Category Archives: Software

New SimCity coming in March – with DRM

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Back in the mid-1990’s — when I was still single and living in Sweden — I spent many evenings and nights playing the city building game SimCity 2000. I actually think I purchased the game during a trip to Redmond, visiting Microsoft. More than once I was playing “a quick game” after work in the office, and suddenly I realized it was almost midnight…

SimCity 2000

A year or so after I moved to the USA I got SimCity 3000, but did not play it as much. I was married by now, and had other priorities. I still enjoyed the game, though. The graphics was of course improved. I also got SimCity 4, but my computer was not powerful enough for a decent game play, and I quickly lost interest. I think I still got all the boxes in a closet somewhere…

Now Maxis and Electronics Arts are preparing to release the latest version of the game, called simply SimCity. It looks great compared with the previous versions, and introduces a number of new concepts, like multi-city play, where you (or a friend) can take control of adjacent land and build and manage another city there. The game will be out in the beginning of March.

SimCity (2013)

The game can be played online against other players. As a matter of fact, even if you are playing in single player mode, you still need to be connected to the EA servers. This is going to be used for copy protection/DRM reasons, and many gamers are already upset about this, especially the ones in rural areas with bad/slow internet connectivity.

I am still curious to see the reviews of the actual game. I just need a better graphics card in order to get the full experience… Guess I have to spend $250-$275 so I can play a $50 game… :-)

LibreOffice 4.0 available for download

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LibreOffice 4.0, the latest major release of the free office suite, have been released. A list of fixes and new functions can be found here. Some of the functions listed are:

  • Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard.
  • Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
  • Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
  • Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
  • Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
  • Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
  • Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.

You can download the latest version here.

CrashPlan online backup

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I have been thinking about using one of the many online/cloud services for backup. I have plenty of photos (200+ GB) and also other important documents I don’t want to lose. Today I have them mirrored on an external USB drive, but in case something happens to my place, like fire or burglary, that drive will most probably also be gone. So an online service would make sense.
There are a number of contenders out there. Carbonite and Mozy are perhaps the most high profile ones, because of their advertising. Mozy just switched from unlimited storage to plans where you pay more if you store more.
Carbonite still offers online storage for $59/year, but they don’t support backups of large files (4GB+), don’t include video files by default, and don’t support external drives. There are also bandwidth restrictions. Up to 35 GB you get full speed, then it drops to 512kbit/s up to 200 GB. After that the bandwidth is throttled down to 100 kbit/s. An online calculator showed that 250 GB would take me 83 days to upload.And I actually have closer to 400 GB that I want to backup. Both services also lack a Linux client, the clients are only available for Windows and MacOS.
However, I stumbled on a new service yesterday, called CrashPlan.Not only does it cost about the same as Carbonite, at $5/month or $49.99/year, they also claim not to have bandwidth restrictions (throttling). In addition they have clients for Linux and Solaris, as well as apps for Android and iOS.
But the really cool features are some that Carbonite and Mozy does not have, and that to me are very useful. You can backup not only to the online storage on the CrashPlan servers, but also to external USB drives, network drives or even a friend across town or in another country. You can create different backup sets, and have them being backed up to different places.
I installed the client at home, and created a few backup sets. My photos are backed up to my external 1.5 TB Seagate drive, as well as to the CrashPlan servers. My documents and images (like icons and graphics I use for my Notes/Domino applications) are backed up to the online storage only. My MP3 files are backed up only to the external drive.
I also plan to setup CrashPlan on my sister’s computer in Sweden and backup my photos there. The files are encrypted on the external drive and at the friend/family member, so they can not see the filenames or the content.
I think this combination of backups in multiple places is brilliant. I am currently using the 15 days free trial, but I intend to purchase theservice in the next day or two, if it lives up to the promises.
Update: CrashPlan is now $59.99/year or $5.99/month for the cheapest unlimited plan. Details here. Also, something both me and other noticed is that the upload does take time, about the same as Carbonite. So they have some kind of bandwidth limitation, but it seem to be constant, or possibly they just have so much traffic that their bandwidth is not enough.

 

My Favorite Tools

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Kathy Brown today asked “What’s Your Favorite Tool“, so I thought I wanted to share the tools I use.

My favorite tool is probably NoteMan from MartinScott. If I have to pick one tool from the suite, it would be either NoteMan.Editor or NoteMan.DocDelta. It is very hard to decide between the two of them. Editor is great for editing documents, see the contents of different fields and even change data types. I use it to get the UniversalID of documents and much more. DocDelta help me solve replication conflicts quickly and easy. I can higly recommend the NoteMan suite of tools to any Notes/Docmino developer, and for the price ($395 for the whole suite), you get a lot of functionality.

I also use several tools from TeamStudio and Ytria. Yes, I am lucky enough to have a boss who believe in getting me the tools I need.

From TeamStudio I use Undo (previously called Snapper) to make snapshots of the design while developing for easy roll-back, Profiler to find performance issues in my code and Configurator for search-and-replace through-out a database (design and/or documents). Those tools run around $500 each, if I recall correctly. I also use their free class browser, a tool I highly recommend to everyone doing object oriented Lotusscript development.

From Ytria I use a number of tools.The two I use the most are scanEZ and actionBarEZ. The latter is great when I want to apply a specific design of action bars to many forms and/or views. I design the action bar in one view, with colors, fonts, backgrounds, etc. When I am satisfied I can update all views and forms the the database with the new design. I don’t use scanEZ as much, but still on a regular basis. It also have functions to identify replication conflicts, like NoteMan.DocDelta, but the two tools complement each other. Using scanEZ, I can locate and delete documents of a particular type, including profile documents, and much more. I also sometimes use designPropEZ to check the design of a database and make sure it does not inherit element from the wrong templates/databases.

Here is a screenshot of my currect toolbar with all my development tools:

 

In addition I use Photoshop CS2 for graphics editing, TechSmith Jing to create screencam demos for managers/users, and Notepad++ for some HTML/Javascript/jQuery editing.