Ubisoft takes Tom Clancy’s Game World to the Skies

Tom Clancy has long been one of my favorite authors. Along with this, I have always loved aircrafts and have been working in the creation and simulation of aircraft simulators for many years. This said, you can easily understand why the latest game from Ubisoft, based in the Tom Clancy universe, called HAWX, would excite me.

After reading about this new game for some time, I downloaded the demo made available on the Playstation store yesterday and was quite impressed by the high quality of the 3D terrain database that they have created and the fluidity of the graphics. I am considering adding this game to my collection if reviews turn out positive for this title.

If you own a PS3, get the demo from the Playstation Store for free and enjoy the skies.

Blogging for Work

I have already loved writing. Across the years, this love of writing led me to be responsible to write articles for the local paper when I was part of a science club in high school, it led me to become editor-in-chief of my college newspaper and it led me to write DVD reviews for a great site for four years.

When it comes to work, I first wrote four white papers across the last few years to explain how our technologies work to existing and potential customers. And now, since last fall, I became the company`s corporate technology blogger. Check it out here to get a glimpse of the types of technology that I work with.

Going a bit crazy with WordPress Plugins

Aftere revamping my site a month ago, updating an old plugin of mine and writing a new one, I decided to take a look at the various plugins out there that could make my life using WordPress even easier than it already is. Here are the plugins that I settled on:

• Collapsible Archive Widget: After running this blog for six years, the monthly archive that the wordpress sidebar widget generates started to be quite long. With this new plugin, archives can be collapsed into monthly and yearly groups.
• Contact Form 7: This plugin is great to easily add a contact page to a site.
• Flexi Pages Widget: Excluding pages that I did not want to see listed in the default Pages widgets started to get really annoying. This Pages Widget replacement makes it very easy to pick pages to display from a list.
• Flickr Manager: After using Flickr manually for many years to host the images that I post to this blog, I found this handy plugin that automates the task of uploading pictures to Flickr and then including them in my posts.
• Google Analytics for WordPress: Very simple in nature, this plugins add the necessary code so that hits on your site can counted on Google Analytics. I installed this one after I forgot to put the code back when I changed my theme.
• Add to Any: A plugin that adds a menu onto my post pages so that you can easily e-mail someone or save off an interesting article that you read.
• WPtouch: A plugin that will display a nicely formatted iPhone / iPod Touch version of the site to people visiting using safari on the these devices.

You might find some of these plugins very useful yourself.

Sync your contacts with Google

If you own a Smartphone, especially one running Windows Mobile, you have probably been frustrated by the fact that Windows Mobile can only sync contact information with a full licensed copy of Microsoft Outlook. Besides the fact that Outlook is a pretty expensive application, it is overkill if all you are looking to do is to sync a few measly contacts so that you don’t lose them if your phone dies.

Google has seen this gaping hole and recently started offering Google Sync, an application that enables uses of Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Nokia phones to sync their contacts between their Google accounts and their phones. My wife was quite happy to learn about this one.

Environment variable editing made easy

Anyone who has ever had to edit the Windows Environment variables on their computer, specially the path, has probably cursed at the small window that Microsoft has built in their operating system to handle that task. While visiting a customer recently, I was shown a great little tool called the Rapid Environment Editor.

This free utility allows you to see all of your user and system environment variables in a large window. It also breaks down long variables such as include directory or the ever-growing path. Finally, it even checks that directories listed in your variables exist, letting you do some cleanup.

New WP Plugin and a new take on an old one

I have been using WordPress for many years now to manage the content of my blog. I have also been maintaining a plugin called Link Library for it for a long time. Now, I recently went back to the Link Library code and improve it a lot.

I first made it so that you no longer would have to edit page templates to be able to use it. You can now just create a page and write a few keywords in the page body and Link Library will do its thing. I have also added a section in the admin page to configure the plugin output.

I also got inspired over the holidays and created a new plugin called Tune Library. The purpose of this new plugin is to allow users to import their iTunes collection into WordPress and be able to print the list of sonfgs from their library on their site.

I hope that you will enjoy this new plugin and the update to my existing plugin.