NaughtySpawn

To put it simply, I can’t work without Roboform. There is no better way of dealing with web site passwords. Now that I’m in the midst of my Ubuntu musings I find I don’t have Roboform at my disposal as I once did. However, until there is a native version of Roboform for Ubuntu there is a pretty easy workaround to make your passwords available in a different OS.

First thing you need to do is go here and create an online account so you can sync your passwords. This is the same account you would make if you want to sync your passwords to your iPhone/iPod Touch (which I have also done).

With the account created sync your passwords.

Back on that same Roboform page, drag the Roboform link on the right to your toolbar.

Now, whenever you need to log in, click the Roboform button on your toolbar and your list of synced passwords will appear.

Pretty easy and very handy.

But wait! There’s more!

Roboform is having a Valentine’s Day sale. You cam get Roboform for 20% off which makes the price $23.95. Not a bad savings for this incredibly handy app! Plus you can get it working cross-platform no problem.

Get the full instructions on the Roboform Bookmarklet page

Stem a zombie attack on your iPhone!
Get ready to soil your plants in this brand-new version of the hit PopCap game! A mob of fun-loving zombies is about to invade your home, and your only defense is an arsenal of 49 zombie-zapping plants. Use peashooters, wall-nuts, cherry bombs and more to slow down, confuse, weaken and mulchify 26 types of zombies before they can reach your front door.
Each zombie has its own special skills, so you’ll need to think fast and plant faster to combat them all. But be careful how you use your limited supply of greens and seeds… as you battle the fun-dead, obstacles like a setting sun, creeping fog and a swimming pool add to the challenging fun. Get ready to soil your plants!
- Conquer all 50 levels of Adventure mode — through day, night and fog, in a swimming pool and on the rooftop
- Battle 26 types of zombies including pole-vaulters, snorkelers and “Zomboni” drivers
- Earn 49 powerful perennials and collect coins to buy upgrades, power-ups and more
- Open the Almanac to see all the plants and zombies, plus amusing “facts” and quotes
- Collect 13 iPhone-exclusive PvZ achievements
- Replay levels in the all-new Quick Play arena
- All the fun of the hit PC/Mac game — adapted for fun-dead fun on your iPhone
- Hilarious graphics, great soundtrack and a bonus music video

Plants vs. Zombies – $2.99

Lots of games on sale this weekend. Besids the price drop for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars ($6.99), there’s plenty of other sales going on:

• ACE COMBAT Xi Skies of Incursion, $6.99 ? $2.99
• BurgerTime Deluxe, $1.99 ? 99¢
• Dig Dug REMIX, $2.99 ? 99¢
• Galaga REMIX, $2.99 ? 99¢
• Garters & Ghouls, $4.99 ? 99¢
• I Love Katamari, $4.99 ? $2.99
• Inspector Gadget, $2.99 ? 99¢
• Isaac Newton’s Gravity, $3.99 ? $2.99
• Mr. Driller, $1.99 ? 99¢
• Ms. PAC-MAN, $4.99 ? $2.99
• PAC-MAN, $4.99 ? $2.99
• PAC-MAN Championship Edition, $2.99 ? 99¢
• PAC-MAN REMIX, $2.99 ? 99¢
• RIDGE RACER ACCELERATED, $2.99 ? 99¢
• Time Crisis Strike, $4.99 ? 99¢
• Star Trigon, $1.99 ? 99¢
• Airport Mania: First Flight, $2.99 ? 99¢
• Angry Birds, $1.99 ? 99¢
• BATTLE BEARS 1.5, $1.99 ? 99¢
• Catan, $4.99 ? $3.99
• Family Feud, $4.99 ? $2.99
• Flower Garden, $2.99 ? 99¢
• Low Grav Racer 2, $2.99 ? FREE
• MonsterKill, 99¢ ? FREE
• Neocell Fighters, $1.99 ? 99¢
• Underground , $3.99 ? 99¢
• Star Wars The Force Unleashed, $5.99 ? 99¢

MonsterKill by Origin8 is free for today. A fun little castle defense game featuring all the classic monsters such as Mummies, Dracula and the Wolfman. The graphics are very good and it’s a lot harder than you might think.Give it a try, you have nothing to lose!

