When I upgraded my SBC / Yahoo DSL service a while ago, I received a free Xbox Live Starter Kit, including a one-year subscription. I finally signed up for the Xbox Live service last week. Overall, I have to admit that Xbox Live is pretty neat. Signing into the service is very easy from any game I've tried....

When I went to Amazon a few minutes ago, I was presented with a memo from Jeff Bezos, introducing the new Amazon Prime service. This sounds like an excellent idea, and certainly one that I'm bound to benefit from. Amazon Prime requires a yearly membership fee of $79, for which you get free second day shipping on most items. You can also upgrade to overnight shipping for $3.99 per item....

After a bit of fiddling with masked ebuilds, I finally managed to get Bluetooth working with Gnome on my AMD64-based Gentoo system....

While browsing Gentoo Portage for some Bluetooth ebuilds, I came across an ebuild for quat, a "3D quaternionic fractal generator". I had never heard of 3D fractals, let alone quaternionic fractals, so I checked out the website, and it looks pretty interesting. Here and here are some nice examples of what 3D fractals look like. If you're interested in computer graphics, these are worth checking out.

I've been reading up a little on the Spring Framework, which seems very impressive. It can be used in several tiers of a typical web application, and depending on where it is used it either cooperates or competes with other established frameworks. For example, Spring comes with its own MVC imlementation that competes with Apache Struts and addresses several of Struts' shortcomings....