gonewest

The current Battlestar Galactica season will be resuming tomorrow, but I am starting to wonder if the series may be in trouble. The schedule change to Sunday should be an improvement (Friday and Saturday have always been considered the worst days to air a show), but the 10 pm time slot will be too late for many people’s taste and I think the ratings will suffer for it.

I have also heard that the ratings for the show have recently dropped, so the additional dip from the schedule change and the move to a later time slot won’t help matters. Still, the show has garnered quite a bit of critical aclaim (unusual for a science fiction series, I think) and it is still one of the highest rated shows that SciFi has, so I think it will be safe for another season at least.

I thought that I would take a few shots of the neighborhood after the recent snow storm came through, but it appears that the memory card in my Powershot is on the fritz again. I could use this as an excuse to buy that nice Canon or Nikon DSLR that I’ve been thinking about, but just buying another CF card would be much cheaper and I need to be thinking about possible moving expenses at the moment.

Oh well, maybe I’ll buy the new camera toy next month…

I’m watching the webcast of today’s Macworld keynote right now. The big news of the presentation [so far] is the release of the iTv AppleTV and the iPhone.

The AppleTV looks pretty cool, but I already have a Mac Mini hooked directly to my TV, so I think I will wait until the AppleTV moves from 720p to 1080i (or p) before giving it a try. That iPhone phone though… Ooooooooooh that looks cool and I really want one!

For all you Firefly fans disappointed that there will almost certainly be no new series or movies to look forward to, it can only be good news that the rights to turn firefly into a MMORPG have been purchased and so there is a decent chance that you’ll be able buy a Firefly and do your own crime in the next year or two.

I bought a flashlight the other day when I was out shopping for fireplace accessories. It has six LEDs, takes 3, 6, or 9 batteries (your choice) for up to a claimed 200 hours of light, and it converts from a standard flashlight format to a tripod for when you need both hands free.

If Tim and Jeff don’t have one of these yet, then they better find one as they can’t let me be the one with the coolest LED light ;-)

Did some tooling around with Python today for a work project and I finally got a working Twisted Python based Windows service running from a single exe (I have not yet determined whether or not Python needs to be installed on a target system — there may be an unmet PythonService.exe dependency that the exe doesn’t cover). There isn’t much to it, actually, it’s just that there are one or two details that have to be handled correctly that don’t seem to be clearly documented anywhere.

Now, I just have to turn my working example into a nice framework with event logging and other niceties that anyone would want to start with when writing a Python service using Twisted. I’d really love to figure out how to do the enhanced service property sheets too, but I haven’t found any information at all on that API yet,

I did an upgrade of the gallery software that I use for my photo albums yesterday morning and didn’t have a chance to check up on it later in the day. Apparently, the images have not been accessible since because I had to take some manual steps to complete the upgrade, and the image links to the source images have broken as well.

That last part is probably just a change in the URL format to reference a given image; I’ll try to get it fixed sometime this weekend.

On the plus side, I finally got around to fixing the db access problem I was having so Dad now has a photo album for uploading some of his pictures.

MIT has recently started making many of their lectures available over the web (kudos for that and I really must set aside some time to explore the collection). I ran across a post on treehugger (one of my favorite blogs at the moment) with a link to a lecture detailing how we can cut our oil use in half (and completely end oil imports) using only existing technology and without requiring significant extra costs or a change in the “American way of life” (an important requirement since we Americans are too spoiled and too lazy to change how we live).

The video is here (click the Play Now link just above the lecture’s picture). The material is apparently drawn from the lecturer’s book, Winning the Oil Endgame, which I have not yet read.

I’ve been using Flock instead of Safari for a month or two now. While I have liked it quite a lot overall, it seems to have the same problem that other Mozilla based web browsers have on this old Powerbook of mine; namely, it is too memory [and possibly CPU] intensive and eventually brings the laptop to a crawl.

Opera dropped its price to $0 not too long ago — I took a quick look at it back then and liked what I saw — but I wasn’t in the mood to switch from Safari at the time, however.

Now that I have decided to “shelve” Flock for a while, I think I’ll give Opera and extended try to see how it fares. So far, it seems to be much less resource intensive than Safari or Flock, but it will take a week or two to verify that.

I recently received a renewal fee notice for my flickr account. I have been very happy with flickr so far, but why should I be paying for a photo album service when I have my own web server? Because I’m lazy, that’s why :-)

Anyway, I finally did a search for open source linux based photo gallery software and have decided on Gallery. You can browse the new Gonewest gallery for some recent and older photo’s that I’ve taken.