No way will this be as good as the original.
WarGames: The Dead Code
From the looks of it, they’ve taken the original plot and just substituted different teenagers, a different city, a new computer and… well, not much else. It’s more of a remake than a sequel.
No wonder it’s going straight to DVD. Release is expected in July.
And if that’s not to your taste, how about this rumour: Leonardo Dicaprio to play Nolan Bushell in a movie about the creator of Pong.
Some web sites have very well designed, brief, URLs.
But some have URLs that are way too long. And you don’t always want to be putting them through TinyURL.
Here’s how some of them can be shortened if sending them via email (when they might break when text wraps) or in print.
Anything that’s not bold can be chopped out. And remember when putting it in print, drop the http:// — it’s not necessary to key in, and only slows people down. The same is usually true for the www — though I’m in two minds about that. For publicity etc, it sometimes helps to jog people’s minds that we’re talking about web addresses.
Amazon — it’s the ISBN or other identifier which is critical here
http://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Who-Complete-David-Tennant/dp/B000UVV2GA/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1212896155&sr=8-1
YouTube — remove the country, and any extraneous arguments such as “Featured”
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-BOYAl0F6xs&feature=user
The Age (and other Fairfax sites) — remove the headline text. (This works for their older articles/older URLs too.)
http://www.theage.com.au/national/clouds-loom-as-oil-price-soars-and-petrol-hits-170-20080607-2n9n.html?page=-1
Google Maps — the co-ordinates and zoom quotient (or whatever it’s called) matter the most. Though if you’re trying to specifically point out an address, you’ll need to leave the query in.
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&q=247+flinders+lane,+melbourne,+vic,+AU&ie=UTF8&ll=-37.813751,144.964621&spn=0.011188,0.018196&z=16&iwloc=addr
Realestateview — gets really messy depending on how you find the property. Some of the arguments tell it what navigation options to show, but when it all comes down to it, it’s the OID which is the critical argument. Mind you, leaving the “rev=on” stuff gives you the area map by default, so better to leave that on if emailing.
http://www.realestateview.com.au/cgi-bin/view.pl?OID=1136439&rev=on&s=102294592&Sub=bentleigh&BeL=0&BeH=9999&PrL=0&PrH=99999&Surr=&IKW=bolinda&PT=hou&PT=uni&PT=tow&PT=stu&PT=lan&PT=dev&PT=inv&PT=ter&PT=vil&PT=sem&PT=dup&PT=pen&PT=wac&PT=hol&PT=rta&PT=alp&PT=car&PT=bof&PTr=&CS=VIC&OrderBy=listed&OrderStr=&Con=S&SearchPage=/buy/residential/melbourne.shtml&Bkmk=_&OFI=&OFIDays=&BS=10&Thu=&Qui=n
BBC News — these aren’t overly long, but can still be shortened.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7442323.stm
MS KB — all kinds of different versions of their URLs fly around the place, though a lot of their new links use the most sensible, concise version.
One of many of the old style: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q917925
Better: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917925
(Of course to many geeks, just say Q917925.)
For other sites? No doubt people will have their suggestions.
For myself, when I’m sending a URL to someone, and I have the time, I tend to muck about and remove what look like the extraneous parameters and see what still works. Mind you, some sites don’t work very well for this — Dick Smith (dse.com.au) for example, relies on some kind of weird-arse session parameter, so it’s best to use their own “email this link” feature.
And always check it before you send it.
Get slightly jerky results when encoding XVid and watching it on a MediaGate player?
Turn off the Packed Bitstream option. That seems to fix it.
I was amused to see this Donkey Kong reference in a cartoon by Andrew Dyson in last Friday’s Age, commenting on the current Australian political stoush over petrol prices. It features opposition leader Brendan Nelson as Donkey Kong, and PM Kevin Rudd as Mario.
Memo to self: When VirtualDub complains about an error -100, which it claims could be due to a corrupt file, or a codec problem, check it’s not the latter. In particular, if using the resizing filter, make sure the size can be handled by the codec. In the case of XVid, it won’t handle a size not divisible by 4.
Twitter’s ups and downs are now almost legendary. There’s now a web site which can tell you if it’s up or not.
Twitter is very popular. It has a lot of users. (Including me.)
