cygweb

My dad and I went to see the second Spider-Man movie over the weekend, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it's safe to say this film has probably the richest story of any of the genre movies to date. The lack of a need to tell the "origin" story freed the movie up to explore Peter and Mary Jane's relationship. It also gave it time to really build up the character of Otto Octavius before the accident that gives him his mechanical arms (although it could have done even more, but that's OK). Tortured soul Harry Osbourne and Aunt May are also in the movie quite a bit.

I think the movie went a little over the top in playing up the whole "Peter is screwed" angle, where he can't even grab an hors d'oeuvres at a party without somesone snatching up the last one on the tray. But it pays off in the end, when he makes some huge decisions about his life.

The effects in the movie were top-notch. Doc Ock's arms were characters themselves, and the action scenes were, dare I say it, even more entertaining than the first movie.

One of my favorite scenes is the subway car one. Very cool.

Folks, some of the story decisions made at the end were surprising, but great. They're setting things up perfectly for a very interesting SM3.

Two thumbs up. Go see this thing in the theaters, and buy the DVD the first day it comes out. It's that good.

My dad has been a Tour de France fan as far back as I can remember, and it's rubbing off on me this year. After watching some of the coverage of the first few stages on OLN while visiting my parents this weekend, I'm now checking the web for updates.

Lance Armstrong's USPS team won today's team time trial and he's now wearing the yellow jersey. Cool.

It looks like the Dominator will be the Senators' lead goalie next season. I think he's great, but after my experience with him in our fantasy league last season (when I picked him in the first round) I don't know that he'll be an '04 Thunderbolt.

My first "real" fantasy hockey season really did a great job of helping me learn the league and appreciate the games I saw more than before. I just hope that next season isn't shortened or wiped out by a strike.

I've been trying to get linked up with Technorati off and on for a few weeks now. It finally worked today. I had previously given it "http://alexharden.org/blog/" and "http://alexharden.org/" in attempts that fizzled out. No syntax or examples are given in the instructions (at least not the ones that I read). Apparently the URL they want should terminate in a document name: "http://alexharden.org/blog/index.html" worked.

Via HydrogenAudio: I've always admired Roberto Amorim's listening tests that compare the quality of various audio codecs. I've neglected to submit results in many of his previous tests, but I'm going to try to participate in his current 32kbps test.

Over the years I've tried streaming MP3 and Vorbis at low bitrates, sometimes reducing the samplerate of the source to make it more more compressible. I've always been sensitive to that; currently I stream ICYG at 44.1KHz stereo Vorbis Quality 0, which is quite efficient (averaging 64kbps or less) and sounds OK to me for what it is. I want to participate in the listening test to see how development is going in the low-bitrate world, and to see how Vorbis compares to the other players. I probably won't change my streaming specs as a result, though. We'll see.

I encourage any of you reading this to participate, as more opinions will increase the validity of the test.

Update: Darn. With all the holiday activity I must have missed the original announcement. The testing period is scheduled to end today. I may not have time to take it.

Update 2: I took the entire test (kind of quickly, but I took it) and submitted my results. Boy, 32kbps can make a lot of stuff sound like crap. ;)

I've just upgraded the site from MT3.0D to MT3.01D. No complications.

Thanks, 6A.

Via Slashdot: Anandtech has an article that compares the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Fedora Core 2, and SuSE 9.1 on an Athlon 64 PC config. It's an OK read, but a little dissappointing if you're looking to move to 64-bit for gaming or multimedia. I have to say that FC2 on the Opteron Server I'm testing is quite compatible, but I haven't really benchmarked it against anything else. If you're looking to put together a new Linux server, I think an AMD64 platform is probably the best current option.

Via Exchange Security: Mozilla Vulnerability Timeline. Impressive.

Paul (Robichaux, who publishes the Exchange Security blog) criticizes Mozilla on a few things, such as not having "a robust system for notifying people of updates and, optionally, pushing them to affected machines." I'm running Mozilla FireFox, and even after upgrading to 0.9.2, I have a red square in the bottom-right of the browser that says critical updates are available. When I went up to Mozilla.org to download the 0.9.2 package, I experienced no delays and the setup was smooth. And this is for free software that's technically in beta, but embraces standards better than IE.

I think one of the benefits of documenting the patching of this vulnerability is to show a counterpoint to the "security through obscurity" that Microsoft relies on in many instances in the time before they've published a security patch.

