So after much anticipation and ignoring all the bad reviews, a few of us decided to go watch "The Village" last night. Unfortunately, I can't say it lived up to the expectations...

It started off pretty well - the sound effects and camera work did make a few scenes feel quite eerie. There was nothing that made me go "whoa" though, something that happened several times while I was watching Shyamalan's earlier movies. I don't know what exactly to attribute it to, but it felt like the whole story turned out to be pretty weak at the end of it all.

I really don't know what else to say about it...but hey, I guess I'd never know what it was like unless I watched it myself, so I don't regret going all that much.

I realized I hadn't posted any pics after I moved into my new room, so here goes...

Here's a great little video from Microsoft Research's VIBE (Visualization, Interaction, Business and Entertainment) group that highlights just some of neat stuff they're working on.

I really liked all the ideas that they showcased - some rather significant useability enhancements in there.
Wonder if we'll see any of this stuff in Longhorn? This is the kind of stuff I'd really like to see, rather than just eye-candy.

Watched Mystic River last night before going to sleep. Thought it was an excellent movie. The acting was great, and the story/plot was very intriguing. It was on my list of movies to watch for quite a while, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to watch it.

I'm curious to see what "i, Robot" is like. If any of you have watched it already, leave a comment and let me know what you thought. Still have to check which theatres it's running in.

On campus right now...connected via WLAN. Have to head to class in 5 minutes, so more later.

While reading this great book yesterday, I wanted to actually try out some coding on my own. I clicked my Visual Studio .NET 2003 icon only to realize that I hadn't reinstalled it since I formatted my drive sometime ago. Now my MSDNAA CD set is back in my room at uni, but I remembered that Microsoft was offering free downloads of the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 Express components which are currently beta versions. So I went ahead and downloaded Visual C# 2005 Express, and I was impressed...very, very impressed.

The improvements in 2005 are huge! VS .NET 2003 was already undoubtedly my C++ IDE of choice, but 2005 introduces all these new features that really increase your productivity.
For example, when you now type a keyword and hover over it, the tooltip displays not just the syntax as it did in 2003, but also a general description of what the method does. This is awesome, since you don't need to refer to the Help files or MSDN as often now as you had to.
But perhaps the best thing I almost instantly discovered when I wrote a few lines of code was the fact that the IDE automatically detects syntactical errors in your code right as you type. So for example, if you forget a semi-colon or a curly-brace, you don't have to wait to compile the program for the error messages to be thrown at you all at once. VS will underline the problematic area with a squiggly line (like spellcheck in Word) and display a friendly error message at the bottom of the screen while you continue typing. This is a big plus - it lets you fix errors there and then, which becomes especially important in those huge programs.
And then of course, you have IntelliSense and auto-completion, which have become indispensable to me, and they really show marked improvements in this new version.

Big props to Microsoft for this one. If you're doing any C#/C++ programming (or VB/VB.NET/J# etc. for that matter) in Windows, you really, really should check this out. I'm just very glad I'll be able to get the whole CD set for free via MSDNAA when it goes final.

I've had this book sitting on the shelf for a long time now; just never had enough time to start looking at it during regular quarters. Now that summer is here, I finally decided to dive in.

All the programming courses that I've taken in school and uni so far have been limited to the command-line, and most of the coding that I've done "for fun" has also been the same (except for that one Checkers game in which I made use of the CMU graphics library). I have been meaning to start Windows programming, and with the next version of Windows being heavily dependent on .NET, I figured it would be a good idea to start off with C#, .NET and Windows Forms right away, rather than taking the Visual C++ and MFC route.

I got through the first 2 chapters this afternoon...C# really has lots of really neat features going for it as a programming language. Seems to combine the best of several other languages. One amusing, yet very handy feature is that conditional statements like "if" only work with the bool data type. So for example,

int a = 10;
if(a = 2) ... // This leads to a compile-time error!
if(a == 2) ... // This obviously works just fine

Think of the number of times you've erroneously used = instead of == in C/C++ and had really bad things happen.
No more of that!

Another cool concept is that of managed code and automatic garbage collection, which I had actually read about quite some time ago. No more delete! When the runtime environment finds that an array, for example, isn't being referenced by anything, it automatically reclaims resources. Definitely a handy way of saving you from those nasty memory leaks.

I quite like the syntax too. Most of it is very clear and readable. Lots of other great stuff in the first chapter itself, but it's still too much to list really.

