May 2004 Archives
You see, the problem with watching VH1 before you go to bed is that you *will* wake up humming the last song you heard. I absolutely guarantee it. Doesn't matter how craptastic the song was. So yes, this morning I woke up humming 'Hey Mama' by 'The Black Eyed Peas'.
"Off the Richter, off the Richter, off the Richter. Steady, are you ready?".
Someone please make it stop :-)
My wife bought the The Return Of The King DVD yesterday. We were one of the few people on the planet who didn't actually see it at the cinema :-) It was AWESOME. Best trilogy I think I've ever seen. I'm sure my DVD player will get quite sick of us replaying these movies :-)
See, and there you were thinking reality TV was a steaming pile-o-shite. No so says Tessa Jowell, the British Culture Secretary, it's actually a public service.
There was a time when the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, was in no doubt of the horrors of reality TV. A year ago she called for a "viewer's revolt" if the number of shows spiralled, suggesting they boycott the exploits of "has-been celebrities."On the eve of the fifth "Big Brother" show, she displayed a distinct populist touch, however, and yesterday declared that it was perfectly legitimate to describe them as within the "broader remit" of public service broadcasting.
John McNamara has released a new version of Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. This is undoubtedly one of the handiest Perl modules on the CPAN and has made life at work so much easier. Users and managers love their spreadsheets and we are always asked to send spreadsheets out as email attachments. Thanks to John's hard work on Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, this is a trivial task and we send out spreadsheets via Perl cronjobs like nobody's business :-) If I ever meet John in person, I'll be buying him a beer that's for sure.
I've liked Kraftwerk ever since I was a wee lad. I don't quite remember how old I was, it was probably around 1985 ish but I do remember the first Kraftwerk song I heard. It was 'Trans Europe Express' and I heard it when I was playing at my mate Jason's house. His older brother was heavily into synth bands so I got exposure to stuff like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and The Human League every time I went over there. I've been a fan of synth bands ever since. It's all Jonathan Hall's fault :-)
Kraftwerk CDs seem to find their way into my car more often than some other synth bands (with the exception of Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb perhaps). This week is no exception as all 6 CDs in my car's CD changer are Kraftwerk :-) Trans Europe Express is prolly the finest synth album ever made. And for an album that was made back in 1977, that's quite a compliment.
If you're in any way partial to medieval hack/slashfests with spell casting, skeletons, vampires, and baddies galore - Champions Of Norrath is a *must* have.
If you've ever played either of the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games on the PS2, you'll know what to expect with Champions Of Norrath. The game was developed by the guys behind Baldur's Gate (Snowblind Studios) and the gameplay feels very familiar. Hack & slash baddies, collect treasure, pickup new weapons/armor, cast spells, take potions, gain experience, become stronger, etc etc.
The graphics are stunning, the music & sound effects are great, but it's the gameplay that gets to you. I've been playing it on and off since the weekend and I'm totally hooked. It's great fun. I'm now a level 13 Barbarian :-)
The only bad thing I have to say about it is that every once in a while it suffers from slowdown when there are a lot of baddies on the screen at once. Doesn't really interfere with the gameplay but I was somewhat surprised that Snowblind didn't clean that up because the two PS2 BD Dark Alliance games were flawless in that regard.
Al Gore most impressive today. Me like :-)
George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.
Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.
How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.
Via Justin Mason, a Commodore 64 revival band.
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE is a Commodore 64 revival band, (almost) exclusively playing tunes from the 80's home computer Commodore 64 as rock on real instruments. We are six guys from Copenhagen: Jesper and Martin on guitars, André and Theo on keyboards, Søren on drums, and Uffe on bass.
Ben Hammersley made me chortle this morning.
Band names taken from the Movable Type XML RPC API documentation:
* Array of Structs* Boolean Is Primary
* String pingTitle
* On failure, fault
I was talking to a coworker the other day about natural disasters. He was talling me about a hurricane he experienced when he lived in Florida. My wife has experienced a couple of tornados when she lived in Kansas. One wrecked her car and destroyed her friend's house.
He asked me what kind of natural disasters I'd witnessed in England. Natural disasters in England? There are no such things :-) England is really quite crap in this regard. No earthquakes, no tornados, no hurricanes, no volcanos. Nothing, not a peep.
