virtual-sushi

Why would my local cinema wait until the busiest (probably) movie-watching day of the year — the Thursday after Christmas — to let their prebooked-ticket machines and their credit card machines break down? I hate missing the beginning of a movie more than I hate missing the end, and bits in the middle.

Still, assuming nothing Earth-shattering happens in the first few minutes, like a virus killing everyone on Earth, I Am Legend really is a solid movie that paced itself and ended well. Some good bits with Will Smith showing how lonely being the last man on the planet can be.

The vampires are really quite poor and not terrifying at all. A shame after the atmosphere of tension that is set up every time just before you see one. It’s best to treat them as no more than simple plot devices to drive the core of the movie.

Worth seeing in the cinema or on DVD.

As a side note, this is the first time in years I’ve watched a movie in a crowded cinema hall. A good reminder of how horrible it is. It must be a universal law that if you bring 200 people to one place, there’ll be at least one baby that can’t stop crying, five guys who can’t stop pointing out the obvious in loud voices and two who are incapable of figuring out how to silence their mobile phones.

The recent Xbox360 fall update gives users the option to view DIVX films. If, like me, you have a huge collection of DIVX movies stored on a separate Linux machine, you’ll want to find a way to get the linbox to deliver these movies to your Xbox (trust me, it’s great). The particular tool I’ve used to do this is uShare (part of the GeeXBoX distro - specialising in HTPC implementations).

So, to get started, install uShare. The uShare website (here) gives details on how to do this. Installing uShare using apt-get will set up three files (amongst others) on your Ubuntu machine:

• /usr/bin/ushare - the uShare binary file
• /etc/ushare.conf - the uShare configuration file
• /etc/init.d/ushare - the uShare daemon start/stop script

We can get uShare to start serving our files immediately to the Xbox with the command

uShare -D -x -c /media/directory (where /media/directory is the path to your files).

This isn’t very neat though, so read on if you want to integrate uShare properly with your Ubuntu install.

We now need to make sure uShare knows which files to serve and to make it operate in Xbox 360 compatibility mode. Bring up your text editor (using sudo) and open up /etc/ushare.conf. Change the line ENABLE_XBOX= to USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX=yes. Set USHARE_DIR to the path(s) of the files you want to serve. If you want web access, change the line ENABLE_WEB= to USHARE_ENABLE_WEB=yes and set the USHARE_PORT.

The uShare daemon script also needs to be amended slightly to tell uShare to use the config file we’ve just changed. Using your text editor (again with sudo), open up /etc/init.d/ushare and add a new line under the CONFIGFILE=/etc/ushare.conf that reads USHARE_OPTIONS="-f $CONFIGFILE" (running uShare straight on the command line will automatically open that config file. For some reason, the command used in the script doesn’t. Thanks to [this forum](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=631213&page=7 for the solution)).

Once this is all done, restart the uShare daemon by running the command

sudo /etc/init.d/ushare restart.

If you load up your Xbox 360 and go into the Videos section under the Media blade, you’ll see your new media server listed as “uShare” (press X to change video source if not). Happy viewing!

Still need to resolve the following issues:

1. uShare does not differentiate between media types, so all my movies are appearing as music as well. Music also isn’t organised into albums.
2. Only the first directory I’ve specified for sharing in the configuration file is being scanned and delivered.

Conclusion - Use uShare if you want to just deliver movies. For delivery of multiple media types, including a large music collection, uShare can’t seem to handle it just yet.

You’d have to be pretty dumb to do this. In fact, if you have done it, I wouldn’t recommend you tell anyone lest they laugh at you.

So a “friend of mine” left their Ubuntu 7.10 Server Install CD in their mac mini with Ubuntu 7.10 Server already installed and configured. This lead to the following path of shame:

1. He turned off his mac mini, moved it to another part of his room and turned it back on.
2. He forgot about it for a few weeks.
3. He decided to spend Christmas evening getting his mac mini to deliver media to his xbox 360.
4. He couldn’t figure out why his mac mini wasn’t on the network.
5. After rebooting it again, he realised the CD was in the drive and there was no manual eject pinhole on the chassis! (Gah!)
6. Nor would the PC boot from the “First Hard Drive” (some bootup parameter not set right perhaps?)

The only solution I could find was to:

1. Choose to install the CD onto the harddisc.
2. Press escape within the installer to give a list of various install steps.
3. Choose to detect the CD. Get to the point where the installer starts configuring the network.
4. Press escape again to go back to the install steps.
5. Choose to detect hardware (your harddiscs). Get to the point where the installer starts configuring the network.
6. Press escape again to go back to the install steps.
7. Choose to bring up a shell.
8. Running fdisk -l will show that the Mac Mini harddisc with the current Ubuntu install is on /dev/sda1.
9. Mount the harddisc to an accessible node by running the command /mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /target.
10. Run the command /target/usr/bin/eject /cdrom.

Et voila! Couldn’t have been easier now, could it? Well, a proper Linux expert could probably find an easier way, but since all the Internet could advise was for me to disassemble the Mini (erm, no), I’m calling this a win.

Heh heh heh, at least South Park is still funny.

Didn’t have high hopes going for this one. What little I did have was mainly based on the expectation that Vince Vaughn would give the movie a bit of a Dodgeball flavour.

First half of it was a bit bland, but not offensive. Shortly degenerated into cliche after cliche though (the elf DJ talks like a gangster - portrayed by Ludacris!). Most of the visual gags have been done before too (the sleigh has a fasten seatbelt light, Vince Vaughn obstinately and vehemently claims he isn’t going to a dinner with the parents before the scene cuts to show him going to dinner anyway). The entire plot is predictable by the time Vaughn caves in and calls his brother for bail money, about 20 minutes in.

Mind, I am being a bit harsh. Kevin Spacey brings a bit of life to the monodimensional bad guy character, and there’s a fun in-joke during his character development scene.

Still, this definitely is a movie for the kids. And pets.

I just saw The Golden Compass with the intention of coming out of the cinema telling everyone how the book was better (honestly, I’ve never been able to do that before). I can’t though - the film was just too awful.

So awful.

Obviously any movie that intends to start and finish in the same day cannot include as many twists and turns as you can put in a book, but it should give you enough to understand what’s going on. A rule that’s especially important for something like the His Dark Materials trilogy, where the plot is embedded within a lot of mythology. Unfortunately, it looks like the director selected chapters at random. The only good bit of the book - the last few chapters - was discarded totally! As a result, the most I could say for the movie is that it was a confusing, plotless series of meandering ambiguities that ends before it properly begins.

And they could have saved it all if they just had more Jedi.

With all the different ways to access music, it makes sense to centralise my collection so it can be accessed from anywhere in the house. Same for videos and pictures. And it’s always fun to start a new computer project which I probably will lose interest in a few weeks before completion. So far I’ve selected a vague outline on the software I’ll need and, from that, the hardware. Progress can be tracked here.

Jay’s also creating his own media server which’ll be part-bespoke. Details are on his site.