Welcome To The Scene - aka The Scene - is a low budget [fictional] series about underground Internet content distributors. It's really enjoyable to watch and suprisingly well made for the [I imagine] meager budget. The method of presentation, a shot of the computer screen with a video window in the top left corner, is really effective.

NYU student Brian Sandro has a secret: he and his friends pirate hundreds of millions of dollars of illicit Hollywood movies in their spare time. They are revered, reviled, hunted and admired. No one know who they are - at least, not as far as they know.

Check it out. It's much more enjoyable than most of the shows you'll find on TV. So far production is up to episode 10, with 11 due to be released in the first week of August.

This post is well done. And the comments top it off. =)

And If World War II Was an RTS is pretty good as well.

The trailer of the movie version of V For Vendetta is online. Even thought Alan Moore pulled support for the film, it looks like it will be an interesting watch, although you can never really tell the quality of a movie from the trailer. More often than not these day the trailer is better than the film.

I highly suggest reading the original comic of V For Vendetta. Apart from it being a great comic, it's more than relevant for this day and age.

Wouldn't you know it...

Over the past few weeks I've been developing a social bookmarking web-based application, based on del.icio.us. My reasoning is [was] that, while del.icio.us is great, a similar social bookmarking application that could be installed on local intranets or community websites would be of use to smaller communities. del.icio.us is social bookmarking for the masses, but I was thinking more about social bookmarking on a community level.

What really kicked the thought off was the Blender community, which I contribute to in my own way through the form of BlenderBlog - A Blog About Blender. I thought a Blender social bookmarking site would be a great idea because it would provide a repository of bookmarks [tutorials, projects, news, whatever] that everyone in the community could not only benefit from, but contribute to.

In any case, I dubbed my application oishii, because it's Japanese for delicious, and since I live in Japan, it just seemed to make sense. Unfortunately, in a recent browse of my aggregated feeds, I found that there's another project called oishii that is related to del.icio.us. It's not a social bookmark manager, but more a...

Oishii is kind of a del.icio.us mini-zeitgeist. oishii! polls the del.icio.us front page every 5 minutes, and returns all sites bookmarked by at least 30 people. In the spirit of facilitating self-organization, oishii is a kind of pheromone trail allowing me and others to find the resources other members of the hive found useful, interesting, humorous, or for some other reason worth visiting again.

Damn...just when you think you have a named licked, chaos steps in and throws you a curve ball. I'm not really sure what I should do, so any advice would be appreciated.

I am thinking of changing the name to Umai 旨い [うまい], which is another Japanese word meaning delicious, or maybe even maiu [まいう] which is a reversal of the word and also used in Japan as a slang alternative to oishii and umai.

Or maybe I'll just keep the oishii name and see what happens.

I'm planning on releasing oishii under the Creative Commons GPL in a few weeks time, once I've finished the beta and all the bugs have been worked out. I also want to make it templatable so users can choose between the del.icio.us look, something more user friendly, or create a template of their own.

There's also some functionality that del.icio.us has that I haven't yet implemented in oishii, partly because I haven't gotten around to them, and partly because I think there are some differences between a massive social bookmarking app like del.icio.us and a small community-based social bookmarking app like oishii.

Anyway, congrats to David Wiley for thinking up a good name for an app and getting it out there. [btw - his app is a really cool idea]

An advert for AU mobile phones. This poster is just so Japan.

Found via Boing Boing at this Flickr page.

Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters is a great read for anyone interested in computers/IT/Internet/etc...but as a hacker/programmer myself is found it both enlightening and reassuring.

Below are a few quotes from the book [thankfully typed out by someone other than myself - thanks palojono].

What and how should not be kept too separate. You're asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without understanding how to do it. But hacking can certainly be more than just deciding how to implement some spec. At its best, it's creating the spec - though it turns out the best way to do that is to implement it.

As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do...

It's unrealistic to expect that the specifications for a program will be perfect. You're better off if you admit this up front, and write programs in a way that allows specifications to change on the fly.

I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is to solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end. It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

The quote about debugging is so true. I quite often look forward to debugging because I know there's going to be an end-point and I know I'll feel good when I get there. And it's also a great counter-balance to designing & building.

Paul Graham's website is worth checking out for other interesting thoughts & articles.

There's a site called WorldDreamBank which catelogues peoples dreams. They seemed to have capped it at 2000 dreams, but I think if this was a more community based site, with input from anyone who wanted to share their dreams, you'd have a data haven of interesting tales [not all of them I'm sure, but...]. Think of The New Age meeting Web 2.0.

A library of 2000 dream texts and images, sorted by topic--whether you want funny, sexy, spiritual, scary, or lucid dreams, we got 'em. Dreams are uncensored, but potentially offensive entries have warnings.

ExtremeTech, while having a wealth of information in the form of reviews, tips, howto, etc, is really quite an annoying site to actually visit. The designers need to get some usability training [but don't we all]. I think part of the issue here is the staggering amount of advertising mixed with the content. Crikey...even their image slideshows contain an advertisment every 4th or 5th image. I've Ad-Blocked a lot of the site and perhaps that's why the layout of the site also fails to render correctly.

