Archive for April, 2003
While
It’s been a while since I updated this thing, not much has been going on. Haven’t watched any more films (about 20 minutes into Fight Club — still). Deleted those Enterprise episodes off the TiVo (let’s be honest here, I was never going to bother watching them). Finished v2 bar the shouting (some help files and HTML being the only things left to do) and actually have one of the more popular boards converted over to it to see how things go. First sign is that it’s a lot slower than v1, which might prove to be a problem. I’d go so far as to say it sucks for speed and it’s something I really need to do something about. I’ll probably delay a bit as I see what I can do about that because otherwise I think I’m going to hit real trouble.
I set a date of July 1st for the v2 subscription system to go live. Taking credit card payments all of a sudden adds a whole new spin to this thing, as all of a sudden things have to work right. I’m still in two minds about the whole Bearkey Dollars thing, which I don’t think will make sense initially. Further down the road, with more Bearkey services online however, I do ultimately think it’ll have been the right choice. Only problem at the moment is how much to charge. $1 per 5,000 page views seems about right, it’s cheaper than ezboard, but the maths suggest it’s going to be quite hard to break even on the server. Even come close. If I can significantly up the number of page views I think I can do (or drop the cost of the server) I think I’d be in much better shape… but well, we’ll see. Maybe it’s time to start thinking seriously about what stuff I have on there (the end of IRCBear perhaps?).
On a final note, Apple’s iTunes Music Service. Very nicely done, but no UK version make baby Jesus cry. As Steve would say.
Wow, v2
Somehow, despite months of procrastination, I managed to whip through almost 4,000 lines of code this weekend and do about 70% of the v2 administration system. That includes putting in final support for the new style template and HTML template system and drawing a whole load of buttons.
People will be more than a little shocked if later this week it’s completed and it goes into testing.
T-Shirt Hell
Edward pointed me towards T-Shirt Hell where they have the funniest selection of t-shirts I’ve seen in a while. Many of them are totally inappropriate (so much so that I decided against putting banners for their site on Chatbear) but that doesn’t stop most of them being too darn funny.
Best Ad of the Year
I highly doubt anything is going to beat this Honda Advert for the best advert of the year. Made even more impressive by the fact that it’s not computer generated (apart from a little technical wizardry in the middle to join the two halves together because they couldn’t get a studio big enough to do it in one shot) and is in fact the life and work of eight men for five months. It took 606 takes to get it right.
Magic.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(IMDB - #226) Steven Spielberg has done better films, but this is still pretty good fun. The biggest problem with it simply being the lack of explanation of why things were happening and why it was such a good idea to get into the ship at the end. But the journey was fun.
Excellent special effects, good musical motif and well executed alien encounters. Will watch the special features tonight to see if I can find out what the first and second kinds were.
Citizen Kane
(IMDB - #7) Now this was much better. Especially impressive cinematography for a film made in 1941 and Welles is excellent in his role as both Kane and the film’s Director/Producer.
I have Casablanca and Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the bed in front of me, but I can’t bring myself to watch either of them until I can get rid of this damn headache.
Brain Candy
(IMDB) One of these days I’ll finally buy it on DVD…
Dr. Chris Cooper: [holding out cappuccino cup to assistant) My cap is luke.
Assistant: Lukewarm, Chris?
Cisco: No, Luke Skywalker, you fuckin’ inbred.
Not Love the Bomb
(IMDB - #11) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was recommended to me highly by Edward and of course all those IMDB visitors, but it did almost nothing for me. A handful of moments that put a small smirk on my face, but I simply did not find this film that funny. And since it’s meant to be a comedy, that’s not good.
Another sign that the IMDB voters are in serious need of help (The Sixth Sense at #71 was the first sign of that).
Coke-tastic
Coke in glass bottles, the re-discovery of how good Cherry Coke tastes (after that unfortunate episode the last time they relaunched it in this country) and now the surprise that new Vanilla Coke isn’t half bad either.
