There is a very good introduction to version control at BetterExplained.

http://betterexplain...e-to-version-control

This one sounds a bit serious..

October 19, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in RealPlayer in order to infect Windows machines running Internet Explorer, Symantec Corp. said late Thursday. The security company issued an alert that rated the threat with its highest possible score.

According to a warning issued to customers of its DeepSight threat network, Symantec said an ActiveX control installed by RealNetworks Inc.'s RealPlayer program is flawed. When combined with Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) browser -- which relies on ActiveX controls to extend its functionality -- the bug can be exploited and malicious code downloaded to any PC that wanders to a specially crafted site.

Only systems on which both RealPlayer and IE have been installed are vulnerable.

Symantec ranked the attack as a "10" on its urgency scale because it has confirmed that attacks are being conducted in the wild; those attacks have resulted in malicious code downloaded to victimized PCs.

http://www.computerw...ic&articleId=9043319

Sorry, if this has been mentioned by someone else before, but my forum search didn't show it. Simon has been mentioned, portable apps have been mentioned, and I found lots of threads about tiny games. Don't miss out on those:

http://www.chiark.gr...k/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Introduction

This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games. All of them run natively on Unix (GTK), on Windows, and on Mac OS X.

I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing. And I was also annoyed that every time I found a good game on (say) Unix, it wasn't available the next time I was sitting at a Windows machine, or vice versa; so I arranged that everything in my personal puzzle collection will happily run on both those platforms and more. When I find (or perhaps invent) further puzzle games that I like, they'll be added to this collection and will immediately be available on both platforms. And if anyone feels like writing any other front ends - Mac OS pre-10, PocketPC, or whatever it might be - then all the games in this framework will immediately become available on another platform as well.

I'm sure somewhere on this forum there is a brief thread asking for a service that would do something like this http://www.deathswitch.com/

if you fail to log in after a period of time your stored information will automatically be released to people you have specified using the deathswitch service.

i can't remember if the previous thread mentioned any services like the above so i might be repeating what has already been stated.

I'd consider this service useful if it included more than a simple email forwarding service. there are people i'd want to pass on information to that do not use computers so a physical mail service (or even telephone service) would be required - does anyone know of such a company offering such things?

(if there isn't such a service then perhaps we should start one.)

edit:
forgot to mention that i found it amusing to see a 'human league' http://en.wikipedia....iki/The_Human_League photograph being used as a bit of stock photography on the deathswitch site.

Bloons Tower Defense #1 (see discussion here) was a very fun and very well done Tower Defense style game which i would consider one of the more enjoyable such games i've played, if not the most challenging.

Well here comes Bloons Tower Defense #2, with more kinds of towers and some harder difficulty modes.  Yes!

http://bloons.tower....nse.2.fizzlebot.com/

i'm thinking of doing a diagram representing my 'life'. maybe like a tree with the 'key' events represented along the branches. it will probably look more like a series of arrows rather than a tree.

this reminded me of something i've sometimes pondered about but never really asked anyone - how do you represent time in your own head? so, that's your past, present and future?

do you see images of events, are they staggered across a timeline, is the timeline a single line. more, how do you think of the days of the week, months of the year, what about a big chunk of time like a year.

perhaps it's beyond explanation how you perceive it all. perhaps computers have provided a visual language to represent it so now we think in terms of software calendar layouts with moving images, etc.