Toonfest 2006 Update

News from Disney's Toonfest 2006 held this past Saturday August 26:

• Support for Safari and Firefox browsers is underway ("the new guy from Pixar wants us to support his browser...."). The Disney management team confirmed that other browsers apart from IE will be supported. Work is actively underway;
• Confirmation of "gardening" as the new, large upcoming addition to Toontown. Plant Jellybeans to grow flowers, pick them and sell them in the market. Plant gags to grow gag trees (with a whole range of bigger and better gags). Trees and plants need watering (at the time of the demo the watering can animation was not complete)
• Wedding Cake gag - attacks *all* cogs you are fighting at the same time.
• Daisy Duck will be coming back to Toontown (after all, the Garden is named after her. Goofy was just looking after it while she was away).
• Disney ToonTown runs on "about 40" servers in Seattle. Linux is the OS of choice (couple of distro's)
• Cog HQ is under construction. No details from the Disney team regarding release date.
• Disney is lookig into how to allow users with single accounts to play multiple toons at the same time (their stated largest fear was "additional characters being sold")
• Trolly games in development
• Account packages that will combine accounts for Toontown and the upcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean" online game.
• ToonTown pins were given out at Toonfest: Three Cogs and five characters (the blue monkey being my favorite). I've asked Evan to scan them for me + will post a picture. (Some are already for sale by others at ebay)
• If you collected six out of seven stickers around the evnet you received a set of magnets with each of the ToonTown land names + a special "ToonFest" magnet. I've seen two sets of these for sale on ebay.

"Snacks on a Plane"

My new concept for airports: "Snacks on a Plane", serving tasty morsels to to famished passenger.
Movie tie-in possibilities are almost endless.

Linksys WRT54G Upgrade to DD-WRT

Spent this afternoon upgrading my Linksys WRG54G to DD-WRT in order to run a FON access point. Since I had the V6 version I had to jump through a few additional hoops, removing vxworks and installing a micro Linux binary on the router. Very useful pages at bitsum. I plan to complete the FON installation and configuration next weekend. Will update then.

So Sue Me......

Expand the image below to see an e-mail message that was sent to a web site admin. This really happened!

August 19: Open Source & Amazon Video

Just found a CM Journal article that was published last year entitled Open Source Development Community Drives Processes Benefiting Enterprise Applications. Length-wise it's little more than an abstract. I'll dig out the full paper on which this was based and post it.

Friday morning Arstechnica ran a story about screenshots of Amazon's new video web store.
Story was picked up by Slashdot, Digg and others:

• Downloadable Movies from Amazon - posted on Slashdot on Saturday
• Screenshots of Amazon's new video web store hit the web - posted on Digg Friday

News is getting kinda 'same-y' these days...

Oh, and read the reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk on Amazon. But don't be drinking said milk at the time unless you want it to be ejected from your nose at high velocity. You have been warned.

More Numbers.....

Seems like the "paint a number - make a sale" business model is being pursued by more than one artist. Anthony White also has a number series. I'm not overly excited by Anthony's artwork - looks like the daubings of a chimpanzee on crack, however you can buy it in varying currencies and it is multi-colored. The fact that he's created his own "secondary market" is quite impressive - even though it appears that he's buying back his own artwork for more than for which he sold it. Smart move there Anthony.

Update: 17 August. Seems like Anthony White is a little tetchy. At least I didn't liken his artwork to that which is created by elephants in Thailand - but wait, maybe I should look again? I'm working on my own wonderful business opportunity to sell plastic and metal scuptures of numbers based on some wacko bit of 2nd grade math. Get those credit cards ready..!

Update: 18 August. I had a call this morning from the legal representatives of the Elephant Sri-Siam, currently in residence at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. They cautioned me about comparing the primitive splotchings of Anthony White to the elegantly executed paintings of their clients, especially Sri-Siam. Below is an original elephant painting created by Sri-Siam on elephant dung paper. It's entitled "Daawk Sunng" ("Tall Flowers") (actually 'Daawk Sunng' translates on Babel fish as "bean sprouts, pad thai and rice", so I'm not really sure). I'll leave the decision regarding which artist is the better, elephant or Anthony, to the reader....