Ninjamurai

Superb video, really it is one of the best I’ve seen, set to Dagger and Zidane from Final Fantasy and the music of Vanessa Carlton’s Home.

Some of the best lyrics ever combine with awesome visuals to form one of the nicest videos I have seen yet. Check it out, please.

Some people live in a house on the hill
And wish they were some place else
There’s nobody there
When the evening is still
Secrets with no one to tell

Some I have known have a ship where they sleep with sounds of rocks on the coast
They sail over oceans five fathoms deep
But can’t find what they want the most

Even now when I’m alone
I’ve always known with you
I am home

Some live in towns
Cardboard shack on concrete
All bluster and bustling life
They search for the color they can never quite see
Cause it’s all white on white

Even now when I’m alone
I’ve always known with you
I am home

For me it’s a glance and the smile on your face the touch of your hands,
And an honest embrace
For where I lay it’s you I keep,
This changing world I fall asleep
With you all I know is I’m coming home,

Coming home

Tags: Dagger, Final Fantasy, Home, Kidane

One of the great melodies from this wonderful game. If you have never heard this song play it.

It’s short and beautiful–seriously beautiful.

Tags: Final Fantasy 9, Song of Memory

Do not install the newest Adobe Flash Player 10 unless you know you can uninstall it if things go wrong. Apparently there have been issues on top of issues with this release and the biggest of all is it can cause full lock ups on computers possibly causing a reboot.

I ran into this yesterday after installing an update to Safari and then Adobe Flash 10. YouTube would work, but Fancast, Hulu, SciFi and more would quite literally lock the browser up hard.

This was the first “Windows” like issue I have had on Mac OS X in 4 years. Things just always work. An app might crash here and there, but never, never are there “Windows” type problems with random slow downs and misconfigurations or OS lockups. Never. Truth.

So, I did some debugging and noticed it was happening in Firefox 3 also. Ah ha! Not the browser or OS at all, but probably a plugin. OK. We can fix this. Long story short, tested, checked and solved by uninstalling Adobe Flash 10 and reinstalling Adobe Flash 9.

I normally would not say anything to you folks about this, but apparently this is not isolated and is actually quite a big issue. Checking just a few boards and looking at some stuff I can from Apple, shows clearly this is widespread. I even called one of my buds on the IE team and they also are having a ton of reports of lock ups and full system hangs.

To make matters worse, if you don’t have a backup of Adobe Flash 9 you might have problems getting it from Adobe or others. One thing is for sure, make certain you uninstall Flash 10 before you go to Adobe to try and download Flash 9.

To fix this lock up issue follow these instructions and the links provided.

1. Get the uninstaller for Adobe Flash 10 and check out the knowledge base article for detailed instructions by system type. You must use Adobe’s uninstaller or it probably will not work.

2. Download Adobe Flash 9 and install it.

As with all bugs, you may not be affected. After this happened I got curious and spent about 2 hours testing other machines. Hey, I don’t have to do this kind of thing usually and it was the first issue in over 4 years so, what the hay.

I managed to reproduce the effect of hanging or freezing on 4 out of 4 computers and on Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer on all 4 machines. That is 12 reproductions with 100% reproducibility on multiple, different operating systems and hardware.

1. My OS X Leopard MacBook Air
2. My OS X Leopard MacBook Pro
3. My Vista Ultimate MacBook Pro
4. My Windows XP Sony Vaio

 So for the record every machine I have is affected the same. Well, almost the same, Windows usually crashes IE or Firefox with the problem but a couple times it froze so bad I had to reboot. Everything stopped responding. OS X never stopped responding. 

Oh and one more thing, YouTube does not seem to show this behavior on any machine. The only thing I found with YouTube is it was a bit slower on Vista than normal. Fancast and SciFi were 100% repeatable.

Now you see why this is so serious. I have to watch those Galactica webisodes, The Face of the Enemy.

Well, I think I rode that horse about as far as I could. Remember, you may not have a problem. However, if I can reproduce something 100% on 4 different computers running different operating systems on all 3 browser on each I figured it would be best to post some instructions on how to repair the problem.

