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Windows has a file called hosts, found in Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, that can contain local domain name to ip conversions. It's like a local DNS service with a text database. That means that if you open the file and write 127.0.0.1 www.microsoft.com then every time you try to access microsoft, the browser will redirect to your local machine, effectively making it unreachable.

You can use this to block some of the sites you don't want your child to access or whatever, but most of all, you can disable the access to sites that are known sources of unwanted ads, spyware, malware, etc. Or, as I did, disable access to sites with online games that you are addicted to :)

You can find an updated hosts file at mvps.org. Backup your previous hosts file, for safety, then overwrite it with this.

Update: If you have a blog on Google's Blogger, you should comment (by adding a # in front of the line) or delete the line of the hosts file relating to service.urchin.com #[Urchin Tracking Module], else you will get some javascript errors when entering Blogger. Or you can just ignore all javascript errors.

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Unfortunately, the lead singer is now in prison after accidentally killing Marie Trintignant, his girlfriend and the daughter of famous actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. This clip is manga-style, but that's not why I put it here, it's because I really like the song.




Links:
Noir Desir at Wikipedia
the Noir Desir site

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Clive Barker is a man of extraordinary imagination and, while HellRaiser is what people most know him for, I think his "young adult" books are what define him. And by this I don't mean sweaty teenager sex, but wonderful fantasy worlds that also have a tang of darkness and stories that have a conclusion beyond the idiotic morality taught to little children. They are also a bit more actual, without dwelling on feudal or anachronistic features like, say, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. I liked "The Thief of Always" and I also enjoy, although not to the same extent, "Abarat".

Abarat is a magical series, much like a darker Alice in Wonderland, with two books currently having been released. The classic "girl enters magical world" is expanded to the point of bursting with the description of the 25 isles of Abarat, one for each hour (including the 25th), each with their own features and crazy-weird inhabitants. Abarat is also a twisted mirror of Earth, with coca-farma conglomerates trying to destroy the magic in the world.

You can find a site at www.thebooksofabarat.com, very nicely done, that teases the imagination with flash animations and excerpts from the books.
I've read a review that compared Abarat to Harry Potter and even declared that it is the writer's alternative to it. I dare say that is completely wrong. The worlds of Clive Barker are about finding your way through your own inner power and imagination, whether you choose the path of Light or of Darkness. Purpose is what defines a Barker hero, not taking sides.

Bottom line, a nice book, clearly well written (I like Barker's style), and the storyline is detailed and well thought of. I may not be in a wonderland mood right now, but it is the best book I've read in the last month. There was an attempt to create a movie based on Abarat schedulled for 2005, but, according to the Wikipedia entry for Abarat, creative differences killed the project.

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A while ago I presented what I thought it was a very nice flash game from the category of Prince of Persia, Aladdin, Sonic, etc, but simplistic in design and rich in functionality. A demo for world 2 has been published and you can now play it.

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I enjoyed this book. It is the fantasy story of a medieval land where magic is seen as the most sinful of things, all through the eyes of a woman that falls in love with a magician.

At first, I thought the ideas were nice, as the entire plot reminded me of Berserk , the latest chapters of the manga, and so I upped my expectations a bit too far. Then I realised that, even if the book was written in an even and professional way, I wasn't getting caught into the story. Was it because I couldn't relate to a woman? No, that wasn't it. After a few more uncomfortable pages I realised that the thing missing from the book were true emotional descriptions. The lead character was almost cold, rational as very few women (or any people of that age) would be. The scenes were detailed enough in describing whereabouts or scenery, even facial expressions or human interactions, but no feelings.

I thought to myself "Damn! This is a book as I would write if I started writing one". Funny enough, after I finished the book, the author was described as an American mother of three, who writes books while being a software engineer. I am curious of the percentage of software people that have a lack of emotional vocabulary like I do.

The ending of the book was also slightly disappointing, as I couldn't relate to any of the characters and their actions. The reasons for the story to end like that also eluded me. However, as I wrote in my first sentence, I enjoyed the book, as it was well written. I don't think I will read more of the series.

