This week, Facebook started offering Facebook Chat over Jabber. What does this mean? This means that you can use Adium (OSX), Pidgin (Windows) or even iChat (OSX again) to talk to your Facebook buddies. There is no longer any need to log into Facebook and chat in your web browser or use the bloated MSN client from hell. As a point, I haven’t used the official client in years, Adium offers it perfectly well.

Either way, I’ve been using it for a few days now. It’s much more stable than they hacky approach that had been taken before and means that communication tends to be a lot smoother. It’s refreshingly cool.

So a call to everyone, stop using MSN. It’s bloated, horrid, ad/spam ridden (especially on Windows). Uninstall it, leave it alone – the friends you have on MSN are highly likely your friends on Facebook already. Let’s get this non-standard, horrid closed system outta here!

If you want details on how to do this, Facebook has a page on their site detailing how to set up the various IM clients out there.

I also just realised… this is my first truly opinionated blog post! Scary.

I have included it below:

In other news, Green Man Gaming’s usage of the Qt library hit the Nokia Qt blog yesterday as well.

Details are comically thin on the ground (the official site’s just a cheapo holding page, but VG247 has rounded up some pertinent quotes from CEO)

I’m wondering what an expensive holding page looks like? It’ll be changing in a few days anyway – so maybe it’ll look a little less cheap then. The pertinent quotes referenced are from the COO not CEO. Quite a big difference!

The rest of the post goes into guessing around commercials and the like. Which I guess has to be expected when the details are “comically thin on the ground”. If one basis of business on what some of the posts around the web have been guessing, then yes it’d be absurd! Apparently there’s no way a publisher would be interested in working with Green Man Gaming… the press release covers this already with the “400 titles for launch” so that’s pretty much put to bed already isn’t it?

Naturally the comments continue – the editor at Game Spy noted this:

Green Man Gaming is one company I’ll be keeping tabs on. If this takes off, it might be the start of something huge. Three letters keep popping into my head — D.R.M.

Yep, DRM. As noted earlier it’s something, along with Code Security that gets a lot of attention at Green Man Gaming. It’s worth making sure that we distinct the two there. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is just checks to make sure a piece of media is being used in the way it’s intended. Code Security is then used to protect it. The consumer world wraps this up in just DRM.

The DRM we’re employing is designed to be secure and lightweight and not intrude on the poor customer’s PC. I personally hate all the Sony hell that was created with their music DRM system. I’ll be happy to go into that in more detail another time if there’s a demand to know more.

On Geek.com it actually goes as far as:

This is interesting, but still not very good for consumers. Basically, what’s happening is you’ll never be able to buy a pre-owned game through Green Man Gaming: you just tell them you never want to play a game again, they give you some credit you can use for other purchases, and then that credit is used to pay royalties to the developers of the next game you buy.

Where in the press release did it say that? In fact MCV get it right, saying:

The firm will then re-sell that game code to another customer for a ‘pre-owned’ price

An interesting comment on kokatu brings up some interesting points:

Setting these systems up is not cheap.

Malloc is right, it certainly isn’t cheap. I can only speak from a technical point of view (being the CTO ‘n all), but the most significant expenditure has come from the tech. side of the business. We’ve hired some quite top notch developers to work on this and they’re storming through the last bits of the system.

It kind of reeks of something that would sound great to people who don’t really know a lot about how this stuff actually would work and figure they’ll just hammer out the logistics when they get there.

I’ll put this one to bed right now! Everyone at Green Man Gaming has a long background in the gaming industry. In fact, the full list of people involved is on Linked In – go check out the Green Man Gaming Profile on there.

By far the funniest has to be on Shacknews:

That placeholder construction image looks surprisingly sexual.

Yes… he appears to have a rather large err… we’ll leave that there.

I’ll keep reading up and probably grab some more snippets of info in the next few days – early comments appear to be good overall.

When working on closed/embedded projects that you distribute, the GPL requires you to make you application open source as well – the LGPL requires you use the library in a DLL/.so form – it’s all fairly simple. License checking is time consuming but worthwhile as it means you end up with a product that you have at least tried to protect from potential lawsuits.

That also said, open source developers should consider dual licensing (a bit like Nokia with Qt). This way, if a large company wants to use your code, you make a reasonable amount of money out of it to fund the GPL/LGPL versions.

Doing it that way may well mean breaking Stallman’s view of the world – but there is his view… and the way the world actually works.

Lawsuit alleges Palm Pre violates copyright – Artifex, copyright, gpl, GPL violation – Techworld.

	LPDIRECT3DSURFACE9 pd3dsBack = NULL;

	if ( SUCCEEDED ( device->GetBackBuffer(0, 0, D3DBACKBUFFER_TYPE_MONO, &pd3dsBack) ))
	{
		D3DSURFACE_DESC desc;
		pd3dsBack->GetDesc(&desc);

		LPDIRECT3DSURFACE9 pd3dsCopy = NULL;
		if (desc.MultiSampleType != D3DMULTISAMPLE_NONE)
		{
			if (SUCCEEDED(device->CreateRenderTarget(desc.Width, desc.Height, desc.Format, D3DMULTISAMPLE_NONE, 0, FALSE, &pd3dsCopy, NULL)))
			{
				if (SUCCEEDED(device->StretchRect(pd3dsBack, NULL, pd3dsCopy, NULL, D3DTEXF_NONE)))
				{
					pd3dsBack->Release();
					pd3dsBack = pd3dsCopy;
				}
				else
					pd3dsCopy->Release();
			}
		}
	}

The first thing you’ll notice is we grab the back buffer and query whether it has multi-sampling. If it is, we create a new render target and then render the scene onto it. This is far quicker to do than trying to take a shot of a multi-sampled scene as you’ve forced the GPU to do the rendering down onto a surface with no multi-sampling. Job done! That way you can then continue with LockRect() etc. and take the shot as you would do normally.

This makes taking shots of multi-sampled scenes not more than 1-2ms longer than those that aren’t. Enjoy!

Apple has just sent out an e-mail to registered iPhone developers informing them that In App Purchasing, previously restricted to paid applications, is now also permitted in free applications.

The only issue is that setting up in app purchase can be a pain. The pay off is worth it however as apps are less likely to be pirated as the extra components are downloaded after the app is installed from the app store as part of the bolt on purchase.

Roll on more usage of this feature.

Apple Opens Up In App Purchasing for Free iPhone Applications – Mac Rumors.

Anyway, taken from Ars Technica is this little gem:

CFShow([[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"SBFormattedPhoneNumber"]);

You can also browse quite a bit more of this dict.:

NSString *path = [NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist"];
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:path];
CFShow(dict);

Enjoy… But use responsibly.