Persepolis The Story of Not Being Able To Find The Book.

So I know that there is a phenomanol movie playing 5 miles away from me, it’s called Persepolis, but not wanting to ruin the comic books I’ve chosen to hold off and get through the books first. Well when I grabbed Persepolis I thought that it was the only story being told in the movie. No it’s both. And now I’m up a creek with out a paddle, mainly because everyone has the first book, but not the second book. Anyways, it’s kind of annoying when things like this happen. I mean it’s great that it’s become so popular so quickly, but you’d think that the publisher would have realized that the movie would create a HUGE demand for the books so why not start pumping out even more of them. Of course they don’t. Or if they are, they’re doing a really bad job at it. Anyways not being able to find the book I decided to pick up a couple of other comics, which are the First trade of Preacher, and the other is DC’s Kingdom Come which I had started to read but finally decided to pick up the trade. Anyways, I’m looking forward to getting into the Preacher story line because it really seems to be a staple in comics. I guess they’re a decent replacement for Persepolis.

Family Guy Aliens Movie

Ok so I know that the writers strike still has all of American TV in a strangle hold, and some have chosen to abandon TV all together and go to other things, like Video podcasts, and TV networks run by people in their basements (my personal favorite is Tiki Bar Tv). The content that is being generated by these shows are defiantly things that you would not see on mainstream television. Anyways, I was watching Family Guy the other night with my roommate, and this showed up on tv

The first clip that is a parody of Aliens is what caught my eye. And I turned to him and said “They should totally make an Aliens Family Guy Movie”.

And no I don’t mean one like the Family Guy Star Wars flick that they aired on tv, instead I want to see the family guy animators recreate the Aliens movie shot for shot in an animated form, and then lay over the original dialogue from it, and then go to town. Maybe pull out all the alien sounds and put in that voice track. I’m not sure exactly how it would happen. All that I now is that it would be AMAZING!

Apache, php, perl… Oh My!

So I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that I’m fairly proficient with computers. While my specialty certainly is the net and creating web pages. I certainly hit a block when it comes to installing something more complicated than lets say an Illegal Version of Adobe CS3 on my MacBook (not that I do that or that I condone it). Anyways, even with my brief stint in the Shell Scripting department I get a little uneasy going too deep into the command line mainly because I’m afraid that I’ll break something in the Unix and in the end be screwed. That’s what my Ubuntu machine is for. Anyways, because of that I think going into uncharted territory to get php active on your OS 10.5 machine to get the PHP 5 turned on is a bit much for me. Thankfully there are king people out there who will walk you through it!

I have two cases of this, one of my peers in the field runs this excellent blog over at  Tangential Musings  on how to get Apache and PHP running as well as installing Mysql on Os 10.5 (Leopard).

The other is through a program called XAMPP It adds a lot of features that the previous blog doesn’t go into, such as instally perl, but also it is still in beta for OS X, so it’s certainly not for everyone.

So I hope that this helped some people out there who are looking into starting up some PHP work! As for me I need to get crackin on my PHP work!

Al Gore… Amazing.

Ok so we have a presidential election coming up, we know this, we also know that there seems to be a rift in the democrats (I don’t keep track of those right wingers (sorry!)). There seems to be 2 camps, the I want Obama to win camp, and I want Hillary to win camp, and of course to a lesser extent, the I want Edwards to win camp (but apparently that’s a small number). Now with all the controversy going on over whether the American people are ready to have a Black President or A Woman President shouldn’t be the issue, it should be where the candidate stands that’s how we should be making our decisions. Anyways none of this wouldn’t be happening if Al Gore was running for President. It seems like everyone has realized the mistake that was made putting bush into office and we all want to go back and see what would happen if Al Gore ran, especially after all of the work he’s done with global warming awarness and well… Now This:
<object classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ width=”400″ height=”400″><param name=”movie” value=”http://current.com/e/88817757″ /><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /><embed src=”http://current.com/e/88817757″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”400″ height=”400″ wmode=”transparent”/></object>

He’s a national icon, a celebrity and a Noble Peace Prize winner. I think he’s setting us up for a run at being President… Now I know that this is all just wishful thinking, but personally I believe that he could declare himself as interested in running 10 days before the elections, and everything in the world would be thrown into a tizzy. He could win, hopefully he’ll throw his hat in very soon. I want to be voting for Gore in 08.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus & Heath Ledgers Death

So the news has broken, the actor Heath Ledger has passed on.

