kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Miscellany

Warner Brothers Backs Blu-Ray

On Friday executives at Warner Brothers announced that they would be committing to support the Blu-Ray format for HD movies and would be ceasing production of movies in the HD-DVD format at the end of May, 2008.

Though the battle is far from over with technology giants like Intel and Microsoft backing the Toshiba-led HD-DVD format.  Disney and Fox have both committed to the Blu-Ray format.  WB has been producing movies in both formats until now.  With the decision to move to the Blu-Ray format, this tilts the scales in the direction of the Sony-backed format quite significantly, particularly for movies.

One possibility we may see is Blu-Ray being adopted for movies, and HD-DVD being adopted for the video game industry, particularly given Microsoft’s support of the format in it’s XBox 360 console.

Hidden Details in OS X Leopard

I found an interesting bit of hidden text in OS X.  The icon for “TextEdit” actually contains legible text if you can enlarge it enough to read.

This is in addition to the other little “hidden gem”… Those cute kids in Cupertino thought it would be cute to paint every non-mac computer with the Blue Sceen of Death… funny… Cobalt (seen below) is running Ubuntu 7.10…..

I wonder what other hidden gems might be waiting for me… a working flash player perhaps?

Leopard has Landed

Well, I survived the upgrade.  No major challenges.  In fact the hardest thing was finding a CD I was looking for…  but more to come on that.

So far I’m pretty impressed with the performance boost that I’ve gotten from the new OS.  I’ll be doing a longer post on my Leopard experience in the next couple of days.   But now… it’s time to get some shuteye.  :mrgreen:

Dreamhost PS – “Probably Stable”

About 6 weeks ago, I made some changes to my hosting service. I’ve been hosted with Dreamhost for over two years now, and for the most part it’s been pretty good value for money.

So recently I switched hosting packages to Dreamhost PS, a virtual private server configuration offered by DH.  And ever since acquiring my dedicated resources, I’ve had nothing but instability — which some of you have probably noticed.

Coincidentally, the provider has had some major network issues over the past few weeks.  As of yesterday, these should he corrected.  If not, I will be looking for a new hosting provider for the five domains I’m currently hosting.

NinjaWords – Quick definitions

Zutter Bug tipped me off today to one of the greatest additions to the Web 2.0 space… a new free dictionary service called Ninja Words. Launched in November 2006 by Phil Crosby, it’s an Ajax-based dictionary site which pulls all of it’s information from Wiktionary and the Princeton WordNet.

It is (for the moment at least) lightning fast and has been able to find all of the words and phrases I’ve thrown at it so far, including:

The tool will also correct spelling (I forgot the second “m” in grammarian), as well as distinguish between common and proper nouns (note the two spellings of Enterprise).

This tool also comes with the ability to have a Windows Tray application, though the link to the OS X widget is broken. Hoorah!

Moving In…

Well, I’ve finally made the switch and moved the blog over to its new home at kdmurray.net. The reasons for the switch are mostly personal, and partly practical. Suffice to say I like the new name better, and it’s a much shorter URL. ;)

Please enjoy the new site, let me know what you think, and don’t mind the dust as the tweaking continues over the next while.

For those of you subscribing subscribing to the blog, please use the Feedburner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kdmurray as it will insulate you against silly little things like my changing the domain name. :D

Sedins Star in NHL Commercial

Swedish TwinsThe new myNHL advertising campaign has a couple of new spokesmen: the Sedins! Starting next week a new commercial for the NHL will debut on national TV. It was shown for the first time tonight on Hockey Night in Canada.

Check out the “Swedish Twins” spot right now on Canucks.com!

This ad is quite amusing. Kelly Hrudey speaking on HNIC said that the way they got the twins to perform in this spot was that they lied to them. It wasn’t until they were in the middle of shooting that they twins found out about their little dance routine.

Edit: 2007-02-20 :: I’ve redirected the link to YouTube as the Canucks.com link no longer works.

What was I thinking?!

Oops...There was a nasty surprise waiting for me when I woke up this morning (dreadfully early for a Saturday on account of work — but thats another story). It took me a while to notice, but the awning that we got as a gift this past summer was overturned on the deck. Immediately I thought about how naive I was to think it would be OK to leave it out there, but I didn’t think much of it (and I couldn’t really see it because the sun hadn’t come up yet).

Later in the morning I got a better look, and realized the extent of the damage. You can see under the table one of the legs not pointing the same direction as the others. Add to that the two very large holes in the awning cover itself and I’m not overly optimistic about our ability to fix this.