Was doing my normal afternoon browse for news and came across this post on slashdot about a guy who posted a picture of a load of G5 being deliverd to Microsoft in his blog. It’s a bit unfortunate for Michael, though I guess there are some grounds for the action.
Damn, why didn’t I think of this – I’m going to start taking pictures of the Tesco guy delivering biscuits to our office with my T610 and post them here.
Well I tried to install my modchip and do the Blue LED mod, ended up completing the Blue LED modification and getting the hard part of the X-Box mod done. Ran into conflicting instructions for a few steps in the install guide, plus a little bit unsure about soldering directly in to tiny Via, when the wires we have are clearly to big. Must go to Maplin and get thinner wire. I have some pictures of the excercise and a nice picture of the Blue LED so I thought I would post them here.
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Went and got my X-Box today, will be ripping it apart tomorrow to put in the modchip. Actually I had forgotten how good Halo is in single player mode, have mainly been playing multiplayer or co-operative should provide a good couple of days worth of entertainment. Got some CDRW the other day have burned images of Dynebolic, XBMP seem like a mission to work out, need to work out how I can get hold of a binary or get the XDK so I can compile the software myself.
Going out for dinner tonight should be a hoot to celebrate yesterday.
Well I wanted to go and check out Panther before putting in an order for a Powerbook or iBook in the next couple of week. Went to the Micro Anvika in the basement of Selfridges. All the staff there where wearing their Panther t-shirt and giving demos to other people, they had installed 10.3 onto all of the demo machines there. I got to a 17″ iMac and started playing around. Brought up a terminal and checked the versions of Python and Perl, as well as looking for new things in the setup for the Bluetooth keyboard.
My attention quickly turned to Expose which has it’s own Setting program so I had a quick look, really not much to configure. So I began to play, fired up a bunch of apps to occupy the desktop, Safari (2 windows), iTunes and iChat. I slowly moved the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen – wow. Expose kicked in. All the apps minimised and moved to occupy a space on the grid, I then highlighed one, it automatically zoom in a bit, then you click and it very quickly animates to the foreground. Very cool.
So I think I must get 10.3 and quickly however I don’t think my current iBook is up to the job, the new G4 iBooks however have a very nice price point, then again the Powerbooks are just too sexy.
What a week, glad it is nearly over. Been reviewing a requirements document in preparation for writing a specification document for my new project. Been in a stat e of limbo for a number of weeks while details have been finalised, though straight away I know I’m going to be going back and foreward for the next couple of weeks.
However the big plus is that it is my BIRTHDAY! yipee. I’m 27 today, not much different to being 26, 25 or 24, however I now only have 3 years left to the big 3-0, going to be in the pub this evening with the friends from work, and dinner with some other friends tomorrow night. Ohh, and the new X-Box pack is out £139 for consle + Halo and another game, looks like I’ll be picking that up tomorrow.
I have been playing with the foobar2000 music software again, the latest (0.71) version seems rather complete, and as a bonus handles all of the various AAC file extensions correctly. The best thing about it has to be the fact that it is not resource hungry like iTunes for Windows. However it is gonna take a little while to get used to of the insane features under the bonnet however I think it is going to be worth it in the long run.
Like I said before I was expecting great things from Tarantino’s latest flick and I’m glad I’m not disappointed. <movie-critic-like-comment>A must see…, …if you watch one film this year make sure it is Kill BIll</movie-critic-like-comment>
No reallly this film is really good without doubt the best film this year. I have been doing some browsing on the topic and it would seem there are various thoeries about why Kill Bill has been split in to 2 volumes, and why a majority of scenes in the American and European prints are in Black and White.
The main reason is plainly because of censorship, it would seem that the Asian cut of the film does not have any black and white scenes at all. Also another thing I think Kill Bill was always meant to be a single 3 hour film, however because of the violent content of the film I think Tarantino realised that he had to split the film up so that it would get by the censors. Without a doubt a 3 hour flick with more than 50% scenes of violence would have got an X-rating in the US, meaning that it would not rope in as much money as an NC-17 rated film.
The whole manga anime scene is clearly an addition. Also I suspect the second film will also feature a scene relating to the tail of O-Ren Ishii. Clearly it is Bill who is the swordsmen that killed her father and since Lucy Liu is listed in the cast listing for Volume 2 meaning some sort explaination of there alliance is going to be given. So basically I think this whole sub-story is some thing Q dreamed up after he had thought up the rest of the film. Another thing to note is that Q has not appeared in the story yet, I’m sure he has cast himself as something, I personally think he is going to be ‘The Groom’, also Samuel L. Jackson is in the second film, obviously a significant role. I suspecting the training scene from the trailler will be present in the second film, it is clearly in the one month gap in Japan in the first film. I can’t wait only 4 months to go!