Of course, the fact that England itself doesn't have any natural disasters doesn't stop the English from falling victim of someone else's natural disaster :-)
Volcanic eruptions in Iceland probably caused an unusual rise in deaths in England during the summer of 1783.UK experts suggest a cloud of volcanic gases and particles sweeping south from the Laki Craters event of that year may have killed more than 10,000 people.
Damn those pesky digital cameras. Now the whole world has seen what is really going on in Iraq. What shall I do? Stop the abuse? Resign? Wait a minute, I've just had a fantastic idea, I'll just ban the use of cameras. See, problem solved already.
LONDON (AFP) - Cellphones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a business newspaper reported.
It's been a while since I've listened to Morrissey. I was a big Smiths fan back in the day and naturally bought his first few solo albums. Then I'm not sure what happened, either he got a bit crap or I lost my interest as I remember being a bit disappointed with Southpaw Grammar so I didn't buy any of his albums after that.
One of my friends is a huge Morrissey fan and thinks that his solo stuff is as good as The Smiths (blasphemy I tell you!). Anyhoo, he let me borrow Morrissey's new album You Are The Quarry over the weekend. I've been playing it on and off since Friday night and I'm actually quite pleasantly surprised. It's really quite good. I might have to go back and pick up from where I left off after 'Southpaw Grammar' to see if I've been missing out on some good stuff.
Don't you love it when your better half is a bigger video game geek than you are? Last night my wife was trying to convince me that it's our mission in life to buy Champions Of Norrath so we can play it this weekend. Well, ok, if we *must*. It's a hard life :-)
In no particular order...
Got MT-Blacklist upgraded to v1.64. Remembered that Orgy are rather good, Vapor Transmission and Candyass are on heavy rotation in the ol' car CD player. GARNOME rocketh hard - dead easy to upgrade GNOME nowadays :-) My caffeine experiment lasted exactly one day :-(
That is all.
Neil Turner has a review of MT 3.0 Developers Edition. Screenshots as well.
Our office has (er *had*) some spare cubicle space. Apparently, workers from another of our offices are now going to be working here. Today marks the start of the influx. Time to put the headphones on as it's getting rather noisy. Hopefully this is just 'moving-in' chatter and not a sign of the future volume level in this office :-)
So this weeks little experiment is to see if I can live without caffeine. I haven't had any coffee or diet coke or anything with caffeine in it since Sunday. Got a bit of a headache yesterday afternoon but other than that, all is well. My other attempts at steering clear of coffee haven't really worked out that well. We'll see how long this attempt lasts :-)
Via Matts. Just when you think you've seen it all. A Sinclair Spectrum Emulator and it's written in Perl. Of course this begs the question of why you would want to emulate a Spectrum in the first place[0] but my hat goes off to Jon Mitchell for writing an emulator in Perl.
[0] Way way back in the day when I was but a wee lad, those of us that had Commodore 64s would routinely take the piss out of anyone who owned a Spectrum. Afterall, the Spectrum was a bit crap really :-)
McSweeney's Daily Reason To Dispatch Bush.
Via Elaine.
Being a big fan of the original CSI (and to a lesser extent, it's spinoff CSI: Miami), I was quite looking forward to CSI: New York last night. Can't say that I was overly impressed to tell you the truth.
I think the problem is that American TV already has *so* many crime dramas set in New York that I almost don't care about another one. If you *are* going to have a new cop drama set in New York, at least try to make it stand out from all the others. Alas, CSI: New York didn't stand out. It was all rather lame and bland really. I'll prolly give it another try when the season starts for real in September but I'm not holding my breath.
On yesterday's Meet The Press, Colin Powell admits to offering misleading information to the United Nations when making the case against Saddam Hussein.
Russert: Thank you very much, sir. In February of 2003, you put your enormous personal reputation on the line before the United Nations and said that you had solid sources for the case against Saddam Hussein. ...How concerned are you that some of the information you shared with the world is now inaccurate and discredited?Powell: I'm very concerned. ...But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines and head on over to Nick Berg's Killing: 50 Fishy Circumstances, Contradictory Claims, and Videotape Anomalies.
Jay Allen (of MT-Blacklist fame) waxes lyrical on the reactionary silliness surrounding the MT 3.0 payware announcement. In short, those who want to take their toys and go home should perhaps take a collective deep breath instead.
