Nowadays, though, you've got enough horsepower to write end-user kids' games in Flash, which requires stuff like an ActionScript (aka JavaScript) interpreter, extensive class library, bitmap and vector graphics subsystem with anti-aliasing, and polyphonic MP3 support.
That's pretty cool and, at $80, it's a pretty unbeatable deal for a handheld Flash-machine. Unfortunately I also learned that the Leapster folks aren't interested in 3rd-party Leapster development in favor of doing everything in-house. That means I'll have to wait until somebody hacks it before I can walk around with a little handheld gizmo that'll run my games nicely.
And yeah I know that some cell-phones run baby-Flash, but that takes much of the fun out of it, as they can only run Flash 4, have only support for MIDI audio, etc. Flash 5 is actually fairly powerful.
Oh, and I've gotta recommend something, following my earlier entry about comment spam. It's MT Blacklist, which is a nice little gizmo. It's just a little perl program that scans through all of your comments looking for the URL's of known comment-spammers. If it sees one, it kills it. Of course it's got a couple of tools that allow you to add new entries to your blacklist. It's awfully nice for those times that I pop up Outlook to find that somebody's just posted 25 new comments to my diary. With MT Blacklist, I can just run it and clean 'em out in one step.
