A while ago I was writing about the novel Infected, a sci-fi thriller written by Scott Sigler. In it, an automated alien probe was using biological reconstruction to create a portal for unspeakable (and not described) evil that awaited on the other side. Alien probes being as they are, the operation failed, but not permanently, since the probe remained undiscovered and ready to plan more mayhem.

Enter Contagious, Sigler's latest book, also freely available in weekly installments on his personal blog in both MP3 and PDF versions. Is the guy too nice or what? Today the final episode was released and I can finally comment on the book.

It is clearly a better book than Infected. Not by too much, but definitely more intense. It's like Aliens to the Alien film, only for Infected :) The probe is logically doing all kind of stupid stuff, including duplicating part of his functionality in the brain of a little girl. I mean, we humans have enough trouble as it is with girls, be them small or grown up, albeit the alien probe had no idea I suppose. The US centric approach was kept, there are more explosions, lots of killing, contagious yet centralised alien organisms... in other words, a decent sequel. The only thing I couldn't really get is the father-son relationship between Perry and Dew. Couldn't believe that for a moment, although it may be my fault.

All in all I read all chapters with pleasure, anxiously waiting for the next episode. It would make a nice manga :) I can only thank mr. Sigler for allowing me to read his book without feeling like a thief getting it through a file sharing service.

So, is humanity doomed in this one? Well, yeah... I mean, we still have girls... and besides, I can't possible spoil the ending now, can I? Rest assured that there will be a third book and our favourite aliens may still get rid of the human infestation and bring the love of God on our planet. Hmm, why did I say that? My tongue feels funny, too.

I haven't watched too many movies recently because I've mostly switched to TV series. They're more comfortable as they last under one hour, I don't have to waste a lot of time negotiating with my wife which film to see and they're regular. Bottom line, they're like soap operas for old people. And I am, inevitably, getting old. There should be a whole blog post about that, though, so back to the subject at hand: the list of TV series I have been watching.

This is a bit depressing, almost everything I have been watching is either at the end of the season or the end of the series. The economic crisis and everything, I suppose, or maybe people have finally started to move off TVs and switch to computers, as I have, and the income for any TV production has decreased dramatically.

So Stargate, both SG1 and Atlantis, has finally ended. A new Stargate Universe series in on the way, something a little darker, so something like the Deep Space Nine of the Stargate franchise. That should probably be the best series, and yet I predict the worse TV ratings. And that's because people are morons. Not to mention that at least a quarter of the original Stargate fans (those that weren't in the gun battles) were watching the series because of the green scenery on alien worlds.

Battlestar Galactica 2003. A brilliant reinvention of the old BSG concept, with a fantastic first season, faltering second season and abysmal third and forth seasons. This series has ended as well, and in the worse possible way: "God did it!". There is a spin off prequel, though, called Caprica. The pilot was released already and it was decent enough, although the religious crap is there from the very beginning.

Doctor Who 2005. Another remake of an old classic. Weird and ... weird. I can't stop watching it, but I also can't say why I do. It's a sci-fi, supposedly, and it's British :). Not to mention Christopher Eccleston played as the doctor for the first season, accompanied by beautiful Billie Piper as the female sidekick. This series has not ended, but it is on hiatus, one that will only end next year :(

And since I mentioned sexy Billie Piper, here is a non sci-fi series for you: Secret Diary of a Call Girl, where she is a call girl. Based on a book written by the infamous Belle de Jour, it is funny, honest and not so full of bullshit. And it's British :) Ok, enough with the British smiley, but you have to admit, being the second class citizen as TV series are concerned makes room for a lot of ingenuity and originality. The series has two seasons already and a third on the way, after Billie recovers from her pregnancy.

Eureka. Another sci-fi I am watching only because it is sci-fi. A wonderful concept, where a small village is actually a think tank of all the most brilliant scientists America has to offer. Of course, this would have been a fantastic show if made by the Russians. But being as it is, it is mostly a comedy, with the science put there only as comic prop. The say a fourth season is planned for mid 2009, but with TV series dropping like flies, who know.

