Monthly Archives: January 2009

Maybe I’m a cynic, but … (Watchmen news)

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So, Fox and Warner Brothers appear to have come to an agreement on Watchmen.  So two huge studios agree to share some cash over a movie, which has been super-hyped by the last two months of public legal wrangling.

And the movie release date wasn’t affected.

I’m a cynic.

It’s why I’ve not bothered posting anything else about the story as it went along (other than the one post I think at the start).  Maybe they did screw it up, maybe someone ‘forgot’ that Fox owned the rights, but I’m pretty sure they milked it for all it was worth once they knew.

David Gemmell Legend Award news

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gemmellaward

Quick update about the David Gemmell Legend Award, there’s an article in the Guardian Online covering the award, you can read it here.

Here’s the article intro,

A group of fantasy authors have teamed up to launch a new award celebrating the genre and the bestselling author David Gemmell, who died in 2006.

The 18 authors on the steering group for the annual award, chaired by Stan Nicholls, author of the bestselling Orcs novels and administrated by Deborah J Miller, who has written the Last Clansman and Swarmthief series, hope the David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy will help to redress the negative way in which fantasy is often viewed.

Don’t forget to visit the main site (http://gemmellaward.com/) and check out the long list, you have until the end of March to read and vote.

Movie Memories: Weird Science

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I had a crush on Kelly LeBrock for about 10  years.  She was I think, my first movie celebrity crush and it was all thanks to this single movie.  That crush even resulted in me watching a Steven Seagal movie (Hard to Kill) I would have otherwise passed on because she was in it.  Weird Science was released in 1985 and as always I’m never really sure where I saw it first, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in the cinema.  I do remember that since I was a nerd, and this was a ‘nerds do nerdy thing but then come good in the end’ movie that I associated with it pretty closely.

It’s a true pre-90’s John Hughes movie (the stuff he did post 1990 mostly sucked or maybe I just grew up) and it’s an iconic example of a whole bunch of stuff I loved from around then.  Of course, at the time I didn’t realise that I was watching a load of similar movies, or that these kind of films would spawn franchises like American Pie or one off homages like Road Trip, but they did.  If you’re younger than me and you loved American Pie, you should look out for Weird Science and anything John Landis or John Hughes did before 1990.

I just remember that I really fancied Kelly, that the movie was funny and involved computers and had nerds who won against bullies.  I didn’t even know they were nerds, or that I was a nerd, just that two kids I could sympathise with won out against the bad guys.

I really need to buy this movie on DVD as soon as possible.

My lasting memory of this film?  Any of the scenes with Lisa in them of course.  Burned into my memory.   She was a miracle of science.

Downtime

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My web host has just made me aware of some upcoming downtime.

Essential Maintenance
On Sunday 18th (January) we need to perform some maintenance in our data centre in London. This will cause some services to be stopped during the hours of 11am – 6pm. The services which will be affected are:

All VoIP customers on lon-pbx-1/2/3 will be unable to make and recieve calls from thier phones, including any huntgroupsetc, will be unavailable for a period of time during the window of maintenance.

All customers web services running on lon-file-3 (/home6) will be unavailable for a period of time during the window.

Other services may be affected during this time and we apologise for any inconvience caused.

That includes me.  So, no web service during those times (UK times).

Windows 7 beta – again

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Played with the Windows 7 beta again last night (I put ear plugs in so the fan noise didn’t get to me).  What can I say, either Microsoft are pulling a fast one and this is a fake version of Windows designed to run really quick, or it’s actually pretty good.  I installed Firefox and OpenOffice on the the machine yesterday and both are quick and responsive.  OO starts pretty smartly and dragging windows around is pretty quick (not very scientific, but let’s be honest, the way I use a machine these days I’m all about how responsive the UI is).

The access protection stuff doesn’t really get in my way, there’s a couple of dialogs to click on when installing stuff (‘do you want App_01 to make changes to your system?’) but otherwise it’s pretty seamless.

