Archive for August, 2009
LEGO playsets that never were… DUNE
31, Aug 2009
Tell me of your homeworld Usul, LEGO sets that never were but should have been… DUNE @ Brickself…
Now that Disney will soon be the parent company of Marvel Entertainment, we can begin brainstorming the ultimate video game crossovers between the House of Ideas and the Magic Kingdom.
Marvel Kingdom Hearts
Yeah, this one is easy. So easy that Kotakuite Goldenhearted already had the image above created before I even saved this article in my text editor. If Disney characters plus Final Fantasy character equals an awesome video game, just imagine what would happen if you thrown in Wolverine and Spider-Man – total freaking chaos. Realistically speaking, this is not a good idea for a game. This is, ‘Oh, we have access to new characters, let’s throw them in here.’ Still, makes for a rather lovely mocked-up screenshot.
Marvel VS. Disney
Whenever you have two diverse sets of beloved characters, your first instinct is to throw them into a fighting arena and watch them kill each other. It’s a universal truth, in effect ever since ancient Romans found themselves with a surplus of both lions and Christians. This is probably a title that will have to reside only in our collective imagination, as I cannot see Disney allowing anyone to create a game that involves punching Mickey Mouse. It’s probably much better off in our heads anyway.
Marvel Disney WHAT IF… Downloadable Games
Owen was actually teasing me earlier with instant messages suggesting new stories for Marvel’s WHAT IF… series of alternative reality comics, but after the first few it struck me as an extremely good idea…and not just from a Disney standpoint. Marvel’s WHAT IF… series would make for an amazing downloadable game franchise. Add in Mickey and friends, and you’ve got pure gold. Here are a few of Owen’s ideas:
WHAT IF … Hannah Montana joined The Defenders?
WHAT IF … Howard the Duck and Donald Duck Joined Forces?
WHAT IF … Daredevil was trained by Darkwing Duck instead of Stick?
We could do this for hours. Days even.
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Disney Characters Dressed as Marvel Superheroes in Let’s Make a Billion Dollars Adventure Who needs the adorably super-deformed Marvel Super Hero Squad, when you can have Mickey Mouse dressed as Wolverine? You could take this concept, throw any old game around it, and sell millions of copy. Marvel Disney Heroes Kart Racing? Sold. Marvel Disney Heroes Table Tennis? I’ll buy two copies. Donald Duck just stands around looking vaguely like Bruce Banner? Game of the Year. |
Ice Man / Walt Disney Marvel Team-Up
The rumors were true! Walt Disney World is incased in an icy prison, and it’s up to X-Men founding member Iceman and the cryogenically-mutated Walt Disney to take down the evil forces of…does it really matter what evil forces they are fighting? Bobby Drake and Walt could pretty much kick anyone’s ass, so feel free to insert your own evil force into the blank space there. Try to make it something hot, so we can make full use of the fire/ice puns at Disney’s disposal.
You’ve probably gotten the idea by now, and that last one was a stretch of both the imagination and the boundaries of good taste, so we’re going to turn this show over to you. When you wish upon a star, which Marvel/Disney crossover games do secretly yearn for?
- In: General
- Tags: Disney, Dreaming, Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Kingdom Hearts, Original, Top, what if
InfoWorld’s annual Bossies awards recognize top free and open source software projects, and the third annual list of 40 winners is out now. This year’s list of winners, unlike last year’s, focuses strictly on enterprise software, application development tools, networking and network management software, platforms and middleware.
Mobile applications had a good showing among the award winners this year. PhoneGap, an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript, got a nod. Fast-rising open source projects were also honored, including the WebKit browser rendering engine, and Hadoop and Hive–tools for processing data collections in the terabyte and petabyte range. OpenStreetMap, an open source version of popular mapping services like Google Maps and MapQuest, was one of the more interesting Bossie winners. Here are the winners, with links to the pages for many of these projects that we maintain here at OStatic, where you can find out more about them and search for alternatives.
Best open source developer tools
BrowserShots, lets developers enter a URL and see snapshots of a web page in many browsers.
Drools, a business logic integeration platform
Eclipse Web Services Tools, makes building web service requests easy
Hadoop and Hive, tools for processing large data sets
JQuery, easy tool for JavaScript developers
Mono, open source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net framework
NetBeans, IDE that works fast and well with multiple languages
OpenStreetMap, an open source variation on Google Maps
WebKit, the browser rendering engine in the iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, and many Nokia handsets
PhoneGap, open source dev tool for mobile JavaScript apps
Best open source enterprise software
Compiere, a good general ERP package with basic CRM functionality
Dimdim, an open source conferencing app
Drupal, an open source content management system (which OStatic runs on)
Intalio BPM, enterprise-grade Business Process Platform
Jaspersoft BI Suite, open source business intelligence software
Magento, leading open source e-commerce platform
OpenBravo ERP, for every stage of fulfillment
Pentaho, open source business intelligence software
Piwik, open source alternative to Google Analytics
SugarCRM, customer relationship management software
WordPress, hugely popular blog publishing platform
Best open source networking software
Cacti, graphical platform for network monitoring
IPCop, network monitoring and partitioning
Kamailio, open source SIP proxy server
KeePass, cross-platform password manager
Nagios, robust monitoring package
Openfiler, a SAN/NAS appliance
OpenNMS, enterprise monitoring tool
Untangle, network security gateway software appliance
Best open source platforms and middleware
Jitterbit, easy tool for migration projects
Mule ESB, service-oriented application integration tool
Nginx, light, fast server platform
OpenVZ, OS-level virtualization solution for Linux
Talend Open Studio, data integration tool
Turnkey Linux, for building free, easy-to-install, Ubuntu-based software appliances
VirtualBox, virtualization software
WSO2 Carbon, the foundation of WSO2’s componentized SOA platform
Xen, virtualization software
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Learn about the many features included in the upcoming beta 2 release of the .NET Framework 4 and of Visual Studio 2010 by reading the new whitepaper by the asp.net product team.
- In: Uncategorized
And I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords
31, Aug 2009David over at Boing-Boing spotted this jaw-dropping video of an experimental robot arm doing things that scare the bejeesus out of me. David writes:
Researchers from the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo presented this incredible video of a high-speed robotic hand at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The laboratory’s Web site has many more videos related to this project, called Sensor Fusion. Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots
For my money, the most impressive stuff is around 2:22, near the end.
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The Infamous Double Slit Experiment
29, Aug 2009YouTube – The Infamous Double Slit Experiment
YouTube – The Infamous Double Slit Experiment
- In: General
- Tags: The Water Cooler
Magnento Connect Search Tool | Edmonds Commerce Blog
29, Aug 2009Easy Magento Connect searching tool provided by Edmonds Commerce, UK Magento Developers.
Edmonds Commerce Blog – http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/
- In: General| Uncategorized
ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Preview 1 Presentation Sample Code
29, Aug 2009I gave a quick 20 minute presentation on ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Preview 1 at the Tampa ASP.NET MVC Developer Group Meeting on Wednesday which was based on the following ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Tutorials.
I have uploaded the sample code for those who attended:
I hope it is useful!
- In: General| Uncategorized
bbpress is a great peace of software and is based on the code from Wordpress. Since the core version is very basic you need some plugins to change bbpress into a mature forum. This article, written by a experienced bbpress user, gives advice which plugins are very powerful and useful for most bbpress user.
- In: General| Uncategorized