Regenesis. Canadian show. Had 5 seasons then it died. Interesting topic, about an international team tasked to prevent and fight off disease outbreaks. It was pretty nice in the beginning, then it went all sci-fi and then it just collapsed. Think of it as 'Doctor House works at the CDC'. Too bad they had to abandon all pretense of reality. As we can see, disease outbreaks are as real and present as they can be these days.

And speaking of House MD, I am watching it, too. Only this time it's all because of inertia. My wife likes it, and I prefer it to romantic comedies. With the fifth season ending with House being taken to a psychiatric hospital, who knows if there will even be a sixth season. The medicine was gone from the show a long time ago, anyway.

Jericho. The US is nuked. And not just once, but a nuke in every major city. What will the average small town American do in a time of chaos and lawlessness? Great concept and a great first half season. Then it all went south. It was still decent, although infected with the Lost bug, when they cancelled the show. Fans were outraged, media companies did not care. As usual. And they wonder why they are losing money and audience like the Titanic took on water.

Numb3rs. Started great and it is still decent at the end of the fifth season. I will continue to watch it, even if the math has gone from it and it basically is now a police procedural series. What I do like about it is that the dynamic of the characters is very well designed. People really are people in the show, not just cardboard characters. It could turn out to be a show about nothing, and I would still watch it. Good job, Scott brothers!

Lost. This is a show I hate with all my heart. I am not watching it, my wife is, enough said it starts with some people crashing on a deserted island and now people die and get resurrected from episode to episode. J. J. Abrams, I hope you die a quick death and roast in hell forever! This horrible thing has reached the end of the fifth season and people still want more, so it will probably get to season six. Meanwhile, all shows have begun having pseudo mystical crap mixed in with simple scenarios and having big booming sounds whenever some crisis of absolutely no magnitude is born. Lost has invented the sound effects for dramas just as some show invented laugh-over for comedies.

Grey's Anatomy. Beautiful looking doctors that are always in some crisis or another, all of them emotional, while trying to avoid showing anything about actual medicine. Wife watches it, I stay away. Season five just ended and the show is going strong.

Private Practice. A Grey's Anatomy spin-off!! Second season just ended.

Ugly Betty. After three seasons of tortuous mental ineptitude, even my wife can't watch that crap anymore. That doesn't mean it is not high in the ratings.

Prison Break. I actually watched the first season and I thought it was nice. I could barely watch the second season and somewhere in the middle I just stopped. It's a show about absolutely nothing. Fourth season just ended (or is about to).

Criminal Minds. This is a police procedural about a crime unit tasked to profile serial killers and find them. It shows at least in principle how the mind of the killer works and it is not solely focused on the law enforcement agency. Most episodes are just watchable, but some are really nice and make everything worthwhile. The last good episode was about a guy killing people in red cars because his wife was killed in an accident involving a red car. By the end of the series we find out that the killer was driving the red car at the time and he suppressed the memory.

Terminator - The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The Terminator has evolved from hunky Schwarzie to liquid Robert Patrick to manipulative bitch Kristanna Loken to teenage girl Summer Glau. Lucky for us, the new Terminator Salvation movie is not about a child Terminator. Or is it not? Actually, this Terminator series was quite decent. Not good, but definitely watchable. So guess what? Low ratings! The show was cancelled after only two seasons.

Southpark. This animated parody series was brilliant when it started and it is still brilliant after 13 seasons. Usually an episode is a parody to a movie or a real life situation, all involving 4Th grade school children in a backwater town called Southpark. Sometimes they get to use too much toilet humour, but more often than not, the Southpark episodes are great.

Dexter. Oh, this is a show that I just love. Psychopathic killer Dexter Morgan is a Miami police crime scene technician and his policeman father, recognizing his mental persuasion, has taught him "the code" or "how to kill only serial killers and not get caught". Based on a book that I found worse than the show, the show has reached season 3 and I can't wait for the fourth season to start.

Big Love. This is a strange one. It is a series detailing the life of a Mormon family, one guy, three wives. As this marital arrangement is both illegal and controversial (since one major religion embraces it) there are all kinds of interesting developments. I for one think it is a very brave thing to do to make a show like this and Tom Hanks is one of the executive producers! The third season just ended, but I think the quality of the show is starting to go down as it turns more and more to cheap and unrealistic drama.