Update: Dear Blogosphere (via Stupid Evil Bastard)
So today the big news around the blogosphere is Six Apart's announcement that they will charge for MT 3.0. There will still be a slightly stripped down free version:
# No support from Six Apart
# No access to paid installation service
# No access to fee-based services
# No promotion of your weblogs through the Recently Updated list
# No commercial usage
# No more than one author and three weblogs
Won't really impact me much as my blog only has one author - me. Other than that, I couldn't care less about the installation and support so I wouldn't be losing any features by 'upgrading'.
Judging from the announcement trackbacks, there are a lot of unhappy bloggers out there. Phew. One obvious solution is to just stick with MT 2.6* and forget about 3.* altogether. Afterall, if you're quite happy with how MT works right now, why upgrade to 3.0 anyway? Are the new Typekey & comment moderation "features" really worth the upgrade? I've read some less than favorable comments regarding Typekey so I'm thinking MT 2.6* and MT-Blacklist with suit me just fine for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday everyone was blogging about Blogger. Apparently Blogger has had a bit of a makeover and this was big news. Being the sort of bloke that lives in a cave most of the time, I'd actually never heard of Blogger before so I thought I'd wander on over there to see what all the fuss was about.
I signed up for an account and starting blogging immediately :-) My initial impression is that it's VERY nice. The interface is very slick, everything looks very pretty and they have some nice templates. I don't like the Google ads that you're forced to have. But, hey, it's a free service so I really don't have any room to complain :-)
So, let's see, I've got an atom feed but no RSS feed. It seems that I've got to visit Feedburner if I want a RSS feed.
I'll be playing around with Blogger for the next few days, prolly doing a bit of dual posting to see how it grows on me.
Everthing you ever wanted to know about British pub etiquette. It's actually quite amusing and really quite accurate. I've never seen the 'rules' written anywhere before :-)
Josh Marshall today with his tongue firmly in cheek.
When President Bush says Don Rumsfeld is doing a "superb job" you really have to shudder to think what we'd have in store for us if the guy came off his winning streak.(Grin).
Every now and then I just have to try something new. I've been using Mandrake 9.1 for a while both at home and at work. For the last few weeks I've had the itch to try another flavour of Linux. I narrowed the choice to Fedora Core and SUSE. I've never tried SUSE before and have read some good things about their new 9.1 release. So today I parted with some of my hard earned cash for SUSE 9.1 professional. Should be delivered on Wednesday.
Currently reading Dan Brown's Angels & Demons. My wife just finished reading his The Da Vinci Code and she seemed to like it. I've been wanting to read the The Da Vinci Code for ages. I'm told that you don't technically need to read Angels & Demons prior to reading The Da Vinci Code but Dan Brown does bill Angels & Demons as a prequel so I thought I'd give it a whirl first.
Hmm, must remember to get one of these.
No Starch Press and the GNOME Foundation have announced the release of The Official GNOME 2 Developers Guide, the first English-language book about developing with GNOME 2. With this book, current and would-be GNOME developers can come up to speed with the building blocks of GNOME development: the GLib, GTK+, and GNOME API's.
Jade Empire looks really cool. Shame it's only for the XBox though. Is it worth buying another console just for one game? I've already got a PS2 and a Gamecube.
I've been a big fan of the Final Fantasy games ever since I played FFIII on the SNES 10 years ago. The music for those games has always been fantastic and it seems that others must like the music too.
SQUARE ENIX U.S.A. is proud to present "Dear Friends -music from FINAL FANTASY-" a symphony concert at the prestigious Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles. The concert will take place on Monday, May 10, 2004, kicking off SQUARE ENIX's participation in the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo.With the exception of the original Black & White, Age Of Empires II and the Perl masterpiece that is Frozen Bubble I don't play many PC games. As such, I missed out on the whole Evercrack phenomenon. One of our former QA guys, Johan, used to come into work with an Everquest hangover. He'd get about 2-3 hours of sleep after gaming all night so I've seen how addictive the game is first hand :-) But don't just take my word for it as there's a documentary on the subject.
Around the world, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them over the age of 20, spend a significant portion of their life in front of the screen. Socializing. Making friends. Chasing dragons. Getting armor. Meeting soulmates. They are willing to lose friends, family and spouses to live a life "more real" than their own.
The problem with getting used to older versions of perl5db.pl (i.e version 1.07) is that when you have to use a newer version, the tiny 'enhancements' that have inevitably been made can really bugger you up. Some of our older production/dev Solaris boxes have Perl 5.6.1 installed. We recently began some development on some new Sun Fire 280R boxes running Perl 5.8.*.
