Coming Attractions - some history

As previously discussed in this space, one of my all time favorite websites, Corona's Coming Attractions, has risen from the grave.

After the excitement wore off, some "wait, what happened there?" googling turned up a pair of articles from Hollywood Elsewhere that lays out the story.

Oh man, HOTU is down!

Did anybody but me ever visit Home of the Underdogs? It was an Abandonware site - where you could download old, long out of print computer games.

Amazingly, it tried really hard to be legal - or at least as legal as possible. Games that were for sale *somewhere* on the 'net couldn't be downloaded, and takedown notices from copyright owners were always responded to promptly. So, after being around for ten years or so, anything on the site was there thanks to the implicit permission of the owners.

In addition to just being a tremendous resource for old games, it had a wealth of other stuff - reviews, manuals, and the admin tried really hard to hightail games that no one played at the time - the Underdogs of the title.

So, it turns out that the site has gone down. A little digging reveals that this is because the web host has gone bankrupt, and taken their servers with them. And here's the gutpunch - the archive is now gone, having not been backed up anywhere.

There's a revival group operating out of google groups, which looks like it's going about as well as you'd expect - so not very well at all. The founder and admin of the site Sarinee "Fringer" Achavanuntakul has released what she still has into the wild under a CC license - so the database and the webpages are mostly still intact. Although, seeing as how the database turned out to be a 15meg Excel spreadsheet, that may not be as helpful as it sounds.

Still, I've got hopes that someone will put this thing back together. The site really wasn't all that complex by modern web 2.0 standards - the hardest part will be to get the thousands of games back. Still, bittorrent must be good for something besides linux distros and Doctor Who, right?

Someone who has more free time then sense should really spend a weekend and rebuilt it.

It's always good news / Bad news with The Internet

Signing up for Facebook and Twitter in the same week have got me thinking alot about the web as a communications medium. The way it does.

Let's recap. I've got a blog with a feed. A Facebook page. Twitter. A Gmail account. Google Calendar. Google Reader. And an iPhone, with a whole mess of apps that tie into the above, along with mobile safari. Not to mention things like Yahoo Pipes and FeedBurner, which are sitting in the back row going "pick me, pick me!"

My response to this is to think that there must be a way to lash all that together to make my life easier. No, scratch that - by "easier", I really mean "more organized." Instead, "checking my email" now takes half an hour and uses a dozen services instead of ten minutes with Thunderbird like it used to.

I feel like you do about ten moves into working on a rubix cube. It's still all just a mess of different colors, and you're kinda still thrashing around, but the shape of the big picture is starting to form. You don't know the right moves to get there yet, but you're starting to be able to see the final shape down at the end of the hallway.

minor update to www.GabrielHelman.com

I finally got the style-switching widget working. (Among other nips and tweaks.) Yay me?

Where I am on the Internet, March 2009

This Blog

www.GabrielHelman.com

Twitter as ghelman

I seem to be on facebook now, as well.

I now have many, many ways to ignore all of you.