We're going on a week-long trip to Colorado in a few days, so I wanted to pop some fresh mixes on MD. Here's the first one:

• don\music\Marillion\Marillion - Genie.mp3
• scotbuff\music\Iced Earth\Declaration Day.mp3
• don\music\Opeth\Opeth - Death Whispered A Lullaby.mp3
• scotbuff\music\Shadows Fall\Welcome To The Machine.mp3
• scotbuff\music\Ryan Adams\04-Wish You Were Here.mp3
• don\music\Velvet Revolver\Velvet Revolver - Slither.mp3
• scotbuff\music\Ben Harper\03-Diamonds on the Inside.mp3
• alex\music\Gist\Gist -08- Inactivity.ogg
• alex\music\Blackfield\2004-Blackfield\Blackfield - Pain.mp3
• alex\music\JFJ Band\The Apartment (2003)\JFJ Band -02- Sold Me Out.ogg
• don\music\Grey Eye Glances\Grey Eye Glances - Halfway Back.mp3
• don\music\801\801 - Diamond Head.mp3
• scotbuff\music\John Hiatt\02-Perfectly Good Guitar.mp3
• don\music\Whitesnake\Whitesnake - Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City.mp3
• alex\music\David Bowie\David Bowie - Let's Dance.mp3

Update: I just noticed I didn't include any of Brian's tracks. There are definitely a few I'll include in Trip Mix 2.

HD-DVD Specs To Include Microsoft Codec

Via Slashdot: Gates Says DVD Will Be Obsolete In 10 Years

Are Gates' statements self-serving or self-effacing? Can't figure that out.

We had quite a storm here today and my cable modem is down. ICYG is offline for a while. I may have problems with my router as well. :( Wish me luck!

• scotbuff\music\Ryan Adams\06-Luminol.mp3
• citrus\music\Joe Bergamini\05. Cyberspace.ogg
• citrus\music\John Floy\the_truth_is_alive.mp3
• don\music\Fish\Fish - Shadowplay.mp3
• citrus\music\A Perfect Circle\A Perfect Circle - Gravity.mp3
• scotbuff\music\Kiss My Ass\01-Lenny Kravitz - Deuce.mp3
• don\music\Phish\Phish - Billy Breathes.mp3
• citrus\music\Jeff Beck\01. Guitar Shop.ogg
• dziner\music\TheShins\04 04 Young Pilgrams.mp3
• don\music\Whitesnake\Whitesnake - Here I Go Again.mp3
• citrus\music\Eric Johnson\04. High Landrons.ogg
• scotbuff\music\The Von Bondies\06-Mairead.mp3
• don\music\Velvet Revolver\Velvet Revolver - Headspace.mp3
• scotbuff\music\Iced Earth\High Water Mark.mp3

I think I'm set for the trip...

It turns out the storm produced a tornado that touched down about 13 miles east of us in Campbelltown; it's actually very close to where Paul's family lived. In fact, we usually drove through a corner of Campbelltown to get to their house.

Here's some news stories about the storm:

• Storm slams midstate, levels homes in Lebanon County
• Residents gather, regroup after storm

After signing up at Gmail4Troops.com a few weeks ago, I finally received three requests for accounts. I've sent them invitations, thanking them for their service to our country.

I still have a few invitations; time to go donate some more to the cause...

On a lark, I performed this search. Reassuring, seeing as how my "cygnus" handle (which I've been using since '89) isn't exactly unique. Thanks to all you other A. Hardens for refraining from using the nick. ;)

It's being reported that George Eads ("Nick Stokes") and Jorja Fox ("Sara Sidle") have been fired from CSI. Disappointing. I like all of the main CSI characters.

The article also mentions the other CSI flavors. I'm not a fan of CSI: Miami (besides, I watch MNF live, thank you), but I plan to check out the new CSI: NY.

I had personal web pages before I formally "blogged", but Monday will make it two years that I've been blogging in this fashion. Here's my first entry. At that time, I was using Squishdot on Zope.

We're heading out for a week's vacation in Colorado a little later today. It's always good to unplug and unwind. Have a good week.

We're back from our trip to Colorado Springs. We had a great week there; we finally made it to the top of Pikes Peak (by car, not bighorn sheep). We also visited the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (should "Giraffe" be inserted in the name? -- wait'll you see the pics) and The Broadmoor for the first time. (This was our third trip out there.)

More info and pictures to come. We had a lot of fun out there, but it's good to be back.

I'm still dealing with the fallout from the electrical storms two weeks ago which I believe caused problems with some of my network gear. When I got home Saturday, my Internet connection wasn't up, and it took a power-cycle of the cable modem to get my router (which lost two of its switch ports in the storm) to re-connect. So I still don't know if the cable modem or router is to blame for the problems.

