Nasi Rames, Bu! Demo Version -- The Street Cuisine Game

Title: Nasi Rames, Bu! Demo Version
Type: Java Mobile Game / Casual
Supported Platform: Nokia S60 Series, Nokia NGage / NGage QD, Sony Erricson W-Series
Download: Here!

"Nasi Rames - A Traditional Cuisine from Indonesia, consist of rice with various toppings of fish, meat, vegetables and spices of choice. Usually sold by female street peddlers or traditional diners in Java."

Nasi Rames, Bu! is a unique casual game, where you play a part as a traditional food peddler. Your job is to complete your customers orders, by matching items in the order with items on the menu. Careful though, the longer it takes for you to complete an order, the customer might get impatient and decided to leave without paying. In each level, there's a certain number of score that you have to fulfill, or else you'll lose the game.

The demo version currently only allows you to play until level 1-3, but a full version game will come soon enough. Here's what to expect from the full version game:

• More menu item, more order, more mayhem
• Color Coded Order - finish orders with the same colors to add some combo bonus!
• Out of this world orders - serve rice with the most unthinkable toppings ever: pizzas, cactuses, cell phones -- even rockets!
  
• 21 wacky levels
• Better graphics
  

CrestBreaker v1.8 Demo Version

Type: Mobile Game Supported Platform: Nokia s60 Series - Up, Sony Erricson with Nokia UI API

Download: CrestBreaker.jar

CrestBreakers is a revamped version of the classic game, Mastermind. In this game, you played as a commander of Mozzarella Country, who's an eternal enemy to the Oregano Country. Your job is simple, direct missiles towards the enemy territory by inputting the attack codes, consisting of four unique digits matching the enemy defense codes. The catch is, the enemy codes is hidding, so you'd have to guess those codes by yourself by evaluating the attack results after each attack phase. To make matters worse, the enemy is doing the exact thing, and the UN is watching each civilian casualties you made for every wrong guesses. If the casualties has gone too great, they will cut in the fight and take over your goverment's military priviledge. So it's a race between you, the neighbour, or the UN peace troops.

The demo version will only allow one type of game, but the full version will have 3 types of game:

1. Story Mode : Play all the levels starting from easy to hard.
2. Free Mode : Play a single game against the computer.
3. Multiplayer Mode : Play head-to-head with a friend.

The demo version also allows only one difficulty level, and only Nokia phones model support. Please stay tuned for the full version where there'll be more phone support and features.

Any comments or bugs on this game? Please let me know ;)

Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows - A Safari On The Internet Jungle

Not so long ago (June 11, 2007), Apple Inc. announced the release of Safari 3 - the originally MacOS X web browser - on PC platform. In spite of being released as public beta, the browser is boasted to be the fastest and most appealing web browser compared to the others such as IE, Mozilla or Opera. The presentation on Safari's website shows exactly how fast: about 2x faster than Opera on loading HTML pages, a bit faster than Opera on Javascript operations and application launch. Safari also uses tabbed browsing, which I loved so much in Mozilla, and is equipped with several other features such as SnapBack: the ability to return to your previous search result prior result link click, a feature I find quite useful sometimes (although not too often) when browsing through google.

It was a colleague of mine from work actually, who inspired me to try out the new Safari 3 for Windows. He said his web browsing experience improved drastically, with loading speed as the main factor. So based on his suggestion, I downloaded and installed Safari 3 on my laptop. Yet apparrently, his experience seems to be quite different than mine.

Just as a started Safari 3, the browser appears with absolutely no text on it. Not in the title bar - it's there, I can focus my mouse on it, but there's just no text in it. The same thing happened to the address bar and the search field. After browsing the forum to find out the problem(on a different browser of couse, luckily I didn't remove my Firefox), I found out that it was caused of a corrupted/missing fonts.plist file (the Safari font list). So I downloaded the valid file, and copy them to my computer. When I restarted Safari, the texts are reappeared.

To test the speed, I tried opening one of the slowest page to load - oracle.com. A few seconds after pressing enter, the page appears. It seems that Safari has a different mechanism upon rendering pages, allowing them to load page faster. But what about streaming data, such as videos? I tried opening a youtube movie for the answer. Yet another problem appears - my youtube movie plays without sound. Also, the browser crashes randomly - yet another flaw. Nevertheless, it does prove to be faster the other browsers at some point. And it's animated features does seemed appealing - It looks exactly like iTunes, all text fields and text areas are draggable, and I had some mindless fun dragging the tabs, just to seem them slide :) But it seems there's still plenty of bugs to patch before we can say it's a decent competitor for other PC web browsers. Here are a few bugs I experienced during the test:

• Missing fonts, solution: replace the fonts.plist file
• Browser crashes randomly, solution: turn auto complete off (doesn't solve the problem completely though, but it's a bit more stable)
• Browser crashes when opening bookmark
• No sound
• Memory tends to bloat after awhile
• Plugins are missing - no clue on how to install plugins

The verdict? Well, it's too soon to say, but the Public Beta release still have a long wat to go there.

Drifting Around With Andy

Before reading anything else, just take a look at this.

If you can't see the movie, see it here.

Andy McKee was born in Topeka, Kansas, 1979. Played his first guitar at the age of 13, he is now wellknown as "just this guy from Kansas who kind of blew up on the Internet about a week before Christmas". The song you've just heard was titled Drifting, and has become one of the hottest sensation over YouTube, which also massively voted by users at Diggs. Since then, even a larger number of video was submitted by YouTube users, showing people attempting to play the same song.

Andy McKee started his carreer at 2001, when he released his first album Nocturne. At the same year, he placed third at the National Fingerstyle Guitar Competition in Winfield, Kansas, and dubbed the youngest competitor to ever place so highly in such competition. What's so special about Andy was, well, the previous says it all -- his unique and complex fingerstyle guitar technique. In 2003, McKee toured in Taiwan with Jacques Stotzem, Isato Nakagawa, and Masaaki Kishibe, and earned first place in Kansas' Miscellaneous Acoustic Instrument contest with a Ron Spillers harpguitar he purchased from Steven Bennett in 2002. 2 years later, he released his second album Dreamcatcher, where he features several tracks which uses the same harpguitar. His recent CD, Art Of Motion was released on CandyRAT Records in 2005, featuring several songs from his recent album such as Drifting, Practice Is Perfect and several new and wonderful songs such as RyLynn and For My Father. The album has also earned considerable praise from established acoustic guitarists such as Don Ross, whom McKee is currently on the same label with and has noted as one of his favorite artists.