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Rarely have I had the honor to read such a boring book. It took me forever to finish it, as you can see, only so I can blog about how unreadable it is. It's not like Iain Banks doesn't have the good ideas that make a book great, but he has no idea on how to use them.

The entire book had the feel it was patched together from pieces of text written with completely different moods by different people. The ideas shifted from one to the other without any sense. The science was ludicrous. And worst of all, the ending had that wonderful "huh?" feeling, when all the plot finally ends just as boringly as it has begun.

And all this in a book that talks about the Universe in the far future, with great empires spanning galaxies and fighting epic battles with weird technologies. I appreciate the effort, but not the result. The book seems like something a writer would do and throw away and a publicist would pick up from the garbage and publish.

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Update: the band released their first album in December 2009

Last month I blogged about the Romanian band called duteVino. On the 8Th of March they had a concert in Suburbia and I decided I should go.

The bar is nice. It is slightly smaller than Fire, but a little classier, with small tables and taburets on one side and with a more open space (less colonnades). I got there with my wife and a friend and hunted the chairs until we had some table space.

The band started singing soon enough and they sounded really nice. The girl vocal has it all: the looks, the voice, the nicety. The band itself is made of four people and, since I am not a musician, I can't comment on the quality of their instrumentation. They sounded OK to me. duteVino played (I think) all the songs from their upcoming album, ten in total, and Gruv they left for the encore piece.



Unfortunately, the sound engineer was a moron. It's not like you can find good sound engineers anywhere on the street, but at least find one with guts! You see, the "chicken" way is to maximize the sound of instruments and minimize the sound of the vocal. In this way, even if there is faltering in the voice, most people won't realize it. Or at least I think that's the explanation why most concerts leave you almost deaf from the sound of the instruments while you struggle to understand (or even hear, as was the case here) what the vocal says.

The result here was that the voice of the singer was almost inaudible and I wonder if I would have enjoyed the concert if I didn't know some of the songs beforehand.
All in all, I like the band. I won't call myself a fan, but I will try to buy their album, nonetheless.

Ok, let me feed my weird side. This is the soundtrack of a very nice anime series, itself spun from an anime movie called Ghost in the Shell. The series was called GITS - Stand Alone Complex and this was the opening song. This is not the official video for this song, especially since it depicts images from the movie, not the series, but I liked it better. Enjoy!

The original video was removed from YouTube, this is another, same song.

[youtube:h71xGNXpRVo]


Inner Universe - GITS SAC OST
Composed by Yoko Kanno
Performed by Origa
Click here for lyrics and details.
You can also download the manga for Ghost in the Shell and its sequel (GITS 2 :) ) at narutocommunity.net, after a very annoying registration and a lot of popups (or javascript errors).
Try these direct download links, although they might not work:
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2
Warning: don't use multiple connections or download accelerators. This site only allows one connection from one IP, apparently.

And here is Making of a Cyborg, by Kenji Kawai, the original soundtrack for the movie.

[youtube:-u77XdL8_B4]

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You might think you are so cool when you blog about whatever goes through your head, but people have done it before you since times immemorial. Bucharest, for example, is filled with Real Time Bloggers (or RTB) and you may find them really easy by going on any public transportation vehicle (or RATB).

The RTB is easy to recognize. He or she (let's call them it) has old and discolored clothes, smells really bad and, most importantly of all, can't shut up. It will tell you its entire life story and any (if any) thoughts that it has had in the last 15 to 20 years. It will tell it whether you want it or not, usually hitting end tape and repeating itself in about 30 minutes which is, by the way, the average time someone spends in public transportation to get to one place to the other in the city.

Now, you might think that this has nothing to do with any network (aka web) or logging (since it is all verbal), but if you spend some time researching this you will notice that they are everywhere and they pretty much say the same things, so they have their own network and they are saying the same thing from their own unique perspective. So it's exactly like blogging.

Also, don't confuse them with beggars. Beggars smell worse, they ask for money and they usually make sense. They are the real life equivalent of spam or commercials. And everyone would like to click them really hard, but they are afraid they will catch some virus or some other malware.