I bought a new BEFSR41 router (same model I have now, but a newer revision) today and that will go into use tonight. If I continue to have connectivity problems, I'll suspect the modem is flakey and will have to decide whether to try to get Comcast to replace it or just buy a new one (which would save us $3/month once I return Comcast's modem to them). I haven't looked very hard at a new cable modem yet, but I think a compatible one can be had for about $60. Since I don't plan on bailing from Comcast's service any time soon, a return-on-investment 20 months from now isn't a bad prospect. However, I wish Comcast would get off their duffs and begin supporting the cable modem included in their Motorola set-top boxes. That would solve my problem and prevent me from spending money I don't need to.

I'm putting together a DVD-R that implements this synchronicity. I'd heard about it before, and may have even tried it back in my college days (Phil?). This is what DeCSS was really meant for. ;)

Thanks to my co-worker Roger for lending me the Oz source DVD. I'm sourcing the audio from my 20th anniversary copy of DSOTM.

More inspiring speeches were given at night 2 of the Democratic Convention. Particularly moving to me is Barack Obama's.

I have yet to read the ratified party platform, but I'm definitely voting for Kerry this year because I'm keenly interested in removing our current "war president" out of office.

Over the last month I've noticed that Yahoo! News has added RSS feeds for some of their categories' subcategories. Check out their main RSS page.

One reason I'm posting about this now is that they just recently diversified their sports-related feeds, potentially making the feeds I've been generating through hourly page-scrapes of Yahoo's news pages obsolete, which is fine with me! I'd encourage anyone grabbing my NFL or NHL feeds (you know who you are) to switch over the appropriate Yahoo feeds and see how they work for you.

Of course I had to quote this because of the Tap reference:

Is it difficult as an entertainer to be involved in politics? And if George Bush were a member of Spinal Tap, which one would he be? -- Oliver J., Raleigh, NC

Not if you have real conviction about wanting to play a role in moving an agenda forward. And I don't think George Bush has the intelligence to be a member of Spinal Tap -- because we doubt seriously whether he can count to 11.

I've subscribed to NeoWin's RSS feed for some time; up until today it contained links to the articles' web pages. Today they started putting full content in the feed, which is great. However, what's not so great is the 160x205-pixel GIF they've embedded in the feed. It makes the title bar of each entry HUGE when you look at article contents in SharpReader. I've emailed one of the NeoWin admins to see if there are plans to embed a smaller logo in the feed.

Via Lessig Blog: One of the substantial noninfringing uses of Bittorrent is to find out more about the INDUCE Act. A Torrent of digital video of congressional hearings regarding the Act is available here. Once I have it downloaded I'll be checking it out.

I previously blogged about the INDUCE Act.

Arnie now has his own stamp -- in his native Austria.

Happy 57th Birthday to the Govenator.

Having been a Comcast Digital Cable customer for over a year now, I know the power of their addressable set-top boxes. Individual channels are either enabled or disabled, according to my subscribed services, and pay-per-view is achieved without calling someone. One of the things that bugs me is that to get some of the analog cable channels I'd actually watch (ESPN2, SpikeTV, TNT, etc.) I'd have to purchase the Standard Analog tier of service for something like $30 a month.

This Wired article speaks of the FCC grilling the cable companies as to why they don't offer subscribers the ability to subscribe to channels of their choice. It's a good read, but it says the cable companies cite advertising returns as a major reason for not wanting to unbundle channels. I'd have to think there are huge technical reasons as well. I'm not talking about the bitflipper (person or computer system) that would have to keep track of what channels I'm currently subscribed to and paying for. I'm talking about the fact that the analog portion of cable is still the main draw of the service, and until the channels served through analog are migrated to digital, the dream of "a la carte" cable probably won't come to pass. The article mentions signal traps for analog channels that could be installed at customer locations, but I agree with the industry that that's not a feasible solution.

Getting analog content moved to digital is going to be a huge hurdle because of the huge installed base of (analog-)cable-ready TVs. The industry may have to force another phase of mandatory set-top boxes to achieve their digital migration. Remember the late-70's/early-80's where you had the plastic cable box with the sliding channel-changer? Those days may come again, but current technology should allow a relatively feature-rich mandatory STB.

It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds. Note that this issue is (as far as I can tell) currently completely unrelated to the FCC's initiative to move analog broadcasters and over-the-air television receivers to digital.