Well well, it does seem like I'm getting paid for advertising Firefox, doesn't it? I'm going to try and contain myself from now on, although you have to admit that the progress towards 1.0 is quite exciting.
Or maybe it's just me...

Anyways, on to other things: as always, I'm back home for the weekend. I was talking to my dad about the picture-frame notebook mod during the long drive back, and he agrees that it's a really neat idea. Unfortunately, he's too busy to work with me at the moment, but there is a very good possibility that we might resurrect that Twinhead notebook in a similar fashion sometime before September. Lovely!

The VAIO on the other hand probably has a burnt out mainboard, so we'll just have to try and get rid of the parts one by one somehow. I'm thinking of saving the hard disk and converting it to an external USB/Firewire drive using one of those nifty little 2.5" aluminium enclosures. Since notebook drives have such a small form-factor, it would almost be like carrying a USB key drive around, except it would have a much larger capacity. The only thing I'm concerned about right now is the reliability of the drive after such a long time. After all, they do say that notebook drives have shorter lifespans than regular desktop ones. We'll see how that idea turns out...

MoBlog MoMent: The innards of my Inspiron: what you can see is the graphics card on the left, and the CPU/HSF setup on the right.

If you go to the Mozilla site, you'll notice that it's the first anniversary of the Mozilla Foundation.

Congratulations to everyone involved in making all the Mozilla software projects what they are today. I remember the early versions of what has now become Firefox - what was first known as Phoenix, and later Firebird - and I can honestly say that the project has come a long way since then. Every new preview milestone has been a huge leap in both stability and functionality. Firefox 1.0, the first true release-quality version, is undoubtedly going to be the greatest browser ever created.

Some really neat statistics that I didn't know about until today:

* 5.5 million downloads of Mozilla products in the last 30 days, including over 3 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox. That's close to 200,000 downloads a day over the last month.
* More than 300 million page views on our web site for the year. This month alone, an estimated 10 million visitors have come to mozilla.org - and we're just halfway into the month.
* Growing buzz for Firefox, with more than 20,000 web sites linking to the Firefox product page!

I usually don't visit the Blogger control panel very often since I post and make all template changes using w.bloggar, so it seems like I've missed a nice new feature for a while now.

Ever since Google took over Blogger from Pyra Labs, a ton of great new features have been added, including lots of very professional-looking templates for those who don't/can't create their own designs and layouts. The Atom feed feature was announced in January this year...I just never happened to notice it until today.

Since all it involved was checking a couple of boxes and creating a new XML file, I've enabled Atom syndication for anyone who uses feed-readers. The feed will display short excerpts from the five latest posts that are displayed on the index page. The nice thing is that Blogger generates perfectly structured XML that validates correctly.

This has to be one of the coolest mods I've seen in a long time.

Basically, an old notebook was completely disassembled, and then put back together to create a "picture-frame" computer. The end result looks just incredible!



Read the whole tutorial to see how it's done and to see many more great pics.

I actually have two of my dad's old notebooks at home, neither of which are being used - a Twinhead and a Sony VAIO, both PIII machines, the VAIO being more recent. The Twinhead works perfectly to this day, but the VAIO died after it was...err...dropped. The individual components (screen, CD-ROM, hard disk etc.) still work.

I'm so tempted to try this project on the Twinhead, but I'm not going to because (1) it's going to be too time consuming, and (2) I'm not so sure I'll be able to finish it and still have it in working condition.


I'm still wondering what I could do with the Twinhead. Was thinking of setting it up as a DVD player sometime ago, but I'd like to do something cooler with it...not something too difficult though. Any ideas? The working VAIO parts will probably go up on Ebay at some point.

Here is a working download link for the latest version of Floodbox for you, Robb. It's probably newer than the version I'm using right now...besides, I've modified mine quite a bit from the original (removed some fields, changed the CSS, and some other little things).

Floodbox v2.0 Download

EDIT: The same page also has a link to Floodbox v1.0, which is what I've been using. Didn't notice it earlier.

A security hole plugged in a single day by the Mozilla dev team. *Applauds*

On July 7 (yesterday) a security vulnerability affecting browsers for the Windows operating system was posted to Full Disclosure, a public security mailing list. On the same day, the Mozilla security team confirmed the report of this security issue affecting the Mozilla Application Suite, Firefox, and Thunderbird and discussed and developed the fix at Bugzilla bug 250180. We have confirmed that the bug affects only users of Microsoft's Windows operating system. The issue does not affect Linux or Macintosh users.

