Favourite Movies of the Year

Lost In Translation poster
My absolute favourite movie this year would have to be Sofie Coppola’s Lost In Translation. Other movies which I thoroughly enjoyed were:

And for being overhyped pieces of crap there were:

And for making me want to yell out like a hoon “YEAH!!! Kick that ass!!!” goes to:

Rendering in different browsers

daveg :: weblog - safari screenshotUsing iCapture, I found out that perhaps some of the recent changes that I made caused some problems in Safari. Previously I had checked, and it did look OK, but now it seems that it ignores quite a bit of the layout. The titlebar at the top doesn’t have the blue background, the search form is on the left hand side, not the right, the menubar on the left is just a bunch of list times, with no background colour at all, the styles for the navlist at the top are completely ignored and they are just outputted as a vertical list. Way to go Safari!

I checked it out with Konquerer (which is supposed to use the same rendering engine as Safari, KHTML) and it renders a lot more of the page than Safari could dream of. The only problem in Konquerer is that the navlist isn’t quite right, and an image which I had inserted as floating to the left, sits on top of the text, which doesn’t bother me too much.

I thought Apple chose the KHTML rendering engine over the Mozilla rendering engine because it was supposed to be more “compatible” over a greater range of websites. Over the time that I’ve used it (since the first public beta releases), I’ve not seen any evidence of this. One of my pet hates is that it still can’t handle SSL connections through a proxy server.

Next I’ll have to check IE (I checked out IE 5.x on Mac OS X last night and it wasn’t pretty) next on some Windows platforms. I had a quick look on Monday night on IE 6.0 on Windows XP, and it appeared to be OK, but you never know I guess. ๐Ÿ™

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing

Digital Play coverAn interesting book called Digital Play that I noticed in Berkelouw Books on the weekend.

Digital Play is a major study of the video and computer game industry, from its origins as a minor spin-off of the military-industrial complex to its contemporary position as a major global media business as big as Hollywood. It discusses how interactive games affect theoretical debates about the information society, gives an historical account of the rise and fall of companies such as Atari, Nintendo, and Sega and of today’s savage competition between Microsoft and Sony, and offers critical analysis of gender and violence in games, the marketing strategies of game companies, intellectual property and work in the game industry, and the problems and possibilities of on-line games. Digital Play is a book for anyone interested in the cutting edge of virtual culture, or in a digital business that is transforming everyday life.

I must remember to go back and pick it up.

Lost in Translation

Something I got in an email:

Subway sign

These are signs in japanese metro trains, “Priority seats for…” from left to right:

  1. person with injured arm
  2. person holding a child
  3. pregnant woman
  4. person with injured leg

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Since I’m back at work with a nice fast connection again and no desire to do any work, I thought I’d jazz some stuff up around here. Made some changes to the stylesheet to change some colours, added in a horizontal menu bar (thank goodness for Accessify for making things easier), moved the search function to the top right-hand corner, and added in a “listening/reading/playing” section in the left-hand sidebar. Might have to work on that though, since its not looking particularly sexy at the moment.

Some new photos online

Duran Duran at the EnmoreDJ Sleepy at Jupiter JazzKris Kringle pressiesDuran Duran at the Enmore

Its been a while since I put any photos into my gallery, but after much hassling from Patrick and also the fact that I’m back at work away from a dialup connection, I’ve managed to put up some photos. Some photos from the Duran Duran concerts at the Enmore Theatre and Aussie Stadium recently, the Jupiter Jazz party down at Bar Europa (not as good a Tom’s photos though) and some happy snaps of friends down at Bronte for a little Christmas picnic get together.

Update: Just to keep my reputation in check, I didn’t actually attended the Duran Duran concerts. Rozie did. I swear, really, I wasn’t there. ๐Ÿ˜€

MAME 0.78 released

Yesterday, just in time for Christmas, MAME 0.78 was released. Changes to the games are as follows:

New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • 7jigen no Youseitachi
  • Aquarush
  • Ashita no Joe
  • Biofreaks (Prototype)
  • Bonanza Bros
  • Borderline (bootleg)
  • California Speed
  • Cross Pang
  • Crypt Killer
  • Dynamic Country Club
  • Ehrgeiz
  • Fighting Layer
  • Funny Bubble
  • Mahjong Angels
  • Mahjong Campus Hunting
  • Mahjong Yarunara
  • Mr Driller
  • Quiz Rouka Ni Tattenasai
  • Quiz TV Gassyuukoku
  • Super Tank
  • Tekken 3

New Clones supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Chinese Hero (older)
  • Delta Race (omega Race bootleg)
  • Fighting Hawk (World)
  • Lode Runner III – The Golden Labyrinth
  • Pairs V1.2
  • Premier Soccer (EAB)
  • Vs. Atari R.B.I. Baseball (set 2) [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

New Non-Working games / clones supported:

  • Ace Driver
  • Battle Arena Toshinden 2 (USA)
  • Beastorizer
  • Brave Blade
  • Champion Baseball Japan set 2
  • Crackdown
  • Gain Ground
  • Gallop Racer 2 (USA)
  • Judge Dredd (Rev C)
  • Judge Dredd (Rev B)
  • Mr Driller 2
  • NBA Jam Extreme
  • Primal Rage 2
  • Quiz Syukudai wo Wasuremashita
  • Scramble Spirits
  • Star Gladiator
  • Strider 2 (ASIA)
  • Strider 2 (USA)
  • Super Masters Golf
  • Target Balls

Kool Keith

Last week I went with Rozie, BJ, Patrick, Phil and a few other friends to check out Kool Keith. Its been a while since I’ve seen any live hiphop, and I must say that I found it highly enjoyable. Keith was ripping it up earlier on in the set, but later on he seemed to slow down quite a bit. Probably due to the fact that he seemed really, really stoned. Lucky for him, his sidekick Marc Live was there to back him up, which he did extremely well. So well in fact, in my eyes he almost overshadowed Keith.

One of the more amusing parts of the show was the fried chicken break. Packets of fried chicken and juice poppers were throw into the audience.

You can check out more photos here.

Netboot/Netinstalling Mac OS X with a Linux server

At the moment BJ’s old Apple Powerbook G3 laptop seems to have crapped out. It can’t boot off its hard drive (it times out and then eventually boots in read-only mode after a while) and booting off CD media seems to have just as pathetic results. I guess the hard drive, the DVD-ROM drive and possibly the entire ATA bus are ratshit.

Anyway, not being one to bow out of a challenge (or the jibes from my wife that I might have to get a “Mac Guy” to help me out, pffft), I’ve been looking into possibilites of getting this thing going. Being the kind of that I am in the line of work that I’m in, I instantly thought “Aha, network install. How hard can that be?” I do these everyday at work and their easy as all hell.

Well not in the Mac world (well OK, its kinda easy, but involved at the same time). Basically you need a Mac OS X Server (which I don’t have a copy of, nor do I have a spare Mac lying around to setup anyhow). So I thought, someone has to have figured out to setup a Linux box to serve out Netinstall requests of Mac OS clients. Thankfully, I was in luck. It looks like it requires patching ISC DHCP server, and then the request requires pretty standard open source software which comes with pretty much any distro of Linux or *nix.

It looks like there is some binary RPMs for distros that swing that way. If I get the time I guess I’ll compile some Fedora RPMs. Might even stick ’em online if I get the time.

Hopefully I’ll have this all up and running by tomorrow, and I’ll be able to report back some success. If I fail, I’ll guess I’ll probably go for the install off a firewire drive option (Yeah, I know. Its easier than setting up a Netinstall server, but it ain’t as much of a challenge ๐Ÿ™‚ )