Wow! Several McDonald’s [MCD] outlets have extended the fantabulous 99¢ Filet-o-Fish promotion, at least until the franchise management has had enough of it, or until supplies run ou

Quite a surprise, but perhaps a minor one: McDonald’s recently announced decent profits, based upon their feedback and sales on their new $1 Breakfast Menu, which builds upon their successes with the $1 Lunch Menu. There was even a rumor that their sponsorship of, and advertising during, the 2010 Winter Olympics also gave an additional boost to sales.

Whatever the case may be, confirmation that the 99¢ Filet-o-Fish promotion has been continued came earlier today.

N.B.

Other related Javamancy posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Update: Today is the Last Day for 99¢ Filet-o-Fish
• End of Another Deal: $1.19 Filet-o-Fish
• $1.19 Filet-o-Fish
• End of Another Deal: 99¢ Filet-o-Fish
• 99¢ Filet-o-Fish Coming Tomorrow

There was a recent update provided for the 99¢ Filet-o-Fish promotion at McDonald’s [MCD]. The last day for the promotion has been moved earlier to March 7, 2010.

Just when you thought it would never come again, since the last promotion of its type was at the much higher $1.19 price point…

McDonald’s [MCD] has finally decided to run its famous, limited-time 99¢ Filet-o-Fish promotional offer once again!

Update:

This offer will end March 14, 2010 March 7, 2010.

N.B.

Other related Javamancy posts (in reverse chronological order):

• End of Another Deal: $1.19 Filet-o-Fish
• $1.19 Filet-o-Fish
• End of Another Deal: 99¢ Filet-o-Fish
• 99¢ Filet-o-Fish Coming Tomorrow

Earlier today, the long-awaited third DLC for the popular Borderlands game made its way to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace for download. For many people, this is quite a surprise, given that there had been no formal drop date previously divulged. Nevertheless, this is a welcome release, and it evidently builds upon the successes from the main game and its two previous DLC’s.

The new expansion’s plot builds upon the notion of the increasing presence of the Crimson Lance and the presumable reassertion by the Atlas Corporation over their claim to Pandora, thereby opposing the Dahl Corporation’s current occupation and management of the planet. The main game had the players running afoul of several Atlas-backed Crimson Lancer squads, and now there is a major invasion force coming to Pandora. An ex-Lancer Siren character (NPC), Athena, is trying to escape the clutches of her former Lancer assassins and figured that by joining the other characters on-world, her odds of survival would be better. So, now the players will have to crush-kill-destroy the seemingly overwhelming forces of the Crimson Lance and Atlas… and who is this “General Knoxx” and his secret armory, anyway?

In many ways, this looks like it forms the third part of a trilogy representing the post-Vault era: there are a lot of references to characters and events from the main game and the previous two DLC’s. However, the first two DLC’s seem to act more as standalone expansions, with virtually no references toward each other. So, does this symbolize the completion of the Borderlands story, once and for all? Or is Borderlands II getting vetted through the approval process? Only time, and the fanbase, will tell…

N.B.

Other related Javamancy posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Borderlands: What We Have Learned from the Achievements
• Borderlands: Raising the Roof, and Achievements
• General Knoxx on Twitter?

Even more related content, from Javamancy mini (in reverse chronological order):

• Borderlands: The Monster and the Racer
• Borderlands: A Lot More Driving
• The Secret Armory of General Knoxx… Not So Secret Anymore
• Knock, Knock… Who’s There? General Knoxx…

Yesterday, while Javamancy and Javamancy mini were chugging happily away, servicing you, our kind readers, WordPress.com had apparently suffered a multi-hour system outage.

One of the fine services that we use is Akismet, and according to the Akismet blog, it was unaffected by the recent WordPress.com system outage. This is obviously a Good Thing, since many sites rely upon the functionality that Akismet provides in protecting sites.

Yesterday, while Javamancy and Javamancy mini were chugging happily away, servicing you, our kind readers, WordPress.com had apparently suffered a multi-hour system outage. According to Matt M., this unexpected downtime impacted about 10.2M (that’s millions!) blogs that are serviced by his WordPress.com service, including their VIP subscribers.

Fortunately, it seems that WordPress.com is up and running once again, and Matt promises to figure out what happened. Kudos to Matt and WordPress.com for bouncing back and getting back online!

A scant couple of days ago, Subversion (the project) formally graduated from its incubation phase, becoming a full-fledged Apache project at subversion.apache.org. It seemed like almost yesterday that it had been accepted as a candidate by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)… In fact, it was in late 2009 that the proposal to join the ASF had been filed, and just a few months later, it made its way toward acceptance.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what Subversion is, it is an open source file-associated content versioning system. Many developers who are familiar with RCS, SCCS, and CVS have probably heard about Subversion (SVN) as the “next step” toward versioning “modernity” or “modernness”, especially for those who are transitioning from traditional code branching and merging toward changeset management techniques. For people participating in agile configuration management (CM) and coding initiatives, Subversion may have even been selected as the primary (or even, sole) versioning system.

