DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

Having now watched both the pilot mini-series and season 1 of the ‘new’ Battlestar Galactica, I’m quite shocked at how different it is. The campness has been pretty much been completely replaced with a sense of gritty realism (apart from the goings-on inside Baltar’s head).

Turning Apollo and Starbuck into mere callsigns instead of actual names was a good move, as was the inspired casting of the original Apollo as Tom Zarak. I’ve got mixed feelings about Starbuck’s gender-switching – it definately gives the pairing a renewed dynamic, but it also brought along some emotional baggage, that wouldn’t have been there if Starbuck remained male.

On the other hand I’m not a fan of the new theme tune, and I also think the original 1970′s model-based FX outshine the modern CGI counterparts more often than not. And what’s with the bullets instead of lasers?

One other thing that annoys me (along with a lot of other shows), is the fact that the opening credits display the actor’s names without either their photo, or even their character name, leaving me clueless as to who plays who!

It’s still an enjoyable show (when you aren’t comparing it to the original), and I’ll definately be picking up season 2 when it gets released here in the UK.

After about 15hrs of work, I’ve managed to get my PC working again, with zero data loss.

The key step was the realisation that the thing that stopped Windows from successfully loading might be a corrupted secondary hard drive, not a corrupted primary one. Basically, the drive with Windows installed on it was absolutely fine, it was my other one where I keep my data that was dodgy.

Microsoft: Since Windows needed nothing from the bad hard drive, why can’t you let the system boot up? An indication as to which hard drive was at fault in the error message displayed before rebooting would also be nice – I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world that blames the hard drive with Windows on it, when Windows won’t load….grrr

Last night I got a pop-up saying that my hard drive couldn’t be defragmented, because Windows had scheduled a check of the disc.

Today, my computer won’t even boot into Windows – not even safe mode. I get a blue screen of death for half-a-millisecond, and then the computer reboots itself. Try as I might, I just can’t get the thing working again, and I’ve been trying for 7 hours now. Looks like a format/reinstall is in order, once I’ve managed to salvage my data.

Kinda glad I bought my Mac mini now!

Everyone’s a racist. Even the most ardent believer in racial equality.

That’s a premise behind ‘Crash‘, one of the movies likely to win several Oscars this year. It’s a pretty bold position to start from, and makes the films agenda perfectly clear, but there’s a significant element of truth behind it that ensures the result works. Every time you think you’ve got the film figured out, another perspective comes along and throws you for spin.

It’s definately a film to make you evaluate your personal beliefs on race and/or racial stereotypes (especially those who think they fall into the category in my 1st sentence), and another film that I highly recommend.

I really think that it’s about time that the DVD Profiler Contribution Rules got updated – they’ve been unchanged since June 28 last year, and in that time, many flaws have been spotted that need correcting.

IVS – are you listening

Inside I’m Dancing is one of those films that you know is going to have an impact on you, but surprises you anyway.

Top quality movie – incredibly well acted, an eye-opening storyline and a top-notch script. This is easily one of the best films I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen a lot of films.

I highly recommend that you go rent/buy it.

In order to assure the highest levels of quality work and productivity from employees, it will be our policy to keep all employees well trained through our program of Special High Intensity Training (S.H.I.T).

We are trying to give employees more S.H.I.T than anyone else. If you feel that you do not receive your share of S.H.I.T on the job, please see your manager. You will be immediately placed at the top of the S.H.I.T list, and our managers are especially skilled at seeing that you get all the S.H.I.T you can handle.

Employees who do not take their S.H.I.T will be placed in Departmental Employee Evaluation Programs (D.E.E.P S.H.I.T) Those who fail to take D.E.E.P S.H.I.T seriously will have to go to Employee Attitude Training (E.A.T S.H.I.T).

Since our managers took S.H.I.T before they were promoted, they do not have to do S.H.I.T anymore, as they are all full of S.H.I.T already. If you are full of S.H.I.T, you may be interested in a job training others. We can add your name to our Basic Understanding Lecture List (B.U.L.L S.H.I.T) Those who are full of B.U.L.L S.H.I.T will get the S.H.I.T jobs, and can apply for promotion to Director of Intensity Programming (D.I.P S.H.I.T)

If you have further questions, please direct them to our Head Of Training, Special High Intensity Training (H.O.T S.H.I.T)

Thank you, Boss in General (B.I.G S.H.I.T)

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill currently making it’s way through parliament should worry anyone who values democracy.

