Movie Ad Poll MyBC.com is running a poll entitled: "When you go see a movie, how do you feel about the ads". I encourage everyone to take this poll and choose the obvious answer of I hate them - I don't pay to see ads.

Max Payne Flash Animation SilverStr found a sweet Max Payne movie in his search for nifty flash stuff. MAX PAYNE 3D by Andy Torres is done in the style of the cool kung fu flash movies that were circulating a while back, and is quite well done.

Tales of MoronBoss Great link to a fella's blog and his stories of dealing with MoronBoss. Most amusing....

TTT DVD News Ain't It Cool has a scoop on news about The Two Towers DVD. It sounds like a lot was cut from TTT, and "The FOTR extended cut had 35 extra CG shots - the TT extended cut has over 150."

Can't wait!

Deconstructing Michael Jackson Interesting look at the world's most famous wierdo pop-star. Deconstructing Michael Jackson is over at whatever-dude.com.

MP3 Device News Site More a link to remind myself than anything, but Phataudio.org has some interesting mp3 and portable music device news.

Mental Note: add to bookmarks.

Harry Potter Font Neat, someone's put a harry potter truetype font called Lumos online.

Who Would Buy That? Probably a repeat, but always good.... head over to Who Would Buy That? to see strange stuff you can buy online. A good candidate for this would be the giant mutant cheeto currently going for $7m (it was $631 at one point earlier).

Kitten Picture My friend Dragon passed this one over to me, and as I'm on my way to being a crazy old cat man, and am a sucker for kitten pictures, heres a shot of someone just too tired to eat.

Spamassassin 2.50 Released SpamAssassin 2.50 Released. Fixes include addition of Bayesian filtering, translations, new rule set, and much more...

Poignant poign�ant - (poinynt)
adj.
...
a) Neat, skillful, and to the point

Bush For Dummies I'm heading out for a couple of days on a business trip folks, but in the meantime, feel free to wander through Bush Speaks, which is full of un-patriotic and completely offensive to all good people of the US :)

Nifty 404 SilverStr threw me a link to one of the more original 404's I've seen lately. Thanks!

Hep News Aggregation Another new aggregation program called Hep looks promising. It plans to integrate both pop/smtp mail, a webservice and jabber support to allow posting/reading of weblogs. No MT support yet though :(

Hep Message Server is software that transfers bits of information between different messaging sytems on the Internet. When it's done, you'll be able to use Hep to transparently route messages between e-mail, weblogs, and instant messaging.

Terry Jones take on Bush Emailed from Harry...

Yes, THAT Terry Jones. He wrote a brilliantly worded article for the Observer which can be found here: http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,882526,00.html

It has to be read to be believed, I think it would make a worthy addition to Ufies.

3D Modeling Tutorials and Gallery Noticed a comment on a story here about blender tutorials which pointed towards elYsiun.com, a nifty looking site with 3d modeling tutorials, galleries, and other cool stuff. The poster of said comment also has a blender gallery.

Beta Gnome Bitstream Fonts Available As you might remember there are a bunch of high quality truetype fonts released to the open source community. Well, they are available now from http://gnome.org/fonts. The fonts drop in nicely if you're using fontconfig (put them into ~/.fonts) and look pretty good, as you clearly see from the image (1280x1024 png 333k).

Punk Kittens in Flash I won't say who sent this to me, but let me say that punk kittens is the strangest thing I've seen done in flash so far this week.

Portable Lie Detector They may say that this portable lie detector has some legitimate uses (testing stress level before an interview, etc), but we all know what it's really for.... training yourself to hold out while being interrogatedviewed by The Man.

Spend 18-20 hours a day practicing saying things like "I only use them for educational purposes", "I don't know where that stack of DIVX :-) movies came from", "I was researching a book", or "Kevin who? I got that bumper sticker from some guy on the street" and you're sure to be able to withstand any interview that comes along.

Cool HTML/JS Tricks Dissapointed that you have nothing to do after watching the end of Joe Millionaire? Head over to Browser Experiments and find nifty stuff to use on your site.

This site has some very cool things you can do with a modern (DOM compliant) browser (ie 5.5+/mozilla) using Javascript, CSS and unobtrusive DHTML. I'll probably play with some of these here on Ufies, just for fun :)

More Proof Canada Rocks [fark] Canadians play an 80 hour hockey game for charity in Edmonton. Final score of this amazing game: 650 to 628.

