March 2007 Archives

There's only one problem with my kung fu resurgence.
I have a very, very high credit limit.
This could get ugly.

Need to convert from celcius to fahrenheit? From miles to kilometres? From yards to stadia? units will give you this.

You have: tempF(41)
You want: tempC
        5

What could be simpler?

The remake of 'The Producers' is practically the entire original movie - word for word, with some extra musical numbers. I mean they didn't even try with this one. You would hope that they could at least try, but Matthew Broderick's acting in this was cardboard to the point of annoyance, not a touch on the original Gene Wilder one (simply without compare). Nathan Lane was a bit better, but didn't have the right level of desparation that Zero Mostel brought to the original one. Let's just leave Uma Thurman's role out all together, and Will Ferrell deserves to be clobbered for this one. Seriously, stick to the properly low-brow comedy like 'the ballad of ricky bobby'.

I've just re-watched 'The Producers' having not seen it for several years. It is as fun now as it was back then. I now have the song stuck in my head. I'll have to watch something completely different to get the noises back out. Maybe some 8-bit music from Trash 80. Old school feels like a Spectrum feelings back again. I feel like getting nostalgic with some original Jet Pack.

The more things stay the same. I am a 100% pass person. Any deviation from that is considered failure.

Sorry, that's about as good a title as I could put on this post. Seriously, what do you expect after a bank holiday weekend. It's Monday, and if you didn't have to work on Saturday then you don't have to work today either - I love the official statement on this, it makes my hungover head spin.
Well, I could not make it to Kerry this weekend. I have my reasons. Rolling exhaustion is the most reasonable item on the list - I could not make it out of the office before 6.30, which makes traveling on the Friday a little difficult. Then I got drunk. Repeatedly. For the entire weekend. Some of you know why.
I am feeling seriously self destructive at the moment. I put on the smiles, and I tell the folks that everything is all right, but the reality is that I am not a happy camper. It's been coming for a long time, I'm just a tad slow on the uptake.

Steam is a great idea. You get to download your games and you can play anywhere that you can log in to steam. The problem is that the prices of the games are a bit on the high side. For example today Eidos have announced a load of their games are now on steam. Hitman: blood money is $35.95. It's cheaper to walk into your local game store and get it there.
For some reason the re-release on steam pumps the price up over what you can get in the stores. And then it stays there. You get the occasional reduction in price, but overall the price of each game remains reasonably static for it's life on the system. Which is frustrating.

This is the unicorn of blame. Whenever you break the build he gets to live on your desk. I think it could be quite motivating to keep the build working.
Unless it gets to one of the girls' desks. I'm sure that they would not be motivated to get it removed from the desk.

Well, having had enough of the dd-wrt firmware for the linksys router. It was annoying, slow and irritating and every time we enabled QOS it lost the connection to the WAN I upgraded to the tomato firmware. So far it works. It successfully QOSes the p2p stuff down to the lowest category. It has pretty graphs! Whoopee!

Apparently the PS3 has this new thing called 'home'. It's basically second life for all those people who bought a PS3. Or there, or something equally as silly. The benefit of it is that sony don't have to program for every GPU on the planet - they only need to get it working for the PS3 and they're golden. Everyone on the site has at least one thing in common, and they don't need to congratulate each other again and again. Based on the sweet graphics, I'm presuming that just about everything on it is small-c configurable, rather than big-c configurable (involving lots of downloading).

It was in my last full-time job. I brought the CD collection into the office. It occupied an entire large box in the office. I was ripping the disc on my desktop and parallelizing the mp3 encoding to a bunch of machines in the lab. It was easy. Honestly. God what a nerd. I even had the automated rip then eject so I would put the next CD from a stack of them into the drive. It still took over a month... and then there was the great hard disk crash of '05 - I had to re-rip them all and some of them got frelled from jitter.
Foo!

Until they occupy more than a 3-row strip of DVDs in the local shop I'm going to skip on them (more of acceptable quantity of titles!)