But really that’s not what has peaked my interest (not to say that it’s terrible that we have lost another great actor), it’s the fact that he was working on a movie titled The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus which was slated for a 2009 release. Now I’m sure that the film won’t be shut down completely, maybe stalled, or put on hold. But what I’m interested in seeing is where the movie will go from here, because Batman is finished, they’re in post right now so maybe we won’t get some killer ADR that needs to be finished up but what Happens to the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, were they far enough along to leave him in the film, or are they going to have to recast the role? From what I can gather about the movie from the wikipedia page is that it will probably be a heavy CGI film, so whether the practicals have all been shot and we won’t see the final Heath Ledger film until 2009 is a mystery that can only be decided by the people making the film. Hopefully the film won’t be scrapped because of this, I’m not saying this because I’m a huge movie fan, instead because isn’t that the entire point of making movies, to capture an imaginary world that really isn’t there, and what’s more imaginary than the dead coming back to us.

Embeding Quicktime in HTML

 So my friend was in need of embedding a Quicktime movie into her website, but of course all that Dreamweaver seems to support is Flash, and Flash videos. Anyways knowing it that at some point I’d need to do this same thing at some point, and I figured that I would blog about it here so that other people can see this as well!

<OBJECT classid=’clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B’ codebase=’http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab’>
This is a very basic, we use the Object to declare the video, and give it an id and a Codebase so that the browser can use the right codec.
<param name=’src’ value=”my.mov”>
So this is the actual movie, just replace “my.mov” with what ever your movie name is.
<param name=’autoplay’ value=”true”>
The autoplay is useful for portfolios and demo reels.
<param name=’controller’ value=”true”>
You can turn any of these parameters off, Controller just means that there is a play and pause button.
<EMBED src=”my.mov” autoplay=”true” width=”720″ height=”500″
controller=”true” loop=”true” pluginspage=’http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/’>
</EMBED>
So this is simply a recap of everything that we have set up in the parameters.
</OBJECT>

Amazingly it is THAT simple.

Pirates of the Caribean MMO

So I saw the ad for the new Pirates MMO that Disney had recently released, we both laughed about how it is probably really bad and neither of us would ever play it (because it wouldn’t be OS X compatible). Of course that changed quickly. I hopped onto the Disney site to see what was up with this game. Low and Behold it is OS X compatible so I quickly download the application. So here’s my first hand experience with Pirates. It Sucks!

Ok so I know that I didn’t pay for the application, and that I’m not paying for a monthly subscription, but there’s virtually no options for you. the first ship you get in the game, a Light Sloop which can hold only 3 crew members (including you) and can only store 3 cargo units, which trust me fill up pretty damn fast. There’s not much room for expanding your gun or swordman ship, even most of the loot you’re going to get is off limits unless you decide to fork over for the Unlimited Access in which case you’re loosing $10 a month but you get access to everything. Now don’t take my word for it, go ut, download the game, give it a try, and make the decision for yourself. In the games defense though, not everything is horribly pointless in the game, the ship to ship combat is AMAZING! But not if you’re navigating the ship, oh no, that’s pointless. Instead navigate to some Navy infested water, and hop off the steering wheel and run to your cannons, firing form your canons is the funnest part of the game. Now I can’t really talk about what it’s like to not be the captain of the ship because at the time of writing this I couldn’t get an invite to be in anyones crew so I don’t really know.  I’ve got a bunch of pictures in game on my  flickr if you’re interested. I hope to see you in game.

Running Windows XP on Ubuntu

This is a really nice demo that documents how to install and run Windows XP on Ubuntu with Virtual Box. It seems fairly straight forward and easy to do.

The Train Show – Lego Train

I’m not sure which is more amazing, the lego train, or the fact that there is a Tv show all about Trains….

I used to have a lego train set, a long time ago… I wonder what happened to it?

My Parent’s Are Dead

So I started to watch Batman Begins this evening on F/X, I’ve always liked this movie, from the very first time I saw it in the theater, anyways Scott Kurtz, who runs an amazing webcomic titled PVPOnline. Anyways, Kurtz made this amazing short comic at the 24 comics in 24 hours event. I think that it’s very applicable to Batman Begins. And reading it makes me all that more excited for the new Batman! Here’s a Link to the comic as well as the comic itself.