And still, pigs are not yet flying! Here is the news article:
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Bottom line: IIS is being optimized for PHP, PHP is being optimized for Sql Server and, by becoming a sponsor of Apache, Microsoft probably gets a say in their development.

What a typical corporate move that is. But what would be the effect of such a move only time will tell. Will ASP.Net start working habitually on Apache?

My computer was never the sanest of them all. Its most peculiar problem was that, after running for a while, you could not reset it. You had to either lower the CPU frequency or shut it down, wait for it to cool down, then start it up. And funnily enough, it did that only when having 512Mb of RAM. With an additional 512Mb chip it did not present this abnormality.

About two weeks ago, it started to show "Write delayed failed" errors during the night, when the only utility running was some file sharing app. I started researching and found that the error itself wasn't indicative of anything! A lot of people had the same problem, but each and one of them for different reasons. It was like an "I am on strike" sign from my computer.

Well, I thought updating drivers for my SATA hard drive may solve the problem. In the same swoop I also updated to the latest NVidia display drivers. Nothing changed. I then looked for an application that tells me what is the temperature of my CPU. I found SpeedFan, which is completely freeware and which I highly recommend, application that indicated a temperature of about 63 Celsius.

I thought it was too much so I've decided to clean up my CPU cooler. Between the cooler fan and the metal radiator there was a 2 mm thick dust cover. No wonder it was so hot. I cleaned everything up and my temperature dropped to about 51C. Glad I'd solved everything I started playing a game. Nothing fancy, not something 3D or anything complicated. The computer suddenly reset itself.

Now that was a complete revolt! Frustrated I started a movie and went to the other room to watch it on my TV. You see, I use this wireless AV connector to transfer the TVout signal from my display adapter to the TV in the other room. I could hear everything, but the screen was blank. What the...?

After hours of trial and error I've reached the conclusion that the newest drivers just couldn't do video overlay on the TV. Also, the fact that I chose 1280x1024 as my monitor resolution and it showed in 640x480 was also from the drivers. Funny enough, when I removed the "clone to TV" option, it worked ok. The solution was to download and install an older NVidia driver, version 91.47. When everything was said and done and I was half in watching the movie, the computer reset itself!

I am now at the stage where I found an overclocking setting on the NVidia drivers and when fiddling with it, I get my computer to reset. It is funny that it does that even if I set a lower clock setting, which was my original intention anyway. I believe that the new drivers (and the new not so new drivers) are making my NVidia FX 5200 card go too fast. It overheats and causes my computer to stop. I can only hope that buying a cooler fan for the video card (it has only a small metal radiator) will solve the problem.

Meanwhile, I have set the Hardware acceleration setting from the 3D Settings menu of Nvidia control panel to Single display performance mode instead of Multiple display performance mode as it was set, since I have only one monitor and a TV clone. I could play that game without a reset, although that is not really indicative of anything yet.

Please, computer, I am sorry! I will never do it again! Please forgive me! Don't act insanely anymore! :(

Update: in the end it was neither the video card nor the processor. It was the SATA RAID drivers!! Updating them was NOT a good idea. I went to the specific site of the motherboard I have and installed some drivers from 2003 and it now works without any glitch.

But how did I realize that was the source? Because in a rare stroke of luck I watched the computer display a blue screen and then resetting itself. In Windows XP, if you go to My Computer - Properties - Advanced - Startup and Recovery you find a System Failure groupbox with a bunch of options. Unchecking the "Automatically restart" box will make the computer display the BSOD and NOT reset, giving you the opportunity to read the error message. In my case it was a viamraid.sys giving the error 0x000000D1: VER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

Update 2: The problem with Write Delayed Failed was not from the SATA drivers, but from the USB external hard drive. After trying everything I knew and found on Google, I was really pissed off that this still happened, until I ran into an obscure forum where a guy said his problems all went away after changing the physical USB port!! So I moved the actual USB jack and the problem was solved!

Some other explanation I found were about the protocol of sending data packets. First it is sent a small chunk of data then, if everything went ok, the next data chunk is twice as big, so 256kb, 512, 1024, 2048 and so on. Windows has some problems with sending packets bigger then 1024Kb! There is a utility on the net that patches a Windows system file to address the issue. I might have run it, I don't even remember it's name :) I pretty much threw everything at my computer and ran it for a few weeks until I was satisfied that it worked. But do try the USB port change first...