Tags: Adobe, Apple, Bug, Flash, Freeze, install, Lock, Lockup, Microsoft, Uninstall

This is a video, by me, of The Doctor and Rose Tyler set to I Know You By Heart sung by Eva Cassidy. 

My first video in about 3 years actually and I think it turned out pretty well.

I hope you like it and especially enjoy one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded.

Tags: Doctor Who, I Know You By Heart, Rose, Rose Tyler, The Doctor

A great video of Ryoko and Tenchi set to the A-Teen’s wonderful song, Around the Corner of Your Eye.

I normally don’t post videos twice here, but this one is so right on the mark hitting the relationship of the two lovers right on the money. It is wonderful.

Tags: Ryoko, Tenchi, Tenchi Muyo

The greatest fireworks show of all time, Sydney 2009. This is just awe inspiring.

Make sure to click the video to see the high res version and of course the second part to this masterpiece. I am just speechless at this.

Australians, the Masters of pyrotechnic technology.

Tags: fireworks, Sydney

I really, really like ASP.Net MVC. It is quite the nice framework and the people working on it are trying very  hard to make it simple to use. 

However, I believe, truly, that it is a great example of Microsoft’s total and complete misunderstanding and failure to implement Rails like web development. As each new thing comes out or is added, more often than not the system gets more complex not less and more confusing not more understandable.

I mean, seriously, it took them over a year to figure out you don’t need code-behind for aspx pages in the view section. This does not bode well. Again, fundamental, complete and absolute misunderstanding of modern fast web development.

So, sadly, while I had hoped it would be something nicer than Rails, instead it appears it is something to save a bit of code, say they do MVC/MVP, be with the “cool” kids, but in the end it will be just a convoluted as ASP.Net and .Net is in general.

I know people are really excited, as am I, but boy talk about wishing it was more than it actually is.

Still it will rock and it will be used and I like it!

Tags: ASP.Net MVC, Microsoft, Rails

Oh man, I am pretty excited as tonight will be having my first try of Glenlivet XXV. 

Glenlivet's XXV - A New Premium Single Malt

This is Glenlivet’s new premium scotch and it is really, really good, or so I hear. It has been pretty soundly recommended by all the usual suspects so I am on board with trying it out.

Price is a bit too rich for my blood for use as a my normal scotch. But, that’s what Glenlivet 12 is for. 

Here are a couple reviews of the new Glenlivet XXV:

Maltadvocate

Drinkhacker

So, as tonight is, heck, it’s already New Year’s Day in Australia and elsewhere,

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Tags: Glenlivet XXV, scotch

As I start getting my stuff together for the short Spotlight series I am planning, I thought I would start it off with one of the “must have” programs I use to manage Spotlight.

It is called Spotless and it is made by FixAMac Software.

Spotless allows manual control of Spotlight indexing up to and including deleting the current indexes and rebuilding them. I use Spotless mainly for that task. I like to delete and rebuild my master index about once every two months or so. No real good reason why other than just preventative maintenance so the indexes don’t get messed up.

I consider Spotless one of the few programs I do not want to live without.

I will get the first couple articles in the informational series up by the end of this week.

Tags: FixAMac, Spotless, Spotlight

Here’s some nostalgia and geek cred all in one

This is the Thunderbolt 1000T and a test of attack mode signaling.

So? You may ask.

Well, this is one of the nicest sounding alert sirens you will ever hear. Sadly, they are going away since they are older and require a lot of maintenance. The two tone minor third notes that this siren outputs are also quite distinctive and, to some, eerie.

What is replacing this historical wonder? There are a variety of different sirens, but, they have one thing in common. Voice. Yep, these sirens talk their warnings as well as siren (?) them. Check out the video below for an example. This is pretty eerie to me. 

Like the guy who posted the video says, “It’s like the voice of God.” I think they should do the same thing with things like good movie quotes. What an experience that would be.

Think about it.

“Shop smart. Shop S-Mart!”

or maybe

Gandalf saying “You Shall Not Pass!”  except that the whole of Oklahoma hears him at once.

Tags: sirens, Thunderbolt 1000T