For those of you approaching CM for the first time during this latest iteration of Web development (circa 2006 and onward), while you may be more familiar (and even using) distributed/disconnected/decentralized versioning systems like Mercurial (hg) or Git or even monotone, you also may have heard of Subversion as one of the last vestiges of centralized versioning systems that organizations that have moved onto the current system have used in the past.

For others, the folks who have been using commercial versioning products like StarTeam or ClearCase, you may be scratching your head and wondering what all the fuss is about.

And for those you who’ve been deep in the CM trenches for awhile, you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, it’s about time.”

There are benefits and disadvantages to the features that Subversion provides, and depending on your development requirements, it may be 100% the tool to use, or it may cover enough of the features that you need that it’ll do the trick, or it may be insufficient to match your needs. But it always seems to be on everybody’s short list for consideration, replacing the position that the venerable CVS once held.

For public repository access, Subversion is very popular because a couple of its access methods involve leveraging HTTP rather than a proprietary protocol. For that matter, you may find site hosting services offering Subversion as a way to manage versioned content for Web sites due to its support for WebDAV (however incomplete) as well as to support development codebases, big and small.

So, we’re tickled pink that Subversion has made its way to ASF as a full-fledged graduated project at this time. Kudos!

You may have noticed that we’re starting to use the Tell.im service in some of our links, including in this post.

What is Tell.im?

It is a URL shortening service, similar to many of the others floating around that help to take a very long URL and dramatically chop-it-down-to-a-shorter-length (hopefully). This will make some of our outbound links more uniform and reasonably shorter, so they are ready-to-digest by other services like Twitter. When you activate a Tell.im link, you are redirected by Tell.im to the real destination, whatever that may be.

Admittedly, this may make trackbacks and pingbacks toward Javamancy and other blogs unsightly or unavailable, depending on the other systems’ ability to follow and manage transitive linking.

N.B.

Other related Javamancy mini posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Tell.IM is Now Tell.im
• Tell.im Activity is Becoming Noticeable…

Yesterday, WordPress 2.9.2 was released to correct a bug in which “trashed” blog posts are visible by potentially unauthorized users.

According to Ryan, this can occur when logged-in users attempt to browse the trash area; these users can view posts that belong to others, so sensitive or private information may be inappropriately accessible. Thomas Mackenzie first mentioned this on his blog a few days ago (with a lot of interesting details). An “unofficial” WordPress diff patch was posted for it to address the defect, and WordPress 2.9.2 was released shortly afterward in a couple of days.

This is a good upgrade for WordPress sites which allow for multiple users to log into the system and use different authorization levels to govern various user roles.

N.B.

You may have noticed that we’re starting to use the Tell.im URL shortener in some of our links, including in this post…

UPDATE: Thomas points out that this post had incorrectly attributed the unofficial diff patch to him. According to him, it originated from the WordPress folks.

With all of the fun and hilarity garnered through both the single- and multi-player modes in Borderlands and its two DLC’s, it’s only natural that, with the availability of the listing of the new achievements for the upcoming third DLC, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx (and what is this love for two X’s?!?), we’d all want to know what’s new and exciting in the new expansion. Certainly, the speculation factor is baked into the achievements listing…

Level Cap Increase

Like the frustration with Diablo II’s level cap, the one found in Borderlands– at Level 50– has irked a lot of players, given the wide expanse of territory and cannon fodder to mow down.

There are a couple of achievements keyed to the increase in character level; the highest one indicates that there is at least a Level 61. However, it may make more sense that the maximum is higher than 61, unless 61 represents some sort of special numeric value to the game’s developers.

Let’s Get This Party Started Right… and Red…

One of the fun bunch o’ enemies in the game, at least for the Soldier types, has got to be the Crimson Lance. In addition to the odd high-pitched whines that they emit when killed, they also seem to drop some really nice items. So, bumping up their presence in the DLC is a nice touch, hopefully with more goodies to come… and to match the character level increase, ‘natch.

For the Love of Cars

There are a couple of achievements that refer to vehicles: one for building one, and one for killing a Crimson Lancer while driving one. This could refer to some sort of death-race, a vehicular cousin to Mad Moxxi’s Underdome (and the 2nd DLC) or it could be just one of those incidental slaughter achievements. The other aspect of vehicles, to actually build one, could be an intriguing feature to actually equip one with various parts to make that Über-car to wage a blitzkrieg mobile war on the hapless hordes, or it could be merely reminiscent of one of Scooter’s fetch-the-parts missions. We’ve been getting tired of the Scooter’s scooters, so hopefully we get more variety.

New Enemy Type: Grab Bag, Anyone?

Loot midgets… hmm (and not trying to be insensitive in any way, but that’s the description on one of the achievements)… We’ve seen various horde midgets, shotgun midgets, a “king” Weewee type. Will there be a new midget type that, say, steals from your stash? Ooh, or maybe one that rips the weapons right out of your hands? Quite a twist, especially for players who enjoy the ol’ melee attack or ten…

More Fun?

So, we’ve gone through the desolate wasteland party fun. And we’ve satisfied our zombie-slaying jones. And then we shot-clubbed-sliced-detonated the hordes. Now we get the chance to add more vehicular homicidal rage to the proverbial bucket list, level up some more, collect more stuff, see more sights, and meet more interesting people.

What’s not to love about Borderlands?