Author Archives: Gary

Building 36: Where Office is made

My hotel, the Redmond Town Center Marriott, is about 10 minutes from the Microsoft Campus. The hotel itself is very well presented and I was particularly happy to find that they have free wired Internet Access. Most impressive are the staff who literally bent over backwards to help me when I found that I’d [...]

From Reading to Redmond

So (I have to start the sentence with ‘So’ because it makes it sound like I’m from the Valley) I’m off to Redmond. Off to the Microsoft Campus to talk to them about Office 14 and the Wave 14 products in the Unified Communications space. It should be exciting. I’m hoping they listen to some [...]

Too much demand for Blackle

Toby Heap has posted on his blog about the reason why Blackle has vanished.
Needless to say they’re working on bringing it back. Perhaps the recent interest in Blackle might prompt Google to offer their own equivalent version. But then again the World’s most powerful brand wouldn’t want to dilute its famous homepage by doing something [...]

Blackle - where have you gone?

Menori.com has been getting a lot of traffic from people looking for Blackle, Toby Heap’s black skin on Google’s search engine. Infact Kelly from Canada commented that she had changed her homepage to Blackle and was wondering what had happened.
Blackle has recently disappeared. Visiting the URL just results in an Apache server 403 ‘Forbidden’ error. [...]

World of Warcraft gold economy on BBC News

The BBC have ‘finally’ had some primetime coverage for the shadow economy of WoW gold. People paying real money for in game gold in a virtual world. The BBC News website has covered WoW, Second Life and other online worlds comprehensively over the last couple of years but this is the first time that I’ve [...]

Shivering Isles - behold the Mad God

After about 10 hours or so of Shivering Isles Hadaster, my Dark-Elf Monk character, is now the new Mad God of Oblivion.
So here’s my little review, and a few tips, to the Elder Scrolls IV official expansion. There are a few spoilers so go and read something else if you don’t want to know what [...]

‘PWN to Own’ MacBook hack

At the recent CanSecWest conference a security expert took on the challenge of the ‘pwn to own’ contest whereby if you could hack a MacBook pro, you could win it. ZDnet covered the story of Dino Da Zovi creating a Zero-Day exploit that took advantage of a hole in Apple’s Safari browser. Dino created the [...]

Sensible World of Soccer for Xbox Live

Now news that SWOS is coming to Xbox Live is nothing new. What is news is that a Custom Team that I submitted to CodeMasters is going to make it into the release! Hoorah!
So when you download SWOS from Xbox Live look out for ‘Bad Haircuts’. I assume they’ll be managed by me!
The line up [...]

Joost 0.9.0 - Vista friendly and sporting new channels

Joost 0.9.0 has hit the beta testing community and sports a more polished interface, 26 channels and a new way to dish out Joost Invites. More importantly for me personally Joost now works fine without any kind of UAC changes in Windows Vista. No more need to ‘run as administrator’. The install process now detects [...]

Andora 0 - 3 England

Unconvincing. That said England’s second half performance was reminiscent of a team whose players earn in hours what the Andora players do in weeks. Bravo to Steven Gerrard who, in the absence of Frank Lampard, played in the way that he can… and gaffered the game. If Lennon could cross the ball then England could [...]