Boy was Matrix Revolutions great!

I mean, that scene with Agent Smith as a human making his way to the Zion main frame. It really pulled it together in seeing why he wanted into that mainframe and how it was his ticket out of there.

That big battle between Neo and the ghost twins. Now THAT is why he's "The one".  Once you free your mind there's nothing you can't do. Seeing them phasing into other dimensions in their battle was just incredible and I loved the way the world shimmered as Neo and the ghosts phased in and out of each other's dimensions.

The Trainman neo battle was a great fast paced way to get the movie off with a bang. Seeing two "gods" battling it out was a good warm up that would only be surpassed by the final battle between Smith and Neo.  Plus it led to the immediate confrontation with the Merovingian which really gave us a cool glimpse about how the Matrix is just a piece of the overall machine world.

I really liked the way they resolved the whole issue of how if Neo didn't return to the source that the Matrix would suffer a catastrophic failure leading to the death of every human being connected to it.

It was also very cool on how the red/blue pill metaphor became a metaphor for all of mankind as machines and humans recognized the symbiosis alluded to by the councilman in Reloaded.  Seeing the humans and machines recognizing that they could live together and rebuild the earth together was breath taking.

Which reminds me, who else thought it was cool in how they resolved the whole destroyed earth, what are they going to do with the population connected issue? I thought it was very clever that Zion and the machines collaborated on a way of slowly having the Matrix world become like the destroyed world and having humans controlling machines from inside the Matrix to fix the world so that both could live in harmony.

I also liked how they explained the machine need for humans when one might wrongfully get the thought that maybe the machines might simply just put up zeppelins covered in solar panels attached to the power grid via wires to get sunlight since the cloud layer over the earth wasn't too far up.  Not to mention that one might easily harness all that electricity in the clouds by putting a metal rod up there. It was good that they spent a minute explaining that.

The greatly expanded roll of Persephone was nice. I thought it would have been too predictable for the Oracle to be the "mother" of the Matrix given the things the architect said in the second.  Persephone's roll was enlightening and yet helped make sense of the whole sentient machine thing that had been alluded to from the beginning.

Morpheus has an ass kicker was really good to see. When he and Neo were separated, it was pretty easy to see why he was considered "by most authorities to be the most dangerous man  in the world". 

I liked the way that Zion was able to make use of the Matrix-like features by remote controlling those huge mech things. The virtual use of those hardened EMP emitting mechs made it clear that the humans were going to be a tough thing. The introduction of machines hardened against EMP pulses only made sense and I'm glad that they did that since everyone knows that even low end miliary hardware is hardened against EMPs today.

It was interesting and yet understandable why Neo was able to control and do things to the machines outside the Matrix.

And most of all, I really liked the ending. It neatly wrapped things up while at the same time giving us an incredible plot twist that I would never in a million years imagined. Great stuff!

What am I talking about?

"Oh, when I get bored I make up my own movie..."

Want to change your boot screen without patching your actual OS kernel?

Stardock has a free program in development to do just that and the first alpha is now available:

http://scripting.stardock.com/private/bs_current.exe

BootSkin replaces the boot screen by creating a device driver that does the job. This has several advantages:

1) It will work on Windows 2000, it'll work on Windows XP, and it'll work on Longhorn 4051 it seems to work. Heck, it probably works on NT 4.

2) This has been implemented in the way that Microsoft would probably do it (or arguably how they should have done it). No patching, no hacking, totally safe.

3) No need to "back up" your kernel. If you somehow blow up your system, you can just boot up in safe mode and uninstall it.

Limitations:

Right now it's no better no worse than the regular boot screen. That means 16 color VGA (640x480).

What's next:

High resolution, true color and animation.  But this is just to get things started and make sure there aren't any problems.  It's been tested extensively internally but usual caveat: This is an alpha, use at your own risk, assume it will blow up your computer, kill your pets, set the house on fire, etc.

I'm so far behind on so many things. I also have a bunch of topics to cover. I have a fun article about Hydrogen fuel cells and the problems they have. Short answer: We're not going to have hydrogen fuel cells any time soon. Sorry.