I know, you're thinking "Who made the great effort of coming up with this incredible gay name?", but keep reading a little more, because this anime series is rather interesting. I am refraining from calling it cool, since the name and because it is not over yet and because it is partially mecha. Also, because I think the direction it is going is a bit off course. Now that the bad things are out of the way, let me tell you about the good ones.

Anyway, the whole thing revolves around Lelouch, the third prince in line for the throne of the Holy Empire of Britannia. It is set in an alternate universe where battles are fought with humanoid robots called Knightmares, and the above mentioned empire considers the Britannians first class citizens while any other enslaved nation gets a number that designates its teritory and its people. The Japanese are called Elevens after the occupation of Japan, and Japan itself is renamed to Area 11.

I will let you read the plot in the Wikipedia page, and focus on the good bits: Lelouch is a very smart guy, he plays chess and defeats just about everybody. He uses his strategic skills to fight against the empire of Britannia as the faceless terorist Zero - for reasons too complicated to explain here. He is still in highschool (why must every Japanese story happen in high schools?!) and he has one more advantage: a geass. This is a magical ability that allows him to command any person he has eye contact with.

The first season had 25 episodes and was pretty cool. It involved strategy, drama, action, sci-fi and a tight script. The second season (R2) is more complex, but my opinion is that it lost much of the power of the first season and has reached episode 14 (released with English subs today). It is worth mentioning that the team that made Code Geass also worked on Planetes, a sci-fi anime based on Arthur C. Clarke's ideas, which I also liked a lot.

Some links:
Code Geass Wikipedia page

Oh, no! After such a glorious second volume, Baxter regressed for the third volume of the Destiny's Children series, Transcendent. What you get is basically a continuation of the first volume, but without the emotional content or the cool ideas of Coalescent. Same awkward family relationships that no one really cares about, same main character who is actually driven by the actions and thoughts of people around him, rather than his own, same single final moment that shapes the world without actually making the reader feel anything, same lengthy dialogue that brings important issues into discussion, but without drawing the reader in.

As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic. Same thing applies to humans 500.000 years into the future, going back into the past to redeem the sins of humanity. No one cares! The Earth is pushed to the edge by global warming and the lead character is championing a great hydrate stabilisation engineering project. Who cares?!

Bottom line: the book was well written, but badly designed. It's like an engineer doing a great job building something that is fundamentally flawed. I struggled to finish the book just as I've struggled to finish Coalescent, which was far more interesting to begin with. The reason is simple: the reader cannot really empathise with any of the characters, except in disparate fragments of the storyline.

I was looking for new manga to read on the OneManga site and I found Gantz. It has senseless violence, gratuituos sex scenes and great looking chicks in erotic positions. The concept is that a weird black ball is taking people right from before they die and brings them to a room from which they are sent to battle aliens in the streets of Tokyo. Normal people can't see them or the monsters, but they can be killed by them. And they often are.

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This is something only a Japanese could have thought of. People are dying, most people around don't care and they are all trying to show how superior they are compared to others. And then they find something to PROTECT and they cry all the time.

Bottom line: Monsters, Aliens, Vampires, Hot chicks, Sword fighting, Gore, Sex, Rape, Emotional torture... they are all in there. The script doesn't make much sense, though, and I think all characters are emotionally stumped to the level of three year olds. That's how Naruto and InuYasha won so many fans, through carefully crafted emotional landscapes, something Gantz lacks almost completely.

Read Gantz at OneManga.
imDb link for the anime

A while ago I was recommending the anime called Inuyasha and then reading on the manga. Well, after 558 episodes - each having around 19 manga (comics) slides - Inuyasha has reached the end. A bit anticlimactic, considering the things that attracted me to the story in the first place, but an end nevertheless.

You can read the entire story here at MangaStream

I am not usually one to talk politics, especially since I don't really think there are essential differences between people participating in this game. Yes, I do see it as a game, with rules that you need to follow to get the prize. But this year's mayor election proved that some of the rules are more subtle than just spending the biggest amount of money in promotional ads and having the biggest party support you. Well, pretending to be "one of the people" seems to always help, though. :)

What happened? Internal struggles within the main opposition party led to them choosing their candidate for the city hall not the man with the most popular votes (as resulting from opinion poles), but the man with the most connections in the party. Therefore the other guy decided to candidate independently. He spent almost nothing on campaign ads, while the leading party candidate spent about 600000 euros just for the first part of the elections and God knows how much for the final part.

