121 images from Highfiber’s Christmas charity event, 21 Dec 2005.
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DBAA 2005
23 Dec 2005 -
Favorite Music of 2005
22 Dec 2005FAVORITE ALBUMS
Doves’ Some Cities
The two singles "Black and White Town" and "Sky Starts Falling" by themselves are enough to make this album one of my favorites of the year.The New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema
A.C. Newman sounds great solo, but there’s nothing like the New Pornographers.Maximo Park’s A Certain Trigger
"The Coast is Always Changing" and "Now I’m All Over the Shop" and the coolest Newcastle accent ever.The Decemberists’ Picaresque
I was playing this on my iPod for close to a month before I found something new to obsess about. Colin Meloy is an indie songwriting demon. Great tracks include "This Sporting Life" and "Engine Driver," the former being a jaunty narrative about a college athlete and the latter being a wrenching folk ballad about loss. Meloy’s writing style is elegantly controlled and this whole album is a real charmer.Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary
Like their Canadian compatriots, Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade is a crazy blend of what I like to call everything/nothing music, mixing electronica, rock, pop and like the Fire, some crazy-ass vocalizations. "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts" and "I’ll Believe in Anything" are intense tracks, although they are so far into the "indie/non-mainstream" territory that I can’t really recommend these to anyone but knowledgeable indie fans.FAVORITE SONGS
Apart from the tracks I mentioned above, I did have a number of tracks that I enjoyed more than the album that they came from.
Hot Hot Heat’s "Goodnight Goodnight"
Almost too poppy for my tastes, but "Goodnight Goodnight" is easily the strongest song on Hot Hot Heat’s Elevator album.Kiss Me Deadly’s "Dance 1"
Read my original Kiss Me Deadly review here.Coheed and Cambria’s "The Suffering"
Veda’s "Desire on Repeat"
Original Veda review here. You need to listen to these guys if only for the amazing vocals.Athlete’s "Lay Your Head"
The whole EP is really fantastic, but since it only had 3 songs, I couldn’t list it in the albums section of this post.Switchfoot’s "Golden"
My guilty pleasure.Death Cab for Cutie’s "Marching Bands of Manhattan"
Death Cab’s first mainstream album is very good and apart from "Marching Bands", "What Sarah Said" and "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" are also really strong tracks.Raveonette’s "Love in a Trashcan"
One of my favorite riffs of the year. -
Merry Christmas, from B&B
19 Dec 2005
Help us decorate our Christmas tree, with this interactive greeting card from B&B Multimedia. -
How to Manage Your Server Without Really Managing Your Server
19 Dec 2005My recent debacle with my webhost has forced me to reevaluate just how serious I am about learning the whole network administration aspect of web development, and the truth of the matter is: I’d rather just build websites. Finally admitting that to myself has motivated me to look for other ways to get that oh-so-important position filled, i.e., by having someone do the administration for me.
Now, most people aren’t aware of this, but network administration is a fairly high-paying kind of job. I’ve talked to several administrators over the course of my search and none of them have given me a quote for lower than US$50/hour of hands-on work (approximate amounts; I’m averaging here). Even working at minimum capacity, I would have to shell out about $250-300 a month for a regular administrator to mind my server for me (not full-time, of course, but on-call and able to handle ad hoc requests quickly). The trade-off of course, is that I get to breathe easy. The bugs, crashes, reboots, security patches and other hundred little things that I’d otherwise have to investigate, review and/or fix myself would be completely the admin’s territory.
But the price was simply out of reach, and when I did my initial canvassing in the first half of this year, I had totally given up on the idea of ever having a regular admin on my payroll.
Enter WebHostingTalk.com, a forum for tech professionals in the web-hosting, network-administration or server sales industries. Finding this site was a real milestone for me – right there on those pages were the answers I was looking for.
The first useful link I picked up from them was HyperSpin, a remote monitoring site that checked your server in 1-5 minute increments 24/7/365. If your server didn’t respond after 2 consecutive attempts, it’d fire off an alert to your inbox and cellphone automatically. (The service starts at about US$10/month, and is the most affordable site in its class.)
Of course, that only solves half the problem, because even if I knew my server had crashed, I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if I was, say, at a meeting or on the road, or otherwise away from an internet-connected PC.
That’s where PlatinumServerManagement comes in. Once they detect that your server has failed, they’ll issue a manual-reboot request to your host (or reboot your machine themselves if they have access to it). And that’s not even the best part. PSM offers the full server-management package – software installation, optimization, hardening and unlimited administration time, all for the exceedingly affordable US$30/month.
