Looks like he’s worried again. It’s annoying, but these things do happen.
[Listening to: Ramende – Wes – Welenga (Universal Consciousness) (4:03)]
Mandatory trailers
I know, it’s an old complaint. On DVD’s there’s a bunch of logic on the disc to prohibit you from skipping certain things – like the copyright notices in two billion languages. Disney and Warner are bad, putting trailers for movies before you get to the main menu. You can skip them by hitting the menu button, but the most painful thing I find with the trailers is that they have dates on them, like ‘coming to a cinema near you in June 2004‘. Software DVD players can be convinced to skip the trailers – see software like DVDidle for that.
Then there’s the computer games. Big, loud, 40 second trailers, and 10 of them all in a line. One for the developer, one for the distributor, one telling you that this graphics card kicks your graphics card’s ass, one for the physics engine, one for the banana maker who supplied the developers (ok, the last one was a joke, but I mean really). After launching the game 20 times or more, the only things I have to say are – effing annoying crap, cut to the game.
[Listening to: The Video Games Show #70 – 09/12/05 – Hoss, Nickel & Rich – The Video Games Show – 64 kbps (59:50)]
It’s a Sin
My copy of Sin City arrived in the post yesterday.
It’s the Chinese edition, so it’s got a few extra bits and bobs with it – a little note book, and some post cards. Cute little things that i’m sure I’ll make no use out of at all.
Gosh, but I’m tired.
Slow on the uptake
Ok. I presume other people have a similar problem to me with their iTunes. It takes about a minute to shut down. This is, of course, because it’s rebuilding the music library, which it a pair of files; one XML and one binary; which contain all the information on the music I have; play counts and the likes.
Maybe it’s my slow hard drive; I don’t know, but it’s really irritating. I only have about 22,000 songs in my library. My addition rate is about 1 album a week (there’s nothing good out there). The biggest update is the play counts.
Suggestions for performance improvements. Make the binary file be a bunch of binary files. One file contains the file information, one contains the individual song information, one contains the play information, and then one per playlist. At a guess, the XML doc is being created by building a huge ass DOM and walking it off to the hard-drive. It’s only a guess, but how many entries and playlists did they make for the performance testing? My iPod can’t take all my music, so I’ve a large number of playlists. Could this be the issue? Could any of the engineers at Apple tell me? I’d be very interested to know. Act now before I get tied into another NDA 🙂
enough of the rantage, I need to get suited up.
[Listening to: Love Is Rare – Morcheeba – Fragments Of Freedom (4:04)]
Upgrade time
The time has come, I believe to upgrade my site from the 2.6 version of Movable type to the 3.2 version. I’ve made a few personalizations to the 2.6 code base so support my specific features. I just wonder how difficult they will be to integrate into the new code base.
Features I added were not huge – inline comments (via a bit of AJAX), and a small HasComments tag.
Why am I upgrading? I’m the only author, and the free ediiton supports that. I want to do a little more theme work, and I’d like to get my added features out there in the community – I think they would be appreciated.
Not much else to talk about. I’m expecting job offers in the post any day now 🙂
And in other links today…
Strangeness. Top ten stupidest utopias. Funny and sad.
Cute bit of flash. big black pencil. Nicely animated.
[Listening to: Let It Go – Great Big Sea – Something Beautiful (3:11)]
Funeral Arrangements
Ok,
The arrangements for the funeral of Joan Cosgrave are as follows
The removal happens at 8pm from the house in Tureengarrive (pronounced, not spelt) to the church in Ballydesmond on Tuesday, 13 September 2005.
Funeral mass will take place at 2pm at the church in Ballydesmond on Wednesday, 14 September 2005.
In Other news…
Joan Cosgrave passed away at about 8.15pm on the 11th September 2005. My condolences go out to her family at their time of loss.
David McWilliams’ elephant in the corner
Reading through the Sunday Business Post there’s an article by David McWilliams about needing to seriously consider the use of Nuclear power in the future. Considering some of the countries with the most reliance to nuclear power – France, Germany, Sweden and Finland; they also have really good track records with, for example, not having horrible nuclear accidents. He made some good points, especially about the fact that these places are being run by responsible people who would care about how things work. I’m sorry, but I could not trust anyone in this country to run a nuclear power plant properly.
Stupid browser Drag and Drop Tricks
A lot of this I did not know, but now that I do it explains some of the silly things that kept happening on my brother’s computer when the staff accidentally dragged the wrong thing around the screen. I accept the fact that you can way-overuse the drag and drop metaphor.
The we have the Six dumbest ideas in computer security. Funny, and true.
Of course nothing could be complete without 10 more CSS tricks you may not know, a collection of CSS tricks to work around broken browsers and do some funky retro-kitch.
The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme