When I upgraded my SBC / Yahoo DSL service a while ago, I received a free Xbox Live Starter Kit, including a one-year subscription. I finally signed up for the Xbox Live service last week. Overall, I have to admit that Xbox Live is pretty neat. Signing into the service is very easy from any game I’ve tried. Once signed in, many games (such as MechAssault) offer downloadable content such as new maps, new mechs (in this case), etc....
When I went to Amazon a few minutes ago, I was presented with a memo from Jeff Bezos, introducing the new Amazon Prime service. This sounds like an excellent idea, and certainly one that I’m bound to benefit from. Amazon Prime requires a yearly membership fee of $79, for which you get free second day shipping on most items. You can also upgrade to overnight shipping for $3.99 per item. We order from Amazon all the time and definitely spend more on shipping than $79, even though we often take advantage of the free (but slow…) super saver shipping....
After a bit of fiddling with masked ebuilds, I finally managed to get Bluetooth working with Gnome on my AMD64-based Gentoo system. In case you’re running into similar AMD64-related issues, please check out the following bugs I submitted to the Gentoo bug tracker: The following bug is also relevant: The HOWTO mobile phone, Bluetooth and GNOME Wiki page is also helpful. Note however that this is somewhat outdated. For example, the bluez-sdp package is deprecated and should no longer be used, as its functionality has been rolled into the other bluez packages....
While browsing Gentoo Portage for some Bluetooth ebuilds, I came across an ebuild for quat, a “3D quaternionic fractal generator”. I had never heard of 3D fractals, let alone quaternionic fractals, so I checked out the website, and it looks pretty interesting. Here and here are some nice examples of what 3D fractals look like. If you’re interested in computer graphics, these are worth checking out.
I’ve been reading up a little on the Spring Framework, which seems very impressive. It can be used in several tiers of a typical web application, and depending on where it is used it either cooperates or competes with other established frameworks. For example, Spring comes with its own MVC imlementation that competes with Apache Struts and addresses several of Struts’ shortcomings. On the other hand, Spring’s container framework can be used to build a business tier in conjunction with another front-end technology, such as Struts (for example as an alternative to more heavyweight J2EE solutions such as EJB)....