the easiest thing to do is to install the J2SE SDK in a non-system directory (such as your home directory). When installing J2ME WTK, you can input this path for the J2SE SDK. I also used a non-system directory for the J2ME WTK installation.

After it is up and running, you can get Antiquities out of Subversion and place it in the “apps” subdirectory of wherever you chose to install the J2ME WTK. If you’d like to check Antiquities out elsewhere, just create a symbolic link within the “apps” subdirectory.

Links to download pages:

• J2SE SDK 1.4.2 Linux x86.
• J2ME WTK 2.2 Linux x86.

Just a few closing notes. There are some instructions on the Ubuntu wiki detailing how to create a Debian package from the SUN J2SE binary, but these instructions are only for the 5.0 version (which is incompatible anyway). The future looks bright though, the next version of Ubuntu (Breezy) will have open source Java 1.4 packages.