THEY SAY the first step is acknowledging that one has a problem so here goes… I’m addicted to sci-fi, and the worse the better. Think of it like a B movie addiction, the type of guity pleasure you wouldn’t even admit to your wife, and this weekend I couldn’t resist the lure of killer bugs, rampaging mutants and lethal viruses in a marathon of futuristic fun… all due to the wonders of Rapidshare and direct downloading.

It’s not something I would have bothered with in the past because of the bandwidth demands, but this new shiny 20mb changes everything and I have to say the combination of rapidfind.org with rapidshare is a potent mix. for my viewing pleasure this weekend I decided to case a glance at Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, Doomsday and The Mutant Chronicles, a worthy selection of sci-fi crappiness I think you will agree.

I started off watching what I thought would be the worst of the bunch, and I wasn’t dissappointed

Doomsday is pretty much a series of stolen cliche moments from all of your favourite sci-fi flicks of the last 20 years, from a director who should know better, staring actors who really should have known better and missing a plot because, well the plot knew better and buggered off. It’s completely nonsensical from start to finish.

I’m trying to sum up one single thing the film did right, but to be honest the only thing that I found memorable at all was the use of a foam grenade, yes you read that right, in a falling elevator scenarion. Picture the scene… elevator full of suited and booted soldiers, cable snaps and the carriage falls many stories downward only somewhere during the descent one of the good guys lets off a foam grenade which basically blankets the entire cage and protects them from the fall.

I did say it made no sense didn’t I?

Anyway, moving on from one cliche to another, I decided to give Starship Troopers 3: Maurader a try out and I was actually surprised. It was not completely without merit, but still a shite movie overall. The first 10 or 15 minutes are very similar to the original of the species and carry just as much tongue in cheek facism and racism elements, but gradually it goes down the religious route and starts to completely loose cohesion.

One of the most underused elements of the entire film are actually the ‘maurader’ suits mentioned in the title. Fans of the original book and/or animated series will know all about these cool outfits and the experience of dropping from space into orbit in one… but the whole exposure to same in this movie was about 10 minutes in total. If you like your sci-fi fast, facist and fucking ridiculous then this one is a must!

I followed that up with a complete shot in the dark (sorry, bad pun) and gave The Mutant Chronicles a lash. I didn’t know anything about the story or plot before trying it out so I had nothing to go on by way of comparison, but it was one of those blue screen jobbies, a kind of cross between steam punk and world war 1 concerning the last attempt of the human race to save itself from a ‘machine’ which was turning the entire population into mutants.

I gotta tell you this one made fuck all sense from start to finish and I was surprised to see some of the actors show up in this like Ron Pearlman (Hellboy) and Devon Aoki, hell even Sean Pertwee put in a forgettable perfornance but the one which surprised me the most was seeing Thomas Jane in the mix. Anyhoo all I can say is… don’t bother unless you’re a devoted fan of the original (which I assume is a graphic novel of some sort) and want to draw comparisons.

Hmm… maybe next weekend I’ll pick a different theme and see what I can snag with my new wormhole download speeds

Technorati Tags: b movies, doomsday, download, marauder, rapidfind, rapidshare, Sci-Fi, starship troopers 3, the mutant chronicles

THOSE DILIGENT developers in the Wordpress community have gone and released the latest iteration of Wordpress (V2.6) almost a month earlier than planned, but I wouldn’t be rushing to upgrade just yet if I was you.

I’m a long time Wordpress user and should have known better, but driven by all the hype of WP 2.5, I willingly went ahead and upgraded to that version pretty much days after it was released, only to be confronted by numerous issues and really obvious problems that should have been sorted in the testing of the release. Pretty quickly afterwards a V2.5.1 was issued to address the growing problems list but even that didn’t fix everything.

So, although I’m a huge fan of the open source blog/CMS software I’m going to recommend that you wait a few weeks for the dust to settle and let the early adopters go through all the grief first before you commit your website to the upgrade process. Let’s face it, WP 2.6.1 will be along any time now with - probably - a list of fixes just like usual.

Having said that there are a few cute improvements in this 2.6 release as follows:-

• Version Control for draft posts/pages
• Improved Press-It functionality
• A theme ‘preview’ function
• More Avatar functions
• Enhanced plugin management

And of course there are a bunch of bug fixes and probably a whole lot of other minor enhancements mixed in there as well. Still, I ended up having to rebuild my site from scratch, move hosted, move platform and eventually redesign my entire site the last time I tried to upgrade.

