EA Releases C&C: Red Alert as Free Download

Command and Conquer fans, rejoice! As part of the pre-release hype for Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3.
EA is making the ORIGINAL Red Alert 1 available for free! I don't know about you, but I'm not going to miss
this chance to get 13 years worth of nostalgia (RA1 dates to 1995/1996).

Link to the official EA News page with download instructions:

COMMAND & CONQUER RED ALERT 3

Apparently there are Vista issues (such an old game, after all) but EA says that several fansites have workarounds.
I'm still rocking XP, though, so that won't be a problem. If you've been living under a rock and still have Windows 95/98/ME,
no problems for you.


If you'll excuse me, I've got to download those two Soviet/Allied ISO files now...

New Pair of ThinApp Portable Programs Now Available

Here come two new ThinApps, just in time for back-to-school!

• AIM 6.8.12.4 w/ Ad Hack 5.55
  • 
  • Lightweight and ad-free thanks to Ad Hack
  • DOWNLOAD NOW
  • MD5: B29A11CF3A90A8AAD10AB7B61FD84D49
• Thunderbird 2.0.0.16
• 
• Desktop email client from the Mozilla Foundation
• DOWNLOAD NOW
• MD5: EB1BD7C622A444225D1F335CFBEF354F

HowTo: Make Firefox Remember Any/All Passwords

The Password Manager in Firefox is great for us lazy and forgetful types. But some websites (*cough* Yahoo* *cough*) make it hard for us and don't allow password saving by instructing Firefox to disable this feature on their login pages. The solution? Tweak Firefox itself. The following post from optimiced.com details the solution:

How to make Firefox remember *all* passwords (even when logging to PayPal & Yahoo Mail)

Confirmed to work with Firefox 3.

Blackjack in Java - an AP Computer Science Project

Now, after the conclusion of my AP Computer Science A class/camp/summer program at Northwestern University's CTD, it's time to release the program my partner, Francis Chen, and I created as a final project - a simple text-based Blackjack game written in Java. Originally, we planned to go for a GUI version as well, but that turned out be a little complicated...

Blackjack v1.01 is licensed under the GPLv3. Features include:

• classic casino-style Blackjack play
• player chooses starting cash and bets
• hit, stand or double down
• dealer hits on soft 17 (Vegas-style)
• insurance for dealer's ace
• fully random card draws and deck shuffling
• standard 3:2 natural and 1:1 blackjack payouts
• source code included w/ comments

Screenshots:

The download package contains source code, a Windows EXE, and a cross-platform JAR (ideal for Mac and Linux users).

On Windows: Run the EXE. Duh.

On other platforms: open a command-line and type:
java -jar blackjack-bin.jar

DOWNLOAD NOW! (210KB)

1337 Tip: Get Facebook Chat in Pidgin

 

Facebook, everyone's favorite social networking site, is packed with a smorgasbord of features, of which one of the more useful is Facebook Chat. In its vanilla form it appears as a little Ajax applet at the bottom of the screen, allowing communication with any friends of yours who are online. This works great but with one obvious limitation: you have to have Facebook active in your web browser, which can obviously be quite cumbersome when you're doing other things or have tons of other webpages open.

Well, it's actually possible to use Facebook Chat without Facebook, thanks to a nifty plugin for the IM client Pidgin. Thanks to the multi-protocol nature of Pidgin, I can have my Facebook Chat friends coexisting with my AIM buddies:

 
names + profile pics blurred for privacy purposes...

 

Profile pics, status messages, profile data...it's all there. This appears to be a very polished plugin, and is great news for users of both Facebook + Pidgin.

Hit the link below for the plugin's project page and directions to download + install:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/