Fringe. J.J.Abrams again. He takes X-Files, adds a mystical twinge to it and the infinite puzzle of starting story arches and taking them nowhere and he creates Fringe. I am not watching it anymore, but for the episodes I did watch at least half the credit is due to John Noble, interpreting Dr. Walter Bishop.

Eli Stone. This was crappy to begin with. And it ended in a shameful cancellation after only two seasons. Imagine a lawyer that is also a psychic. Actually, he is a prophet of God. Geez!

Heroes. "Oh, you have to watch Heroes, it is so cool!". After my initial fear of starting to watch something about super heroes, again!, I got convinced by all the people telling me to watch it. Unfortunately, that only has proven I keep stupid company. The show is not only bad, it is beyond stupid. Third season has ended, the fourth is on its way.

Legend of the Seeker. Well, when I heard the people that made Xena and Hercules were doing another show I thought I would never enjoy it. But I do. It is still rather idiotic, but at least it doesn't turn battles into comedy scenes. People really do die, even if in the most clean ways. What a good horror series this would have been. The first season is close to its end and I suppose it will have a second season at least.

True Blood. I had to see it to believe it. Vampires in a small American town in which everybody actually behaves like in a small isolated town: they are superstitious, bigot, stupid, sneaky, mean. The story is a bit weird, but I allow it :) Second season is set to start on the 14Th of July.

Californication. Oh, oh, oh! David Duchovny has just become my personal idol. His character is a writer, intelligent, middle aged and totally cool. A bit too sexually active, but that plays well into the cool description. This is just one of those shows I can't not love. I can barely wait for the third season, sometime in late 2009.

Breaking Bad. I can't really relate to the main character, but the show is sound. A chemistry teacher finds out that he has terminal cancer. In an attempt to make a lot of money quickly in order to leave his family with a decent life, he starts cooking methamphetamine and selling it with the help of a local pothead. It is a show both funny and scary. His family doesn't know a thing, which adds to the tension. Not as good as Dexter, but pretty close. Can barely wait for the third season to start.

I am also starting to watch Entourage. Mark Wahlberg is playing a young actor "making it" in Hollywood. At least this is what I have read about it. It already has 5 seasons and I wonder if there is going to be a sixth. But I have still to start watching it and telling you what I think.

And at the end, last but not least, the anime series: Naruto Shippuuden and Bleach. I only started watching Bleach because of a friend liked it. I think it is barely watchable. I do read the manga, though, and that has gone way further than the anime. Surprisingly enough, though, the anime has some mini story aches that are not found in the manga. Licencing issues? Of Naruto I have already spoken of. I think it is pretty nice, although only at an emotional level. The manga is also way ahead and both manga and anime have story arches the other doesn't have. Both these series are shounen, meaning the type of story where the male character goes through increasingly difficult challenges which he overcomes, mostly through strenght of will and not something real like lots of work and exercise :) They still feel good, though, to immature males such as myself.


And that was it. Hopefully you will forgive me for not providing links. Just google it! :)

I was installing a Visual Studio project made by a very cool team and, as they are very cool, it had this very complex folder structure for every little class and test and long names on the folder and so on and so on. Therefore, when trying to create a file on my Windows XP computer, the installer of the project failed with the strange error: 'the file name you specified is not valid or too long'.

I was under the impression that the path was no longer limited to 255 characters in Windows XP, but I was wrong. The MAX_PATH constant in Windows XP is 260. Everything over that causes an error unless specifically using a UNC formatted path (starting with \\?\). Weird huh?

Here is a technical description of the path concept in Windows: File Names, Paths, and Namespaces.
And here is the KB article with the "solutions": You cannot delete a file or a folder on an NTFS file system volume.

I don't pretend to know much about mathematics, but that should make it really easy to follow this article, because if I understood it, then so should you. I was watching this four episode show called Story of Maths. Its first episode was pretty nice and I started watching the second. The guy presented what he called the Chinese Remainder Theorem, something that was created and solved centuries before Europeans even knew what math was. It's a modular arithmetic problem. Anyway, here is the problem:

A woman selling eggs at the market has a number of eggs, but doesn't know exactly how many. All she knows is that if she arranges the eggs in rows of 3 eggs, she is left with one egg on the last row, if she uses rows of 5, she is left with 2 eggs, while if she uses rows of 7, 3 eggs are left on the last row. What is the (minimum) number of eggs that she can have?
You might want to try to solve it yourself before readind the following.