But it hasn’t commercialised. There’s no ads, no user subscription fees, no deals, and, I suspect, no money. Or at least not very much.
Or at least not much. It’s maintained its independence and integrity, but I wonder if subsequently having no dosh is the reason the service is becoming so unreliable as popularity increases. At least the commercial services out there have been through all these issues.
Some are blaming it being built on Ruby On Rails, which evidently doesn’t scale very well, but this is only a problem if they don’t have the funds and the will to migrate it onto another platform.
It’ll be interesting to see where Twitter goes as more people pile on. Are they up to the challenge? Will they just give up and sell out in return for investment in reliability, or can they find another way forward?
Sometimes Lifehacker is just overwhelming, posting zillions of things per day. Way too many to keep up, and for some reason Lifehacker Australia posts things that it calls “US-centric” which are, in fact, useless to anybody outside the US. Not sure why they bother.
That said, they also post some real gems.
A beauty the other day: a link to the Wikipedia List of commercial games released as freeware.
Some of them are oldies. Some are pretty new. Some of the classics that caught my eye included a 90s era Lode Runner sequel, the classic Sim City, an old instalment of The Elder Scrolls, and that ol’ favourite Elite.
Forgotten the security code for your Nokia phone?
I did. I dug out my old mobile to give my eldest son, and while it would happily accept my old SIM, it wouldn’t accept his new one without the security code.
As long as you can get into the phone, use *#06# to get the IMEI, then feed the number in here to get the “mastercode reset”.
The same site also has facilities for network unlocking phones, but I haven’t needed to try that.
PS. It doesn’t work on a stolen phone, assuming the SIM has been disabled by the owner’s network, as you have to get fully into the phone to get the IMEI and do the reset.
Of all the useless error messages, this one would have to take the cake. I found it in a Word document tonight.
It appears to be caused by the author using Mac Word, and having pasted a picture into the document in some weird and wonderful way.
The error is useless, because I already have Quicktime installed on this machine. (I didn’t particularly want it; it came with iTunes.) And if it wants a particular decompressor, it would be very helpful if it gave me a hint as to which one, and where I should get it from.
I couldn’t even see a way of extracting the picture so I could try and throw it at another viewer program.
In this age of standards, when the vast majority of pictures flying about the place are either GIF, JPEG or PNG, and even proprietary standards like MS Word are almost universal, why on earth should I be getting an error message like this?
Evidently the only fix is to go back to the source (on the Mac) and change the picture to something more universal. Thankfully the document’s author was around, so I could do that. But who knows why Mac Word lets people insert pictures in this way in the first place. (Powerpoint is susceptible too.)
Conclusion? Blame Microsoft!
I’m working from home today, and looking at some system monitory stuff in Firefox. In the background I’ve also got an Remote Desktop session open to my work PC.
Every few minutes, the corporate screensaver kicks-in on the work desktop. For some reason, RDP decides it absolutely has to show me this. It grabs focus, bringing its window into the foreground.
STOP GRABBING FOCUS, DAMMIT! I DON’T CARE IF THE SCREENSAVER HAS KICKED-IN. YOU’RE INTERRUPTING ME! JUST FLASH YOUR TASKBAR ITEM!
It even does this while connecting. If I alt-tab away onto something else while waiting for the connection, it keeps grabbing focus to show me… that it’s working on it, so please wait… Other applications do this sort of thing too.
And it keeps losing the connection, and re-connecting. But that may be a server and/or VPN issue.
(This is the RDP client in XP SP2. I’ll upgrade to SP3 in the next few days and discover if that’s any better.)
Ever wonder how they fitted an entire computer language into just a few kilobytes, back in the 80s? Documented disassembly of BBC Basic 4.
How to highlight author comments in WordPress … but it relies on the author being user ID 1, so it won’t work here, where we have several people posting. Could easily be customised to look for other user IDs though.
Some developers are throwing in the towel and running Vista as Admin.
The excellent Secret Life of Machines not only has a web site, but is available freely (and legally) via BitTorrent. And the theme tune is available on iTunes.
It’s official — Vodafone will sell the iPhone in Australia. It’s not expected to be exclusive to them; I’d bet on hearing from other carriers soon confirming they’ll be selling it too.
And reasonably persistent rumours suggest it will be launched when the Apple Sydney store opens, towards the middle of this year.
(via Shane)