Oh, also did I mention the soundtrack is fantastic as well, Tarantino’s usual mix of old and newish stuff. Funnily enough I just saw the new Chemical Brothers video the other day it’s basically video samples taken from a Kung-Fu series or movies and cleverly edited together, they have even manipulated the faces of the characters to match the words of the song, and the track is quite good which is pretty freaky combination these days.
Well I have been playing with iTunes on Windows for a number of of days and I thought I would share some of thoughts. iTunes does seem to be quite resource entensive, so a fairly capable machine is required. I’m running an Athlon 1GHz with 768MB at home an it is totally fine. However my work machine is just a Pentium 3 800MHz with 384MB, (in CPU terms not a lot of difference). Since I run a lot of applications simultaneously switching to and from a music player becomes an issue.
My usual complaint with the library features is still there, accessing a large music library with 10GB+ worth of files over a network is still slow, regardless of playing with Samba performance options. (That reminds me I must play with Samba 3.0 some more. Might have some new performance features.) The music tagging features seem more faster on my PC than they do on my Mac, hmm but that could be because I’m tagging local files.
iTunes on Windows is generally a responsive application, and works very well my only criticism would be that you can plainly tell that they have just lifted the Mac application, the background service ‘iTunesHelper’ is started in the background during user login. So iTunes consumes memory even if you do nothing with iTunes in a session, why can’t it be started when the user launchs iTunes – I understand that would mean that the startup time is greater, perhaps making
Well I guess I’m going to have to live with the network performance problem, everything else seems ok. Feature for feature everything is there, though I guess once I get my iPod fixed I’ll continue to use the iBook as my main sync point.
My advice to any Windows iPod owners would be to get iTunes for windows since it does make using the iPod simpler. My only hope is that Apple does address issues that are being raised and quickly. Support for third party encoders/decodeder would be a great feature, not sure about the ability of using other players since that will of course take away Apple’s edge.
Well I’m going to be watching Kill Bill later tonight. I’m expecting a lot so expect a detailed post in a couple of days about it.
The X-Box price was meant to go down yesterday was out at my local Virgin and Game earlier nothing about a £99 X-Box anywhere. Perhaps it will happen in the next week or so. Basically Microsoft have to drop the price soon since Sony and Nintendo have alreeady done in expectation of Christmas and some big title releases. Mario Kart : Double Dash and FZero-GX are the ones I want.
Well with the Half Life 2 delay it looks like I can put off my PC upgrade off till atleast February, seen Halo on the PC and I’m sure it does have an edge over the X-Box version, but I would have to get a Radeon 9800 just to make it worthwhile so I’m just gonna wait till the New Year when 9800 prices are down by at least £150. I still think HL2 code leak is bogus, I think Valve or Sierra have done it as another way to delay the game. Only god knows why, the reasons they have given seem a little flaky. If you where that concerned about competitors copying the AI aspects of your game, wouldn’t you rush to market and be there first rather than later?
Well it seems my thoughts on the N-Gage where not to far off. Sales for the first week where not great at all, as this piece on gamesindustry.biz shows. Whilst reading through the site I also came across this piece about John Romero’s new role at Midway. Basically it would seem that Romero is not to happy with the mobile game scene. He founded Monkeystone with Tom Hall and the rather lovely Stevie Case. They are doing the Red Faction port for the N-Gage, but have decided to pursue things at Midway. Things like this are not exactly good publicity for Nokia, having veterans like these guys leave the mobile scene could spell badness for Nokia.
I was checking out the new CD releases at my local Virgin Megastore, when I came across the John Mayer album Heavier Things. I came across John Mayer late Monday night when he happened to perform on Dave Letterman’s Late Show (Which obviously was Friday’s show.), now I did not get the song’s name but I was hooked. It turns out the track was Bigger Than Me which apparently was a big hit in the US. I had tried to WinMX the track but I thought he was John Mayor, which yielded very little in hits, any how Sony are up another £10.
I also picked up the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s album Fever To Tell which I have been meaning to get, but missed in all of the 2 for £22 deals.
