Month: February 2007

Activewords’s Productivity Reports

I’ve mentioned before how much I absolutely love and rely on ActiveWords which combines text substitution and program launching into one incredible application for Windows.

What I also love, as a stats freak, is its extensive reporting features which are pretty thorough considering its just a text substitution/program launching application.

For example, ActiveWords knows that in the 607 days I have had my current laptop, I have entered 5,673,094 keystrokes. Of those, 148,768 were the result of ActiveWords text substitutions — or 2.62 percent of all my keystrokes. Based on my typing speed, that’s 11 hours of typing that the program has saved me.

Similarly, based on the number of ActiveWords command that I have that perform multiple steps (i.e., macro-like processes which open an application, then a file, then do complicated string search and replaces), the program has saved me 8,159 total steps — or about 13.6 hours worth of time.

So, in total, I’ve saved about a day of my life. W00t. Actually it is much more than that because I have quite a few processes that I use ActiveWords for where before I would have had to sit and think for a few moments about all of the steps I needed to take, where now I just type a short keyword and hit F8 and the program takes care of it for me.

Congrats to Rogers Cadenhead for Sticking It to MGM Over Wargames.Com

Rogers Cadenhead got to declare victory today in his fight against the morons at MGM over the Wargames.Com domain name.

Cadenhead registered the domain years ago to sell wargames, but MGM contended that the only possible use for the Wargames.Com domain name was for the sequel to its 1983 film War Games (and WTF is MGM thinking making War Games 2?)

The funny thing is the lengths MGM went to convince the domain arbitrator that Cadenhead clearly meant the site to reference its movie. For example, in the introduction to one of his books on Java, Cadenhead wrote,

The quote “Shall we play a game?” is from the 1983 movie War Games, in which a young computer programmer portrayed by Matthew Broderick saves mankind after almost causing global thermonuclear war and the near-extinction of humankind. You’ll learn how to do that in the next book of this series, Sams Teach Yourself to Create International Incidents with Java in 24 Hours.

According to MGM, this reference (and a few other similar references) shows the extent to which Cadenhead was obsessed with the movie which led him to register the domain.

Yeah, every time I ask my wife “Shall we play a game?” what I’m really thinking is, “I wonder how I can steal MGM’s intellectual property.”

As an aside, I saw “Wargames” during its initial theatrical run during one of my rare summer visits with my father. I never saw it again until a few weeks ago — man, the movie that looks great when you’re 14 or 15 sure looks like shit when you’re approaching 40. All I can say is that Matthew Broderick is certainly not Bill Shatner.

Gay Groups Should Adopt Anti-Israeli Positions

Reuters notes that gay and lesbian NGOs have a rather difficult time being credentialed by the United Nations which usually has almost no standards at all for such determinations (based on some of the odd groups that do have NGO status).

For example, Canada’s Coalition of Gays and Lesbians of Quebec was rejected as an NGO by an 8-6 vote. The vote in this case is extremely revealing.

Voting yes to credential the group — Colombia, Israel, Peru, Romania, Britain and the United States (hmm…and here I thought the U.S. was run by a fascist theocracy?)

Voting no — Burundi, China, Egypt, Guinea, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Sudan.

Given the tenor of the United Nations, the best bet for gay and lesbian groups would probably be to adopt anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic planks. Egypt, Pakistan and Qatar may not be thrilled by a gay and lesbian group, but if that group, say, argued that Jews were behind a worldwide plot against gays and lesbians, they’d probably win immediate approval.

Source:

Canadian and Swedish gay groups frowned on at UN. Evelyn Leopold, Reuters, February 2, 2007.

Jack Thompson Headed for Disciplinary Hearing?

GamePolitics.Com reports that anti-video game idiot Jack Thompson has a disciplinary hearing coming up in Florida on several counts including three related to his ongoing war against videogame violence.

Those ethics counts relate to Thompson’s role in an Alabama lawsuit against the makers of Grand Theft Auto. According to GamePolitics.Com,

In upholding a pair of complaints against Thompson by [Alabama] Judge James Moore, the Florida Bar alleges that the outspoken attorney violated numerous professional standards both before and after his Pro Hac Vice status was revoked in Alabama. Among the misconduct alleged by the Bar is Thompson’s assertion that a local Alabama attorney claimed he could fix cases before Judge Moore.

Apparently not only did Thompson privately allege that Moore was crooked, but he also sent e-mails to the judge to that effect, such as one Thompson allegedly sent to Moore in July 2006 that included this claim,

You’re the guy who wants to give (Grand Theft Auto publisher) Take-Two my scalp. You chose to believe people that you knew were thieves and liars, and now you are their useful SLAPP Bar complainant… These are your corporate criminal buddies, Judge Moore. These are the folks with whom you made your bed, the folks whom your good friend said he could fix the case.

It is bad enough that Thompson was able to make his empty threats and charges, but remember despite it being blatantly obvious how unhinged he was, Thompson was the go-to guy that media outlets such as CNN went to whenever they needed commentary or analysis on video game violence even though he clearly knew nothing about the very games he was commenting on.

Source:

Jack Thompson Faces Florida Supreme Court Disciplinary Hearing. GamePolitics.Com, February 3, 2007.

Blackboard Tries Divide and Conquer Approach

Color me unimpressed with Blackboard’s latest move in its ongoing war to kill innovation in the courseware market by patenting obvious CMS features in the education market.

Blackboard is now promising that it won’t go after non-profits and universities who develop their own internal or open sourced courseware. But it is still pursuing actions against its competitors, which will detrimentally affect the courseware market by stifling innovation there.

Fortunately, several groups opposed to the awarding of the overly-broad patents to Blackboard have teamed up with the Software Freedom Law Center to challenge the patents. In November 2006, the UPSTO agreed to re-examine all 44 of the claims of the Blackboard patents in question.

Richard Fontana of the Software Freedom Law Center isn’t buying Blackboard’s latest gambit, noting that Blackboard has confused the issue by suggesting it might still sue open source projects that are bundled with proprietary code.

CNET News.Com’s Stephen Shankland quotes Fontana as saying,

Blackboard could have acted responsibly by making a clear and unqualified commitment not to assert its patents against open-source software. Instead, Blackboard has produced a convoluted document in which, for example, it reserves the right to assert the patent against open source software that is “bundled” with other software, an ill-defined concept that could potentially cover most circumstances in which open e-learning software is used.

Hopefully the USPTO will do the right thing and render this debate moot by invalidating the patents it awarded to Blackboard.

Source:

Education software firm OKs open-source patent use. Stephen Shankland, February 1, 2007.

Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG

Disney is planning to release a Pirates of the Caribbean MMO to coincide with the third Pirates film later this year.

The game is getting some press because it will be free to download and play in an ad-supported model (think a windowed game with ads on the top or periphery of the window) or $9.95/month for the no-ad version.

MMORPG.Com has a preview of the game which doesn’t sound like it will be as child-oriented as Toon Town is, but probably not something that is going to rock the world of the World of Warcraft devotees either.

Frankly, as long as it doesn’t outright suck, the more pirate games the better.