Detroit Project Ads I think that JD already beat me to this scoop, but the detroit project has two great ads (realplayer format) that are just great. Know those "if you buy a bag of pot you're really supporting terrorism" ads? Same idea, different target. For cynical bastards like me, especially ones that hate the lying media bastards (and politicians, and monkeys posing as politicians...), these are top notch.

Original Wallpaper Artwork Fozbaca found some sweet and sexy wallpapers over at PixielGirl's site. All high quality and original looking. Most impressive.

Galeon 1.2.8 and 1.3.2 Released Good news for all galeon users. Phil has released version 1.2.8 (stable) and 1.3.2 (gnome2). Both now support mozilla 1.3b and they both have cool release names. Read more for the email put out to the galeon-devel list.

From: Philip Langdale 
Subject: [Galeon-devel] Galeon 1.2.8 and 1.3.2 released!
                                                                                                         
Hi all!
                                                                                                         
After a couple of months of quiet, we are happy to announce the release
of new version of galeon from both the stable and gnome2 branches.
                                                                                                         
They are:
                                                                                                         
Galeon 1.2.8 "Gettextize me captain!"
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6999&release_id=140473
                                                                                                         
and
                                                                                                         
Galeon 1.3.2 "Stop calling us dead, or we'll haunt you"
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6999&release_id=140648
                                                                                                         
They both support Mozilla 1.3b, the latest release (and Galeon 1.3.x
requires at least Mozilla 1.3a) and feature bug fixes and 1.3.x also has
some nice new features. In the interest of brevity, the release notes
can be found with the files in our sourceforge area, if you follow the
links above. We currently have source tarballs up with rpms on the way.
Enjoy!
                                                                                                         
--phil

Zooming User Interfaces The UI buffs out there should take a look at this, if they haven't already. Zooming User Interfaces is a concept that is analogus to reading a newspaper. When you see something interesting you bring the paper closer (zoom in) to remove the distractions on the rest of the page. When you're done, you zoom out. Or something like that. The home page has a great introduction to the concept.

Kudos to http://www.stressbunny.com/brainjuice/ for the link. For the aformentioned UI buffs, check out his desktop gestures program for linux (and soon win32) which allows you to use opera/netscape like mouse gestures for your day to day desktop navigation.

XFMail 1.5.4-1 Released Looks like cfreeze has released xfmail 1.5.4-1.

MIMEDefang Random Linkages today go to MIMEDefang.

MIMEDefang is a program for inspecting and modifying e-mail messages as they pass through your mail relay. MIMEDefang is written in Perl, and its filter actions are expressed in Perl, so it's highly flexible.

One Pissed Off Cat My bud BSpudd threw this over to me.. I'd swear they are fake, but they look real enough. Maybe I should show my cats these two pictures the next time that they shed all over the place. That being all the time, time to print them out and get them framed (the pictures, not the cats).

Movable Type 2.6 Released Looks like Movabletype has released version 2.6 of their web log software. Some neat highlight of the new release are:

• ability to add new categories when adding or editing a story
• postgres and sqllite database drivers
• new tags, new sanatizing options, and more love...

I'll upgrade this weekend most likely, and see how nifty it actually is....

V. Day Yup, that day is upon us folks.... don't forget guys to give your SO an extra kiss or two when heading to work today, or heck, stay at home! If you're not currently attached to someone, maybe head over to peer 2 peer personals and see if you can find yourself someone special.

Jabber the Easy Way JabberD Quickstart

The JabberD Quickstart package provides a graphical, user-friendly way to install, configure, and manage the JabberD instant messaging server. No hand-editing of XML files, no need to create spool directories, no messy configuration changes -- just a simple, step-by-step setup script that does all the work for you. It's the easy way to get started with Jabber. :)

Scary American Idol Contract Agreements [fark] Apparently the one person with a smidge of talent has been kicked off a show I haven't watched yet, American Idol, for participating in Internet porn. Some said that perchance this is a good idea, and pointed to a very interesting article on salon with details of the contract that contestants must sign before competing. Among the highlights. All 10 of the finalists must sign with the "19" studio for recording, merchandising, and marketting... and if you win you must participate in "World Idol" for the fee of $1400!

Jar of Rocks Joke Stay with me on this one.... read more below. Thanks to Cat5 for brightening up my otherwise horrid afternoon. Jar of Rocks

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, rocks about 2" in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. "Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff."

"If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal."

"Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

But then... an engineering student then took the jar which the other students and the professor agreed was full, and proceeded to pour in a glass of beer. Of course the beer filled the remaining spaces within the jar making the jar truly full.

The moral of this tale is: no matter how full your life is, there is always room for BEER.

Best Quote Ever From a slashdot discussion on the musicbrainz open music information database:

AFAIK, the RIIA isn't opposed to you having information about the music that you own. They are just against you listening to the music that you own.

(original credit)

Best Tech Jokes This ask slashdot, What is Your Best Tech Joke? never made it to the frontpage, though I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not yet :)

More Intelligent Software RAID This is the first I've seen of this project, which looks quite interesting for someone who loves software RAID like I do. Fast Intelligent Software RAID1 adds some extra smarts to the existing linux kernel RAID drivers, such as "...tracks missed mirror updates on a faulted mirror component and when the component is repaired it updates only the missed blocks, if that is appropriate, not the whole device." Very neat. Anyone used this yet?

Beginning Perl Available for Download The book Beginning Perl is available for download in PDF format. Cool stuff! Thanks to use.perl for the link.

"Willard" Movie I wish that I too could have an army of mice minions to do my bidding. No, seriously, I do, well, I'd rather cat minions, but we all know that that's a joke, with them being our masters and all...

This is the first I've seen of this movie, which appears to be about a guy who "doesn't fit in" (typical) and has the ability to control a large number of mice, which he uses to, well, do his bidding. Hit the trailer I linked to (large) or if you're net-deprived go and choose a different size.

This one doesn't make me want to go see it as much as say, the Daredevil or Matrix trailers, but hey, you never know...

Star Trek NemesisReview Anders has a great review of ST: Nemesis on screamingmidget, good for a laugh or three.

Why Not to Use Microsoft Visual Source Safe Related to a rant I posted on my own site a while back about the lack of decent Version Control for the Microsoft world, I found an interesting article entitled Visual SourceSafe: Microsoft's Source Destruction System. I've heard some stories about VSS from someone who worked with it, and it had me both laughing out loud and shuddering.

Google Pagerank Explained Good link from inluminent.com about how Google PageRank works. Very interesting, and explained in such a way that even your boss/manager/mother/PHB would "get it" (or so I'd hope!)

Bush Asks about "Space Aliens" The leader of the free world included in his Budget speech a section entitled Where are the space aliens? Now I'm not objecting to someone saying that extraterrestrial life may exist, I've been waiting for them to bring elvis back for a few years now, but using the term space aliens sort of reduces ones credibility a bit wouldn't you say?

Of course, if you need a distraction from that whole "war with Iraq" and "North Korea has nukes" thing, what better to use than "Space Aliens".

The UN Talk Amidst the stress of the normal day comes a far more lighthearted look at the UN talk that US high-up Colin Powell gave this morning.

Iraq: Failing to Disarm. The first slide alone is conclusive proof that Iraq has failed to disarm. My, Colin Powell is a handsome man. On to Baghdad!

Free the Gnomes In the midst of the /. discussion on the Gnome2.2 release, a hilarious link to the Stop Oppressive Gardening site caught my eye. Similar to the House Elf Liberation Front (or whatever it was from Harry Potter 4), but different.

There are sections on what to do if you see a gnome in captivity, email alerts, and an impressive liberation force. These people are I fear, a force to be reconned with.

Gnome 2.2 Released Yup, it's finally here, the offical release of the GNOME - 2.2 Desktop & Developer Platform. Congrats guys.

Let the downloading begin!

Mitnick Interview on Slashdot As you probably noticed already, the answers from the Kevin Mitnick Interview are up on slashdot. I have to point out one question/answer that literally made me laugh out loud and got me some funny looks from the people around me.

5) Big question (Score:5, Funny)
by GMontag

What is the password to my PayPal account? I forgot it a while back.

Kevin:
It's guym0nt4g. Hope that helps!

More Mozilla Ad-blocking This link is from slashdot from blogzilla from floppymoose. Basically it is a way to block ads (not that I would ever do that) via a user CSS page.

Restart your browser to pick up the styles. Go to your favorite sites and see that many ad images are gone, but other images are still there!

CVS and Visual Studio For all the microsofties out there, a nifty article on how to integrate CVS into Visual Studio.net. Now if only they had something like that for Frontpage (don't ask).

German Geek Store getDigital.de - the german version of thinkgeek or copyleft. I'll have to get some of the german text translated with the fish sometime.