As a bonus I got home to discover that Apple had released iTunes for Windows so I can now deal with AAC files on windows without playing with file headers and having to rename files as I move platform to platform. Hopefully iTMS will be live in Europe as well, have not gathered if todays batch of announcements at the event in SF mentioned anything about the Uk or the rest of Europe for that matter.
I have completed my transition to Orange, so far so good had the T610 for more than a week, just been carrying it around and not really using it, but finally in the late afternoon my number ported over. Have not tried GPRS data to my Tungsten yet., should be the same as before. I am a little concerned about the battery life, don’t worry you’ll hear if there is a problem.
At last my Reloaded DVD showed up this afternoon, along with my copy of Reservior Dogs I have been getting my Tarintino collection complete this leaves me with Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill films to get. Speaking of Kill Bill I had planned on going to see it tonight however it is only showing at the Empire, it will be on nationwide release next friday so I’m going to have to wait till next week I guess since I can never convince my friends to venture into the West End.
I have been playing some more with phpWiki which I intend to use as support tool for managing my own systems. I have been meaning to get around to setting phpWiki up properly now that I have I think I’m going to have to do some rather extreme customisation since I need some more advanced versioning features.
Errrrh, got the post no damn Matrix Reloaded DVD, was meant to be here on day of release. Hope it shows up tomorrow.
Went to LinuxExpo yesterday, got to see the usual crowd of people from the London based user groups etc. All of the big names where at the show, in terms of floor space the show was definately bigger however the actual number of people around the show was about the same. UKLINUX where supporting the community area, they even had wireless access setup.
I discovered dynebolic which is a Live Linux distro very much in the vein of Knoppix but geared towards media support, they have even provided support for streaming media. On top of that the same CD-ROM can be used on an X-Box to run linux. They even had an modded X-Box on the stand there running firebird to demonstrate.
I sort of missed the keynote, but did get the chance to catch this years Great Linux Debate. This years focus was on the credibility of Linux. Judging by the audience I don’t think it was reallly the right sort of place for this sort of topic, this year I noted that there where a number of representative from smaller and medium scale businesses, as well as the usual IBM scale clients. I got bored of standing so I missed the public question part, though to be honest I’m sure people where just hanging around to take potshots at the Microsoft reprentative.
I dropped by the Apple (well some Apple Reseller’s) stand to check out the 15″ Powerbook, I dsicovered that the release date of Panther had just been announced a couple of hours ago. This was good news meaning that I don’t have to wait till December, I might bring my purchase of the Powerbook up since I’m without my PowerMac at the moment anyway.
I also spent some time in the evening with some of the other Lonix guys, our meeting are always entertaining unfortunately the venue for the evening was a little short of space so me and my brother decided to cut our evening short.
Watched Bad Boys 2 last night. I thought it was pretty good, since I liked the original and Bay’s other films I was expecting something special and I have to say I left the cinema quite satisifed. They have gone for a more humorous film than the first one, with some very slick lines and comic scenes.
The action sequences are bigger and louder, the actual main story is your typical cop story. The running time of the film is close to 2 and 1/2 hours and the pace of the film is quite amazing and the amount of action they have managed to cram into this film is quite amazing. It is like they have been writing down every single idea they have had for the last 8 years and some how managed to convince the studio to go for it. As I understand it a number of other action sequences where cut from the film for one reason or another, and there was a certain amount of controversy caused during the filming due the enviormental damage caused in Miami. I hope there will be a third film in a few years time, though there is nothing noted on IMDB at the moments.
Well I have finally had it with T-Mobile now that I have completed the 12 month term I decided to move to Orange. Well there were 2 motivations – better reception and a new handset. Have gone for the obvious choice, the T610
Basically I have started a new contract on with the Orange Value Promise matched to my old T-Mobile tarriff. Will post a more complete review of the phone once I have used it a little it’s going to take 5-7 days to get my number moved over.
Today is my first day working from home, spent a far amout of time just tweaking things in Win2K, so I could work the way I do at work. The new VPN is way better than the old one, the new Dell server has really made a difference a few routing issues but have resolved all of those. Don’t really have much to do except to deal with a few support issues. I know what I’m working on for the next couple of months so I’m going to look at using Mason and mod_perl to provide a templating framework that can be used to generate pages in different web paging technolgies, should be do-able.
Even MT sort of achieves that trick since I embed PHP in my templates, and I get the admin system to output files with the php extension. A nice little trick I figured was possible, but was confirmed by this piece on Brad Choate’s site.
