Harsh J

Spider-Man on Johnny “Ghost Rider” Blaze’s bike. With a quote.

 

Oh boy, I love standards.

When I was wondering how do I search for mails sent by me, where I’m also the thread originator, I looked at what GMail had to offer as it search fields and other such advanced options. In the end my search was simply:

in:sent from:me term -Re

Now am wondering why it didn’t strike me immediately to look for the “Re” keyword that makes a mail a reply de-facto. Of course, there’s a much more neater, more RFC-5322 compliant way of searching such mails, but I’m unsure if GMail supports such querying.

Read this PDF of Paul Allen and Interval Licensing L.L.C.’s patent infringement complaint against AOL, eBay, Apple, Google, Netflix, Facebook (Yeah, Microsoft vs. Allen), Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.

Interval and Allen’s four US Patents in this complaint here deal with the following aspects:

1. Identify, process and alert items of “current interest” to users of online content; i.e. what you’ve seen before as “Users who bought this also bought:” and “Most bought overall” like sections.
2. Displaying an attention message to the user unobtrusively; i.e. your smooth notification popups and/or bubble popups that display information. Also the way Mac’s Dashboard appears when activated (similar to Yahoo’s Widgets dashboard).
3. Displaying items of related interest around a topic; i.e. Related news/pages, etc.

This case is going to be quite fun to follow, as it defines a large chunk of the “related” web (or social web, if you hang that way) we have today. It almost could tear Facebook down to nothingness if justice were dictatorial (No FOAF!).

If you ask me, this is the height of a patent, to hold rights to an idea and also its out-scope itself, not a particular implementation of it. We have a chance now, and we should take it and abolish such stupidness.

I have to play every Spider-Man game produced, somehow. So I went ahead and got my hands on the most recent one of them, “Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions“, and oh boy. I’m blown away!

After playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, my bar that sets the definition of a good RPG action game just took a shot towards the sky. The game-play in it was the most involving for a comic character based RPG, based on a comic character who’s at human heights. The fights were great, the moving around the area fluid and just like how the character would do, etc.. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the game if you play it, cause the story doesn’t disappoint you either.

Along came the Spider-Man game, and brought in perhaps for the first time ever, the Spider-Man 2099 and the Spider-Man Noir characters into video games! I think they’re great characterizations. The former imposing the role upon himself to get rid of a drug addiction, and the latter just facing a twisted history with his timeless humor. Their comics are great too.

Now case-in-point: Spider-Man Noir. The Noir Spider-Man levels in Shattered Dimensions is very similar to what much of Arkham Asylum had to offer. Only, it has much more pace. Any Spider-Man game worth its salt would offer deadly combos and faster-than-eye-can-follow agility during battles, and Shattered Dimensions doesn’t disappoint. The way you could incapacitate a henchman in Arkham Asylum, you can do it with Spider-Man Noir using webbing. Sneak up on them in the darkness, and web yank them to blackouts. Its Arkham Asylum all over, but with webs and sticking on walls! I’m not getting enough of this, so am going and playing more of it now. What’s more is that it offers a great bunch of classic rogues from Spider-Man gallery, across different timelines; yet you don’t get lost!

You should try this game out, its good fun with not too repetitive themes. For Spider-Man fans, it is an imperative. Stan Lee has himself voiced over a few narrations. This one is surely a timeless classic.

[This is a December 2010 Post -- mind it]

Here’s a quick way to download the now-available beta swype.apk if you don’t really want to download right onto your phone via their given link:

wget https://beta.swype.com/android/get/?download_NOW=androidBeta -U "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1" -O Swype.apk

There, nice and easy?

Sorry Swype, to make you count a N1 download instead of an SGS.