It is an ASP based site, so we'll have to make allowances and not expect too much from the developers/designers. Also, recently I've been reading Jeffery Zeldman's - Designing With Web Standards, so I'm a little over passionate on the subject at the moment =)

U.S. Space Command want to take control of the LaGrange points around the earth. Great...just what we all need. We've got The War On Drugs, The War On Terror, now let's get up there so we can have a War In Space. Isn't The Cowboy a God Fearln' Christian? Doesn't he know that old saying about the swords? War On Terror?...War Is Terror.

Anyway, I've promised before not to get political, so forgive me.

Keeping to the subject of Space, Universe Today tells me that:

The Japanese space agency JAXA announced the successful launch of the ASTRO-E2 X-ray satellite on Sunday. A Japanese-built M-5 rocket blasted off from the Uchinoura Space Center carrying the Astro-E2 into orbit. This satellite, renamed Suzuka, is a replacement for the Astro-E satellite, which was destroyed because of a launch failure in 2000. Once it's operational, Suzuka will help astronomers understand the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centres.

Go JAXA.

And finally, DrunkenBlog has released Covercast, but it's more fun reading it straight from the Cow's pen, so go have a looksee.

Here are some screenshots [via this /. post] of the latest version of Longhorn. Looks pretty snazzy, but the resemblance is uncanny to the extreme. For all the millions of dollors and thousands of man-hours that must go into the graphic design of the UI, all I can imagine is a designer sitting in a little office with a Mac, a PC and a sketchpad...producing - innovation.

So far most of the troubles with Tiger I read on the web are when people perform an upgrade rather than a fresh install. It seems obvious to be that a fresh install is the only way to go, but perhaps that's because I've been using computers since I was very, very young, and as a result have experience installing most operating systems on a variety of hardware.

Microsoft's OS upgrades never work as expected, so what would make someone think that Apple's would? I'm not even sure it's worth it to the companies to provide OS upgrade options - I'm mean, obviously it is, because a lot of users are point-and-don't-think-click users [aka PEBKACs]. But, if you were a truely honest software company that released a product as bloated and sophisticated as modern OSes are, you'd just tell your users - "Look. It's damn hard work making these upgrade options even work, let alone work properly. For best results in upgrading to a new version of our OS, just do yourself a favor and perform a fresh install".

And as a responsible user you should really be backing up all you valuable data anyways, whether they be files/documents, email, address books, whatever...back it up. If you do this, there's no drama with a fresh install. Actually it's kindof nice - like moving into a new apartment - and you can improve on the lessons you learn't from the your old setup, making your fresh install work even better for you.

My fresh install of Tiger works great. Apple currently has the best desktop OS and should run with it, especially since Microsoft is now trying to force Longhorn out the door, which means it'll be another incomplete [and insecure] version of their OS and piss off a whole new wave of Windows users.

Manufacturing Consent is a must watch documentary. Of all the films that Noam Chomsky is either the subject of, or appears in, this one stands out because it contains the most footage and information on a wide range of subjects, although it is centered around the media's techniques in influencing viewers/readers.

A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.

Everytime I see Professor Chomsky in a documentary, not only to I learn so much about the world we live in, but more and more I appreciate the intellect of the man. Manufacturing Consent added to this, but also gives a great history of Chomsky's activist efforts. Check it out.

I installed Tiger last night. As expected it was painless and quick, taking about 45 minutes for a fresh install. No big drama with backing up as all my important data is stored on servers. Just had to write down the much loved and used apps so I could reload them afterwards. The List includes, but not limited to, Firefox, SubEthaEdit, CocoaMySQL, Blender, Yafray, Terragen, Photoshop, MPlayer OSX, Kotoba, Adium, Bits On Wheels, and America's Army [for those times when you just have to shoot some **** up].

I also purchase iWork to get a word processor that works well with the OSX GUI. NeoOffice is still a little too slow, although I might install it for compatibility with OpenOffice files. I'm not a big user of spreadsheets [when I need it I'll use the Linux workstation], but I do need to create business documents from time to time, so I think the purchase is worth it.

As for Tiger itself, so far it seems pretty damn nice. It does seem to improve the performance of my Powerbook, although this might just be because the install is fresh. I'll have to evaluate this again in a few months. Thankfully the pin-stripe has gone from the menu bar. The new combined title-bar and toolbar in apps like System Preferences looks better than I expected.

The much talk about Spotlight hasn't really been of any use to me yet, and I'm debating whether I should turn it off to save resources [I have split-second nightmares that take me back to supporting computers that have Microsofts FastFind service running on them]. Dashboard is cute, but also surprisingly useful. With the variety of widgets available, I've started to set up quite a nice little grouping of useful functionality. Again, it's yet to be seen if as this grows it will pose a performance issue. But, so far so good.

As you can tell, as cynical as I can be sometimes, I'm pretty happy with Tiger. In a way it kind of makes up for the whole Intel thing, which may have been a well timed plan by Apple. Whatever...Tiger gets the thumbs up.