Someone is bound to rat me out for this one. I've resorted to using a sun type 6 USB keyboard when typing on the small laptop. For those times when I couldn't be bothered dragging the XPS out of the backpack I just need to reach over to the keyboard and plug it in. Dayamm, but it makes a huge difference. The response is just right. The laptop's keys are just that little bit too wussy.

It's just a shame that you can't use it easily on Linux due to the lack of a driver to communicate directly with the hardware. It's the replacement for IPMI. Complete remote management of your servers (and desktops and laptops) through an always-on network connection (that is as long as you have power going to the box). All it needs is to be configured (not for the faint hearted) and then you need a machine to talk to it. Unless you're using a half decent windows server box (something that can at least pretend to be a provisioning server), you're screwed as you'll only be able to use it in small bunnies mode (business :). You can make a local ISO image on your computer act like it's in the CD drivce of the remote machine, you can PXE boot it from the command line (easy installs; easy cleanup!). It cooks, it cleans and it even sends out SNMP traps when something goes wrong (except of course for when the power goes out). It supports a watchdog (but it's not as easy to program for as the linux watchdog). Unfortunately you have to talk to the damned thing over SOAP. I mean really, wot are you like? It's like using a butcher's knife to perform and appendectomy.

I got a copy of Supreme Commander last night, even though I was worried it was not going to work on the computee; having seen several reviews complaining about the performance. Mind you, I'm playing Company of Heroes at 1920x1200 resolution, so I was not expecting a slowdown. The screen adjusts itself to give you the best view of the play area. It seems to have been designed to scale quite well - as opposed to some other games. So far, I spent about an hour and a half playing it and it does have a lot of the feel of Total Annihilation about it - you end up with a lot of vehicles to control very early on in the game, and you lose a lot as you try to keep the weak against air units covered by the weak against ground units. Move forward in fits and starts and send out scouts to see what's over the horizon. Fun for all the military strategists in the family, especially the history teachers. It really feels like directing armies versus directing small numbers of units. Well planning on attending the great engagement ring reveal party tonight, so I won't be playing this... that is unless I start playing early in the morning when you should expect a rant of tired segueing into something completely surreal. Just like all my other entries (well, not all of them; primarily the ones that have taken place after the hours of midnight and post alcohol enjoyment.) Remember kids '[]' are brackets, '{}' are braces and '()' are parentheses, so mind the parenthetical expressions in your sentences. Note, that I don't generally consider '<>' as any of the above family; I just consider them annoying...

It's a simple premiss, kind of like the matrix. Basically the world has been destroyed and the only people left in it are stored on quantum computers. Approximately 400 to a computer, and there's one for most large cities in the world. The problem is that there is an attacking foe and the only way you can combat them is to perform some funky quantum hoo-ha being re-created at some location far away. EVery time you are transferred a little piece of you is lost. Most of the time it's dry damage, but every now and again it's wet damage - and you lose a piece of your memories. Depending on the damage you can even end up dead. I know what you're thinking, death, but you're stored in a computer - surely there are backups. That's the pain of the system. There are no backups. If something goes wrongoyu could die; or one step worse end up remembering only pieces of your life; losing precious memories of things that happened to you.
Yes, I'm a sucker for the Anime. All I need to do now is bump my learning up from partial sentences to actually understanding things.

Well I've been having fun with a little piece of code in the office. It's apparently written in C++. Well it seems to be written in C with just a small smattering of C++ to make it useless. It's a true candidate for the WTF.

It's funny - the game seems to occasionally have a double image problem. I got a pair of alex characters in the game. One that follows me around, the other that acts like a spoiled child, being grumpy and causing problems. Last time, she got killed by a closing door and the game ended without me noticing anything. I loaded up the autosave today and it turns out I went a hell of a lot further in the game than I remember - I was really tired so that could explain things. I was trying to find information on the super io controller for the s3000ah motherboard (an smsc SCH5027), but can I find a technical manual for it? can I Frell! I reckon one day with the book and I would have most of the work covered. Love the world of can't tell won't tell.