ni9e Posted by rae in General
at 2:11 pm on Friday, 12 June 2009

It’s all about 9 this movie season.

Won’t people get confused?

9

district 9

nine

This kind of thing seems to happen relatively often in Hollywood. Silly people.

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Yet More Medical TV Shows Posted by rae in entertainment
at 9:58 am on Wednesday, 10 June 2009

With the passing of shows (some of which we wish hadn’t passed) comes new shows. I grabbed a few recently and here’s what I thought of them.

Nurse Jackie
Nurse Jackie

Nurse Jackie

Mrs. Soprano strikes out as a not-even-remotely-perfect nurse at a hospital. She swears, takes pain drugs for her back (shades of House) and has sex with doctors. But unlike House or Grey’s Anatomy, this show has a much grittier, more real feel to it. So far though, I’m not sure if that aspect is adding to or subtracting from the show’s appeal.

Edie Falco is a very strong actress, and I could understand why she might want to have a dark, gritty, and above all *serious* show. But she also has a comedic side, and that is completely smothered by the cynical realism of this show.

Royal Pains
Royal Pains

Royal Pains

I’ve seen all of 10 minutes of this show so far, but it’s yet another doctor show. I’m getting tired of doctor shows, but Mark Feuerstein is keeping my interest (so far).’

We’ll have to see where this one goes.

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Hey, this theme is very mobile-friendly,… Posted by rae in General
at 6:30 pm on Monday, 25 May 2009

Hey, this theme is very mobile-friendly, too. Nice..

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Figured out the avatars - you have to be… Posted by rae in General
at 6:17 pm on Monday, 25 May 2009

Figured out the avatars - you have to be using gravatar.com I think.

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Trying out the “P2″ theme, which makes… Posted by rae in General
at 5:33 pm on Monday, 25 May 2009

Trying out the “P2″ theme, which makes WordPress look not unlike Twitter. Maybe I’ll post more. Hm, if I had a plugin for ping.fm, I definitely would post here more..

In the course of doing this, I had to upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1, which was a big no-brainer..

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Success! ASUS A7N8X + terabyte hard drive Posted by rae in General
at 6:18 pm on Saturday, 2 May 2009

Tnir, my household Linux box, has been down for a couple of weeks now. I hit a bit of a roadblock when the motherboard erfused to recognize a new hard drive I had bought. It was too big — 1 TB (which is 1000 GB, or perhaps 1024 if you’re a programmer, or 999 if you’re a sales droid).

So I did my usual check for a new BIOS, which would normally fix things. There was a moderately new BIOS, only a few months younger than the one I had, but installing it had no effect. Still no drive.

After googling around I ran across an article that laid out all the steps I had to take, which included creating my own BIOS. Egad.

That scared me a bit, so I put it off for a while.

But today I tried again, and realized that the BIOS is really like a zip file, with a bunch of other little files in it, and I was just replacing the (SATA) disk part with a new version. And sure ernough, I got my new drive listed, with 938 GB (damn those marketing droids!)

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SciFi Channel —> SyFy Channel?!?!? Posted by rae in entertainment
at 9:15 am on Friday, 1 May 2009

SyFy
new name of SciFi Channel

The US “SciFi” channel is going to be renamed in July to the “Syfy” channel.

I am speechless.

Are they morons?

…

What the frak?

P.S. Wordpress seems unable to handle UTF-8 characters in the title of a post. I *tried* to use a proper arrow character, really I did. *sigh

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April 23rd is Download Day Posted by rae in development, software
at 10:59 am on Thursday, 23 April 2009

I seem to be downloading a couple of Gigs of stuff this morning. First off is Ubuntu 9.04, which was released today. I am grabbing both the “desktop” and “server” editions. I plan on using the server edition when I rebuild Tnir.

Next up is Qt 4.5.1, and this time there are Cocoa, 64-bit Binaries for Mac OS X (last time, with 4.5, you had to compile it yourself to get 64-bit goodness). But you have to dig around to get them. Here are the links to save people some trouble.

If you want to debug, you should get both the normal and debug libraries. And the debug libraries are huge compared with non-debug.

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Bell Canada wants to impose universal 60 GB bandwidth caps Posted by rae in politics, the Net
at 1:11 pm on Tuesday, 14 April 2009

I got notified about this by Tek Savvy today, so I entered the following on their comment page.

File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 - Bell Canada - TN 7181

Bell’s attempts to limit the availability of inexpensive high-bandwidth service would have a grave consequence: Canadian users would lose affordable internet services such as high-quality video downloads available from online producers like Apple and http://revision3.com — downloading just ten 430 MB episodes would consume over 7% of the proposed 60 GB monthly cap.

This kind of tariff would kill modern services such as HD movie rentals on iTunes, turning Canada into an internet backwater.

Canadians have been able to boast about our high-tech infrastructure to the world. This one action would topple Canada from the top to the bottom of the internet world.

Thanks,
Reid Ellis, Toronto ON

If you’d like to make your comments/concerns known about what Bell is attempting to do, go to the CRTC web page set up for it. Just select the word “Tariff” from the drop down list, and add the following in Subject Line: “File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 - Bell Canada - TN 7181″ - make your thoughts known!

The deadline for comments is tonight at midnight, so hurry!

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TV shows tonight Posted by rae in entertainment, the Net, video
at 2:58 pm on Monday, 30 March 2009

show list
shows on tonight - click for large

Wow, quite a few shows on TV tonight.

Until recently I used the site TV Rage to have a calendar showing upcoming shows. But then they changed their APIs to not include iCalendar data. :-(

The place I found out about TV Rage, TV Calendar says it also uses EPGuides.com, so maybe they have iCalendar data I can use?

Worst case I can write a quick CGI script to read XML from TVRage and convert it to iCalendar on the fly.

Seems like a lot of work to go to though..

Update:
So, along with the screenshotted shows…

there were some others!

So wow, that’s like 12 shows! Which is good because the rest of the week is pretty bleak until Friday..

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