Conclusion? Sorin Oprescu, the independent candidate, has won the elections. The leading party candidate lost, with all his ad money, while no one even noticed the candidate from the oposition party. Apparently, a great victory for the people in Bucharest. I have no idea if the guy will be any good as a mayor, and I think that is the major flaw in Romanian elections, but the arrogant belief that party support and lots of money can just land you in a popular position has failed once more in Bucharest today.

But my theory is that Oprescu didn't win just by charisma or by the total lack of charisma of his opponent, Blaga, but from the ugly and cheap attacks against him and other candidates from the main party. With slogans like "Let's get rid of the garbage in sector 5, dump Vanghelie" and images of a bulldog and a snake with glasses (Blaga looks like a big ugly dog, while Oprescu wears glasses) they pushed people away. I guess that the fact that the snake is a symbol of wisdom in many cultures past them by completely.

Anyway, my conclusion is that arrogance is the worst thing a Romanian politician can do right now. They can be stupid, corrupt, pathetic, but NOT arrogant. It is traditional in Romania to dream to become powerful, rich, above all others, and it is even more traditional, since most people never do get rich or famous, to totally despise and hate the people that do or behave like they do. Today was a lesson in humility for the political class.

Exultant, the second book in the Destiny's Children series felt a lot better than Coalescent. Not without its own flaws, it made the entire experience better, but maybe that's just me.

The book describes a universe twenty thousand years into the future, when human kind has infested the galaxy, destroying all sentient races they encountered with their immense war machine. They are currently at war with a technologically superior enemy called the Xeelee, which are trapped at the core of the galaxy, pushed back by the sheer size of human forces. The war has waged for 3000 years and continues with no advancement of any kind, with the entire human philosophy focused on spewing more and more cannon fodder for a war that is neither to be won or lost, just endured.

A rather bleak vision of the future, but fear not, there comes hope! Somehow, an excentric aristocrat comes with all the ideas and resources to create the ultimate weapon that will destroy the Xeelee! And in the pages of the book it is described how they go at it. This is where the book actually fails, because at a such immense space and time scale, a solution of this simplicity is just not believable. You don't feel it in your GUT! But the book is well written, the style bringing memories of Asimov, and the ideas in it pretty interesting.

Stephen Baxter is again applying Universal Darwinism to his universe, bringing more and more species and types of lifeforms out of his magician hat. The ending of the book is terribly naive, but without a bit of naivite, you cannot finish great space sagas in a single book.

Bottom line: if you like space fights, military stratagems, character development, time travel, large scale galactic intrigues and a lot of techno babble (and I know I do! :) ) you will love this book. I do think that some of the great ideas in the book would have mixed nicely with late David Feintuch's writing. Anyway, on with the next book in the series: Transcendent

A year ago I wrote about being a bicycle rider in Bucharest. I complained then that there are no bike lanes and no one gives a damn about bicycle riders or the very law that should protect them. Things have changed, apparently, and now beautiful bike lanes are criss-crossing Bucharest's sidewalks. But it is all for show and appearance.

First of all, they serve no purpose on the sidewalk. Given the peculiar psychology of the majority of the population when they have to choose between walking on a nicely marked yellow/green stripe and the normal gray sidewalk, they will walk where the nice colors are. Even if they would somehow decide to think a little and ponder on the significance of the big bike signs painted on those lanes, there are children that have no idea what they are doing and could always jump in front of you. Normally, the population of the bike lanes in bucharest is comprised of mothers with babies, lovers holding hands, old ladies and people that just wouldn't give a damn. Very often I see young stylishly dressed women walking right towards my bike, ignoring me completely, expecting me to move aside. Do they even consider the damage that I would do if I'd just decided on a whim NOT to move aside? Not to mention places where there is space only for the bike lane and it would be stupid to expect people not to walk on it. And of course, the cars that park right on the lanes and about nobody does anything.

Second of all, the lanes were built close to autumn last year, a season not favourable to biking. Then, of course, winter came, and the plastic like stripes that mark the lanes were pretty much destroyed. So they had to put them again. However, during the spring they started working on fixing the streets. That meant scraping the asphalt (bike lanes on the street included) and puting it back on. But they did draw the lanes back on. Then they started changing the street border stones, usually placing them idiotically high right on the bike lane. And if it wasn't enough, they started placing all above ground wires under ground. That meant digging narrow, yet deep trenches in the sidewalk, interrupting the lanes from side to side, so that there is no way to go around, and they never filled them up! Basically every one in two bike lanes is now broken by this. And, as this was not enough, more often than not the lane is of worse quality than the rest of the sidewalk.

