Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Last weekend Laura & I caught "The Prestige" on Video-on-Demand.  It’s the story of 2 fledgling magicians, Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (played by Christian Bale), locked in a fierce rivalry over an illusion named "The Transported Man".  Borden is responsible for the accidental death of Angier’s wife in a water-tank escape gone wrong, and the two constantly attempt to sabotage and one-up each other on stage.  The movie draws it’s name from the 3rd part of every illusion, "The Prestige" where the vanished object returns with a great flourish.

The movie starts off very confusingly.  The entire movie is a flashback, with the opening scene being the death of Angier’s character described during the trial of Borden for murder.  The entire movie is Borden decrypting and reading Angier’s journal, which is convoluted further as Angier’s journal is about him decrypting and readin Borden’s journal.  Luckily, about 20 minutes in you get used to it and it all starts to flow alot easier.

As the story develops you find out why the two men hate each other so, and the incredible lengths they’ve undergone to not only destroy each other but to create fascinating new tricks.  They also unveil alot of magic’s secrets, showing how various tricks are performed and how they’re created.  Eventually the story takes a fascinating turn as Angier recruits Nikola Tesla recreate the pivotal trick.  From here the movie takes a surprising turn toward a Science Fiction end as Tesla unveils his Alternating Current work.

It was a fantastic movie, with several twists and turns and not one, but two great twists at the end. Even Laura loved it, although I had to fill her in on who Tesla was (Sad to see such a pivotal scientific figure reduced to Science Fantasy).  Aside from the klunky start, it’s a fantastic film I highly recommend.  4 of 5 stars
[tag:movie][tag:theprestige]

Sorry my updates have been kinda few and far between lately.  Between working on this website, VizWorld.com, and Visualization.hpc.mil, I’m kinda blogged out.  So here’s a quick update of things around the homestead.

• I cut the grass over the weekend.  First grass-cutting of 2007, and it wound up being pretty easy.  Things are so dry and we’ve gotten so little rain that it was a bit like running a leafblower in the desert, just tossing up dust and dirt more than pollen and grass.
• I’ve been working on the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  I never got it for the Super Nintendo, so I’m having alot of fun figuring it out now. 
• I’ve been watching alot of Star Trek.  My MythTV records 4 episodes of Enterprise every Monday on SciFi, and 2 episodes of Voyager every weekday on SpikeTV. 
• Ethan had his second round of shots last week, and after a few days of fever he’s doin great.  He’s started rolling over now, and not far away from crawling.
• Rhianna been doin great too.
• Laura’s doin fantastic at her job, and even got accepted into a new college program she’ll start this summer.

So while I’ve been pretty quiet, it’s been a good couple of weeks  
[tag:family]

As happens every year, Spring is coming upon us.  For most of the US it’s a time of frolicking through meadows of freshly bloomed flowers and flying kites in the park.  For us in Mississippi, it’s a fight for survival and control of the skies as the giant yellow menace descends upon us: Pollen.

Folks arise in the morning to find their red trucks turned Green as the yellow pollen simply coats everything in sight with a miserable yellow powder that can send even the most hearty sinuses into clogged sneezing frenzies.  The putrid yellow powder doesn’t discriminate as it sends hundreds of Mississippians into sneezing and sniffling fits, and the Doctors rake in the dough as they prescribe antihistamine after antihistamine. 

Of course, I’m suffering through this as well.  I sit here at my desk constantly sniffling and coughing, woozy in a Dayquil-induced waking coma, barely aware of what’s going on around me.  I feel like my head is wrapped in a towel, barely able to breath and hardly awake.  It’s a miserable time, and it seems noone is immune.  To compound the problem this year, Mississippi is in a drought. If you don’t understand the signifigance, it means 2 things.  First, the rain does an excellent job of pulling the pollen from the air and sticking it back to the ground and trees where it belongs.  Second, it means that us citizens must not only ciontend with Pollen, but simple Dust as well. 

Hopefully the old Adage will come true and April Showers will bring May Flowers.
[tag:pollen][tag:drought]

It’s been pretty much 1 month since MythTV 2.0 went into production at my house.  With a full month of usage, I figured it time for a post-mortem.  Also, last night was the first major "reconfiguration" I’ve had to do, so I thought I’ld share the details on that.