Here is how you solve it:

Let's call the number of eggs X. We know that X ≡ 1(mod 3) ≡ 2(mod 5) ≡ 3(mod 7). That means that there are three integer numbers a, b and c so that X = 3a+1 = 5b+2 = 7c+3.

3a = 5b+1 from the first two equalitites.
We switch to modular notation again: 3a ≡ 1(mod 5). Now we need to know what a is modulo 5 and we do this by looking at a division table or by finding the lowest number that satisfies the equation 3a = 5b+1 and that is 2. 3*2 = 5*1+1.

So 3a ≡ 1(mod 5) => a ≡ 2(mod 5).

Therefore there is an integer number m so that a = 5m+2 and 3a+1 = 7c+3. We do a substitution and we get 15m+7 = 7c+3.

In modular that means 15m+7 ≡ 3(mod 7) or (7*2)m+7+m ≡ 3(mod 7). So m ≡ 3(mod 7) so there is an integer n that satisfies this equation: m = 7n+3. Therefore X = 15m+7 = 15(7n+3)+7 = 105n+52

And that gives us the solution: X ≡ 52(mod 105). The smallest number of eggs the woman had was 52. I have to wonder how the Chinese actually performed this calculation.

Let me summarize:
X ≡ 1(mod 3) ≡ 2(mod 5) ≡ 3(mod 7) =>
X = 3a+1 = 5b+2 = 7c+3 =>
3a ≡ 1(mod 5) =>
a ≡ 2(mod 5)=>
a = 5m+2 =>
X = 15m+7 = 7c+3 =>
15m+7 ≡ 3(mod 7) =>
m ≡ 3(mod 7) =>
m = 7n+3 =>
X = 15(7n+3)+7 = 105n+52 =>
X ≡ 52(mod 105).

For me, what seemed the most hard to understand issue was how does 3a ≡ 1(mod 5) turn into a ≡ 2(mod 5). But we are in modulo 5 country here, so if 3a equals 1(mod 5), then it also equals 6(mod 5) and 11 and 16 and 21 and so on. And if 3a equals 6(mod 5), then a is 2(mod 5). If 3a equals 21(mod 5), then a equals 7(mod 5) which is 2(mod 5) all over again.

Well, this is a time of great change in my life. First I had to give my cat away, due to medical reasons. I had him for more than 5 years and I really liked him. Now he is living in the countryside, with my parents in law, trying to get some pussy (sorry, couldn't help it :) ) and getting beat up for it by sturdy country female cats.

A few months after I got the cat, I also got a new job, prompting me to write my first blog entry. I was saying then that I am starting my first real software developer job in an Italian company. Now, after almost five years, I am giving away my cat and also changing jobs.

My new company is (hopefully) a place where I can accelerate the rate of my learning and professional development and I will be working there on a Windows desktop WPF+WCF+WF+Entity Framework application. So expect a lot of blog entries about new (for me) technologies. I will be starting work there on the first of June.

On the other hand I don't know if it would be permitted (or I would have the time) to stay available for chat on the blog, so if I don't answer, it's probably because I can't.

Wish me luck, everybody!

Here is a fun little site called Wordle. It allows the graphic creation of a compact word cloud. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to take into account the counts for the words.

After a very long wait, one destined to only increase expectations on this movie, the second adolescent Naruto movie, Bonds, reached me. Well, as with any high expectations they were destined to breed disappointment, but I think beyond that, this movie was bad in an objective way.

I mean, yeah, Sasuke and Naruto meet once again in the face of the most pathetic enemy yet. They didn't even try with this one. After a sneak Pearl Harbour attack from some weird ninjas, a four people team kicks their asses completely. Meanwhile, Naruto is fighting with Reibi, the 0-tails (I know Japanese are masters of zero-based numbering and logic, but this is ridiculous) and the master of Dark chakra. Guess what? He kicks their asses. But it was so ridiculously easy. Was Sasuke even required?

On the emotional level, it was like an atom bomb. I feel I can do anything, so I do it. And that's it. Big bang, no subtlety whatsoever. Not that Naruto is known for subtlety, but there are limits.

