Thursday, August 27, 2009

Monday, July 27, 2009

Ask.com Google Gadget for iGoogle and OpenSocial containers

Check out my new project! If you like to search via Ask.com from iGoogle, you have some help!
Ask.com Google Gadget Add to Google

Add Ask.com Search to iGoogle and OpenSocial Containers.
This google gadget makes searching the web via Ask.com easily accessible to iGoogle and OpenSocial users.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Play Classic GameCube games with enhanced Wii control!



Nintendo has some taken existing GameCube games, that show the potential for Wii like controls and released them as "New Play Control" games - by tweaking their controller interface mapping to use the Wii controls instead.

For the most part, this involves changing the control scheme mappings, but could involve some further tweaks that change the original control scheme significantly to make it familiar with Wii users - clearly a larger user base than the original GameCube one.

I am excited that Nintendo has innovated on this idea, and the only thing fans will complain about is more GC games to be reincarnated on the Wii - especially games like Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, The original Metroid Prime + Prime 2: Echoes and Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II.

Its interesting - the Wii now has along with standalone Wii games -
* WiiWare - smaller games available as downloads
* Classic games - from older Nintendo consoles
* And now "New Play Control" games

Just more games to feed your Wii appetite. But Nintendo has yet to implement my Wii wishlist -

* Better graphics and hardware with 1080p support (via HDMI)
* A better classic controller that is more Xbox 360 and PS3 like - some games can take advantage of dual control schemes
* Wireless nunchuck
* Better, ergonomically designed Wiimotes
* Motivated marketing folks to attract more 3rd party game developers!!

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Great to see "Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot" (Japanese TV Show from the 60's) on Hulu.com

It's great to see "Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot" (Japanese TV Show from the 60's) on Hulu!! - http://www.hulu.com/johnny-sokko-and-his-flying-robot

Some background-
Giant Robo (ジャイアントロボ Jaianto Robo?), is a manga and tokusatsu series created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. It is similar to his famous Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor in the US), only Giant Robo has more fantastic elements.
The original tokusatsu TV series, produced by Toei Company Ltd., aired on NET (now TV Asahi) from October 11, 1967 to April 1, 1968, with a total of 26 episodes. The English dubbed version of the series was produced by American International Television as Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. [more on Wikipedia]


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Love this creative, japanese video on Google Chrome

Google Chrome, Japan

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

HTC Magic aka G2 - Android Phone Hands on Video Tour

You can watch in high quality by clicking on the youtube video.



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Friday, February 13, 2009

Enhance Twitter! Add a search box with search suggestions on twitter.com to search tweets instantly!



If you are a regular visitor on twitter, you might enjoy my new project -

The Problem -
Have you ever wanted to search tweets (on twitter.com) easily from the twitter.com interface?

The solution -
I have a written a script that does just that. It is a greasemonkey script and requires Firefox. To download the script, or for more information, visit the project page.

Update -
Now with search suggestions!!$#!

In the screenshot above, note the big search box on the top of the page. This is added by the script. More enhancements to twitter.com's UI are coming..

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Which one is more powerful - Xbox 360 or the PS3 ??

Gamasutra.com secured an interview with David Shippy who was the chief architect of the power processing unit for the Cell (the engine that drives the PS3). The chip began the research and design process in 2000 when Sony asked IBM for an "order of magnitude increase in processing performance." Ironically it was that very ambition and the design that followed that would one day be the foundation for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

When asked the flame war inducing question, "which console is actually more powerful?"

Shippy tells Gamasutra,
"I'm going to have to answer with an 'it depends.' Again, they're completely different models. So in the PS3, you've got this Cell chip which has massive parallel processing power, the PowerPC core, multiple SPU cores… it's got a GPU that is, in the model here, processing more in the Cell chip and less in the GPU. So that's one processing paradigm -- a heterogeneous paradigm."

"With the Xbox 360, you've got more of a traditional multi-core system, and you've got three PowerPC cores, each of them having dual threads -- so you've got six threads running there, at least in the CPU. Six threads in Xbox 360, and eight or nine threads in the PS3 -- but then you've got to factor in the GPU," Shippy explains. "The GPU is highly sophisticated in the Xbox 360."

"At the end of the day, when you put them all together, depending on the software, I think they're pretty equal."

Found this on IGN.

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Sunday, January 11, 2009

Finished Call of Duty World at War on VETERAN dIfFiCuLtY

Wohoo. It feels like an achievement in life. Worst missions were Heart
of the Reich and Downfall - the last 2 ones.

Check my achievements here.

The pain involved with the veteran difficulty.

Monday, January 05, 2009

The total 108 = Your birth year + age

Did you know, that the last 2 digits of your birth year + your current age is always 108 ?

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About Vishal

© 2008 Vishal V. Shah. All rights reserved. Contents of this web site reflect my personal work and is not representative of my employer.