Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Everything is finally lining up now, as I’m pulling into the final stretch of actually getting Chie to Canada. We’ve got the apartment booked (in the same building as before) for May 1st, so I’m moving in on Sunday. She’s finished her job today (congrats!), and on the 20th my family will all travel there for the wedding. I’ll come back with them on the 30th, and Chie will be here at the start of June - at which time the folks’ll be bringing my stuff down from Iron Bridge.

So I’m just saying everything is working out :-)

In an effort to whip people into a frenzy over the upcoming “Longhorn” operating system, Microsoft:

1. Gives bloggers a sneak peak at the software
2. Finds lots of negative reactions, many of which lambaste the non-existant GUI overhaul
3. Sends cease-and-desist letters all over the place, demanding that the screenshots are taken down

It’s like they’re trying to one-up Apple’s horrible P.R. moves.

The entire first episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series is available to watch on SciFi.com. (Eventually I’ll get back to writing multiple sentences - maybe even paragraphs!)

The Nintendo D.S. just got a hell of a lot cooler.

Two miscellaneous things tonight. First is I’m done playing World of Warcraft. Technically, I decided to quit and all that Friday night - just ask James, he’s my witness! I’ll probably write a bunch about that eventually, but not tonight.

The other thing is the Insipid bookmark manager got a whole new look thanks to the hard work of Thom-o. And the source code is finally hosted on Savannah. Good times.

You know, you pay for your cable and you still have advertisements. And product placement. You pay huge prices for movies at the theater, and you have lots of advertisments and product placement. Magazines, same. Cable will run at least what, 25 dollars a month? A movie is about 15 (or maybe 10 at Famous Players now). A videogame in Canada is almost always over sixty dollars. So if you ask me, this crosses the fucking line:

I guess this is to make up for all the money that Ubisoft is losing with their budget titles that only sell a few thousand copies. Oh wait…

(And yes I caught the irony of showing that image.)

Derek joins the club of people who have been F’d in the A by both Bell Canada and Rogers. On the same note, you can type in Google the phrase “Bell Mobility” plus the foul word of your choosing (I tried it with fuck, and sucks) and you’ll get my site as the first hit. Huzzah!

In a joint effort, Microsoft Canada and the RCMP built a piece of software to ferret out child pornographers. It’s not open source software; why would it be? You would just naturally assume that it isn’t. Nowhere does Microsoft call it open source, or the RCMP for that matter… So why do news sources that supposedly “get” technology like Wired and Slashdot calling it open source? Maybe I missed something.

Maybe it’s only supposed to find child pornographers who write open source software.

Update: I e-mailed Slashdot, Wired and now the Associated Press about the bogus information; Slashdot changed the title of their story to reflect that it’s not open source about five minutes after I wrote them. Very nice. Wired sent me a simple message telling me that they don’t correct wire stories (which is I guess no surprise).

A science fiction movie that blows your mind is a rare thing, but Primer did exactly that. I read about it on a few science fiction blogs (like Coalescent on Livejournal) and it was held pretty high. My expectations were met and exceeded. It’s a time travel movie, and uh… yeah. I can’t really explain it more without really spoiling anything except that it was made for about seven fifty grand. I highly recommend it. A+++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN.

“If a user is tricked (into going) to a site carrying malicious code, they can become infected by just surfing across a banner ad.” - guess which pieces of software that quotation’s about.