I’m still running the same R5E50 distro that I installed, and it’s been working beautifully.  I’ve pretty much had to make 0 changes to it, and haven’t had any trouble with it.  A few things I’ve managed to work out:

1. A new version of the Xinelibs was released that fixed a strange audio lag problem in DVD playback.  It didn’t happen when ripping DVD’s tho, so it wasn’t much of a problem.
2. I setup "MoBlock" and FTP, just because I could.
3. I found that I could FTP videos up into the /myth/gallery directory and then watch them with the "Image Gallery" viewer.  It uses MPlayer, so any format that it supports is fair game.
4. I’ve ripped a few CD’s and listened to them on the MythTV.  It rips them as Ogg Vorbis (rather than MP3 or M4A) , and playback is great.  I wish the interface was a little better, seems something like ITune’s CoverFlow would be perfect here.
5. I was using the mythpowerbutton script to kick in the DPMS features of the video card.  When the DPMS enabled, the screen would blank and my automatic Signal Switcher would flip back to regular TV.  Unfortunately, it was also flipping at random during showings, which was extremely annoying.  I found the problem was that in using the ‘xset dpms force off’ command, I was inadvertently re-enabling the DPMS screensaver timeout.  I simply modified the script to include a ‘xset -dpms’ after the ‘force on’ and the problem went away.

I’ve been recording several shows every day.  It includes kids shows for Rhianna (Spongebob, Mickey Mouse, etc), dramas for Laura (House, Scrubs), and SciFi for me (Star Trek Voyager, Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica).  I’ve also got some Anime scattered in there, and I’ve recorded a few movies off of various channels (Nothing Pay-Per-View, strictly the TBS "Edited for Television" variety).  Everything’s been working great, and the commercial flagging means I haven’t really watched a commercial on TV in weeks.  It’s refreshing (and time-saving) to watch an episode of Voyager in 45 minutes.  However, the commercial flagging isn’t perfect:  It relies heavily on station logo’s to determine what’s going on, which it usually does a great job of, but some channels (Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, my Anime source, is the worst) tend to fade the logo in and out seemingly at random throughout the show, leading to short 30s clips being removed from the middle of the show.  It’s easy to work around, tho, so I don’t mind it so much.

Last night, however, was the first "Major Reconfiguration" I’ve had to do.  I used Time Warner Cable, which was recently bought by ComCast.  As part of the merger, all our channels were being rearranged, and last night was the "Target Date" for the change. I waited until the last minute, hoping the MythTV would work it out by itself, and then realized I was on my own here.  I noticed that the MythTV showed "NO DATA" for every channel that was being moved, and when I checked my subscription on Zap2it (the source for TV listings on MythTV) the channels that are moving were simply missing from the lineup.  I deleted the listing and recreated it, and got the new channel layout.  The next problem was how to get this into MythTV.

Well, I had tinkered with this a little bit before, so I logged into the system and ran ‘mythfilldatabase’, the command to force downloads of listings.  It downloaded the new TV listings and filled in all the "NO DATA" areas, but still left the channels in their old Locations (Channel 16 was still listed as Disney & showing Mickey Mouse, when it’s actually CSPAN in the new layout).  After a bit of digging, I ran ‘mythfilldatabase –refresh-all –do-channel-updates’.  That took a while to run, but when it was complete it had completely rearranged all the channels and their logos, and shifted the recording schedules to the new channels as well!  I checked it this morning and it’s recording just fine.

So hopefully I won’t have to tinker with it anymore for quite some time.  Given how well it worked, I’m tempted to make the ‘–refresh-all –do-channel-updates’ command a weekly crontab job or something, just to handle future rearrangings.  But given how rarely it happens, I’ll probably just leave it on manual.  As for now, the system is working perfectly and better than I could have hoped.  Now I’ve just got to get that 2nd tuner

Update: 3/21/2007
I also just used the information shown on CodeBlog to get cute little sounds when I click buttons on the Remote.  I know, it’s kinda silly, but it does help a bit in telling "Yes I hit a button and the system is just thinking a bit".  Initially I had some strangeness with getting remote sounds but no TV sounds, which pretty much defeats the whole point.  After a bit of digging, the same guy had a good post on switching from OSS to Alsa, which fixed my problem. (eg. Switching the Audio Device from /dev/dsp to ALSA:default, and the mixer from /dev/mixer to default)
[tag:mythtv][tag:pvr][tag:comcast][tag:dvr][tag:tv]

This week is Spring Break.  With Laura & I both working fulltime jobs now, that means Ethan & Rhianna are spending some time with the Grand-parents.  I would say "much needed" but I’m sure the grandparents will be good and tired of them in short order   Rhianna can be quite a handful.

