Want to give the Firefox 3 beta a spin, but you don’t want to go through the tedium of backing up your profiles and personal data? Here’s an easy solution if you’re a Windows user.

The folks at PortableApps.com — all open source, all no-install, all the time — have just debuted a new build of Firefox 3 beta 4.

For those not familiar with the Portable Apps paradigm, their mission is to provide you with custom builds of the best open source applications which can run without needing to be formally installed.

They can be mounted on a USB flash drive or copied into a directory and run as-is. They also provide a handy application organizer and launcher which works the same way, and I’ve stumped for them whenever they come up with a noteworthy new edition of one of their apps.

The best thing about the portable edition of FF 3 b4 is that it runs totally separately from any other instances of Firefox in your system, including your user profiles.

Typically, whenever I tested a new build of Firefox, I had to back up my user profile just to be on the safe side. PortableApps’s Firefox uses its own separate user-profile instance, stored along with the application.

There’s a couple of downsides to this. One is that if you want to use your existing bookmarks, you need to export them from your existing instance of Firefox and re-import them.

The other is that things like password fields aren’t inherited, either, but I’ve been using the impossibly handy (and also open source) SuperGenPass to manage passwords, so having passwords saved in form fields isn’t crucial in my case

This isn’t the first beta build of Firefox that has premiered through their system, but it’s one of the first I feel wholly comfortable working with on a daily basis.

So far it’s been extremely stable, markedly faster than even the “accelerated” 2.x builds I’ve used (like Pigfoot), and racks up a good deal less CPU usage when running JavaScript applications, like many of the Ajax-based tools I use for managing web content.

I’m still getting used to the new ways things like bookmarks are handled — for one, the “Smart Bookmarks” system doesn’t particularly interest me; I don’t like it when software tries to second-guess my work habits.

But on the whole I see the finished version of FF 3 in my future — and frankly, the current beta 4 version is already a big part of my present.

It’s time to salute MAME’s 11th birthday with a nice new release.

That’s right, not only has MAME been around for 11 years, there’s also a new release:

MAME version 0.123 which supports over 6,960+ ROM sets and 3,705+ unique games.

This is great news for classic arcade gamers like myself. Be sure to grab the latest releases from my MAME download page. Enjoy!

Is it just a marketing veneer or is IBM really getting serious about integrating the social Web into its enterprise content management stack?

Yesterday, Big Blue released details on how its collaborative toolsets help companies prepare for Web 2.0 and previewed an integration between Lotus Quickr and its FileNet P8 ECM platform.

This is good news for FileNet clients as it appears their ECM repositories might get a Web 2.0 facelift, bringing better collaboration to often siloed islands of information.

Part of the foundation for its Web 2.0 strategy is Lotus Mashups, Web-based capabilities that make it easy for companies to assemble and publish mini-applications in real time.

And in true Big Blue style, IBM is ready to enter the building and take the business.

It has positioned Global Services to capture the projected demand for enterprise 2.0 solutions and social networking with the launch of specialized consulting services.

According to the release, it will focus on emerging technologies like social computing, SOA, and the 3-D Internet to improve business performance.

Not all open source software is Serious Business.

A project that caught my attention in the last couple of days is a port of the classic Infogrames / EA title SimCity — released for just about every platform known to man — into an open-source implementation named Micropolis.

Thank programmer Don Hopkins for his hard work.

Since the original SimCity source code has been released under the GPL, he decided to make a version that runs on Linux and port it to the OLPC.

Said port — named “Micropolis” for the same reason that community builds of Firefox are not called Firefox — has been heavily rewritten to run well as a modern application, and is still a bit of an ongoing project.

The whole thing is available either as a source package or a compiled Win32 binary, the latter of which isn’t itself an actual playable version of the game but just a demo — for the time being.

Bill Simser has been writing a series of posts documenting how to create a playable game from this code on Win32, and for anyone interested in programming — and not just game programming — it’s absorbing reading.

I also read with no small amount of fascination the long-term goals for Micropolis — things like multiplayer support and porting to many other languages are all in the works.

I think there’s a lot more than nostalgia at work here. Aside from SimCity being a hugely influential and fun game to begin with, I think game programming is one of the better ways for people to understand open source — either as a programmer or a user.

Once explained in that context, I’d think open source becomes that much easier to understand in other contexts — and concepts like the lvarious licensing schemes and whatnot can be related in a fairly straightforward way.

If there’s one thing about open source that remains something of a mystery to most people, it’s why open source development works the way it does.

You may not persuade people to become programmers, but you can at least make their job a little less mystifying.

On a side note, my longtime favorite open-source game remains NetHack. You’d never think a simple cursor and some ASCII graphics could still be so addictive in this day and age.

The most recent issue of Nintendo Power offers up some new information about BioWare’s RPG for the DS, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.

You can choose your party of four from 11 different characters, including the expected Sonic crew of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow, as well as Amy, Rouge, and Big the Cat.

You’ll be able to spot enemies on the field, giving you some flexibility in just when you engage in the turn-based combat. Control will be apparently be entirely stylus-based, a la Phantom Hourglass.

There will be team attacks and special attacks, which you can flat-out purchase or level up. Rings will naturally be the currency of the land and the game takes place in two acts: the first is in the more familiar Sonic environment while the second is a darker world.

JeuxFrance has scans of the screenshots from the article, and they look absolutely lovely. I tingle with anticipation and cross my fingers that this all works out for the best.

Microsoft is already adding to the Xbox Originals library, and the new title is a great one: Burnout 3 Takedown.

If, like me, you’re getting antsy waiting for Burnout Paradise, this might be just enough to tide you over, though 1200 points is still awfully pricey.

You can grab Burnout 3 starting on Monday. That’s assuming you can connect to Live to download it, of course.

Live service has been suffering lately due to “server strain” brought on by a huge upsurge in demand over the holidays.

The Xbox team has been scrambling ever since to get it back to normal, with varying degrees of success.

I’ve been getting mixed reports. Some of my friends say Live is smooth as pudding, while others are still frustrated.

I’m having trouble getting and staying connected. What’s it like for you?