virtual-sushi

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.