I’m thinking it’s a better idea this time around to just sit on my ass for a while and see how everyone else gets on, and then maybe consider the upgrade around 2.6.1. Of course I’ll probably have to get around to building my test site for that too I suppose. Oh well, so much for a bit of procrastination.

Technorati Tags: Issues, Procrastination, Upgrade, Wordpress, Wordpress 2.6

WANTED finally hit the screens here a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to post a quick review, but I got distracted by a minor disaster  for a while. Actually, distracted is a good way of summarising my thoughts on this movie because the combination of bending bullets, slow motion fights, sexy assassins and hard rock music is actually good, so good that it distracts you from the complete lack of any credible plot.

And - just to clarify - I’m not going to do my usual thorough review of the film. It really doesn’t deserve that much effort, so I’m just going to let the stream of conciousness take over and see where the words fall.

To be fair Wanted is really a summer popcorn flick, the kind of movie that you know going in you will probably enjoy as long as you don’t take it too seriously. I mean it’s not art by any stretch of the imagination, but it is an enjoyable romp which the lads in the audience will have some fun with because Angelina Jolie really does sparkle in this film.

Not as an actress you understand - her acting talents were not exactly in demand for this one - but as a sexy female assassin. Her eyes literally sparkle in some of the shots (maybe it’s the drugs!) and she is fit as ever. In fact there is one - all to brief - scene in the movie where she rises from a hot bath, completely naked except for the tattoos and walks away from camera which will have all the fan boys playing with the pause and slo-mo buttons on their High-Def DVD players in a couple months…

If you think I’m kidding, check out this still image from the scene. Anyway - enough about her, what about the film? Well it’s pretty pointless drivel with no real plot or in-depth characters that a respectable postman couldn’t see through in ten minutes (twist? nah - not really) but that’s not really the point in the end because this movie is pure visceral fun.

There is a story of sorts hidded between the action scenes (Useless son discovers his father was some legendary assassin with mad skillz who went rogue and started killing the good guys and further that the son may have inherited the same capabilities himself, if only he can bend bullets and survive the training blah blah blah). Oh yeah and there was something about a whacky fruit-of-the-loom destiny bollox maguffin determining who should be killed which will completely piss you off until the action starts up again.

And the action in this movie is pretty fucking insane. Think Matrix bullet-time and frantic camera angles, now factor in bending bullets and fast cars, oh yeah of course Angelina in some cute outfits with some crazy ass weaponry and you’re getting close.

Overall it’s not going to win any awards and you will pretty much forget about it within a few hours of seeing it, but I have to say I still think it’s worth seeing just for the hell of it. The pumping hard rock tracks combined with the relentless action on screen and the sometimes awkward transition from clueless and oppressed office worker to uber-assassin for the central protagonist (James McEvoy) are just about enough to put a smile on your face during the movie, but not enough for you to give a crap once you leave the cinema. Morgan Freeman should have stuck to his supporting role in Batman because he is plain dreadful in this film, and as for the other actors there are none worth mentioning.

So - in summary, if I was going to do anything with this film I’d add in more Angelina, more nudity and, well, actually that’s it pretty much

Who needs plot anyway?

Technorati Tags: angelina jolie, assassin, bending bullets, james mcevoy, morgan freeman, wanted

I KNOW America loves its guns, but this is weird on a whole new level folks. A Church in Oklahoma city decided recently to hold a weekend conference for teenagers, and what better way to entice some nice young faithful into the fold than by offering a prize of a semi-automatic rifle in a raffle for all attendees?

I recall reading a few years ago, after the Columbine school massacre actually, about how some American banks were giving away guns to people who opened a new account with them, and the idiocy of this kept me amused for quite a while.

This time though it’s the turn of the Church it seems, and it looks like they are intent on preaching faith through superior firepower!

This particular church, Windsor Hills Baptist,  had planned to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle until one of the event’s organizers was unable to attend the conference because he injured his foot, so they cancelled the giveaway but intend to do it again next year. Ross said the conference isn’t all about guns, but rather about teens finding faith, although I’m not too clear on the linkage between one and the other to be honest.

