I saw Resident Evil: Extinction today. Unlike some other people I know I really did enjoy the first movie in the installment. The acting wasn’t bad for the genre and the story and setting was well developed. Apocalypse, the second one, was a travesty not much unlike most sequels these days. Milla Jovovich made a barely passable job at acting and the story didn’t really encourage anyone to make an effort to begin with. I did not have high expectations when I heard there was going to be a third one.

My first impression was that this was going to be better than Apocalypse and after having watched the entire movie the final decision was that yes, it is slightly better. What put the entire movie down was that it is as if someone took Day of the Dead and cross pollinated it with Land of the Dead only changing minuscule details. Now both of these movies were great in their own way but putting them together and neither adding nor subtracting virtually anything does not make another great movie.

Extinction had potential and it is not as if they did not have the means to have made something more out of it, they simply didn’t do it. If you haven’t seen Day of the Dead and/or Land of the Dead I recommend you see them first. If you have watched every other decent movie in the Zombie genre out there give Extinction a go. It’s watchable and mildly entertaining if you are looking to kill an hour and a half but it will leave you with a feeling of sadness left inside.

At the last MöLUG meeting I was recommended the talk given at TED by Richard Dawkins on atheism. I like his “Selfish Gene Theory” so naturally I’m interested in any other theories he can put forward. This talk was a bit on the short side and a bit basic but still quite amusing.

If you do not believe in atheism you probably won’t find this very interesting.

Link in case you cannot see the embedded object or simply want to download the movie.

FlashBlock

As you might have experienced if you’ve visited my site recently it has become quite unresponsive. It appears that MySQL doesn’t run very well on the UltraSPARC. I’ve tried increasing it’s memory footprint and put the entire database on a 4-disk SCSI RAID5 but to no avail.

Therefore I’m looking for a blogging engine, preferably similar to WordPress in functionality, that does not depend on MySQL. I’m not sure what database backend would be appropriate but something that is much more lightweight than MySQL should do, like SQLite or Berkley DB. I’d like a system that will handle blogging, content uploads (images, tarballs etc), RSS and preferably something which will allow me to create simple pages where I can place downloads and textual content.

Although static HTML would accomplish all this something along the lines of WordPress with a WYSIWYG editor and what not is preferable.

If you know how to optimize MySQL, if that is even possible, let me know.

I installed Google Analytics as I’ve heard some good things about it. If I don’t like it after a few days I’ll simply remove it. In the meantime, if you do not want to be tracked by Google simply reject all cookies from my domain.

During the second day of hack-a-ton Mikael and me went out to Lunch and while heading back we found our way to an Asian store where we found a couple of rather interesting beverages. Both came complete with refreshing coconut shavings. I can’t help but feel slightly violated after having guzzled down these vile mixtures.

Finally back up again!

Not only did I get my blog up again thanks to an awesome Sun Enterprise 250 donated by a friend I also, finally, got my Gentoo system back into a usable state. It feels really good to be back in Fluxbox after having been away for more than two years living in evil desktop land.

Using Internet Explorer to browse the web is like walking through an art gallery with shades on, utterly disrespectful to the artists behind the works on display.

Everyone that knows me know about the troubles I’ve had with my HP Pavilion zv6148EA laptop and the built-in ATI XPRESS 200M GPU. The chipset has 128MB dedicated RAM but you can configure it to use up to 128MB of system RAM for a total of 256MB RAM. The first issue with this scheme is that there is a problem with either the GPU, the BIOS or the Video BIOS because the device always reports that it has 256MB RAM. The HP-branded ATI drivers that came with the Windows install seems to handle this just fine but when you use ATIs drivers on Linux (you can’t use the official ATI drivers on Windows as they refuse to install) the machine will deadlock unless you assign the GPU 128MB of system RAM so it actually totals 256MB. My assumption here being that HP modified ATIs drivers to properly detect the actual amount of RAM rather than fixing this damn bug properly. I have no use whatsoever for 256MB of video RAM so throwing away 128MB of valuable system RAM sucks big time.
I recently found this blog created by someone with the exact same problem as me which not only confirmed some of my fears but also asserts that this is not an ATI driver problem but rather a video BIOS bug.

I received this hilarious spam at work the other day. When you have to resort to spam to sell railroad tracks you are clearly not in the right business. At first I thought there would be a trojan or something like that embedded in the e-mail and that the body was just filler but I couldn’t find anything suspicious in the mail, well, except for the message itself that is.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. ^^

Dear Sir/Madam,

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Hotmail sur i-mode™ : envoyez et recevez des e-mails depuis votre téléphone portable !

Figures it went through one of microsoft’s services. Only their users could be this .. informed ..

I admit the title sounds a bit gloom and I sincerely hope that it is an exaggeration. So what is this all about? Well, I’m moving tomorrow and I’m moving quite far this time, 300 kilometers give or take, and to top it all off I’m not going to have (broadband) Internet access right away. To make things worse it is mostly out of my hands to arrange a connection and the person in charge does not seem to realize the importance of having it. If the gods are smiling on me I’ll be back in a week or two, if not, then it might take quite a bit longer.

On a small side note, I have a policy that if I link to a planet in my blogroll and I have a user listed there which is also available on the planet I will only keep the link to the planet. I cleaned out my list recently due to this policy so if you noticed that I no longer link to you even though I used to, don’t despair, I still love you!