Aidan Delaney’s weblog

I spent a long time yesterday wrestling with various problems with systems, from PHPs incomplete documentation to a stupid printing error with certain PDF files. I’ve fixed most things, but I cant help feeling peeved that I had to waste my time because of some stupid things. At least ILUG irc people were helpful and the Brighton LUG guys helped me solve one problem. So this is part one of a continuing trend on this blog AIDAN -V- COMPUTER. As it stands now it’s COMPUTER 1 – AIDAN 0. But we’ll see if we can change that today

I’m not joking. Last evening I took a walk along Brighton promanade. Looking into the point where the earth meets the universe there was a dark algae-green band accross the whole horizon. It faded into what, as a geek, I can only describe as the full spectrum of blue at a 64bit colour depth. This in turn was stacked below a pink to purple fade that reached the upper atmosphere. It was a perfect visualisation of the layers in the atmospehere.

What was really cool was that the pink upper atmosphere reflected off the pale blue sea producing an effect that appeared as that really expensive reflective paint on cars. You know the stuff; such that when a car passes it changes colour. That’s what the sea did. From the blue over at the Isle of Wright it colour changed to pink under Brighton pier. At one stage I was convinced that I was looking at a blue plain with pink mist rising from it.

I wish I had a camera to take a picture of it. I’m putting a camera on my “to buy” list after I build my low power media server (with RAID 5 SATA drives).

Regular readers may notice a new look to my site for a few days. This is because my roommate from when I was in Spain surprised me and made an honest woman out of his long term girlfiend. Well done Guangwu, and good luck.

I saw five movies last week. That must make me a decent customer of film producers. In previous weeks I’ve also been to the cinema to see Star Wars and I intend to go to see The Fantastic 4, Batman Begins and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when they come out. So I like films, but not in the Rory Donnegan knowing esoteric quotes from film noir way. Of the five films I saw last week one was “Mr and Mrs Smith” in the cinema, “Blade II” and “Hidalgo” on DVD and “Team America: World Police” and “Starsky and Hutch” on pirated DVD.

I enjoyed “Mr and Mrs Smith”, thought “Team America” was hilarous and was plesently surprised that “Starsky & Hutch” wasn’t crap. However the quality of the “Blade II” and “Hidaldo” DVDs was extremely poor. Given that

• it costs £3 to rent a DVD,
• the movie companies keep pushing for laws that I don’t like, and
• it’s illegal for me to view a DVD that I’ve rented or bought (due to said laws: the EUCD a.k.a. the European DMCA).

I wonder why I should ever bother renting a DVD ever again. If it’s just as illegal for me to watch a good quality pirated DVD as it is to watch a poor quality legal DVD I should just choose the cheaper option.

The thing that really pisses me off is that the manufacturers must have gone out of their way to make the legal DVDs bad quality. The pirated DVDs I had came from a friend who downloaded images from the ‘net and burned them using consumer grade blanks and a consumer grade DVD burner. Why were the legal DVDs skipping frames when the illegal ones were of perfect quality? Do the legal DVDs have some copy restriction technology that foobared my viewing experience?

Media companies really annoy me. Why can’t I get the media I want to watch in a format that I want to use? If they don’t give me what I want why should I purchase their product? Especially since I can download a better quality product for cheaper! I must be late to this party as everyone else seems to have figured this out years ago.

I suppose most people know that I started a new job recently in the University of Brighton. I’m a lecturer here and have picked up responsibilities in two level 3 (final year) courses Software Testing and Computer Graphics, the level 2 (second year) Software Engineering course and on the level 1 (first year) Java Programming course.

It’s a great University as they have a great student focus. They have an advantage of being a “new” university and not having to copy the “old” universities. This means that they employ some of the most modern teaching methodologies, the kind of stuff that Des advocates.

Brighton itself is a bit of a mad town as Des, Phil and Andy found out last weekend. We spent way too much money and drank way too much beer. Dave will hopefully find this out in a few weeks time too. At the very least he can contrast Zaytoons with the Albion Kebab

One thing I’m missing from home is the football and hurling. Particularly with Kildare doing so well at the moment. Does anyone know if the GAA is on FreeView?