So I’ve got a nice long five day holiday waiting for me this week. You’d imagine I’d be ecstatic at the prospect of late mornings and late nights. Unfortunately my tendency to procrastinate has meant that my 5 day break will be spent cramming in as much work as possible. as I am approaching the end of my three year articles I’ve got to get my logbook signed off as soon as possible. This logbook is the sum of all my years of practical experience and it documents whether I have managed to become competent in the completion of my work. Part of this whole procedure is the completion of several assignments that work as theoretical tests of your knowledge of accounting and its principles. Now the way its meant to work is that you have to complete one test every six months but due to certain complications at my current employer I’ve had all of them bar one given to me at once. Now it is still easy enough to complete them in a weekend or two but as usual I’ve managed to lose track of time and procrastinate till the last minute. Now I’ve got one week left in which to do them all. So wish me luck and don’t be surprised if I’m not online for the foreseeable future 
Monthly Archive for January, 2009
One of my all time favourite animé series, Cowboy Bebop, is receiving the Hollywood treatment and initial signs are that this Western version is not going to win any Oscars. The casting of Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel doesn’t bode well. While he may have been suited to Neo, Spike is a far more complex character with noir leanings and unfortunately I don’t think Keanu is up to the task. So far he is the only confirmed cast member so hopefully we hear some better news regarding other fan favourites like Jet Black (my gravatar on this site) and Faye Valentine. Let’s hold thumbs that Cowboy Bebop isn’t made into a run of the mill action romp.
For those of you unsure of what precisely Cowboy Bebop is, here’s the breakdown from Wikipedia:
Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese animated television series. Directed by Shinichirō Watanabe and written by Keiko Nobumoto, Cowboy Bebop was produced by Sunrise. Consisting of 26 episodes, the series follows the adventures of a group of bounty hunters traveling on their spaceship, the Bebop, in the year 2071. It is considered one of the best anime series ever made.
Cowboy Bebop has been strongly influenced by American music, especially the jazz movements of the 1940s-60s and the early rock era of the 1950s-70s. Many of its action sequences, from space battles to hand-to-hand martial arts combat, are set and timed to music. Following the musical theme, episodes are called Sessions, and the episode titles are often borrowed from album or song names (“Sympathy for the Devil”, “Honky Tonk Women”, or “My Funny Valentine” to name a few), or make use of a genre name (“Mushroom Samba” or “Heavy Metal Queen”) indicating a given episode’s musical theme.
On the 13th of January Patrick McGoohan passed away at the age of 80 after a brief illness. He’ll be fondly remembered as the lead actor and man behind the cult television series, The Prisoner. While he may not be an all too familiar name to many people these days, it was his early work that found him a legion of fans that are still as strong as ever today. The Prisoner still manages to be screened throughout the world today with fan clubs and avid fans flocking from all around the world to experience the show for themselves. The Prisoner dealt with a British agent who upon resigning is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious island run by someone calling themselves Number One. The show revolves around the island’s rulers trying to break him down mentally and physically to learn his reasons for resigning while he matches them in a battle of wits to retain his individuality and right to choice. For a show that was made in the 1960s this was very far ahead of it’s time and is still riveting viewing. In McGoohan’s own words,
I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself… I think we’re gonna take good care of this planet shortly… there’s never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn’t been used…
…We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche… As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed…
…We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people’s villages but we are all prisoners.
Rest in peace Patrick McGoohan.
1928 - 2009
Just before this past weekend Steve Ballmer announced at CES that the Live suite of products that Microsoft offers for free download had reached the final stage of their release. This means that the Live Wave 3 rollout is now final. For those of you that don’t know, the programs consist of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, Family Safety, Office Live Add-in, and Silverlight. As from Windows 7, Microsoft will no longer bundle the cut down versions of some of these products with Windows by default. This means for instance that you’d have to download Windows Live Messenger as the basic MSN client will no longer form part of Windows. Grab the Live applications from the Essentials site.
Hot on the heels of the MSN woes plaguing libpurple chat clients the devs at Pidgin have knocked up a new release. The new version also fixes an annoying bug for Windows users that caused the program to hang upon exiting. The full list of changes is as follows:
- libpurple
- Fix a connection timeout with empty Gadu-Gady buddy lists. (Martin Rosinski)
- Don’t ignore namespace information when parsing XMPP data. (Michal Witkowski)
- Fix a crash that occurred when retrieving certain Offline Messages on MSN.