And on the animation... it all seemed so mechanical, unchiseled.

Bottom line: bad movie. Even worse since I waited so long for it. I can imagine a two episode mini arch in the series doing the same job, but better. It's not unwatchable, just disappointing. :(

You know how difficult is to test a web site on the many (conflicting) versions of Internet Explorer browsers that were created. While most of us don't even bother to test for anything lower than IE 6.0, there are major differences between IE6, 7 and 8. I used to use something called MultipleIEs before that contained IE versions up to 6, but now I found something that looks even better: IE Collection, boasting IE versions up to and including Internet Explorer 8.0.

I have installed it and so far I had no major issues with it. It does seem to change some part of the default IE configuration, so take a look there after you finish installing it.

A while ago I wrote a little post about pandemics. I was saying then how little we know about them and how little we are taught about disease outbreaks as opposed to, say, war. This post, however, it about the reverse of the coin: mediatization of pandemic fears.

I was watching the news and there was this news about a swine flu pandemic in Mexico. Thousands were infected, more than 100 people dead and the disease had already spread in the entire world and it was impossible to contain. Gee, serious trouble, yes? I had to stay informed and safe. (see the twisted order on which my brain works?)

So I went directly to the World Health Organization site and subscribed to their disease outbreak RSS feed. And what do I read? 27 cases of infections and 9 dead. Come again? They said 150 dead on the news. The news can't possibly lie! It must be either a) a US site where they only list US citizens b) a machination so that people don't panic when the situation is so obviously blown. [... a week passed ...] I watch the news and what do I see? The reported death toll from the swine influenza strain has dropped to about 15 people. False alarm, people, the rest of those 150 people actually died of other unrelated stuff. So the WHO site was right after all, maybe it having to do with the fact that they work with data, not viewer rates. Hmm.

The moral of the story? My decision to stop watching TV is a good one. Get the real genuine source of information and "feed" from it. I am now subscribed to the new disease outbreaks feed and the earthquake feed and I feel quite content in that particular regard.

That doesn't mean the "Swine" flu is something to be taken lightly. As of today, there are almost 1000 cases of infection world wide and, even if the flu development has reached a descendant curve, this might change. The 1918 epidemic actually had four outbreaks, two consecutive years, in the spring and autumn.

On a more personal note, my wife has (and probably myself, too) something called toxoplasmosis, a disease that you take from a cat. I only heard about it two times, one from a colleague and one from Trainspotting. It a strange disease, one that is mostly asymptomatic, doesn't have a real cure, causes behavioral changes in mice and has been linked to a certain type of schizophrenia. Wikiing it, I got that there are about 30% to 65% of the world population that have it and that the drug used to treat it is actually a malaria drug. Is toxoplasmosis the malaria of the developed world? A lot of us have it, but we bear with it?

Stuff like that shows how fragile is both our understanding of as well as our defense from the microscopic world. Could it be that, with all the medical advances from the last century, we are still in the Dark Ages?

A friend of mine asked me about what a tea was based only on pictures of the Japanese writing on the tea bag. How can I do that? I knew it was Kanji, or the Chinese style of writing, but I had no idea what to do. Looked for online Kanji character recognition, Kanji character list, etc. Nothing really worked. Until I accidentally (half through painstaking translation) bumped into nciku! Why, of course, you idiot! If they are Chinese style characters, wouldn't you be able to find an online dictionary for Chinese, not Japanese characters?

Well, nciku has a nice feature called "Handwrite Characters" which pretty much allowed me to translate the rest of the text. But the trick is to take the recognized character, then go to... Wikipedia! Because you don't really need the Chinese translation, but the Japanese one. You get the translation and the use and other useful things.

So, use nciku for online Japanese Kanji/Chinese character recognition. Yatta! :)

I have hidden the private chat [that's the blue one] by default. In order to access it, you need to click on the "Show private chat" link in the top-left. I did that because I would like people to help each other rather than talk only with me, so I recommend using the Jabbify chat [the slightly annoying orange pop-up one]. Also, when entering your name, use a real looking name or nickname. I will not even answer anymore to people called "asfdd", "sfd", "hi" and "can you help me". People with correct names that start conversations with "adsdfs" will also be ignored.

