Data Circle

If you’re running any blogs on WordPress, you should be aware that version 2.2.1 is now available. As well as a number of small bug fixes consisting mainly of cosmetic changes, the release also fixes three security vulnerabilities and so is a required upgrade. I’ve already upgraded one of my blogs without any problems and it was a fairly simple process, although I do wish there was an automated way of doing this, especially for people like me who have multiple blogs (I haven’t got round to trying WordPress MU yet).

iRack (including bloopers) – hilarious satire sending up both Apple product announcements and the American Administration’s attitude to the war in Iraq.

Desktop Tower Defense is a Flash game which I found a while ago, and I hate to think how much time I’ve wasted on it since then. It’s extremely addictive, especially when you fail to get through a game by just one level and think “I’ll just give it one more go…”. I’ve successfully completed the game in medium mode, though not with all 20 lives remaining (I can never build a maze which takes down both of the flying bosses in level 49), but I can’t manage the 100 level one.

Found via Digg:

Wubuntu is supposedly a web version of the popular operating system Ubuntu (which, by the way, I highly recommend as a Linux distribution). It’s actually just some very clever JavaScript, but it’s done so well that I thought it deserved a mention. Also, if such a polished result can be achieved by a lone coder working in their spare time, just think what a team of professionals could do if they worked really hard on creating a great web application that was sufficiently similar to a real desktop that most users couldn’t tell the difference. I think such a situation is still some way off, but things do seem to be moving in that direction.

As we can’t cover every possible technology story on this site, we’ve setup Planet Data Circle (PDC), which aggregates news stories from a collection of websites and allows you to always get the latest technology news from a variety of sources. If there are any sites which you think should be on the list, please let us know and we’ll add their feed to PDC.

Found via Digg:

myIPneighbors is a useful little site which allows you to see which domains are hosted on a particular IP address. There are several sites out there which already offer this functionality, but many of them charge for access or limit you to a very small number of queries. The data on the site seems to be a little bit out of date and doesn’t always match up (e.g. if you search for rixort.com you’ll get the correct IP address, but do a reverse lookup on that IP and you won’t get any results), but it’s an interesting tool to play around with.