When questioned about his plans to give away a lethal weapon to a teenager as a reward for attending a conference the church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, had this to say:

“I don’t want people thinking ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn’t respect it who are then going to go out and kill.”

So what exactly does he expect the lucky winner to do with the gun then?

I know some churches are a bit whacky, and have lost their way in some respects due to fundamentalist thinking and exclusionist approaches to education based upon fear of change or just plain xenophobia, but this is pretty insane… giving away a lethal assault rifle to teens as a reward for just turning up at some meeting is just fucked up. Pure and simple.

The world really is full of wingnuts.

Technorati Tags: Assult Rifle, church, faith, Oklahoma, Superior Firepower, Windsor Hills Baptist, Wingnuts

I’M FINALLY BACK IN ACTION after a crazy few days. The technical issues that had plagued my PC have all been resolved and I’ve put a new backup solution in place to avoid the same happening to me again (hopefully), but it was a strange series of events that knocked me out of action to begin with.

After the dust settled it seems that the main issue which screwed my system was an onboard Raid controller on my Abit Fatality FP9 SLI motherboard which resulted in a corrupt C: partition which basically buggered my boot disk. Eventually I had to abandon all RAID options at all and install an additional 750MB disk to act as a local backup.

When the RAID was sorted my soundcard decided to bluescreen a lot, which then led to even more chaos and confusion. I replaced the soundcard and everything looked groovy. At that point I’d had to have my system partition rebuilt from scratch but then Saturday arrived and my lovely new 20mb Internet connection was installed.

Having the massive bandwidth to now avail of I set about updating/patching all my stuff on Saturday and just marvelled at the sheer black hole speed that the connection exhibited. Massive amounts of cumulative patching and updates was hoovered up in seconds and downloaded for installation… and that’s where I ran into trouble.

Of course I had my ZoneAlarm firewall and Anti-Virus up and running ASAP and was faithfully clicking on all the approvals as they arrived, but upon one patch / update I noticed a dodgy looking DDE request to the IEXPLORE.EXE program and although my brain twigged it as a problem, my mouse somehow went ahead and clicked ‘Yes’ and hey presto I had a freakin’ virus and had to rebuild the entire system from scratch again.

Fast forward to today; system is completely rebuilt and patched up to date (thanks to that 20mb connection) and I’ve just taken delivery of my (legit) copy of Norton’s Ghost backup/recovery software and started a regime of full/incremental backups which should prevent me getting in to this kind of trouble again.

So - it’s good to be back and expect the normal insanity to commence from tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Backup, Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery Plan, Norton Ghost, PC, raid, Recovery, Zonealarm

SORRY for the inactivity of the last few days folks, I’ve been trying to recover my computer from the depths of tech hell since it all went horribly wrong on Saturday afternoon last. I blame Nokia myself, but the long and short of it is that I’ve had to hand my PC in to be repaired.

It all began when I decided to download the latest Nokia PC suite of software to enable me to sync up my contacts from my nice new shiny Nokia mobile phone which I’d purchased last Friday. The install seemed to go ok, but then it froze at around 96% complete.

No amount of jiggery pokery could get that bastard off 96% and eventually I had to reboot my system, and of course that’s when it all went horribly wrong. The C: system partition seemed to have hit a corruption of some sort which prevented a full boot. The system kept trying to “chkdsk” the drive and repair faulty sectors but ultimately the whole process just failed on me and fragmented the drive to hell and back as a nice side effect.

Without the ability to boot into Windows XP I was pretty much screwed. I tried booting in ‘safe’ mode but the only one which worked was ‘console mode’, and that didn’t really help. I tried lots of other things but in the end I just had to call it quits and hand it in to the professionals, and they spent most of the day trying to recover the disks within the raid array and the data on the C: partition.

I get the full story tomorrow, and hopefully I get the PC back, but I’m thinking I’ll probably have to reinstall everything again because they will have reformatted and rebuilt my OS from scratch after all the other attempts failed, which means my registry entries will be blown away and although my data (on the other partitions) will be safe, I’ll have to reinstall all the apps that uses it.

Anyhoo - it might take me a few days (and nights) to get all my shit together again so please be patient while I get it all in order. During this period updates at the site might be a little ‘low and slow’, if you get my drift.