When in the debugger the most common command I use is print so that I can see the contents of variables. Of course, I didn't realize that later versions of the Perl debugger buffer output by default. This means that you see bugger all when issuing a print statement. Obviously setting $|++; when entering the debugger is all you need but what a pain in the arse. That's 10 minutes of my life that I'm never getting back. There I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my code when there *was* nothing wrong with it.
The moral of this story is that I should have paid more attention to perldelta.pod as I'm sure the 'perl5db.pl buffered output by default' change is documented somewhere. Right?
Gather round for uncle Kev will give you his tip of the day. Don't chase your dogs through wet cement in bare feet. It's a bit slippy. You might end up in a heap on the ground feeling a tad embarrassed. I won't say that this happened to me last night but this morning I seem to have a nice big bruise on my hip, a lump on my head and nice scabs on my knee :-)
For the past couple of months I've been using del.icio.us and I must say that it rocketh hard. For me, del.icio.us solves the bookmark problem in the same manner that Bloglines solved the "synching RSS feeds over multiple machines" problem. No matter what machine I'm on or where I am, I always have access to my bookmarks. How handy is that?
Oh my god did that suck (warning cheesy javascript "make your browser window shake" effect). I actually sat through the whole thing hoping that it would get better. What the fuck was I thinking?
I almost couldn't believe how bad it was. It was an absolute train wreck (no pun intended) and I just couldn't look away. In all honesty I really can't remember the last time I saw such craptacular acting. I actually found myself laughing out loud. But don't just take my word for it.
This Sunday's sweeps miniseries from NBC, "10.5," is so phenomenally bad it borders on spoofed genius. The floor drops out so quickly and so massively that you begin to wonder if all the people involved here were in on the joke - - it must be a joke, right? You wonder when they might have figured out that each and every one of them -- from Kim Delaney to Beau Bridges -- were giving the worst performances of their careers in a four-hour tour de force of lameness.Yeh, what he said :-)Either the producers of "10.5" were aware up front that everyone involved was going to make a scenery-chewing monster, or the cast members need to fire their agents. Because this isn't just an earthquake movie, it's one disaster of an earthquake movie.
First up, Gothika. Not a movie I would ever watch again. So let's move on shall we.
So, next up are two movies that I've seen prolly a bajillion times but for some reason, never get tired of watching: Resident Evil and The Bourne Identity. Both excellent.
Next, The Matrix Reloaded. Didn't really like the first Matrix movie so I avoided Reloaded when it came out in the cinema and then when it went to DVD. While channel surfing last night I noticed that it was on HBO so thought I might see how it compared with the first movie. Didn't like it. Overrated, overhyped, silly fight scenes. I dunno, maybe it's just me. Perhaps I'm too stupid to keep track of what is going on and why. I think I will watch The Matrix Revolutions when it comes to satellite in the hope that my plot confusion is lifted. Judging from Nat Torkington's take on it, I don't hold much hope.
Last up was the surprise of the bunch. Big Fish. I'd seen the trailer for this film and to be honest I couldn't work out whether it looked really interesting or really crap. So with some trepidation, we rented it. Glad we did as it is really quite good. I got totally sucked in and felt a little disappointed when it ended - which is always a sign of a good film in my book :-)
Yesterday was The Cure day. Today is Manic Street Preachers day. I'm not quite sure but I think I just broke the record for the most times Motorcycle Emptiness has been played back to back :-) Generation Terrorists is a FINE album.
The Cure were on Leno last night. It's been a few years since I'd seen them play anything live and they were great. I woke up this morning humming a few Cure songs. This means that today is the official dust off all the old Cure CDs and play em to death day.
Not wanting to be outdone by their American counterparts...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iraqi prisoners have faced numerous "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" by U.S. soldiers, including sodomy and beatings, according to a U.S. Army report quoted by the New Yorker magazine....the British decided to get in on the act as well.The army report listed abuses such as "breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; ... beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick."
The report, written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, said evidence to support the allegations included "detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence."
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair says abuse of Iraqi prisoners was "completely and totally unacceptable" after pictures were published showing British soldiers apparently urinating on a shackled prisoner of war.Words fail me at the moment.Britain launched an inquiry after Saturday's Daily Mirror newspaper published five black and white photographs of British troops it said were kicking, stamping and urinating on a hooded Iraqi in Basra, southern Iraq, where Britain has around 7,500 soldiers.