Sybreon Ones Nought

I recently bought a bunch of bluray films, including Speed Racer. I decided to buy that film on bluray because I thought that it would be a perfect show case for high-definition. The film was nothing but colours and special effects. I started watching it and then I got a shock. There was a lot of detail in the film. Not only were the nasal hairs of Royalton rendered clearly, I could even see the bits of boogers stuck to them!

Now, I can understand why the porn industry has been generally staying away from high-definition videos. There is just so much detail in them, more than the normal eye can see. So, someone needs to be really careful and meticulous about their looks in order to look good in them. I can see future make-up artists being sent for special hi-def make-up classes to learn how to cover-up more of their clients’ flaws.

If anyone is curious, the list of blurays that I had recently bought – Moon, District 9, Terminator Salvation, Ironman, 300, Pan’s Labyrinth, Speed Racer, Matrix Trilogy, Wall-E, Final Fantasy Advent Children, District B13/Ultimate and Planet Earth. So, I have now a small collection of bluray films on top of my PS3 games.

I find it interesting that companies have race too in Malaysia. While there is officially a classification of bumiputra contractors by the government, this is the first time that I found out that there are such things as ‘Malay’ contractors. According to TheStar, Penang’s Chief Minister, Lim Guan Eng, said that, “of 66 state government projects in the past two years, 44 projects worth RM68mil were given to Malay contractors.”.

I’m not trying to be pedantic here but, I wonder if he used the accurate term for it. If they are actually bumiputra contractors classified by the government, he should just use the appropriate term. I have never heard of a ‘Malay’ contractor. Of course, I could very well be wrong about this since I am not directly involved with such things. I wonder if we will ever get Chinese contractors or Indian contractors too. Actually, I think we do and they are all foreign companies!

Google’s Super Bowl ad. Sweet.

I’m writing this blog entry to let others know what to do if they are ever annoyed by the red-tinted address bar that you get in IE8 when you try to visit a secure SSL website using a self-signed certificate. This is quite common in development environments. The straightforward thing to do, that every developer knows, is to import the certificate into a trusted store, but for some unfathomable reason this is not so simple with IE8. Maybe it is not so unfathomable – Windows sucks as a development environment and assumes that all its users are idiots.

The catch in IE8 is that you cannot let IE8 decide where to store the certificate. You need to manually tell IE8, during the certificate import process, to put the certificate into the Trusted Root Certificate Authority Store. Once you do this, you will be able to see the certificate in the correct store – the annoying red-tinted address bar will disappear and a nice lock will appear instead.

But the most important thing is to never develop a browser specific application that cannot run in any other browser other than IE. If you do that your application is already broken even before it is ever used. There is no reason to stick with IE only because that just demonstrates your lack of insight into web development.

Frak it – idiocy is indiscriminate.

PS: I do not understand why I need to make infrastructural changes in order to support a wayang kulit – changes that will end up breaking a lot of things and require a lot of time to verify and then more time to undo.

Okay, I will say this. While Battlestar Galactica was a dreary, dark and damning examination of our times, its prequel – Caprica – is consciously and consistently creepy. They have started screening it recently and I have had the fortune of catching some of the early episodes. Let’s just say that I am totally looking forward to buying the blu-ray set when it comes out in the future. The acting is much better than that on Galactica and the story is creepy. Even the opening title is creepy. Creepy.

Alright, I won’t give too much away but I think that the makers of Caprica will score another big hit with this one. It is not just the story writing but even the way that the scenes are framed just gives me the chills. I am sure that as the series unfolds, they will find even more ways to creep me out. And don’t even get me started on the music. It makes copious use of the traditional drumbeats that we had on Galactica, but in a far creepier way. I think that it is trying to tell us that the beautiful life on the 12 colonies is coming to a tragic end.

This already ensures that I will be looking forward to new episodes whenever chance presents itself. I’ve been really busy recently.

I got called up by HP today with regards to my Streamyx upgrade. They called me up to get my credit card details so that they can bill me for the free PC and the Streamyx line. In the end, I got up-sold to a larger screen because I was planning to buy a new one anyway. The machine that I will end up getting is also slightly better than the original one in the brochure. It will have the following specs:

CPU: Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz
RAM: 2GB DDR2*
HDD: 250GB 7200RPM*

This is good for me because I will be using the machine as my virtualisation farm – or cloud in today’s parlance. If I choose to run Xen on it, I would probably be able to run a mixture of about a dozen VM in it. If I choose to run OpenVZ on it, I can probably squeeze in at least three times that number. Since I have begun to grow tired of OpenVZ, I might just choose to move over to Xen instead. Or I could do what some people do that is to run OpenVZ under Xen!

As for the monitor, I got the upgrade to a 23″ screen. I had planned on getting myself a new 24″ screen this month anyway. Turns out that it is cheaper to just get them to upgrade it for me. After all, as a headless virtualisation farm, it does not need a monitor to go with it. So, I am happy today. Today was a good day. I managed to accomplish another purchase. I just hope that they deliver it to me soon.

By the way, my first IKEA furniture arrived yesterday. It is very neat! I will post pictures once my room is completely done up.

A friend consulted me a few days ago on her Dell computer purchase. She had this auntie instinct that told her that she was being scammed. While I will not say that she is being scammed, I certainly told her that she need not pay so much money for her computer. In the end, I spec-ed her a different machine that saved her RM2,000 which she is more than welcome to spend on me!

Then she asked me why it was that the Dell salesperson tried to sell her a machine that was so much more expensive. So, I thought that I should write about some of these reasons.

Firstly, it is the job of the salesperson to up-sell their customers. You see this everywhere, even at McDonalds. Whenever you order a meal, they will try to up-sell you on larger drinks, larger fries or even an added sundae. It is in their best interest to help you to spend your money. Otherwise, they are not doing their job. In addition, these sales people are often paid by commission of up to about 20%. So, there is no reason why they should try to sell you a cheaper machine when they can sell you a more expensive one.

Secondly, computers these days are commodities. One model is pretty much the same as another. In fact, the prime differentiating factor between computers these days is often the aesthetics. Two machine that are of similar specs can cost several thousand ringgit more simply due to a better quality built. Of course, you are getting more for what you paid for but do you actually need the more beautiful machine. If you can afford to pay a premium on looks, spend it on an Apple.

Thirdly, the performance difference is negligible, especially for normal home use. A ultra high speed graphics card coupled with a ultra powerful processor is not going to help Word/Excel/Powerpoint run significantly faster. Now, if my friend was using the computer for engineering simulations or video rendering work, that is another issue altogether. But all my friend needed was a computer for office work, surfing the internet, watching some videos and playing Sims 3, which is something that the most basic machines can do today and do it really well.

So, I advised my friend on getting the cheapest hardware that Dell had and to upgrade certain components that will give you a better overall experience. I told my friend to spend the savings on my consultation fee, a new handbag and maybe some clothes. That’s a much better use of her cash.

PS: Some of the things that are worth upgrading – single-core to dual-core, a higher resolution monitor, more RAM. Everything else is a worthless upgrade.