Therefore I will ignore these lanes completely, except the days when I am really tired and don't trust myself around cars, and risk my life and the paint on the cars around me rather than the lives of the people on the sidewalk. What a sham this all is. The Bucharest European mask is there only for outsiders, NOT for the people living in it.

In 1973, Frank Herbert wrote a book called Hellstrom's Hive in which it described a sect of people that lived underground, in a system much alike insects, with individuals specialised for different tasks and all living for the big hive organism. The book did not explain how it all got there, it just quickly described the situation and then delved into the action.

Jump to Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, the first book of the Destiny's Children series, which pretty much details how a group of humans would reach a plausible hive like society. Unfortunately, the book is more descriptive than anything else, failing to deliver in the action part. A lot of characters are developed and a lot of history (both personal and general) is detailed, but in the end the characters vanish as if they never mattered. It is, after all, the whole point of the novel, that ignorant individuals following certain rules lead to the emergence of patterns, but it did not fit well within a book.

Not that the book itself is not fascinating and well written, because it is, but the pace is very slow at the beginning, accelerating to a snail pace in the end, while the different parts of the book seem fractured, too little related to one another. I intend to read the rest of the books in the series, but I might just give up, too.

Bottom line, I think it would be a nice read to start with Coalescent and then read Hellstrom's Hive, although I do think the second book to be much better.

No, it's not one of the The World Sucks rants, it's actually very serious. I was terribly annoyed that after installing Windows XP SP3 my Internet Explorer 7 browser would (sometimes) freeze when closing tabs. I could replicate the bug easily enough by folowwing these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Go to https://siderite.dev
3. Scrollwheel click on Sign in, thus opening it in another tab
4. Wait until the title of the second tab changes to Redirecting (because I have the cookie from a previous login)
5. Press F5 (Refresh) in the first tab
6. Click on the second tab and close it while the first tab is refreshing

At this time Internet Explorer would freeze with no error message. Waiting for a few seconds I could access the context menu on the taskbar button and choose Close or click on the X Close button, but everything inside the Internet Explorer window would be inactive. If I would switch tasks back and forth, the IE window would appear completely blank inside.

Now, whenever you look for the solution for this you get three answers:

• Check the Warn me when closing multiple tabs option in the Internet Explorer tabs settings.
• Run IExplore.exe with the -extoff command line parameter which will disable all add-ons and this will tell you if the addons are causing this
• Check for spyware/malware

I did all this and nothing changed! I've reinstalled all addons. I've reinstalled IE7. I've switched to IE8 beta! Nothing worked. Then I proceeded in uninstalling all addons, see what happends. Finally, it wouldn't cause any issues. It was just after I've uninstalled Google Toolbar! I suspect the cause for the bug is coming from the popup blocker which interprets tabs as popups and tries to close them. Then there is the setting in GT that is trying to preserve any software from modifying its settings. Maybe that is why -extoff doesn't affect it!

Just to be sure I installed it again and tested the bug and I could replicate it. Something in Windows XP Service Pack 3 messes Google Toolbar up!

Bottom line: uninstall Google Toolbar until I can find out which part of it actually causes the bug.

As I was writing in the previous post, because of that law suit they are in, Google is starting to take measures to protect the copyright of videos on YouTube. The result is that all the blogs and sites that embedded video content that is supposed to be copyrighted now have beautiful flash players with a play button in them, but then the nasty surprise of seeing "video not available" when pressing play. At least display the damn message from the beginning instead of forcing me to play every video on my blog to see if there are still available!

But I did that anyway, for music videos for now, and switched to (currently) unaffected French video content site DailyMotion. Of course, lots of YouTube clones are on the net and even YouTube leecher sites. I mean sites showing a wonderful error when trying to play videos that now are removed from YouTube.

So, please folks, if you find some post with missing videos or pictures or anything wrong, really, please comment on it and I will fix it. Thank you and damn all lawyers to hell!

I really like Korn, they are heavy, melodic and the lead singer is pretty unique. I haven't posted anything by them yet because I was a teenager when I was listening to them. I remembered loving the video for Falling Away from Me and wanted to share it with my bloggies :).