I signed up with both HyperSpin and PlatinumServerManagement just as soon as I finished reading their marketing materials, and I actually got to see them in action earlier today when my server crashed at around 1:30 in the afternoon. All of the sites were unreachable and I couldn’t logon to my control-panel to attempt a software reboot. Within about 2 minutes, my phone buzzed; the failure had triggered HyperSpin’s alert SMS. Within 5 minutes, I had received an email notice from PSM telling me that they were requesting a manual-reboot from my host. And after about 15 minutes, the server was back online, a total of about 22 minutes downtime.
Now, I know that’s not the quickest reboot ever accomplished, but it makes me feel good to know that it all happened without my lifting a finger to initiate any of it. And for a total monthly cost of $40, you just can’t beat service like that.
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One-Handed Keyboard
15 Dec 2005![frogusb-fullview[1].jpg](/img/pics/frogusb-fullview[1].jpg "frogusb-fullview[1].jpg")
Apart from the quirky color scheme, the FrogPad is the human-interface device that I’ve been waiting for! It’s inspired by chording keyboards like the CyKey or the Twiddler but this looks like a much more "designed" product than those other offerings. My dream, you see, is to have one of these in my jacket pocket and be able to type without people knowing that I’m doing it, for example, when I’m interviewing clients or dealing with suppliers. Supposedly you can connect these to a PDA, phone or a regular USB-enabled computer, but its price range is a bit prohibitive. Wonder if anyone out there will be kind enough to get me one of these for Christmas hehehe.
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Some Kinda Monkey: Thoughts on King Kong
15 Dec 2005
I was fortunate enough to catch Peter Jackson’s remake of the seminal monster movie King Kong last Tuesday but had completely forgotten to write out some thoughts on it until now. Hopefully, enough of you will already have seen it so that I can review it without running into any spoiler traps.I’ve read a couple of online reviews griping about the monstrous length of this movie, and saying how it needed to shed about 30 minutes of running time in order to tighten it up, and I tend to agree. King Kong is a very long movie. At 3 hours 20 minutes, it’s even longer than Deer Hunter for goodness sake.
(And indeed, there is one subplot that really needed to be cut, i.e., that of Jamie Bell, the newbie sailor, who I thought was going to end up doing something important, but mostly just stood around shooting at bugs and things. His back-story alone accounted for a good 15 minutes.)
What’s interesting though is that I have a feeling the extended version of this movie is going to be an obscene double-DVD affair. There’s one scene shown briefly in the trailer that you never see anywhere in the movie, and I’m sure that it’s part of a longer sequence:
And it also looks like there’s a missing sequence right after the scene with Jack and Ann riding a giant bat into the river. The next time we see them, they’re running through the jungle again, so I guess they had to cut it for length.
On the whole though, King Kong was a wonderful adventure film, probably the best one I’ve seen since Jurassic Park. (Of course, at a svelte 2 hours, Jurassic Park was a tighter film by far.) Naomi Watts is absolutely stunning as Ann Darrow, and Adrien Brody and Jack Black are outstanding in their respective roles. Andy Serkis, in the dual roles of Lumpy the Cook and King Kong himself, turns in a great performance as well, but I think the real heroes of this production are the WETA Digital guys. These guys have created some of the most astounding special effects sequences ever committed to film: the brontosaurus stampede, the T-Rex fight and the bug invasion are the high points of this movie.
And of course, there’s the brilliant Peter Jackson, who started his career with B-grade indie horrors like Bad Taste and Brain Dead, and now earns something like $35 million dollars for a year’s work. (His next project, slated for 2007, is a movie based on Alice Siebold’s The Lovely Bones, which my friend mocca absolutely loves and will probably cry rivers at in the theater.)
Catch this film now, if you haven’t already. You won’t see a more extravagant production for a long time to come.
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Hold Em is the New Tennis (Addendum)
15 Dec 2005Regarding yesterday’s post about that US$60M poker tournament in Melbourne next year — I seem to have misunderstood exactly how the televised tournament will work. According to Gambling Magazine:
The players will have to ante-up $10m to buy into the match, due to be televised around the world through the Fox Sports Network in the United States and other networks in Europe and Asia, Crown chief operating officer Richard Longhurst said.
I had to re-read that sentence several times before I believed it. It certainly whittles down the list of players who could possibly join, considering that even Phil Helmuth himself, who has won 9 WSOP bracelets during his career, has earned less than US$4 million total. 2004’s world champion Greg Raymer has total lifetime earnings amounting to a bit more than US$5 million, and this year’s Joseph Hachem has US$7.5 million. Neither of the two have the same amount of experience as Helmuth though, and if either of them were at a table with him, they’d be stomped flat.
