I have moved my blog to here.

As a Mac fanboy, this Joy of Tech comic reflects my feelings and anxieties about Leopard dead-on!

Do you remember the Ultima series of D&D-style video games?

I remember playing Ultima III, IV, and V in the 80s and 90s. They were awesome in their day. Many of my youthful late night hours were spent sitting in front of my Apple II+ hacking and slashing away.

Fast forward to 2007. I know for a few years now about a shareware re-creation of Ultima III that was actually sanctioned by Lord British. But then, I came across xu4, an open-source project that has made the original game run on modern operating systems. Furthermore, I also found Ultima V: Lazarus, another open-source project that has re-recreated the Ultima V game using the Dungeon Siege engine.

Now, while xu4 is faithful to the original, right down to the graphics and sound, Lazarus is not due to the use of a 3D engine as well as several other factors that you can read about here.

I don't have Dungeon Siege, so I cannot check it out. However, I was able to run xu4 on my PowerPC Mac w/ 10.4.10 installed without issues. And boy did it bring back memories!

Check it out for yoursevles!

I've been following Microsoft's dealings w/ the EU antitrust courts for a while now, and where the company seemed to have prevailed in the U.S., it is running into a much tougher stance in Europe.

While a part of me wants to shout w/ glee and say that Microsoft is getting its due in a different court system, I do wonder, though, if the Europeans have a bias against American companies in general.

I mean, it's not just Microsoft that's having issues, but Apple also, and maybe others I have not read about....

Your thoughts?

I just realized that I needed to implement the ICloneable interface in one of the classes I wrote for work, only to find out that there is no generic-enabled ICloneable<T> equivalent in .NET Framework 2.0. So I whipped one up for myself.

It's such a useful little interface, wonder why the .NET Framework architects didn't think to include it.

I looked into the documentation for Framework 3.0, and it appears to absent there as well. Hmm....