Update 24 Aug 2013: SyFy rejected the Blake's 7 idea. That may be a good thing, though, as it apparently was taken by Microsoft, to be made as an XBox series.

Update: The previous attempts to revive Blake's 7 have failed, but a new venture to do so was announced on July 23 2012: Martin Campbell And Georgeville TV Shop Reboot Of Cult U.K. Sci-Fi Series ‘Blake’s 7′. I just hope they don't screw it up.

When I was a very young boy, during the Romanian communist era, the only entertainment available was the Bulgarian television (also a communist country, but with a more relaxed regime) who's signal would reach Bucharest to the delight of many. I have always remembered vaguely a British series called Blake's 7, a sci-fi show that I've enjoyed tremendously at the time. Recently I was reminded of it and I was lucky enough to find the torrent for all four seasons. Having watched it now, I have mixed feelings and a new understanding of my child mind.


A short description of the show first. Imagine a team of space wanderers a little in the style of Farscape's crew (civilians, each one with their own ideas and motivations), stuck in a universe that resembles the Star Wars universe (an oppressive Federation ruling the galaxy with an iron fist) and has similar effects and inspiration as Star Trek TOS. All this with a budget that was probably several levels of magnitude smaller than that of ST TOS and also with effects and script a whole lot cheesier (and by that I mean that if I work out the percentages, more than half of the show was just cheese). The actors themselves were British and Welsh TV theater actors and they behaved as such the whole series. Not that it wasn't a refreshing perspective, even now. It was actually original enough and if it weren't for the production values, it might have been a world class classic.

Of course, I didn't watch it now because of the cinematographic value, but because it meant so much to me when I was a child. And I was stunned to see that the things that I remembered fascinated me were quite different in the show. Some weren't even there. For example I remembered that the show was called Blake's 7 but that one of them died in the second episode, which I attributed to British humour. But no, that happened at the beginning of season two. The introduction and music I remembered to be dark, impressive and scary. They were really funny now. There were scenes I remembered in a completely different way, with more emotion and action and the things that happened in the show had another sense altogether.

The structure of the series is funny to follow. The crew of seven was always only of six people. The computer counted as the 7th man. In the second season Gant dies so they are temporarily left with only 6. In the third season Blake leaves the show as well as others of the crew, only to be replaced by other actors and another computer. So they are 5 people and 2 computers and no Blake in Blake's 7. The only constant things are the ship, which is destroyed at the end of the third season, Avon and Vila. Oh, and sexy Servalan, the evil female villain. With a ship that can go anywhere in the galaxy, they always stumble in the same people! The ending was hilarious also, but you have to click here to see what I mean, I would hate to spoil it for you:

Click here for ending spoiler

In the last episode Blake is found, then is accidentally killed by Avon, then everyone is killed by the Federation troops. Servalan wasn't even there!

Here is a sample of the show:



And here is a video from an interview with the actors interpreting Blake and Servalan, old now and talking fondly of the series:



But there are also good news, Blake's 7 could be revived! I found an April 2008 link that says Sky One has commissioned two hour-long pilots for a new Blake's 7 series! Here is also a BBC News entry.

Update: Blake's 7 will be back! I doubt it will pack the same punch, unless done right. BBC should have remade it, but it seems that it will be a SyFy show, which may not be a good idea. The news confirming the comeback can be found here: Blake's 7: Classic BBC sci-fi to return on Syfy channel

There are a lot of movies about aliens, creatures from another world, coming here for whatever reason and trying to communicate. They usually are well versed in English, but sometimes they use some other language like the Klingons or they snarl and rip you to pieces or, sometimes, have to find a protocol of communication first, by using mathematics, gestures or music (like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Yet none of those creatures astound me more than some of the people on Earth doing things I could never ever imagine doing and using it to communicate.

One of these people is Michael Moschen, who uses juggling as language of sorts in order to comunicate his perception of time, space and movement. You can watch a small demo he gave at TED and have your own say:



You can see that he uses separate elements to create, to build, larger ansembles. He uses juggling moves like a language, with structure and building blocks and architecture. Now, what would we do if aliens would want to talk to us by moving objects around and making sounds with their limbs? Would be build a computer that can be programmed by juggling? Would we immediately fly in Michael Moschen as the Earth ambassador? Or is it too science fiction to imagine alien creatures communicating in the same way some people do?