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This one is definitely filed away under Weekend Fun! Kudos to Mozilla foundation, though a bit sad that it doesn’t play on iPad (and some other browsers) yet.

The brilliance of the BrowserQuest is not just in it’s grand fun gameplay, but also that it is truly and completely open-source!

After my son played through 19 of the 20 possible achievements in about 19 minutes, we set out to find the elusive 20th achievement, which is unlisted. Well, as a responsible father (and because it is tons of fun), I set out to find the last one using the source code! The code itself is brilliantly simple. I am really looking forward to promised official post about the architecture, but meanwhile it is easy to see that the entire thing is running on NodeJS server, using BiSON, WebSockets and written in JavaScript and HTML5.

Although it took me only about a minute to track the last achievement down, and figure out that an NPC named Rick is who I need, finding him proved illusive. Even though I had coordinates of the dude from world map definition JSON, it’s really tricky to track him down as game use teleports when doors are opened, to shift you to new area, as I gathered.

So after about an hour of math and checking different door/portal/methods/logic, I just got annoyed and did a quick Google! And voila, of course someone already posted it on our beloved StackOverflow (for Gaming). There you have it – complete fun experience with hidden achievements FTW !!! Next? Just clone the GitHub repo and set of on your own adventure, of making a browser game!!!

Lately I use multiple browser, more so than ever, in this order: Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 64 bit.

This story unfolded literally few minutes ago, and I believe entire thing happened online within past few hours, at the most.

Some “entrepreneurial” guy registered blizzard-admin.net domain and setup a fake Login page to mimic World of Warcraft in every way possible, all in a classic phishing scheme. But, this time they took it a bit further. As I was catching up on my late night gaming, a direct message came in over from someone called “blizzrdadmin” within a Game, telling me to go to this web site to register for Rare in-game mount.

I think it took me about 2 seconds to report that account as Spammer, and from what Blizzard promised in the past, they review such complaints very seriously, often within minutes of complaining.

And here is where Google Chrome shines – I decided to still check out how clever these “phishers” were, and told my Chrome to show me the site. I was pleasantly surprised when a Warning came up, telling me to Stay Away! Excellent!

And here’s the kicker, neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer, which also contain anti-phishing technology, knew yet that this is a Phishing site! They both took me to the site…

This is just further reinforces my admiration for Chrome and I am sure I will be using it more and more as my primary browser. I don’t recall if I wrote about it before, but I also find Google Chrome under Windows 7 to be by far the fastest of browsers. I believe part of the reason is unique architecture of Chrome, as it creates separate Operating System processes for each Browser Tab or Window.

In unrelated news – I realize I haven’t been blogging much lately, apologies, and will improve!

Short post today, since it’s very late.

I tried out Opera 9.50 Alpha today, and while it may be as lightening fast as they claim, that doesn’t help me any. If it can’t render Google Reader properly, which is critical web app for me, it’s no good… I realize it is Alpha, so I will just let them work on these kinks for now.

So, back to excellent Firefox for me. If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, drop everything and go download it right away. You may not be seeing my blog properly if you are in Internet Explorer 6 or earlier. And, since Firefox is totally Open Source and free, what is stopping you? It does not remove Internet Explorer, so you can always go back or use both side by side.

What makes Firefox especially great is the extensive and ever increasing library of addons. I use a lot of them, too many to list here in a short post, but here is one Fun one for you to try. It makes your Firefox Tabs act 3D, seriously! Called Tab Effect, it makes switching tabs in Firefox a visual feast.

Another great feature in Firefox is a setting to Restore your Tabs when you start Firefox. So, if you just want to turn off PC, when you turn it back on tomorrow and launch Firefox, all your Tabs will get restored and be on the same sites as you left it.

Enjoy!