Got that new game jones? Check out the Quake 3 engine-based Open Arena, a free, cross platform, open source first person shooter. I think I mentioned some months ago that the Quake 3 engine was going open source, and this is one of the better examples of the kinds of games folks are releasing now that they have that code base. Anyone up for some action tonight? Send me an IM if you are.

Today, January 19th, is the first time this winter that snow has actually accumulated on the ground. This is by far the latest I can ever recall this happening in my lifetime of living in the northeast. We also had a 70 degree day the first weekend of January, which I can not recall ever happening either. Is it global warming? Who knows, all I know is that to the best of my recollection nothing like this has ever happened before during my lifetime.

Got an intel mac? Get thee over to vmware’s site and grab a copy of the public beta of their ‘fusion’ product, which is basically the PC vmware engine ported over to macosx. I’ve been running Parallels and am completely happy with it, but I’m also really happy to see competition in this space on the mac, and given my last several years use of vmware on the pc, I’m also happy to see it running on the mac, which allows me to seamlessly move my environments from platform to platform as needed. If you’re not familiar with it, vmware, parallels and other virtual machines software allow you to run alternative operating systems inside your host operating system with very high levels of compatibility and at almost native speed. If you’ve had experience with products like virtual PC in the past which left a sour taste in your mouth, rest assured: this is not that. vmware and parallels are both great products and tremendously useful.

All that remains is for Apple to loosen up so you can run OSX as a guest OS in these virtual machines, something which is really needed and would again be tremendously useful. If Apple wants to compete in server rooms, they basically have to do this because vmware has taken over the world’s server rooms over the last couple of years.

Anyway, kudos to vmware on this, and here’s to healthy competition.

This is getting a fair amount of mention, but in case you missed it, Google released a fantastic extension to firefox this week – google browser synch, which lets you synch your bookmarks, open windows, and even cookies, across multiple copies of firefox. Working in your browser at the office and want to resume working where you left off when you get home? You’re all set with this, which alone makes it super useful. The bookmark synching, history browsing and password synching are all just a fringe benefits. Definitely worth running if you’re like me and work at innumerable computers.

I’m just full of pet stories of late, it seems. This one is actually from my sister, who recently had a bleeding pet experience:

OMG. So I am sitting on the couch catching up on work when Spongo flies across the room and attacks Poot, unprovoked, as she sometimes does. Gidget runs over and attacks Spongo until she leaves Poot alone (Gidget is a good and loyal, if half-blind, friend). I rush over. There is blood everywhere, and I quickly realize that it is pulsing, warmly, out of Poot. Now what?

Brian and I try not to panic. We try to find the source of the blood on a white dog covered in blood. Poot’s getting splashed, we’re getting splashed, the floor is getting splashed. It’s a bloody mess. Brian starts looking for an emergency clinic. I am trying to figure out how we manage getting Poot to a clinic with a baby. I find the source of the blood – a gash on her ear, and thankfully not a vein in her neck, which is of course what I had been picturing. I stabilize her, and we start to talk about whether or not we need to bring her to the vet. We feel like things are ok. She shakes her head and the blood gushing starts again.

I call the vet and tell them we are on our way. We stabilize her again, head downstairs, she shakes her head and the gushing starts again. I wrap her in gauze like crazy, she gets excited, shakes her head… you guessed it: gushing. I managed to get her and Brian out the door by wrapping her head and ear in paper towels and gauze and taping the whole number to her neck.

Now I am sitting here wondering what blood to clean up first.

That cat is so out of here!

There’s also an update, 24 hours later:

…after an emergency visit to the vet last night, during which we were told that the two worst places to have an injury are the tail (uh yeah – had to have a piece of Poot’s tail surgically removed two years ago after she slit the tip and it wouldn’t heal) and the ear (of course!), Poot returned home with her entire head (less one loose ear) in a pink bandage (with a green heart – nice touch) and wearing an Elizabethan collar sized for a Saint Bernard.

As early as 8 AM, she had wiggled out of said bandage and splattered said collar with blood. After one more visit to the local vet this morning, Brian is now on his way to Poot’s regular vet in New Jersey (she sees a specialist for her heart) to prep for emergency surgery.

Anyone care to adopt Spongo the somewhat amazing?

Got Parallels running on the mac and wishing the broad variety of virtual OS images available for VMWare were available for Parallels? Check out this short tutorial, and your wishes will come true. You’ll need quemu running on your mac but it’s free and easy to get going.

Got a mac and a windows box? You might find a free, open source implementation of Microsoft’s RDP protocol useful. Similar to a VNC client, this allows you to log into your remote windows box and run it from your Mac. It’s called Cord, and you can download it from its sourceforge page

Check out Aptana, a new eclipse-based (and thus cross platform) web development tool. This is pretty slick stuff and the first thing to challenge Jedit as my web editor of choice. Mind you, this is a full-featured IDE so it’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely worth a look for those managing lab or corporate disk images, or for folks who are looking to take their html skills up a notch and move to professional tools. If you’re already a Dreamweaver user and a bit skeptical, it’s my observation that this is actually less complicated to use than Dreamweaver, and losing the GUI and learning what’s going on with your code is to your professional benefit anyway.

The site also has some great screencasts that walk you through how to use the tool, really these are a model for how to deploy effective screencasts and the developers are deserve praise for their approach. Aptana’s also available as a plugin for those of you who are already using Eclipse or another eclipse-based tool distribution.

The news of this is all over the net of course. I’m only mentioning it here because the numbers are astounding. In 19 months, a team of what was ultimately 56 people managed to create 1.6 billion in value in a company. Zero to 1.6 freaking billion, or roughly $28 million a person, in less than 2 years. One hopes numbers like this will wake up the content companies who are obsessively focused on locking their content away behind DRM – the market values open and free trading of content to a basically unimaginable extent.