Last weekend my Mom took Rhianna to see her first real movie: Bridge to Terabithia.  Laura and I had been talking about taking Rhi to a movie for quite a while, but we were waiting for a good cute animated flic (something like Cars)  before we took her.  She’s always been real sensitive to loud noises and we wanted something that would hold her interest.  My mom said she was great tho, they sat together (Rhi sat in my Mom’s lap since she doesn’t weigh enough to hold the folding seats down), ate popcorn, and watched the entire movie.  Rhi was pretty bored in the beginning, but once all the fantasy creatures appeared she was evidently quite enthralled by it all.

Ethan’s doing great as well.  He’s gonna be a huge kid, at only 4 months he’s bigger than alot of 1-year olds.  We’re pretty sure it’s gonna slow his progression to walking by a bit, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering him a bit.  He’s starting coo’ing and babbling alot, and can just about roll over on his own.  He’s currently fascinated by his own hands, and learning how to cram things in his mouth.

As for Laura and Myself, things are going well.  Laura’s doing fantastic at her job and even found a great online RHIT->RHIA progression program offered there that she’s investigating.  I’ve been doing pretty well at work, spending alot of my time on the new Viz Website.  On Monday I received a reward for being nominated for the "Dare to Soar" award (I didn’t win the "Dare to Soar" award, it’s kinda confusing) and got a small monetary compensation that bought a Wii Points Card, Call of Duty 3, and some groceries.  Things have been going pretty good, just hope they stay that way

Sometime in the next few weeks we’ll probably try to rally the troops for a big weekend with the Great-Grandparents in Alabama, they haven’t gotten to see Ethan yet except in pictures.  It’ll be a long day (3 hours driving there, 4 hours or so there, 3 hours back = 10 hours).  We’ll just see how things go.
[tag:family]

Time for another Wii game review, and this time it’s "Wii Play" from Nintendo.  Like Wii Sports, this is a collection of "minigames" that work with the Mii Avatars.  The game plays out as a "Wiimote Training guide", showing a decent collection of different ways you can expect to see the Wiimote used in various games.  At the start you can only play the first game, but after successfully playing the game once, it unlocks the next until eventually you’ve unlocked them all.  Once you’ve unlocked them you can go back and play them again and try to win the Bronze, Silver, or Gold medals for various scores.  The games are (in order):

1. Shooting Gallery – Very reminiscent of the old Duck Hunt game, you start off overlooking a green meadow shooting targets.  The target start as simple stationary plates, then moving to clays, tin cans, and eventually UFO’s.  The "easter egg" in this game is that occasionally you’ll hear the classic Dog Bark as a duck flies across the screen.  Shoot it for big points!
2. Hide & Seek – a collection of randomly generated Mii’s (along with a few from your own collection) appear on the screen, along with an objective like "Find 2 matching Mii’s" or "Find the different Mii".  Simply point and click on the correct ones to win, but do it within the timelimit.  At the beginning it’s trivially simple, but in later levels the Mii’s start walking or running around, and eventually even start swimming!
3. Pose Mii – Bubbles appear on the screen with the Mii in one of 3 different poses (switch between poses with the A&B buttons).  Simply align the Mii with the Bubble and it’ll pop, but do it before the bubble touches the bottom of the screen.  This one makes heavy use of the Rotational aspects of the tracking.
4. Table Tennis – I had high hopes for this game, but was somewhat letdown by the reality.  The computer hits the ball to you (and never misses), and you simply return the shot.  Your score is the number of times you return it before you miss.  After every 10 returns the ball speeds up a bit, turning this more into a game of Breakout than Table Tennis.
5. 9 Ball – This one I’ve been very pleased with.  It’s a very good implementation of a Billiards 9-ball game.  Complete with english, jumping, and lots of trick shots, it’s a pretty faithful simulation and I’ve had alot of fun with it.
6. Laser Hockey – Basically Air hockey but with neon graphics.  Simply point the remote where you want your puck to be.  The pucks aren’t round, they’re planar, so orientation of the controller can let you get some interesting bounces.
7. Racing – In this one you ride on a Cow (Yes, a cow) around a short track running over Scarecrows.  This uses the Excite Truck controls: Hold the wiimote sideways, turn left/right to steer, tilt foward/backwards to adjust speed.  They add one more control: Jump by quickly raising the remote. 
8. Tanks – This is the one nunchuk game, but the nuncheck is optional.  Simply drive a little tank around with the Nunchuk (or directional pad) and point the crosshairs with the Wiimote to target. 

