2005 October Archive at Strangeparty

Monthly Archive for October, 2005

Morality test

Published

on October 14, 2005

. 0 Comments

This test only has one question, but it’s a very important one. By giving an honest answer, you will discover where you stand morally.

The test features an unlikely, fictional situation in which you will have to make a decision.

Remember that your answer needs to be honest, and spontaneous. Please scroll down slowly and give due consideration to each line.

————————-
THE SITUATION

You are in New Orleans, There is chaos all around you caused by a hurricane with severe flooding. You are a photo journalist working for a major newspaper and you’re caught in the middle of this epic disaster.

You’re trying to shoot career-making photos. There are houses and people swirling around you, and disappearing under the water.

===============================================
THE TEST

Suddenly you see a man in the water. He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris. You move closer. Somehow the man looks familiar. You suddenly realize who it is.

It’s the President, George W. Bush.

At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him under forever. You have two options- you can save the life of the President, or you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzer Prize winning photo, documenting the death of one of the world’s most famous men.

===============================================

THE QUESTION

Here’s the question, and please give an honest answer…….

Would you select high contrast colour film, or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?

Birthday

Published

Anton

on October 10, 2005

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

Yesterday was my birthday!
How did I spend it? I spent the whole weekend watching films.

The first film I watched was Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, which is available free for
download, so was very easy to get hold of!
It is a fan-paraody of start-treck and babylon 5. The special effects were very impressive, and apparently took 5 years to render on the desktops used for production. Overall I thought the storyline was not particularly clever, and as much as I like foreign films, the humor seemed to be lost in translastion. Don’t take my word for it, download it and see for yourself (how often do you see a legal movie download for free?!?)

While shopping, my girlfriend decided to buy Pride & Prejudice. Not the new holywood version but the original BBC series.
That is almost 5 and half hours of film. So can you guess what I thought of it (given it took my until this year to actually watch the whole of Titanic)

Can you belive that I really enjoyed it? It took me a while to actually get the characters names and faces fixed in my mind (especially as they call the oldest single daughter of a family Miss [familyname] and all younger daughters are called Miss [firstname]).
I thought the story was good, the characters were excellent and the acting was brilliant. In my eyes, it just goes to show that while the BBC does produce some crap TV, it also does produce some incredible masterpieces!

In the supermarked I also saw a film that I loved as a child, The Princess Bride saw I bought that on DVD for a mere fiver, and really enjoyed watching that.

And to finish the whole lot off (after watching Mallrats, which is possibly the best film by Kevin Smith
"They’re not there to shop. - They’re not there to work. - They’re just there"

For anyone bored with films, there is a wonderful article on the IBM Developer Works website which attempts to dubunk the myth that Java is slow, and that having a garbage collector (instead of doing memory management by hand) reduces the speed of your program.
I’d like to say here, that IBM seems to have invested a great deal of time and money into Java, and even produces their own optimised version of it. Most of their enterprise products have large portions written in java. Up until recently, the only thing I thought java was good for was toys on the web. Then I discovered the Azureus bittorrent client. They were the first real programs written in java. Now I am finding out that IBM uses it in just about everything they write! It seems that learning Java in uni was not just a useless buzzword!

The Demon Drink

Published

Anton

on October 7, 2005

in Humor

. 0 Comments

Paddy had been drinking at his local Dublin pub all day and most of the night. Mick, the bartender, says "You’ll not be drinking any more tonight, Paddy".

Paddy replies "OK Mick, I’ll be on my way then".

Paddy spins around on his stool and steps off. He falls flat on his face. "Shoite" he says and pulls himself up by the stool and dusts himself off.

He takes a step towards the door and falls flat on his face. "Shoite, Shoite!"

He looks to the doorway and thinks to himself that if he can just get to the door and some fresh air he’ll be fine. He belly crawls to the door and shimmies up to the door frame. He sticks his head outside and takes a deep breath of fresh air, feels much better and takes a step out onto the pavement.

He falls flat on his face. "Bi’Jesus… I’m fockin’ focked," he says.

He can see his house just a few doors down, and crawls to the door and shimmies up the door frame, opens the door and shimmies inside.

He takes a look up the stairs and says "No fockin’ way". But he crawls up the stairs to his bedroom door and says "I can make it to the bed".

He takes a step into the room and falls flat on his face. He says "Fock this, I gotta stop drinking," and falls into bed.

The next morning, his wife, Jess, comes into the room carrying a cup of coffee and says, "Get up Paddy. Did you have a bit to drink last night?"

Paddy says, "I did Jess. I was fockin’ pissed. But how’d you know?"

"Mick called…… You left your wheelchair at the pub"

Microsoft Innovation?

Published

Anton

on October 7, 2005

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

So SlashDot lead me to the following artickles: Microsoft and Invention and Microsofts unique innovation, and I wanted to write about Microsofts innovation.

The articles above praise Microsoft for their innovation (not surprising as the author works with Microsoft), but what have they actually invented recently? Sure, they invented windows, and Office, but that was years ago, and they basically re-worked inventions from Apple and Lotus to get there. They did a good job, I’ll give them that, but how about recent innovations?

Windows XP? Office 200x (whatever the current version number is)?

Are they really innovations? No. Office has just got slower since Office 97, and I have not seen any new features, let alone any I actually want (like getting the stupid auto-bullet point thing to work properly)

Windows XP is just a touch up on Windows 2000. It doesnt do anything new, and it has a horrible interface added (thank god I can go back to the old one still).

How about MSN Messenger I hear you say? ICQ was older, and just as good…

Autoroute They bought the company that makes it, so they just bought an invention…

This is my point. Microsoft has not made anything new in quite a while, anything new that is clever they bought.

The author in the above articles talks about Microsofts music and movie formats, and DRM. How are they even a good idea? I cannot play WMA on my linux box easily, it won’t play on my iPod at all? What part of that is actually a good idea?

As for the author attacking linux standards, at least if I encode my music with Ogg, anyone can get software to play them. In fact, anyone can write software to play them, as the algorithm is open, it is published and source code is available. So if you wanted to write a computer game, you are allowed (even encouraged) to use existing code to allow it to play my music on any machine you like!

The only company that I feel has really been inventive in home computing is Apple. The iPod was a revolution (although Creative did actually have hard disk players on the market first, they were not as small) and iTunes to update them was so simple.
Their OS makes so many tasks that would take you a long time to do on Windows a breeze.

Google also innovated. Their search engine was the start of good web searches, Gmail introduced the world to fast, high capacity web mail. Google maps has shown us that you can combine the yellow pages and a map.

In fact, there are many companies far more deserving than Microsoft to be remembered for their innovations.

Comments

Published

Anton

on October 3, 2005

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

While posting the Fosters photos above, I decided to check the submissions queue (on the bizarre offchance that somebody other than me wrote something for this site). Of course there was nothing there, but I did notice a link to moderating commetns. In there I found 2 comments by Shogun. Unfortunately because the internet is full of people with dishonerable intentions, anonymous comments need to be moderated… (Otherwise I get spam comments with nothing but links to viagra and online gambline sites. [Both together? :s ] )

Shogun: If you create an account (I know, creating accounts is painful) then comments *should* get posted straight away and be visible.

The other way is to just enable anonymous comments, and then for me to try and delete the spam… With other sites the amount of spam wasn’t very much, so maybe I should persue that option. In any case, I think I might need to play with the comments options and see what works best.