REVIEWS
AppVee.com
"Overall, it is obvious this game was designed masterfully as the graphics and gameplay are well-done."
appVersity.com
"Awesome death animations…Great game modes for extended replay…Strategy elements…Halloween Theme"
AppChatter.com
"…MonsterKill is a great game that is fun and has great graphics…"
Appmodo.com
"If youre like me, there are two things in this world you cant live without castle defense games and zombies. With MonsterKill you get a fresh new way to defend your castle against zombies, vampires, werewolves and Frankenstein monsters. Sounds perfect? It is!"
AppAdvice.com
"If you are into castle defense games, MonsterKill is absolutely worth a look"

THE GAME
They’re cute, they’re cheeky – you just want to squeeze the life out of the little monsters!
Hordes of tiny terrors have broken free of their chains and are running amok!
CLASSIC MINI-MONSTERS!
The Mummy aka The Geezer
Count Dracula aka Vlad
Werewolf aka Scott
Frankenstein aka Frankie
… you’ve a few tricks up your sleeve to deal with these guys:

TOUCHSCREEN GESTURES
Summon a variety of spells as you battle against these classic mini-monsters.
Slice and dice them – cut them in two with the cut spell!
Summon lightning – give them a shocking experience!
Turn up the heat by casting fireballs – watch ‘em burn!
Need to slow them? Sculpt an ice block to stun them!

FEATURES
Simple gesture system to summon spells
Stunning characters, animation, backgrounds & fx
Multiple game modes: Normal, Endless & Onslaught!
OpenFeint for online high scores & achievements!
Awesome music & sound effects by Earcom!
iPod music library access (for OS3.0+ users)
Automatic game saving

VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/v/f_7yrFbNZdM
or check out http://www.origin8.com/monsterkill

Over the next couple of years the importance of Windows will decline rapidly as more users and more products switch over to become browser based. The browser will play the dominant role and the OS will go behind the scenes. We’re clearly seeing this change now with more people wanting to use Netbooks and handheld devices. They simply need to connect to the "cloud"; it makes little difference in how they get there.

Right now we’re already seeing a huge increase in browser functionality. You upload pictures to sites like Webshots, Flickr and Facebook through the browser, create blog entries with plugins like Scribefire, transfer files with FireFTP, check email at Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and others, watch movies at Hulu and Netflix and if Flash and HTML 5 continue their development even games like Quake and dozens of titles from Popcap can be played inside a browser.

An extensible browser will have more value than an OS that takes 13GB of space just to get running. Currently, Firefox supports the best model with the proliferation of extensions that can be loaded. And, those same plugins will work regardless of whether you’re on Windows or Linux. The number of plugins available for Firefox dwarfs what’s available for IE. Even Chrome has more plugins available. As we move to a more web centric mentality there will be little need for a preposterously large base operating system. Do you really want to wait for a minute or two while you machine boots up or comes out of sleep mode and reloads everything into memory?

I fully expect that within the next year or so we’ll see full applications running inside of the browser using Flash, Silverlight, HTML 5 and plugins. Developers are making utilities right now that extend the power of Firefox and that will continue as the browser exposes more features. And as Flash and Silverlight develop we won’t be limited to simple games, but more full fledged applications.

Windows will also continue to lose dominance and importance and more games switch over to console platforms. Case in point, even Microsoft is no longer a game publisher for PC games and has even shuttered some of the biggest titles they had – Flight Simulator, Age of Empires and Rise of Nations just to name a few.

DirectX 10 didn’t do much to keep games on the PC either. There’s only a handful of games that are written specifically for it and most game developers have stated they plan to keep writing for DirectX 9.

Microsoft itself is pulling users away from Windows with Xbox 360. They are betting the ranch on Project Natal, which if successful will move even more users off Windows. Further, with the addition of streaming media, Twitter updates and other social media integration the need for a PC and thus Windows will continue to erode.

The other cash cow for Microsoft has been Office which I believe peaked in feature set in 2003 and now offers little reason for continual upgrades. Blog tools, social network apps, and online editors have all chipped away at the need for Office, certainly for Word which is the major reason people buy Office. Even those online comment forms highlight your spelling mistakes.

Word contains thousands of features no one will ever see, let alone use. Excel probably still has features to offer to niche groups, but overall it has exceeded the capacity of most users. In the grand scheme of things, why upgrade? What do these new versions of Office offer? And if they don’t offer new features, the need and want to upgrade to a new OS to support them diminishes quickly. Remember the launch of Windows 95 with Office 95 and again with Windows 2000 and Office 2000? WinXP and Office XP? Funny, it didn’t happen with the ill-fated Vista or the follow up cousin, Win 7.

Sure there is a surge in lemmings upgrading to Windows 7, but considering just how bad Vista was and the low expectations people have it’s really not that surprising. Plus, how many people actually went out and bought it off the shelves versus buying a new machine? Yes, they had a lot of pre-orders and the sales have been steady, but will most users be so quick to upgrade to Windows 8? I don’t believe they will. The hype and excitement over the Apple tablet more than proves people are looking for smaller, faster devices that get them on the web. It also says the functionality is the most important factor, not the OS.

The timing of Windows 7 was probably right, but with so many alternatives coming out and the push to do more on the web, the next version of Windows will probably have a hard time gaining acceptance. I’ve been using Windows 7 for a couple of months now and dislike it immensely. It’s not the upgrade I was hoping for and I have no intention of spending money for the same old crap next time around.