I have also added a small piece of code to remove unwanted spam comments. If you feel that your comment was not spam and it was flagged as spam, let me know in the chat (or another comment :) ) and I will fix the issue.

I urge you again to tell me if there is anything that is bothering you about the blog in order to facilitate positive change.

Have fun, keep trying and good luck!

Update: I have fixed an issue with the layout and IE making the text disappear, especially when scrolling. Also I added a little something on the left that you can copy paste to your blog. So, if you want to help me spread the knowledge put it into your blogs. I am not making any money out if this, so make Siderite famous!! :)

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter has won a Pulitzer Prize and I believe it is the only thing that ever made me want to read other Pulitzer Prize books. I have to thank Meaflux for pointing me to this book and if he ever writes anything in his blog, you can find it here. Anyway, here is my humble review:

I have just finished reading the book and, in its self-referential spirit, I am also starting reading it. A strange loop of sorts, when starting to read a book follows finishing it. It is not an easy read, but it is certainly worth it. I was instantly both in awe and full of envy on this Hofstadter guy that I have never even heard about before.

What is the book about? I believe the most basic answer is it is about the roots of consciousness, and before you run away thinking this is some sort of new age pseudo (or fully) religious crap, let me assure you it is not. The title itself shows the perspective one gains by reading it: look at the same thing from the viewpoints of a mathematician (meta-mathematician, at that), an abstract painter and a great music composer. It's a definition of abstract thought by intersecting the works of three great abstract thinkers. But it is more than that.

The most intriguing part of the book it is how self referential it is. There are portions in the book that are modeled after Bach fugues while paraphrasing Escher drawings in order to illustrate a mathematical idea of Gödel. It talks about artificial intelligence, consciousness, the workings of the brain, formal systems, computer programming, music, art, science, mathematics, quantum mechanics, biology, genetics and does so in a way that links all these things together in a reasonably easy to understand way. It does not feel like a book made out of separate chapters, but one master-single-piece linked to itself in the most imaginative and twisted ways.

I urge you to buy the book, if you find it. I have read a text OCR version of it and I know I missed a lot. If you can't afford it, there it a torrent on the net with the PDF scanned version as well as the music, paintings and other media the book talks about.

The bottom line is that it is an amazing book. For someone like me, a software programmer dreaming of AI, it was a shame I didn't read it before. I almost believe that you will see me in buses like those old ladies reading the Bible, only with GEB in hand. I can't imagine anyone over 15 years of age that shouldn't read this book. I doubt anyone under 15 can truly comprehend it and, as Frank Herbert's Dune, it must be read every 10 years or less, just to see how much more you can understand from it.

Update: I found on the Internet a full length movie based on Hofstadter's ideas. Interesting, in a geeky/goofy kind of way. Here it is: Victim of the Brain.

A while ago I bought this LaCie 500Gb external hard drive and I was rather satisfied with it. With the occasion of the horrible Easter holidays I finally turned off my computer (after weeks of it working continuously). So imagine my dismay when I came back home, turned the LaCie on, then the computer and all I had to show for it was an USB mass storage controller error in the Hardware Manager.

After trying a few things (and noticing that the hard drive would not actually turn on, instead a tick-tock sound was heard from inside) I decided to open up the drive box, proudly written on it "Designed by F. A. Porsche". Well, fuck you, Porsche! I had to almost destroy the box to open it, then the insides had so many "one installation, no after service" components that I felt like walking on broken glass.

Anyway, inside the LaCie there is a small USB controller and an SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive. I installed the hard drive as an internal drive and... nothing! Windows XP blue screen 0x0000007B. The computer wouldn't even recognize the drive in the boot up screen.

Well, after looking for drivers and stuff like that, I was resolved that the hard drive was defective and all my music, movies and books were lost. But shutting the computer down I noticed that the drive was actually spinning in its internal setup configuration. So, desperately, I tried to use the power from the internal computer power source and the rest of the drive in its USB setup... and IT WORKED!

Now I am going to buy another drive and get all data from this one, but still, if you are desperate that your USB hard drive is lost, try to open it up and power the internal drive with a normal computer power chord.