Basically it allows a Minister of the Crown (government minister) to repeal any and all laws or to reword them as they choose – so long as they don’t increase taxes, force people to incriminate themselves, authorise forcible entry, increase criminal sentencing by large amounts or violate human rights. Other than that any UK law would be fair game for a rewrite/replacement/repeal without ‘bothering’ parliament. e.g. to make ID cards mandatory, the government could simply rewrite a law regarding passports…

The UK needs a proper constitution (and not something the EU wrote!).

Yesterday, regress-324422-1.js was checked into the Mozilla CVS repository (where the source code lives) by Bob Clary with the comment

Regression test for bug 324422, by Doug Wright

The important part of that file is line 23. Yay me!

(This was the first of the 2 bugs stopping progress on Companion 0.2, as mentioned here)

So, I’ve just finished watching the original series (the 1978/9 one), and throughly enjoyed it. The plotlines (for the most part) carefully walked the line between ‘enjoyably silly’ and ‘downright daft’, and the special effects were absolutely brilliant for a 1970′s TV series. The casting of easy-on-the -eyes Maren Jensen, Laurette Spang and Anne Lockhart was a nice touch, although I wasn’t a big fan of the ‘triad’ uniforms worn by the male castmembers.

The ‘overly talkative evil leader’ part was absolutely brilliantly played by John Colicos, who brought just the right hint of insanity to the part.

Next week I’m going to watch the 2003 mini series, which by seems to come highly rated.

Did you know that snail mail can be faster than ADSL? Indeed it can, although not the snail mail you’re probably thinking of.

In an experiment that can only be characterised as bizarre, Israeli researchers constructed a data transfer system powered by snails. Yes – snails.

From the introduction to SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol)

Snails are widely assumed to be slow animals. Yet the literature on sluggish speed is surprisingly limited, and only few have actually bothered to measure and record it formally. Further, reported gastropod speeds vary widely with species and circumstance, ranging from 0.000023 to 0.0028 meters per second. With that in mind, it is not surprising that the use of snails as data communications agents was not considered up until the research reported here. Indeed, one can hardly reconcile the phlegmatic disposition of slugs with the fantastic speeds at which information is expected to flow over the Internet. Yet as we show below, the negative attitude towards using snails in communications networks is an example of bounded rationality impeding bold and creative engineering.

The original research

When both Labour and the Conservatives are fighting for the ‘middle ground’, differences in policy are rare indeed. But when those differences arise – they are significant indeed.

Labour

Next year’s local elections in England could be abandoned under plans being considered by the government, the BBC has learned.

Whitehall officials have told council chiefs they are considering cancelling the May 2007 polls because of possible plans for a local government shake-up.

BBC News

This is legal? If this is legal – what law allows the government of the day to simply decide that elections aren’t worth having? Especially after all the fuss/expense over devolution.

Conservatives

One of the factors causing disillusionment with politics is the decline in the status and power of Parliament. Restoring trust in politics means restoring trust in Parliament – and one way to do that is to enhance the role of Parliament in scrutinising the Government’s decisions.

In a number of important areas – going to war, and agreeing international treaties – there’s no formal mechanism for consulting the nation’s elected representatives. In other areas, like making senior appointments and re-organising government departments – the Prime Minister is able to do what he wants without consulting Parliament at all.

David Cameron

Who would you vote for?

Bad plot + Bad acting + Bad CGI = great film.

Highly recommended.

Having downloaded it, installed it and spent an hour playing with it, I now have an opinion that can be summed up as:

The change from IE6 is amazing. Kudos. But since you’ve had 4.5 years since IE6, that shouldn’t be considered as a massive achievement.

The rendering engine seems to be a decent attempt at a large chunk of the CSS2 standard, instead of IE6′s which came across as a CSS1 implementation with a sprinkling of CSS2. Having said that, there are still plenty of bugs that (painfully) show the foundation that the new CSS bits are built on – some date back to IE5.

At the moment I’d say that IE7 is like Netscape 6 – there’s plenty to work with, but when you get bitten by a bug, you get bitten hard.

The best bit for me is that IE7 can actually render dougweb.org pretty much like Firefox/Opera/Safari (i.e. like it’s supposed to look). Sure I’ve had to add some of the IE6 hacks to IE7 as well – but I haven’t had to add anything specifically for IE7, unlike IE6. And IE6 still renders the page horribly.

It’s sad day that I have to praise a browser for simply not sucking at it’s job. But that’s the world we live in…