- Extended purple-url-handler to handle “gtalk” URI’s. (Paul Aurich)
- Fix the hang on exit in Network Location Awareness for Windows XP and Windows Vista. (Paul Aurich)
- MSN
- Change Contact Server to temporarily fix connection problems. (Thanks to Youness Alaoui)
- XMPP
- Support for XEP-0191 blocking. (Vijay Raghunathan)
- Don’t put SASL PLAIN or IQ Auth passwords in debug logs. (Paul Aurich)
- Fix removal of avatars (both PEP and vCard), we weren’t removing them correctly before. (Paul Aurich)
- Pidgin
- Fix a crash in the Add Account dialog when changing protocols under certain circumstances.
- Finch
- Redirect stderr outputs to the debug window.
- Fix rebinding actions with the arrow-keys and tab.
- Windows-specific changes
- Fix the “Hang on Exit” issue that a number of users encountered.
- Updated GTK+ to 2.14.6
As per usual you can grab it from here.
Imagine my surprise this morning as I tried to log onto MSN only to discover that Pidgin kept bombing out of MSN with the error message: “Unable to retrieve address book”. It would seem that the bodies at Redmond have decided in their wisdom to make some server side changes which refuse access to MSNP15 clients such as Pidgin. Further details can be found on the Adium blog. This leaves uses of both Adium and Pidgin with three alternatives:
- Make use of the official clients for either the Mac (in the case of Adium) or PC (in the case of Pidgin)
- Make use of alternative clients which use older versions of MSNP eg. aMSN
- Use Felipe Contreras’ alternative MSN Pecan plugin.
- Adium users can also roll back to version 1.3.1
- Or rather use a better protocol such as XMPP or Google Talk
Hopefully the Pidgin devs manage to get out a fix of some sorts pronto as there are plenty of users up in arms.
Update: The MSN connection issues are apparently sorted out and boiled down to server side changes. Everything should be working fine.
Well my Saturday morning has gotten off to a productive start with an early 7am squash session with Ryan, the first for 2009. Thankfully I didn’t play too badly though I kept my win-less streak going at +/-1000 games! After squash we quickly popped through to my place and I got Ryan to use some of his codemonkey skills on my blog. He did a brilliant job, so starting from today the following changes should be up and running on my blog:
- I’ve put small Google ads on my seperate post pages in hopes that I can get a small amount of money blogging in my spare time
- I’ve ditched the K2 theme’s search functionality and am now making use of a custom search engine from Google. The results page is self hosted and Ryan managed to make it fit in perfect with my blog so kudos to him!
- I’m also self hosting a few of the images and so on in hopes that if Adgator or Amatomu act up then loading the site shouldn’t be too adversely affected.
- Ryan also played around a bit with my 404 error page and added some Google code in it so that the error page is now integrated into my site and will present users with search functionality to find the correct page they’re looking for.
- I’ve also fiddled around with my RSS feed on Feedburner to try and promote it a bit more and make it a bit more useful to those of you who make use of it.
Hopefully anyone visiting this site will find these small changes make the site a bit easier to navigate and use. If not, then please feel free to drop me a comment and I’ll try to make the appropriate changes. My utmost thanks to Ryan again who managed to do a sterling job!
I use Firefox on a regular basis and one of its nifty features is the Awesomebar that performs searches straight from the address bar. While installing the latest version on Windows Live Messenger today I unfortunately forgot to deselct the option to prevent Live Search from taking over my as my browser’s default search engine so every time I now search from the Awesomebar I’m stuck with Live search results. Digging a bit deeper I managed to find the setting in Firefox to change it back to Google. If you type “about:config” in Firefox’s address bar you’ll be greeted with a warning telling you that any changes you make could cause unexpected results in your browser. If you’re brave and accept it you’re presented with a screen of bewildering options but thankfully we can narrow it down by making use of the search bar at the top of the screen. Typing in “search” narrows down the options dramatically and then we can scroll down to the line we need to change, “keyword.URL“. This controls the search engine that is used to search from the Awesomebar. We want to change this back to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” option so change the line’s contents to:
“http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=”
Now seeing as I’m in South Africa I’d prefer to use the South African portal for my searches so I’d change the line to:
“http://www.google.co.za/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=”
Simple as that! Now every time you search from Firefox’s Awesomebar you’ll be taking to the first search result for the term you entered.
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