But sweet jesus, is this for real? I mean, if we were just talking straight-up odds, ponying up $10m for a 5:1 shot at $60m is pretty favorable, but only if you totally ignore the fact that that money is enough to totally bankrupt any of those 5 inevitable losers.
Crazy, I tell you.
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Google > Opera ?
14 Dec 2005Google is going to acquire Opera. That’s right, the wonderful and powerful Opera browser from Norway (Opera Software ASA to be precise) might become Google’s latest acquisition.
In addition to offering a traditional web browser, Opera also plays very hard in the mobile browser space. Might the acquisition be Google’s holiday present to itself?
Could the much-anticipated GBrowser in fact simply be a rebranded Opera? I seriously doubt it. That is, if Google really were set to acquire Opera, they would probably need to invest a ton of money into filling in some of its gaping holes.
The "gaping hole" that is foremost in my mind is that Opera doesn’t work with the HTML editor in Google’s Blogger.com, because it’s never supported the "Editable HTML" functionality that Microsoft proferred with IE5. (The "Editable HTML" functionality I’m talking about allows textareas to function like a mini word-processing software, complete with buttons for Bold, Italics, Underline, font sizes and colors, and practically any other formatting option the programmer can bring to life. Firefox chose to support it, simply because it’s super-cool.) Methinks that Opera’s refusal to adhere to any thing that is non-standard, regardless of how useful that thing is, will eventually end up biting them in the ass. If it hasn’t already, that is.
That said, there are some very compelling reasons for Google to want to acquire Opera as well. For one thing, it’s a major player in the mobile browsing space, home media and vertical application markets. And it’s the only browser I know of that supports voice commands and "mouse gestures" (a really elegant set of UI enhancements that let you flick your mouse left and right to go back and forward, respectively, plus tons of other common browser commands).
Time will tell, I suppose.
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Alexa for Everyone
13 Dec 2005Those folks at Amazon just came up with the novel idea of opening up the entire Alexa index to the public. Yeah, the entire 100 terabyte index. To anybody. The new service is outlined here, but in a nutshell, it’ll allow you to build your own engines on top of Alexa, hosted on their machines and running on their network.
How is it different from Google’s site-specific search field? Well, the Alexa service allows you to program very specific search solutions. For example, say you wanted to create a website that specializes in logo-comparison. With Alexa, you could create an image search-pattern that identifies only GIFs or PNGs smaller than 150 x 150 and weighing between 5kb and 50kb. (More examples here.)
The pricing structure for the use of this bleeding-edge web service is an interesting bit of marketing. It starts at $1, but I’d say that for a medium-sized website with a decent amount of traffic, you’d probably be looking at costs of about a thousand dollars per month. The reason is that what you’re essentially doing is creating your own (specific) snapshots of Alexa’s database, and crawling those with a spider that you define. You’re charged separately for CPU time, number of searches run, bandwidth usage and file storage, so it’s not hard to see your costs inflating considerably. Of course, if your site is tiny, you’ll be billed in a fairly commensurate fashion, so it’s not a bad way for an enthusiast to practice his skillz either.
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Hold Em is the New Tennis
13 Dec 2005LOS ANGELES (AP) - Six players will compete in a winner-take-all $60 million US televised poker tournament next summer.
Fox Sports Net and Mansionpoker.net reached agreement on a three-year deal Monday, with the pots growing to $75 million in 2007 and $100 million in 2008 for the one-day competitions at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia.
![phil-Ivey[1].jpg](/img/pics/phil-Ivey[1].jpg "phil-Ivey[1].jpg")
Oddly-enough, the "world’s biggest payday" will be an invitational-style tournament, with barely enough players to make a full table. This has all the makings of an over-the-top Hollywoodized (or in this case, Fox-ized) production to me, although that won’t keep me from watching like the rest of the enrapt masses.The only player mentioned in the article is Phil Ivey (affectionately known as the Tiger Woods of poker … or i really should say, Tiger Woods is the Phil Ivey of golf). I’d just be guessing about the rest of the table but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Phil Helmuth will be there as well. The trouble with these heavily-covered events is that usually the media will dictate which players will be invited to play simply based on their respective images, and not necessarily their playing ability. So we’d probably have Jennifer Harman (so they won’t say poker is a man’s game), maybe Scotty Nguyen/Johnny Chan (so they won’t say poker is a white man’s game), maybe Doyle Brunson (so they won’t say poker is a young man’s game), and maybe Phil Laak (so they won’t say poker is a smart man’s game).
I’d love to get players like Mike Matusow, Chris Ferguson or Allen Cunningham in there, because I know they’d make for a really interesting game, but with only six seats and so many demographics to represent, these guys’d probably be second-choice alternates at best.