The Matrix Revolutions was spectacularly crappy. Shockingly bad.

I have two huge projects in front of me to get working on that is on top of all our existing projects. One on the business unit and the other for the games unit.

I need to find us a bigger building and soon. It's becoming quite problematic.

We also need to hire more animators (ones who know 3D Studio) and software developers who already know DirectX decently.

I'm annoyed with our elementary school. They don't have a nurse on staff. Unbelievable. My little elementary school had a nurse and I grew up in a place that didn't have anywhere near the resources Canton Michigan has (land of $7500 per year property taxes).

Bullet proof glass? Put some nail polish remover on it and it becomes brittle enough to shatter with minimal effort.

So tired from so much stuff going on.  Gotta get Object Desktop 2004 out the door and DesktopX 2 Pro and work on the Political Machine and WindowBlinds 4.2 is coming and GalCiv Expansion pack is coming and tons of other goodies. It's enough to make ones head spin.

Most of all, I need some chocolate. Right now.

If The Matrix was a 9 or 10 and Reloaded was maybe a 7. Then Matrix Revolutions is a 3 or 4.

Worst movie I've paid to see at a theatre in a long time. But I say that with a big caveat. No set of movies had built up expectations like The Matrix. Movies like "The One" that came out a year or two ago weren't any better than this. But the Matrix, and the story behind it, had been hyped up beyond belief.

A lot of the problem appears to me to be one of editing. A few extra scenes, a few scenes cut, and epilogues could have made a big difference. Instead, we're left with something that isn't really a conclusion but more like the end of a chapter in a larger story that I no longer care to know more about.

Picasa automatically finds and organizes all of your pictures including: jpeg, tiff, bmp, psd, and standard camera movie files. Sending pictures with e-mail used to mean five steps just to get it right. Picasa lets you pick the size and then automatically attaches your pictures. Browse through all your pictures and view slideshows of your albums with the click of a button. Enhance, fix red-eye, and even crop without losing data or permanently changing your original picture.

New in 1.6:
Cropping, Support for more grpahics formats, Movie support, network drive support, more thumbnail sizing options.

 Download: Download

 News source: Betanews.com

What is it with left-wing zealots and the word "lie". It really gets under my skin. For liberals, it seems, conservatives never make mistakes. Oh no. Conservatives aren't, you know, actually human. And so whenever a conservative makes a statement that turns out to be wrong, it isn't that he was mistaken, it is that he lied.

Al Franken has made this into a mini-career with books like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". Sure, other zealots on the left like him will eat that stuff up. But is it convincing? To me, it just makes ugly stereotypes of the left ring that much more true. The left certainly has no monopoly on hypocrisy. The right is full of nuts and zealots on its own.  Many charactertures of the right are actually true. I have actually met rich Republicans who pretty much believe that the poor should be liquidated (and I had this conversation in a hot tub in Grand Cayman with people who have never had to struggle or work hard for anything mind you).

But to me, the left's hypocrisy is more disturbing. And I'll tell you why: The left is the one that believes that the government is the solution to all of life's problems. Name a social problem and the left's solution is to have the government solve it. And why not? Because they would love to run the government because they are, after all, more civilized. Where the right generally wants the government to leave them the hell alone, the left wants the government to be all encompassing. A benevolent parental figure. And that's the problem.

The left's view of itself is that liberalism is simply the more civilized way to approach life. Combine that with a healthy dose of righteousness and the power of the government and you have a recipe for authoritarianism.  Anyone who's been a student at a major university in the past decade knows what I'm talking about.  It is on universities that we get a taste of what would happen if the liberals ran the world.  You see, because liberals are more civilized, or more to the point, because conservatives are a bunch of evil, selfish bastards, they feel the need to play referee in the game of life. But they're not an impartial one because they don't recognize that other ideas may deserve equal time with theirs.

The net result is that all conservative actions are viewed by liberals under the most cynical of lenses.  Conservatives who don't support affirmative action on campus are against it not because they believe it is morally wrong to favor people based on their skin pigment but because they're a bunch of racists. Conservatives who favor military action in Iraq are not in favor because they understand what is a stake and concluded this is the right course of action, they favor it because they're war mongers or at best, duped by "The Bush Clan". And when a conservative statement turns out to be wrong, it's a lie.

