Stratagus is a GPL'ed real time strategy engine. I haven't given it a try yet, but there is a sister project called Wargus that allows you to play Warcraft II (non-Battle.net edition) on a Windows XP or Linux.
One of the games written for the engine, Magnant, looks promising.
I think the engine would have greater popularity if it were licensed under the LGPL rather than the GPL. The LGPL license would allow games written using the engine to be licensed commercially. The commercial games could donate cash or code back into the engine.
Any body want to write a strategy game with me? :)
人材募集 (Google Japan is hiring). If I only knew more Japanese...
Just found Google's mission statement too:
"Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Google Suggest was announced on the Google Blog a few days ago. This company is incredible!
Using their new JavaScript resources (developed during the GMail construction I guess) they've build a very handy suggestion tool into their search page. Check out the Google Suggest beta and see what you think.
Thunderbird 1.0 was released recently (I'm not sure when, I just found out yesterday). The biggest change (that I'm aware of) since 0.9 is the addition of an RSS news reader.
Firfox 1.0 has the same sort of feature via their Live Bookmarks technology. While Firefox's RSS integration is nice in some respects, I think Thunderbird's mail like approach will improve the usability to the point of making it a more frequent part of my life.
If you haven't tried Thunderbird yet, now would be a great time to switch from other virus prone e-mail readers (read "Outlook"). Thunderbird 1.0 has improved migration tools that should make the switch even easier.
The Web Application Component Toolkit version 0.2a(lpha) came out earlier this month. WACT is an amazing little project. It's planned to be a "modular patterns based framework for creating high performance web applications." It's well on its way.
The time between releases is a bit of a problem (almost a year between 0.1a and 0.2a), but that seems to be in the process of changing.
Things of note in this framework:
It's definitely under consideration for all those someday-I'd-love-to-write-an-app-that-does-N projects.
Nathan Duvall, a friend of mine for ye olde high school days, e-mailed me to let me know about his blog, The Meanderings of the Unfettered Bloke. He's just started on the whole blogging adventure, so stop by and say "hey."
You might also check out his well maintained family website, Nathan-Carrie.com.
A "checklist" of XML fundamentals has been created by David Stephenson of HP. It looks to be a good overall view of XML and the core related technologies.
I haven't read the whole thing through, but what I did read (mainly the part on URI's, URL's, and URN's) helped clarify some things I've been fussy on for a while, but haven't had the time to dig through all the docs out there to learn what I needed. Mr. Stephenson sums it up rather succinctly.
If you're interested in XML (et al), I would suggest using this as one of your starting points. It's not exaustive, but it's got the basics on more than just XML.