The interesting thing is that they don't really talk to each other and in the winter, when their publicistic careers peek, there is one on each single bus, trolley, tramway or subway. If one leaves the vehicle, another one comes. So they have a very efficient way of disseminating information, unlike web bloggers who, being relatively new to this business, still wait for others to come read what they had to say and sometimes flock on the same information highway.

I also tried to add an image to this entry, however, no doubt due to their experience in blogging, couldn't find one. They probably don't have any contact with our own, new and untrusted network, and prefer the more advanced technology of 3-D smellovision.

So, quit being so full of yourself. Blogging may be the oldest profession in the world, for all you know. You're not special!

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I don't usually enjoy live performances better than the studio sound. I am sorry, I know that there is a completely different atmosphere, that the true quality of the artist is revealed in live concerts and that the creativity and spontaneity of the band or singer can only be seen face to face, but the sound is usually worse and the way it comes out not usually exactly what the artist wanted or expected.
But this particular performance from American band Evanescence was very emotional and it moved me, even from a recording on YouTube. Enjoy!

Evanescence - Taking Over Me - live at Rock am Park

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My tastes in blogs are rather particular and the number of blogs I am visiting is not large. I write mostly about computing and personal taste and a lot of the things that really bug me! Well, I did use to be a debugger, after all.

Returning to Roblogfest. This was some sort of top blog thing + a party where bloggers got together and talked about ... wait a minute! What would bloggers talk about? And even more than this, would they repeat the most interesting stuff in the blogs the next day? I imagined blog entries like "Yesterday I talked to [some guy - with a link to the guy's blog] at Roblogfest and it was really interesting what he said about [this - a link to the entry of the guy's blog]". That's the Internet for you, hyperlinking to the extreme, I thought, feeling slightly smug and imaginative.

Returning to Roblogfest. I kept bumping into it, while reading some blog or the other, waiting for some smart thing to enlighten me. Instead: the RoBlogFest competition, with voting and everything. I imagined stuff like "The least interesting blog category: Xulescu's, winner with 5534 votes" or "Most read blog: Roblogfest". Well, it wasn't interesting enough to care, so I ignored it. I kept reading BBC news and Google news, looking for stuff. Who cares about who's blog is better or not? Isn't the blog a symbol of personal expression, uncorrupted by external demand?

Returning to Roblogfest. The competition is over, the party is over. The blogs are full of Roblogfest again. This time people either enjoy having won something (more people on their blogs?) or thinking the whole competition was stupid (they didn't get more people on their blogs). Also, a lot of pictures, little youtube videos and stories about how bloggers got together and talked and whatever. Lots of links, too. "I talked to [this guy] yesterday. The rest I didn't know. I wanted to know them, but some I didn't". Most of the bloggers were kids. Some cute, some not, mostly the kind of social pariah which would write their feelings in a blog rather than sharing them during a party. They enjoyed the party, though.

This reminds me of that joke, with two people meeting in a park and admitting to each other that they really enjoy walking alone in the park, then decide to take the walk together. Yeah, I am sure now I feel smug. I am definitely superior. I would have liked to be that young again... or to go to parties and meet cute blogger girls, but I am well beyond that. I am definitely superior. And my blog is better.

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theSTART are a Rock / New Wave / Electronica band from Sudden Valley, California, as it writes on their mySpace web site. They also have an official website. I've discovered them quite a long while ago, but back then I didn't use to put images and video to the blog. Anyway, without further ado here is the videoclip to the song Gorgeous, by theSTARt. I hope you enjoy it.


Yesterday, the video worked, today it's stuck on "Loading". Just in case you experience the same problem, here are the available videos with theStart.

Have you ever wondered how these beautiful girls and boys appear suddenly on your TV, singing a completely meaningless song while looking like they're having the time of their life? And how they seem to overwhelm the TV, then the radio, then appear in tabloids, then completely disappear? Where is a small tutorial on how to make your own!


The clip is from a movie called Before the Music Dies (or B4MD, how they chose to shortcut it) that exposes the bad things in the music industry today. Here is the link to the IMDb entry for the movie. I will see it as soon as I can and review it, then update this post.