Now if I could just get some Tab to see if I like that again…
Back in the US
(IMDB) Slightly disappointing really. While the selection of songs is fantastic and the performance great, the sound is really lacking. It’s got no ooomph to it, even with the volume turned right up it never really feels like you’re there. Shame.
All The President’s Men
IMDB #169. Great stuff right up to the very end, where it seemed to wrap up a little too quickly for my liking. I was left sitting here thinking the DVD had skipped some chapters or something because it just seemed to be over all of a sudden. But up to that point, very enjoyable.
Lots of new DVD’s over the last couple of days (and more to come) so my “catching up” as it were of the most popular films of the last 100 years continues.
Coffee
Why did I just feel like a mug of coffee at 11pm at night? That never happens.
Query
All database functions for Titan/Breeze completed. That’s a nice step in the right direction. Actually starting to see something now on the development platform side of this.
Memento
But I won’t.
Worst DVD menu system ever? God yes. I could rant for a couple of paragraphs about that.
Clever, yes. Tenth best film of all time? Not even close.
Barely
You know this site looks pretty bad in IE. And now I’ve changed the header to use a larger font, it looks even worse. It doesn’t even seem to antialias the fonts, even though I have that option switched on.
Top marks for Safari though, looks great in that.
More TiVo Fun
I really like the web interface that tivoweb provides, if only because it makes a lot easier to find shows I might want to watch. Searching through everything via the remote control is difficult, but with the browser it’s a breeze. I’ve written a little bit of code to pull the current list of shows and stick them on the left hand of the page so you can all see how long it takes me to work through those very old episodes of Enterprise that it recorded for me last year. The Freaks and Geeks episode is even older.
I also managed to setup Bearkey Alerts to post any BBC Ticker stories to my TV screen as I’m watching. Just a bit of fun really. Maybe I should stick a box on the page here and let people type in some characters they’d like to appear on my screen. That might be kinda cool.
As an aside, the shower gel in my bathroom smells terrible.
Double Yay
And that’s video extraction done now too. Fab.
Need to spend some time on Troops tomorrow, finish off those graphics for the soldier and get him animating. He looks a bit daft at the moment with only 5 directions of movement.
Yay
Managed to get a Torx screwdriver to open up the TiVo (after hunting around my dads office unit for the correct end piece) and install the network card. It was pretty painless, getting the card attached to the board was easy and the driver installed ok too after I plugged the TiVo hard disk into my PC. Only problem was that because I run win2k on my PC, I couldn’t back up my TiVo drive, as the Linux boot disk you had to use couldn’t write to an NTFS partition. Scary moment considering I’d then be screwed if something went wrong, but I took the chance anyway and thankfully all went well.
For some reason almost no UNIX tools were installed at the same time (apparently ls and other such important commands should have been put on by the network installation software) so I had to find a copy of them and instructions on how to get them on there. And that’s the only real problem I had, finding good instructions. Got it all sorted now though, and tivoweb installed, so I can now control it over the interweb, which is very cool.
So what next? Video extraction. And working out why the tivoweb UI module errors when trying to load a genre list (or at least it looks like that’s where the error is).
Bah
The TiVo network card turned up this morning, so I unhooked the box from its current position under the TV (not an easy job, due to the number of wires leading into it) and took it through to the lounge to open it up. Unfortunately when I got there I found that it doesn’t use normal screws to hold it together, but a set of odd looking silver things instead. With nothing that appears to fit them, I’m now looking at having to wait a few days until I can get a hold of the approriate tool.
Bah.
TiVo TurboNet
So I finally decided to get the network card for the TiVo. I’d resisted in the past, I really didn’t fancy opening it and screwing something up. Reading the instructions though, it all seems pretty trivial.
I guess we’ll find out tomorrow when the card should turn up. Yay for the postman waking us up at 7am on a Saturday morning.