Today, the Mozilla team released a configuration change which resolves this problem by explicitly disabling the use of the shell: external protocol handler. The fix is available in two forms. The first is a small download which will make this configuration adjustment for the user. The second fix is to install the newest full release of each of these products. Instructions on administering these changes can be found here

Quick, painless fix...and it doesn't even need a reboot. Things like this make me wonder how anyone can not love the Mozilla projects.

Be a part of Firefox's community marketing project.
Blake, one of the members of the Firefox development team, posted this over at the mozillaZine forums:

We didn't start the fire. But we're certainly going to keep it burning.

We kick off our first community marketing project with a simple task, but one that shouldn't be underestimated: boosting our ratings at top download sites like download.com. While our percentages at such sites are impressive, the number of users who have reviewed the product is decidedly not. For example, at the time of this writing, only 79 users have voted on and reviewed Firefox. This is not going to sway the millions of folks who frequent download.com. It's not going to launch us to the top of the popularity lists. And, most importantly, it's not going to get us featured on the prime real estate that is download.com's front page. We've spoken to c|net editors. It's the applications that are generating the buzz that make it onto their front page for weeks at a time, and that make it into their news stories.

In light of that, we introduce our first community marketing project with a, er, modest goal: One thousand reviews of Firefox. By next week. Your job is to go to the Firefox product listing (Mac version available here) and vote on/review Firefox. Your next job is to get five people to vote also. Your final task is to spread the word about this campaign in one public area (blogs work well for this). We are not telling you how to vote or what to say in your review. We are just asking you to get out the vote.

Please don't take this task lightly. We've spoken to c|net, and it really does have a major impact on the future success of our product. Thanks for all your help, and I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do this week to spread the flames.

So go ahead and get your votes/reviews in, then spread the word around.


Link: OSNN thread

Just spotted this article over at mozillaZine and thought it was worth mentioning:

Wired News is reporting that Mozilla downloads have surged following advice from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to avoid Internet Explorer for security reasons. Download numbers approximately doubled in the days following the US-CERT recommendation, which was made in the form of an update to an earlier vulnerability note and comments to the press.

US-CERT's advice follows last week's outbreak of the Download.Ject virus, which exploited a number of holes in Microsoft's IIS Web server and Internet Explorer to install a password-stealing trojan horse on Web surfers' computers.

A few days ago, even an article on a Microsoft-owned site recommended Mozilla Firefox as a replacement for Internet Explorer. UCLA's CTS (our university's Communications Technology Services) labeled Mozilla as the BruinOnline "recommended browser and e-mail client" a few months ago. The browser's marketshare has been steadily increasing, especially following the launch of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation's hugely popular standalone browser.
It's great to see the Mozilla Project getting the recognition it deserves.

Earlier today, a friend and I were talking about the monsoons in India, and the heavy rains in Bombay, especially.

So here we are - the newest site theme: "Rain"
It's a little more mellow as compared to Summer and MetalTrak, and it's going to be my default theme for a while.
Hope you like it too.

Seems like some of you are quite eager to know what I thought of Spiderman 2, so let's start with that.

Well, after reading some of the reviews online, I was expecting something very cool, and needless to say, the movie definitely met those expectations. The acting and the dialogues were quite cheesy at times, especially during emotional scenes, but I think that could be attributed to the fact that it was probably meant to be comicbook-like and entertaining, rather than being true-to-life realistic. Lots of humor sprinkled all through the movie, and that made it a joy to watch as well. But most importantly, the action, camera-work, and special effects were incredibly cool - much better than the first part in that respect, I thought. All-in-all, it's a movie you don't want to miss catching in a theater. Definitely go check it out.

On to other things...as most of you already know, it's going to be a three day weekend. I've got plenty of math homework to do, and a psychology test on Wednesday (yes, already =P). Also have my Fall quarter enrollment appointment tomorrow night. Even then, I should have quite a bit of time to spare for other things...might go watch the fireworks or something. Let's see.

So that's about it. Dinner time.
More later.

MoBlog MoMent: Watching Spiderman 2 at the Mann Village Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles. The place was packed, and the crowd was really enthusiastic.