Let me give you some examples:

When Clinton bombed a civilian Aspirin factory in Sudan during the height of the Monica Lewinski nonsense, his claim that it was a chemical weapons lab wasn't a lie. It was a simple mistake based on faulty intelligence.  Even though the timing of the whole thing was incredibly suspect and the target odious, that was pretty much the end of that.

However...

When Bush follows the same intelligence that Clinton did and assumes Iraq has WMD and calls for military force to remove Saddam for failing to comply with UN resolutions and said WMD are not instantly found (despite Iraq being a huge country) the result is loud cries that Bush "lied" about the WMD.  Clinton was in error about WMD when he attacked Iraq in 1998 but Bush lied. Huh?

It is a symptom of a broader problem. Clinton must have simply made a mistake because he's a liberal and liberals are civilized people.  Bush couldn't have made a mistake because he's a conservative barbarian and is only capable of lying.

Like I said, conservatives can be zealots too full of nasty habits. But there's a big difference -- conservatives aren't the ones hoping that the government gets to be a huge, all encompassing thing with the power to civilize society by force. Conservatives don't view the government as "Mom". Hence, the liberal's tendency for selective tolerance should be a warning to those who believe that in an ideal world, the government would be the one solving life's problems rather than individuals solving them for themselves, their families and their communities.

 

Skinning really got going in the late 90s. The software was relatively primitive back then in terms of features and reliability. And there were a lot fewer skinners in those days.

But what about quality?

Here's a skin from the 1999 time frame:



I mentioned in a post recently that the number of new skins (visual styles) being created has steadily increased over time. This, despite the increasing difficulty in creating a fully featured visual style (due to each new version of Windows and WindowBlinds adding more features that need to be skinned).

Some have argued, persuasively, that the *quality* of visual styles has steadily dropped as complexity has grown. That as the amount of time required to create a visual style has increased, the quality has decreased.

One theory for that would be that those talented enough to create really outstanding graphics simply don't have the free time available to put in to creating a visual style.

Or more to the point, the amount of time *available* to skin a thing has remained constant and as the complexity has increased, the time spent hasn't increased and the net result is lower quality.

One result has been the coming of premium skins. This works on a basic premise: Spending X time on something is fun. Spending X + Y time on something moves it out of fun and into being real work. Therefore, I'll still do X amount of it for fun but need to be paid for that Y amount. Net result, premium visual styles.

But back to the main piont -- what do you think? Do you think that the overall quality of skinning has declined? Or perhaps that the quality has remained the same but that because so many more visual styles are created these days that there's just more junk to sift through.

Little discussed feature about the IBM Thinkpad T40. The Fn-space bar combo will instantly switch the resolution to a the next lower one. this is great when you are browsing the web and want the text nice and big. Just one of the many handy features that makes the Thinkpads rule.

This was asked recently so here's a quickie guide on how to do it.

(1) Download SkinStudio 4 beta from http://www.skinstudio.net

(2)Choose Convert MSStyles




(3) Choose the one you want. I'm using StefanKa's cool "6 pack" visual style.



(4) Now you're in Universal Skin Format mode. You can now edit the visual style in whatever way you'd like. I.e. change color, move buttons around, tweak it a bit here and there.



(5) Then File-Save As... Choose WindowBlinds UIS1 or UIS2 (UIS1 = faster UIS2 = more features -- either will work with an msstyle).

(6) Final result.


Note: DO NOT distribute visual styles you've converted without asking for the original author's express written permission. The original author retains all copyright rights to the visual style regardless of what format/language it is in.

ActiveWin.com has an article that compares Windows XP vs. MacOS X panther (10.3). A lot of good points are made but we also think it is not doing a (pardon the pun) apples and apples comparison.

The article focuses on what comes with the base OS rather than what is available on a platform.  For example, is it really that big of a deal that Outlook Express doesn't include spam fighting features when for free you can download something like SpamPal? Especially when a Mac carries with it a $600 to $1000 premium?

Here's another point of view on the matter at JoeUser.com