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Yes, at last another one of the World Sucks series. Here I am tackling globalisation, yet not the concept, but the buzz. People that somehow are against globalisation are the ones that have actually already accepted defeat. They see the franchise epidemic and high level political and economic games as the cause, not the symptom. They are nothing but fork and torch villagers trying to kill the beast without really understanding the cause of everything. They are especially wrong since they try to kill a beast much stronger than they will ever be.

And the cause is... not dr. Frankenstein, but statistical discrimination. It is the thing that makes shops disappear if they don't give to most of the people most of what they want, that puts people that don't behave like the majority into ignorable categories, the thing that doesn't come from high up to affect us, little people, but comes from very little people to affect the higher ups.

I am talking about statistics. Once you have enough objective data you can draw conclusions based on hard mathematics, conclusions that you know are not biased and that have true meaning. It tells shop chains which are the most financially effective customers and what exactly choose to buy, it tells media conglomerates which are the people which will be most inclined to see their shows, exactly what they would want to watch and how much they are going to be influenced by commercials in order to buy products, it tells politicians which is the biggest part of the electorate and what they could be told in order to elect them.

The effect of this is statistical discrimination, or the oppression of the minority groups that don't "fit" into the whole data schema. That's why you will not get the products you really want, you will not see the shows you want to see or the movies you crave or the books you need. That's why you will see young people asking you about every day things like some vegetables you used to find when you were a child and now nobody knows what they are. They do know about some exotic fruit you've never heard about, too, and they are willing to pay ten times the price of normal fruit for the privilege to eat it.

It starts with small business, it extends to media, then to art, then to politics. Before you know it, you can either do what everyone else does or be ignored. Does it sound like 1984? That was a naive view of the world, where the actual oppressors were a very small minority, where democracy was a dream. No, the actual oppression comes from the majority of people, the idiots watching today's TV shows, eating popcorn at European Gigolo and Scooby Doo the Movie. And it all starts from you, the little people.

Every form of discrimination in this world, either good or bad (yes, there is good discrimination), is statistical in nature, but most bad ones are determined by bad entry data, like all Gypsies are dirty or all black people are thieves. This time there is a growing mother-of-all discrimination, one that starts with perfect data, ends up with the perfect solution and leaves just about everyone that matters out of it.

The only option IS globalisation, the only possible solution for the people that want to do something different is to get together, through the Internet, through the disappearance of borders, nationalities and local law, through the dismissal of all things that separate people of the same type, because the oldest and most effective method of ruling other people is divide-and-conquer. Because no one is special for being American or Romanian, these are just stupid inventions, based on geography or past connections. Each person is special for their own reasons.

Globalisation is not the cause, it is the symptom. It is the opposite of localisation, or keeping something for yourself in a single place. Globalisation is the crucible of sense: you now get to decide what is important and what not in the whole world! And the problem is not high up, it's down with you, it's your decision.

Fight stupidity; elect common sense; choose diversity; create AND consume what others create just don't limit yourself to consumption alone; say the things you mean, not the things others want to hear; fight for your right to party, but think of the people who want to sleep; do what you like, but consider the others.

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Yes, Manga again. I feel the whole manga/anime intensity fading away again, since I've read the Berserk and InuYasha manga and watched the Samurai Deeper Kyo anime series. Oh... that and my wife hates me for ignoring her :)
But before this manga fading to black, I will blog one more manga series. I think that it is nicely drawn, but hard to actually follow. I am talking about hardcore sci-fi manga Blame! by Nihei Tsutomu. Placed in a distant future, humans and silicon creatures (and some crossbreeds) inhabit a huge structure and fight each other for obscure reasons. The manga is a cross between Giger and Aeon Flux and, if you remember the MTV show, just as hard to follow due to very little explaining and scarce dialogue. It is basically a world description, even if it has a central character and a plot line.
The same artist created two other manga series in the same universe: Biomega and Net Sphere Engineer. You can download most of the Nihei Tsutomu works at the Controlling Authority site.