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I’ll admit it… I am a big gamer. I, CEO/President of CentreSource, love to sit back and immerse myself in a great game (alone or with a friend). While I could wax about the therapeutic value of games & their overall role in our stress-laced work force, I’ll save that for another day :) Instead, I thought I’d give you one of the funniest & best written articles I’ve seen on the current state of the gaming industry. Most of his points show that the industry is developing software in a box (or a crate if you read the article!).

The web continues to impress me when I stumble across things that are relatively simple, yet done in such an elegant manner I can’t help but notice. This was the case when I discovered the Javascript overlay techniques of Lightbox, Greybox, and Thickbox.

Lightbox
Lightbox provides functionality to overlay images (with effects) onto your website – without using Flash or other plugins. It is perfect for creating a beautiful image gallery, while still maintaining easy control over your images! Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself: Lightbox JS v2.0

The new mac commercials are great – especially given their crafty delivery of undertone messages about PC users. On the other hand, these parody commercials are hilarious as well. Tit for Tat baby… tit for tat.

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2006/07/07/bwe-mac-ads/

I made a fatal mistake… I thought I could start investigating PHP Frameworks and determine a clear winner. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that there is no clear winner… no clear Mr. Popular… and even worse, no clear source of info to even get started. Well, I hopefully made a nice step towards fixing the latter issue – I gathered every PHP Framework I could find and compiled them into a list at Wikipedia. Going forward, hopefully others will find this list useful for starting their investigation. Oh yeah – one more thing… Did I mention there were 57 Frameworks I found???? Give me a break – how in the world can the PHP community get enterprise traction if we don’t settle on a standard. No wonder RoR is rising in popularity so fast…

Gene McCabe, owner of FrugalReader.com, was kind enough to be a guest blogger this week. He shares his experience in working with a development firm (CentreSource) to develop the latest version of FrugalReader.com. For anyone looking to read an honest, realistic experience about Custom Web Development, I encourage you to read Gene’s commentary.

I can’t tell you how many times I will visit a website, read content that indicates it will cost me something, but try in vain to find any prices listed. This isn’t as bad for service websites where the price can vary dramatically, but now I’m even seeing it for websites that are a service unto themselves.

I just finished reading (SmartComputing) a quick blurb about a Virtual Keyboard that uses lasers and infrared to produce a fully functional ‘virtual’ keyboard. The picture was awesome and I thought it was revolutionary… but upon doing a little research, it appears that virtual keyboards like this date back to 2002 – possibly earlier.

Time Magazine listed a non-production virtual keyboard from Canesta as one of their best inventions of 2002. Interestingly enough, it appears that Canesta abandoned the idea and decided to focus on electronic image processing.

If you own a single slot CD-R, you may wonder how you’re supposed to burn copies of your disks and/or make exact images of your distributions. One popular way is to create an ‘Image’ of your CD-ROM in the format of an ISO. The ISO file is an actual image-copy of the CD-ROM – not the files itself. This may be hard to understand, but CD-ROM’s have more info associated with them other than the files that are stored on them. Special security, volume info, etc. – all stored at the low level of the CD-ROM. While all of this fascinating, it isn’t the point of my post :) If you need to burn an ISO, here is a great site that makes it super simple: Right click -> Copy Image to CD. That’s it! Thanks Alex Feinman.

Recently, a potential client asked us if we could recommend a viable open source document management system (DMS) for their needs. Despite our deep experience with Open Source business solutions, I didn’t have one to recommend. I think that is primarily because so few businesses have need for a true DMS – even if they could benefit from it. As I thought about it, we could benefit from one because we save so many files and even have an elaborate naming scheme for versioning.

So, I went on a quest to see what I could find. The systems I chose have the following features: Easy to use, Flexible to store any file, Versioning, Ability to handle large Volumes of Data, Customizable Meta Data, Document Text Search (including PDF), and Provide a Web Interface for Universal Access. Here are the ONLY two candidates I found:

Apple continues to make headway in their attempt to remove the barriers that have divided the Mac/Windows world for so long. By now, everyone is well aware that Apple is moving the Mac platform to Intel x86 based machines. Significance: Cheaper hardware for everyone who loves the Mac OS.

Now Apple emerges with a new strategy – allow Windows to run on the Mac Hardware! They recently released software, dubbed Boot Camp, that makes this process easy. This strategy allows lovers of Mac hardware to still have access to the safety of Windows. Significance: Windows users can now enjoy the beauty of Mac Hardware.