Wiimote shenanigans

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ

How cool is that…

Battleball – multiplayer 3D pong

I’ve been playing Batteball (www.battleballgame.net) for a few months now. It’s a highly polished, fast, 3D multiplayer version of pong – players chat in a lobby and challenge each other in single matches or as part of a tournament, as well as being able to play single-player modes too. As well as simply hitting the ball, you gain experience from winning games which can be used to upgrade your paddles’s speed, size, power… and you can also win coins which can actually be exchanged for real money!

If you’re a fan of Pong or Curveball, check it out…

Microsoft Rock!

Now there’s a bold way to start a blog entry aimed at programmers. You can complain all you like about monopolies, bugs, security & performance. But then, Microsoft probably didn’t just give you $10,000K worth of software practically for free, so you’ll have to forgive my temporary rush of enthusiasm…

So basically the deal is that Microsoft have a partners scheme, where just about anyone can sign up. If you’re a partner, you are eligible to register for the Microsoft Action Pack, which is a big goody bag of software. You get a nice folder and a big stack of CDs shipped to you, and then a quarterly update of any new version released in the following year.

You can see the full list here but there is a lot of stuff I’ve never heard of so let me give you my highlights, i.e the software I’d actually want:

• Windows Vista Business (32 & 64 bit versions) X 10 licenses
• Office 2007 Enterprise Edition X 10 licenses
• MS Project X 10 licenses
• MS Visio X 10 licenses
• Windows Server 2003 (32 & 64 bit versions)
• Windows Small Business Server
• SQL Server 2005

And next year, I will get full versions of Windows Server 2008 amongst others.

If you’ve never thought how much server software costs, i suggest you take a look. You might have been thinking 10 Vista licenses was worth a lot… not compared to Windows 2003 or SQL Server 2005!

If you’d like to post how much it would cost you for all this where you live, that would be cool. But how much did I pay? Well, for all that software, on actual CDs, delivered to my door from the US, I paid a little under… $500US.

Neat, eh?