And yes - before you ask - I’ve told them to add in a sodding extra big fuckoff disk so I can do proper image copies to it going forward! I guess I’m just dealing the the cause and effect of one of life’s universal principles: Technology will always shit on you, it’s only a question of when.

Honestly IT people make the worst, well, IT users I guess :)

Update @ July 2nd: After three days of trial and error it looks like the issue is with my onboard raid controller (on the mobo). Unfortunately it seems I’ll have to reinstall everything again on my ‘system’ partition, but at least my data was saved. I’ve decided to add in a big-ass disk and get my hands on Norton’s Ghost backup/recovery tool to protect from similar issues going forward, but as usual it’s a case of too little, too late. Anyway - normal service should be resumed by the weekend as I get the box back in action, and more than that I’ve just ordered a 20mb internet connection which gets installed on Saturday… so the anticipation is killing me!!

Technorati Tags: boot, broken pc, computer, flames, hard drive, Nokia, PC Suite, raid, Windows, XP

THE IRISH BROADBAND market got a much needed shot in the arm today with the announcement that ComReg (the Commision for Communications Regulation) has directed Eircom to slash its LLU line share pricing by 65 percent, effectively droppng the wholesale price for LLU line share from €8.41 to €2.94 for other operators in the broadband market.

This is potentially great news for the Irish consumer as the price cuts will lead to more competition in the broadband market and hopefully cheaper prices along with more options for us punters as a result.

On the same day the news broke that Eircom would have to drop their LLU pricing UPC (a cable broadband provider in Ireland) announced it was launching a new series of packages from July 1st aimed at the residential market with significantly larger bandwidth for lower prices, touting a 20mb downstream bandwidth package for only €40 per month, which is dramatically cheaper than other offerings in the same space.

UPC is also improving their upstream speeds. For the 20Mbps product, upstream speeds will be 1.5Mbps. They will also be offering a 10Mbps product for €30 per month and a 3Mbps product for only €10 per month.

Personally I’m a DSL customer - I tried the cable varient but it never had the support, quality and speed I needed - however with these new speeds and pricing I’m beginning to think a move back to cable might now be a smart move.

Does anyone out there reading this have any experience of UPC in Ireland to date? How would you rate them?

Technorati Tags: broadband, broadband market, cable, comreg, dsl, eircom, Internet, Irish, upc

NEW RESEARCH has indicated that some drugs used to put patients to sleep may also increase post operative pain from the procedure itself by boosting the activity of a protein called TRPA1 on the surface of pain-sensing nerve cells.

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to dentists I’m a complete wuss, I need to be knocked out before I’ll let anyone go near my mouth and I just can’t stand the sound of those drills and saws, but when it comes to medical procedures in a hospital for some reason I’m not that bothered by all the fuss.

That’s probably because I’ve been in and out of an operating theatre and under a general anesthetic more times than I can count - put it down to an overactive childhood and a completely misfired sense of danger I guess!

Still, I’m pretty impressed by this new research from Gerard Ahern, a pharmacologist at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. I came across this discoveryt while reading an article over at the Scientific American and the following is an extract from it:

In attempting to pinpoint pain sources, Ahern and his team examined the effect of various anesthetics on TRPA1 and TRPV1, two proteins known to sense pain and respond to chemical irritants. Cells containing TRPA1 were activated by the drugs, but TRPV1 cells appeared to be unaffected. Research confirmed their findings on lab mice engineered not to produce TRPA1.

Essentially Ahern and his colleagues have stumbled upon the reason why patients react differently to identical surgical procedures, some compaining of post-operative pain where others are fine. Hopefully they can now fine tune the type of general anesthetic given to patients in order to minimise the post-operative pain.

Which is great news for those of us who end up going through hospitals on a regular basis

Technorati Tags: anesthesia, anesthetic, general anesthetic, Georgetown University Hospital, Gerard Ahern, operation, Pain, post-operative, TRPA1, TRPV1

IS IRELAND still a democracy? I know that sounds like a crazy question, but based upon the latest news worming its way out from central Europe I’m beginning to question if we do indeed live in a democracy or are we in fact operating as a form of oligarchy, or worse just a puppet state for Europe.