Not to just be content with having Ubuntu on an older machine I went ahead and installed Virtualbox so I could run Ubuntu side by side with Windows. Again, the install took about 20 minutes and it was up and running. It had no problem installing in the virtual environment and came up with video and network drivers. I was on the web, checking email and looking at sites without having to configure a thing.

This also proves to me that I need to ditch Virtual PC for Windows 7 for Virtualbox. VPC for Win 7 is junk and is just too much of a hassle. Virtualbox was so much easier to configure and actually works like the old VPC used to.

Going back to Ubuntu, there is no denying that installing apps in Windows is a far easier task than installing apps for Unix. There’s still tons of command line scripting going on in the Unix world and that alone is going to be an interesting learning curve. I had no problem getting system updates, but getting something like Thunderbird 3 on there was not just a simple double-click. And even when I did get Thunderbird working and downloading my email, the app is sitting on my desktop not in a "Program Files" type of location, so clearly not ideal.

Windows is usually really good for its ease of use, but as far as getting an OS installed which has a browser, word processing, image editing and network functionality, Ubuntu has proven itself to be just as easy and effective. It does come down to the apps, but if MS keeps pushing cloud computing the OS will lose its relevance since everything will be running out there.

While they aren’t the same, I really like what I see so far.

Wow, that worked out nicely! In about 20 minutes I got Ubuntu fully installed with video and network support. It also has OpenOffice, IM and Email client, a BitTorrent client, and system utilities which look very similar to the ones you get with Windows, and full support for USB. Ok, so far I’m impressed with the Karmic Koala.

The hardware I’m using is my old Dell Dimension 515 with a Pentium 4 Hyperthreaded single core chip and 4GB of ram. The drive is the 640GB one that came with my new system (which I removed and replaced with a 1.5TB drive).

I started the install at 1:52pm and I was looking at my desktop at 2:19pm. This also includes the time it took to completely format the drive since it had Windows 7 64bit on it. I figure that took at least a few minutes so the actual install took about 20 minutes.

I even got it to play AVI, WMV and MP3 files right off the bat. It’s a simple download to get the codecs.

I forgot that I could use Virtualbox to install a virtual copy of Windows or use WINE to try and run some apps for those times when I would need them. I’m not quite ready to make the switch, but if this test bed works out Windows may be off this machine sooner rather than later.

I really hope Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I ever use. It’s an underwhelming, bloated, expensive OS that offers practically nothing in the way of feature upgrades from its predecessor. Win7 is Vista with a slightly different Taskbar. Functionally it’s the same annoying OS Vista was, it just has a better installer and driver support. (At least Microsoft got that part under control before release) But as a powerful OS loaded with new and beneficial features it misses the mark completely. Considering Cloud Computing , handheld devices and Chrome OS, I feel the days of the Windows desktop are numbered.

So, I’ve decided to see more of the Operating System world and install Ubuntu onto the machine I just replaced. I think Ubuntu has been making huge leaps in functionality and usability. I originally used Unix BSD 4.3 on an HP mainframe in college (shell scripting indeed!). Since then, I tried my hand at a previous version of Ubuntu and found the UI to be excellent, but a lack of centralized files and updates kept me from really sinking my teeth into it. A lot of that seems to have changed so I’m ready to see what this new OS has to offer.

I’m keeping Windows 7 on this new machine (at least for now), but there is no "Windows 8" in my future. Quite honestly, if I could get OSX on an Intel machine I would switch today.

Well this is pretty cool, you can now view applications from the App Store within a browser. When you click a link to an app you will now be taken to the details page rather than to the page to download iTunes. You can now read the full game description, see the screenshots and check out the full price without having iTunes installed. You can’t buy anything, but it does make things a whole lot easier. And you don’t need to make any changes to the link. Any previously created links will direct to the preview page automatically.

Pretty cool!

Check out the link below to see NFL 2010 in your browser.

NFL 2010 by Gameloft

It’s a sad tale, if you hear Dick Brass tell it. In a new op-ed for the New York Times, the former Microsoft VP explains how he thinks the Microsoft corporate culture has "never developed a true system for innovation," and that while the company is obviously strong at the moment, he doesn’t see the company retaining its dominance if or when the Office and Windows revenues die down.

Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass weighs in on why Microsoft ‘no longer brings us the future’

And here’s Microsoft snappy retort to the chidings of Dick Brass. Quite honestly, it’s a pretty weak rebuttal. I don’t think OneNote proves they understand Tablets (lest we forget Microsoft tried the Tablet market in 2001 and failed miserably). And yes ClearType is installed on millions of machines, but that wasn’t the point. It could have been out the door several years earlier.

Measuring Our Work by Its Broad Impact