So it’s a Fun collection of games, but (as many others on the net have said) not worth the $45 price tag.  Fortunately, it does come with a Wiimote, which is typically $30 – $40 .  That means the game is really only $5 – $15, and for that price it’s a pretty good deal.  It’s a decent little training game, good for seeing how the remote will work in various control situations, but I haven’t found too much replay value in it (except for 9-ball).  So for now, I’m gonna stick with Call of Duty 3.. Check back again soon for a review of that!

[tag:wii][tag:game][tag:wiiplay][tag:review]

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while, but I’ve been completely consumed with my MythTV & my new Wii. For the Wii, I’ve been busy with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  I just finally finished it this weekend, according to my savegame I logged about 40hours start to finish.  With the game firmly under my belt (but not far from my mind, still) I thought it time for a review.

The game was originally developed for the GameCube, but ported to the Wii near the end of it’s development to be a launch title for the Wii.  The game looks very much like a GameCube game.  The textures are a bit blocky and the polygons in the large outdoor expanses are fairly large and visible.  But that’s about where the similarity ends, as the visual effects have been cranked up to the max everywhere else.  When riding horseback you can see all the barding sway side to side, you can see the grass blow in the wind, when in twilight the entire game takes on an eerie dark glow, and the cutscenes with the light spirits are simply some of the most impressive stuff I’ve seen in quite a while (blowing alot of the Final Fantasy X scenes out of the water).

The gameplay is good, and the Wii really makes a huge different in the quality of the game here.  The swordplay isn’t much changed from earlier versions, instead of pressing a button to swing simply you shake the controller.  It’s not quite lightsaberish, any shake results in the same swing, but it does create a little more immersion that does occasionally result in wildly flailing the controller to beat-down the latest bad guy.  The real fun is in the targeted weapons (hookshot, bow and arrow, slingshot, etc) where you literally point the controller at what you want to target.  They give you an on-screen crosshair to help, but it’s so much simpler than using the analog stick to target. 

The puzzles are interesting as well.  Alot of the old mechanics still apply (light the torches, push the buttons, etc) but there are a few new ones this time.  The most interesting mechanic (that pervades the entire game) is in the "wolf-form" that you slip into occasionally (uncontrollably at first, at will later).  In wolf form you can "see" scents, dig, and use a few special attacks not normally available.  Luckily switching between Wolf Form & Human Form is alot simpler than WindWaker’s Music puzzles, this time simply being 2 buttons (One to summon Midna, another to select the option).

But basically, Nintendo has (once again) created the best Zelda Game ever.  The graphics are good, a fresh change from the cartoony balloon-head representations in WindWaker.  The world is significantly larger this time, containing about 8 dungeons and numerous overworld areas, but never so big as to feel annoying since you have Midna to teleport you around and Epona to ride on.  Side-quests and collection quests are abundant, with several that I’ve yet to complete.  The only down-side to the game was the lack of voice-acting, the most common complaint of all Zelda Games.

I have to give it a good 4 out of 5.  If only it had the voice acting, it would be perfect.  Much like Ars Technica, I can’t wait to see what Nintendo comes up with for a Wii-only Zelda Title.
[tag:wii][tag:nintendo][tag:twilightprincess][tag:zelda]