I ask the question because according to the latest news bulletins from Europe our illustrious leader has delivered his view on the recent Lisbon treaty defeat to his European counterparts and stated that there will be “no renegotiation of treaty”, but that there is a “possibility of another referendum”. Assuming no renegotiation.. doesn’t that mean we’d just be voting on the same thing again?

On the one hand he makes statements like the following in one of his speeches which would lead one to believe that yes, we are still a democracy and the will of the people will actually be respected:

“For all of us, the will of the people is sovereign. They have spoken at the ballot box, the ultimate democratic forum, and the Government accepts their verdict. The principles of democracy must be the threads that weave the fabric of the European Union. I am sure that this is a view that you all share.”

But then he also maintains that there is an increasingly likely prospect of a second referendum next spring because findings of a recent poll show a disastrous ‘Yes’ campaign was directly to blame for the defeat.

Who cares why it was defeated? The point is, it was defeated. It was rejected by the people of Ireland so to bring it back again and force it upon the nation - without any changes or concessions - until the Government gets the ‘yes’ vote Europe wants… well in my opinion it just makes a mockery of the democratic process and the so-called respect for the will of the people of Ireland being soverign.

It certainly seems to suggest that the current Governement is operating more as a puppet state of Europe and an oligarchy than a democracy. And further, if this is how our Government intends to behave on the treaty, what’s to stop them doing the very same on anything else in the future? Are we now relegated to doing exactly everything the Eurocracts want, and nothing else? Do we have any say in the matter or is it just a thin veil of democracy covering the surface of an emerging super-state?

I was prepared to accept the result of the Lisbon treaty, no matter what the outcome and irrespective of how I voted myself. I was actually very surprised when it went down in flames last week, but that’s democracy at work right?

It’s not that I disagree with the European ideal or that I’m opposed to the treaty, but I am completely opposed to the concept of just hammering home what the Eurobrats in Brussels want, again and again until they get the result they want without any recognition or deference to the will of the people in the member states. What is the point of holding a referendum if the outcome is completely ignored?

That’s not the kind of Europe I want to live in, and it’s not the kind of political system I want to be guided by in Ireland. Be warned people, this is not the end of the Lisbon treaty, but it might just be the first signs of a sliding democracy in our country.

Technorati Tags: Brussels, Cowen, Democracy, Lisbon Treaty, Oligarchy, Puppet State, Referendum, Super State

WAR IS IN THE WIND. Or at least that’s what the Israeli military want everyone to think since Israeli forces have just staged an ‘exercise’ which pretty much replicates a full scale attack on Iran and in particular the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Military and political analysts seem to agree that the purpose of staging such an exercise was to send a message to Iran, and to the rest of the world - Stop your nuclear programme or suffer the consequences.

That Israel has Iran in their sights is not however news. As far back as 2005 the attack on Iran has been predicted, indeed at that stage it was theorised that it might take the form of a joint US/Israeli strike force.

The Israeli exercise earlier this month involved hundreds of Israeli warplanes, including F-15s, F-16s and aerial refueling tanker aircraft. The size and scope of the exercise ensured that the United States and other nations in the region saw it and took notice. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday warned against the use of force on Iran, saying there was no proof it was trying to build nuclear weapons.

However all of the warning signs are there. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on the 4th of June that drastic measures were needed to stop Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. He said Iran must be shown “there will be devastating consequences if it did develop such weapons”. Then Israeli deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz - a former defence minister - said earlier this month that military strikes to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons looked “unavoidable”.

Of course the Israeli military won’t confirm or deny anything at this point, instead opting to issue a statement saying only that the Israeli air force “regularly trains for various missions in order to confront and meet the challenges posed by the threats facing Israel.”

It’s all looking decidely dodgy at this juncture. Maybe Branson should send in one of his ‘elders’ to make a deal before it gets out of control and escalates into a full blown conflict.

If a conflict is avoided and there is no apparent reason in the media for such a development, check to see if an elder was in the region… because these folks tend to get in under the radar and negotiate peace accords before most people know they were even in the country.

There is a rumour flying around that one of the elders actually had an agreement in progress with Saddam which could have averted war, but the US upped their timetable and went in 24 hours early.

Of course it could just be a rumour ;) 

Technorati Tags: attack, branson, elders, iran, israel, nuclear, nuclear programme, War