I don’t like the file dialogs.  I’m a big fan of files and directories, and I much prefer just seeing a real representative list of what the structure looks like, rather than all the ‘fake’ entries, but I guess that’s because I’m a command-line geek at heart and that as things develop that view is going to go away entirely (it’s not really necessary any more I guess).

File sharing works fine, I picked ‘work’ as the network location, popped the machine into a workgroup and I can happily drag files off my XP machine, haven’t tried the other way around yet.

I tried the Kaperskey trial anti-virus thing this time instead of AVG, and the installer is very annoying with about 14 features I didn’t like the sound of so I turned off.  Otherwise it installed and seems fine.

I’ll probably not post anything else about Windows 7 – as far as I care these days it works fine for me.  I used to demand a lot more from the OS and spend a lot of time configuring and tweaking, but these days I’ve turned into much more of a casual OS user.  As long as I can browse, install apps and manage photo’s I’ll be fine.  Actually, I might try and get Lord of the Rings online installed and running just to see how it copes since I guess games are the other thing I do, if I make any progress or fall foul with that I’ll let you know.  Otherwise, I’m confident that when I have to upgrade from XP, Windows 7 looks like it’ll be fine.

Of course, I don’t intent to get rid of my Linux VM’s, I can’t give up my command line just yet.

Working again

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Gradwell finally read the ticket and fixed the issue (took 3 minutes from reading the ticket to fixing the issue, shame they took 12 hours to read the ticket).

It’s annoying that I really like the Gradwell setup for managing my domains / web sites and that moving anywhere else will be a serious and huge annoying pain (~10 domains, lots of mail forwarding rules, multiple sites on the domains, pretty flexible setup for controlling it all at Gradwell).  I don’t want a single domain web hosting solution, I don’t want a web hosting company to own my domains, I don’t necessarily want a ‘reseller’ account but I basically want the config flexibility that goes with reseller accounts.  The NearlyFreeSpeech.net setup is quite nice but they don’t naturally register / host UK domains.

I’d buy a dedicated server or VPS somewhere if I could be bothered to work out how to handle my DNS.

/sigh

So I’ll probably just continue to vacillate and moan about Gradwell (like I have for 3 years).  Better the devil you know …

O Captain! My Captain!

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Not done any painting this week, still going through a ‘why do I do this when the results are so bad’ phase, it’ll pass.   Instead, been playing Lord of the Rings Online and levelling my captain (46 now).  Captain and Champion makes an oddly good combo (Grete’s playing her Chamption), we’ve been thrashing everything before us and not really struggling to deal with even red Elites.  We don’t seem to be having anywhere near as much trouble as we did with Guardian and Loremaster which in theory is a good combo (I think), maybe we know the content better, but we’re certainly doing nearly all orange quests, and just chewing through them.  We got tired of Angmar (I find the quests really depressing), and headed to Forochel to do the entrance area quests.  Rather than move onto the next Forochel set I suggested Eregion but we weren’t sure we’d be able to cope (at 44) and so we went to do the quests in the Trollshaws.  They were light blue / blue and while riding around to complete one we ended up in Eregion anyway.  The quests were orange, we tried a couple and found them challenging but doable, so there we stayed.

We’ve completed the Gwingris stuff and Echad Eregion and are hanging out in Echad Dunann now.  We’ve got the starter quest for Moria access but are waiting for a friend to be online before we start those.

It’s the third / fourth time I’ve done the Eregion quests and they’re still really fun, and as I said, with the Champion DPS they’re pretty easy to finish (challenging but not deadly).

Windows 7 beta – not in a VM

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I installed the Windows 7 beta on my old PC (Intel P4 3GHz, 2GB memory) and it’s really responsive, it’s easily as quick as XP even with all the funky Aero stuff running.  I admit, I didn’t run up 10 huge apps and see how it handled Firefox with 10 tabs (the machine for some reason, drives the fan really really hard when the graphics card is working overtime and it’s basically too loud to use these days), but in general it’s clearly useable.