June 2008 Archives

I am a Diablo addict. Well, at least I was so, regading Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 (and Lord of Destruction).

Interesting enough, and I am not sure how, I found out that today Blizzard revealed the first details about Diablo III. And I just got.. erm... what is the right word? Oh, yes, I drool a lot. I think I am still drooling.

Accordingly with the movies, it seems quite similar with previous ones in genre (that is good, they did not kill the game already), with new and enhanced special effects. Probably I'll need to buy a few mouses to play Diablo III until the end. But that should not be a problem.

Now, let just hope it works under MacOS.

In the last days Portugal was drown by advertising for Eee PC. I am not sure if this is all an ASUS marketing issue or if all these sellers are happy to see a laptop for about 300 euros.

The truth is that it all started last week with RadioPopular (a known electronic shop in Portugal) saying they will have Eee PC in exclusive. Some hours later I received a similar advertisement from MediaMarkt (also exclusive). Later I knew that FNAC already had one in exposition. Yesterday, another computer store sent me an SMS with an advertisement. Thus, at least four stores with Eee PC and making a lot of advertising.

Now, regarding the laptop itself, it has a resolution interesting enough (although I would like to see a panoramic monitor), is has three USB ports (shame to MacBook Air), ethernet card (shame to MacBook Air again), a full standard VGA connector (erm, should I refer MacBook Air?), WiFi, a small trackpad with two buttons, a full Portuguese keyboard. The operating system is based on Linux (I know, there is one windows based as well), and runs mainly OpenOffice 2, Thunderbird, Firefox, some KDE games and educational applications. There are direct links to web applications like Wikipedia, Google docs and other. It all run fast enough.

OK, now the complaints: I got a shell! I used disk-free in this 4GB machine. The partition had 1.5GB, 150 MB used, 1.2GB free. I wonder where is the remaining 2.5GB. Unfortunatey I couldn't use fdisk to check this more throught. Oh, and I forgot to check if there was a Perl version.

Now, anybody wants to buy one, so I can analyse it better?

Superhero movie appears in the continuation of the good old Scary Movie series. Unfortunately Scary Movie serie got a real loss of quality with each new sequel, and this movie, being in continuation of that kind of movie, is also of very low quality.

The main problem to me is the similarity with the Spider Man movie. All of Superhero movie story follows as the Spidar Man one. There are some small parts of the story where other movies are used, as X-Men or Fantastic Four. But in any case, they appear for a small period of time, and the story continues with Spider Man.

Fortunately there is Sara Paxton, and her eyes, that make us distract a little. Of course there is also Pamela Anderson, but she appears for a too small period of time.

I would not rate the movie as 4/10, as it is currently on IMDB, but not much higher. Something like 6/10 would be enough.

OK, Firefox 3 is installed for two days, download day ended, mozilla website is back online. This means that it is not possible to browse through the add-onds and themes. It is also a good timing to tell you what I think about Firefox 3.

First of all, I do not like its design under MacOS. I think that the design under Windows is very good, but the colors under Mac are too dark. If you put two windows side by side you will notice that Firefox 3 is just too dark. I've tried some other themes but none is good enough at the moment. Note that most of the themes do not work yet with Firefox 3 and those which work require or a Windows installation, or that you register in the addons website. And I am not in that mood yet. Yet on design, I am not happy with the widgets design as well. I know it is more Aquacious, but I do not like it. That was one reason I did not use Safari. Searched on the configuration database for some key to turn off those buttons but couldn't find it.

The two most advertised features are speed and memory. Unfortunately running firefox 3 under a Mac with 4GB of RAM doesn't help to compare with the memory usage of firefox 2, or its speed. But under vmware it seems a little faster. Probably I can get some more about this with some more usage.

Regarding plugins, I do not like this new Del.icio.us plugin. This is not new for Firefox 3, and is not mozilla fault. But I do not like it. I was quite happy with the clear distinction between a web 2.0 website and a browser. Now, things are quite mungled together.

I did not install yet Firebug. That plugin will help me to discover how fixed are the memory holes. With Firefox 2 and Firebug it took me about 10 seconds to open a tab. Hope that gets better now.

Also, I am missing the SwitchProxy plugin, but probably that gets back someday.

To finish, let me advertise myself. You can find my name in the about from the spell checker for the Portuguese (European) language.

Yes, I downloaded Firefox 3. Yes, I am running now Firefox 3 in my Mac. Yes, when I access mozilla.com, firefox.com or other similar URLs, I get a link to download Firefox 2. Yes, I tried to refresh. Yes, I tried to remove the cache. Yes, I tried to use lynx from a remote server. Yes, Firefox 2 link remained there. Yes, this is very weird. And, finally, yes, that explains why there are so few downloads at the present moment.

Now, the question is: this link leads to the Firefox 3 download, or to the 2.0.0.14 download for Mac OS X?

Well, unfortunately it currently links to Firefox 2.0.0.14.

Probably I should wait some more minutes.

For a long time that I did not see a movie. Today it is an official holidays in Portugal. So, I took the day to see a movie: 2 Fast 2 Furious. I've seen the previous one, and the next one (Tokyo Drift) and was taking too long to watch this one. But today I was in the mood to see girls and cars. Nice girls, by the way.

The movie story is quite straightforward. Not too much to say about it. Cars, speed, some violence, some fun. I have a good time watching it.

And it wasn't that difficult, as there is Eva Mendes... and what Eva Mendes. 

I am reading the second volume from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, known as The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Do not read below as it might contain spoilers.

I didn't read much yet. I am in the middle of the book. It continues to be quite strange as the first volume, and quite difficult to read in English by a non native speaker. This, mainly because Douglas Adams makes some jokes with words that are not easy to understand.

The interesting part about this book is its name. When I've read the title I thought of a restaurant in a corner of the universe... you know, imagine the universe to be a flat square, or a 3D cube: there are edges, so, probable ends of the Universe.

But the truth is that the restaurant is AT the end of the Universe, that means, the restaurant from which one can see the Universe ending.

Is this difference subtle for English speakers as well, or just for me?

This was the gift some friends gave me for my PhD. No, it is not that strange that a 30 years old boy likes to play Lego. And this set is quite good (took me 8 hours to build), but has some major flaws:

• it is easy to notice that at first the author would like to make the steering wheel to rotate the wheels, but unfortunately that part of the build is incomplete;
• although at the end the car is quite robust, it is quite hard to build the front without breaking it some times. In any case, that cat head in the front, although very nice, is not robust. The articulation is done by a small axis, which makes it quite unstable when open.
• in the box there are some arrows to the two wings, as they would move. In fact, when building, you will notice two rotula in the wings architecture. But then, the car chassis prevents them to move.

If you ask where I had more fun, it was with the driver seat (neat!) and the rear chassis.