Year: 2005

The Manchurian Candidate

This post will be the first movie review done in the different way. Since some people complained that I have spoilers and irrelevant stuff sometimes and it is difficult to separate these with one glance from the rest of the review, I decided that I will be splitting movie review posts into brief and full texts. Brief text will contain a link to appropriate IMDB page if any, IMDB rating at the moment of writing, my rating, and celebrity highlight, which is basically a list of well-known people associated with the film. The full text (“Read more” link) will contain the brief part as well as my thoughts, descriptions, spoilers, complains and anything else I might right about the film. This way it will also be possible to read the preferred version in RSS feed too.

Anyway, the good thing about immediate blogging (right after the event/happening) is that one doesn’t forget to write about what happened. Yesterday I watched “The Manchurian Candidate” and forgot to blog about it.

IMDB Rating: 6.7
My Rating: 5.0
Celebrity highlights: main parts played by Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Liev Schreiber with brief appearences of Jeffrey Wright and Jon Voight

Continue reading The Manchurian Candidate

Lost and found

It happens sometimes that I forget about this or that piece of hardware in one of my computers. Until recently this or that piece of hardware could be anything except for the hard disk. Not anymore. And what is even stranger is that I forgot about two hard disks long time ago and found them both within the last two weeks.

The first one, 20 GByte, was in my workstation. I didn’t need a lot of space there and was using the old 8 GBytes disk. When I sold the computer without looking inside, the guy to who I sold it called me back and said that there are two disks inside. He asked if I wanted the 20 GByte one back. I didn’t. It is old and small enough not to mean anything for me anymore.

The second one miracleously was found in my home machine today. It is a 40 GByte disk and it came very handy, since I am practically out of space. My root partition has about 5 GBytes which is enough for day-to-day operations, but too small for downloading anything significant (like a couple of movies or a bunch of mp3s). With the 40 GByte disk I can move some things around now…

webby_m3u

Today I have found a really nice way to listen to my home mp3s at work. All I needed to do is share my music directory via web and generate an m3u playlist with URLs to files. m3u playlist than could be downloaded and fed to XMMS, where I could select songs to play. It is also nice to use random playback until I find something I am in the mood for and than switch to sequential mode.

Anyway, I wrote a small Perl script to generate an m3u playlist. It dives into some directory recursively and correctly escapes all the URLs. Check the few configuration variables in the beginning of the file.

webby_m3u.perl

Does anyone feel cold?

It is unually cold these days in Cyprus. Check the screenshot, which shows +4 degrees Celsius at 6 o’clock in the morning. I’ve been living in this country for 9 years now and I don’t remember anything like that. What is even more strange is that the skies are clear and the sun is bright. Usually, it warms up with conditions like this. Not this year though.

Luckily it’s not very windy or rainy or snowy. That would be a real freaking problem.

By the way, weather forecast doesn’t look that good either.

Feed on feeds

Feed on feeds is a free software (GPL) that mimics BlogLines functionality.

Many people are afraid that BlogLines will get evil, commercial or both and they will lose one of the most handy tools ever. Feed on feeds is supposed to solve the problem by providing all the functionality in a free package. One can download the tarball and install it on own server. Since it is written in PHP with Mysql backend it is extremely easy to modify and enhance. It is still a bit rough around the edges, but it will quickly get there, I am sure.

Discovered via this post.