As for why the internal drive did not work directly on the computer? I have almost no idea. The Seagate site says clearly that SATA drives do not require drivers, but the various SATA controllers do! Since I already have a SATA internal drive, I think that that is not the issue. Rather, the people at LaCie used another drive firmware! The Seagate drive also provides with some downloadable firmware so it is clearly possible. As a completely desperate option to recover your lost data, I guess trying to rewrite the hard drive firmware could work, but I don't recommend it and I wonder how it is possible, considering it wouldn't allow me to boot Windows.

I hope this helps somebody. And Happy Easter everybody!

Update September 2012: after three years and a half, the drive (powered by both USB and internal computer power) started to develop bad sectors. It still works, mind you, I just removed it because I didn't need it as much. Thus ends the saga of the mutant harddrive in the computer that never sleeps and never dies [creepy music in the background] :)

Today Internet Explorer 8 appeared to me in the Automatic Updates list. I have been using IE8 for months now and so I was glad that the official release finally came out. So I downloaded and installed IE8.

The installation process has several steps. First is the removal of any previous version of IE, then a reboot, then several small steps of the setup program: Downloading IE8, Downloading IE8 updates, Installing IE8, Installing updates, Finishing installation. Well, for me, at the Installing updates step it threw an error that said the installation cannot complete because the station is shutting down, then my computer restarted.

I did have Internet Explorer available, though, so I tried a few pages. After the pages loaded, I was invariably getting an error and IE closed. "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.". Well, so was I!

I was trying the installation of IE the third time now and suddenly a Java update traybar icon appeared. I updated Java, then I was amazed to see that IE was no longer crashing! So, my solution for Microsoft IE errors: update Sun Java! :)

Well, the Java update probably completed some steps that the installer failed to. But still :)

And interesting link I found regarding any IE error that causes the browser to excuse itself and leave is on Sandi's Site

The finale of what seemed to become my favourite sci-fi series ever (at its beginning) left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Not only it makes no sense, but it is overall incredibly idiotic. If you haven't watched the end of the series, don't read further, because this is the mother of all ranty spoilers ever.

What makes it so emotional for me is not only that I really liked the show, but that this was not a show that was ended because of lack of planning or budget or the economical crisis, so nothing was rushed or changed. This was "meant to happen". And it sucked! Sucked worse that a vampire caught in the event horizon of a black hole that is falling into another black hole!

Not only did it not explain anything in a manner that would make sense to me, but instead it went completely overboard on all the things that I hated in the show. God exists, he somehow planned all this (oh, yeah, real modesty here, mr. Moore!), the model 6 in Gaiuses head was an angel, so was Kara Thrace, in the end they all reach Earth (this Earth) and decide to leave all technology behind (they throw the ships in the sun!!!) in the hope that starting anew would make them "break the cycle" and Hera became the chromosomal mother of all future humans. I guess leaving all that technology behind wasn't a good survival strategy for the rest of the 38000 people left alive, was it?!

If everything was God's plan, then there was no cycle except in its brain!! Forgetting mistakes is NOT a step towards not repeating them. Leaving behind technology is just as stupid! And ending the show with a couple of angels walking on Earth now and making bets on if we repeat the mistakes again or not, with background videos of the latest developments in robotics was.... there is no word in the English language for it. It is dumber than creationist! And the last half of the last episode was all about people saying goodbye to one another then going to live alone (read DIE!!) somewhere!

There is a glimmer of hope left though. The centurions were given their freedom and the last baseship. I will be looking at the sky hoping for them to return, nuke Moore and then air an all Cylon TV show about how they didn't repeat any mistake and just carried on!! Gods, this was frakking retarded!

And, of course, there is one more good thing in the series, and that is the Bear McCreary's remix of Bob Dylan's/Jimmi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower. I am embedding the video with the cool transition from simple piano to all the instruments. Pretty cool!.

Guess what? F***ing YouTube removed the video because of a copyright infringement. What? One minute and a half of a movie scene? Geez! Couldn't find the same scene, so I am embedding All Along The Watchtower.

[youtube:qMo7WybtTWI]

The sound bit of the scene, sans the scene, can be found here. You can also see the live performance of the song here. You might also want to try Bob Dylan's original song.

Update: check out this Google event with McCreary playing the BSG theme with Raya Yarbrough as the vocalist.