It finally happened.
Can’t sleep.
It was hard to avoid the hype on this one. Especially after it came out a week earlier in the US and then I had to wait slightly longer to get a chance to catch it on IMAX. But nether the less I managed my expectations (after being burned before) and walked out completely blown away by the movie. Its strange walking into a movie you know is good before you have seen it.
IMAX is incredible. The improvement in the definition and clarity of the image in IMAX shots is staggering and really gives it a completely unique feel. There’s so much to look at and its all so clear - it really proved to me that IMAX can be used effectively in Hollywood films and not just be relegated to crappy educational movies. The switching between IMAX film and regular film was not a problem either. You have to see this movie in IMAX.
Great pacing, constant tension and epic scale. The pieces were all in place before the movie began so we get straight into the action and story without having to set everything up again. The whole goal of the joker being to prove that everyone is just like him shown and then being proven wrong in ferry scene was very different and climaxed brilliantly. The engrossing final scene with Dent, Batman and Gordon coming back together just proved the joker right in the end, even if he did have to drive Harvey mad. The swerve that led to the death of Rachel was genius. With Dent’s face in the fuel I all but expected him to get incinerated and Batman to rescue Rachel. Unexpectedly Batman goes for Dent, Rachel gets blown up and Dent’s face still gets burned off during the escape!
Which brings me to Heath Ledger. Great job but I think the post death hype got the better of this area of the film. I was expecting him to be darker and even more messed up, but that could just be my reaction to the people around me laughing at the joker cause he made a funny face when he’s actually a fucked up sociopathic mass murderer. Maybe the creepiness didn’t cross over that well here? I don’t know, I enjoyed his performance but I feel it was in a different way to others in the audience.
Can’t think of anything else but I will be seeing it again soon.
I have been shopping around recently for a network attached storage device to see if I can come up with a better solution than my current linux server. One of the main features I am interested in is automatic volume expansion. Basically if I insert a new hard drive the NAS should just handle it and I won’t have to do anything.
Devices such as the Drobo and the ReadyNAS NV+ offer implementations of this but at £400 to £500 without any drives included makes them ridiculously over priced. So I looked back at my linux box and wondered what could be done in software.
The much hyped Sun file system ZFS offers these features and more but with it only being on Solaris and a Linux port not even close I ruled it out a while back. Then I remembered that FreeNAS is BSD based and that ZFS has been ported to FreeBSD 7. Well it turns out that FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 6 but they specifically mention in the roadmap that ZFS support will be coming soon.
So now I just have to wait a bit and soon I will be able to build my own free software alternative to the overpriced Drobo.
It’s a huge undertaking but the Windows UI Taskforce are trying to detail every single UI bug in Vista. Just looking through the list serves as a reminder to how half arsed and rushed out the OS was.
The fact that there are still Windows 3.1 style widgets in Windows Vista is unforgivable, it’s the kind of thing that makes it feel cheap and mashed together when using it.
The time was right for a new venture so here it is, my new collaboration with Andy Griffiths is a site dedicated to Steam news and information that we like to call Steam Report.
Steam is where the most exciting things in PC gaming are happening right now. It’s where I spend most of my PC gaming hours and it has a subscriber base larger than any of the major consoles. For this reason it only seems right that a dedicated site be created for such a wonderful community.
I very much hope you bookmark it, subscribe to the RSS feed and perhaps even follow us on Twitter. As always we are open to feedback so drop us mail, leave us a comment or tweet us!
I have been running this blog for several years now and it was starting to show. In short upgrade after upgrade to wordpress had built up a ton of bloat making it fairly unusable for me and eventually led to the RSS feeds braking. To this end I have spent the last 2 days rebuilding the site from scratch and feel I have now reached the state of the existing site. Please let me know if there are any problems.
PS Wordpress limit XML imports to 7mb. Mine was 15mb. Now imagine how fun it is to trim a 15mb XML file - not good.
As much as I hate Sky, I hate ITV even more. And today is no exception with the announcement that ITV HD will be a Freesat exclusive. So rather than rolling out their channel to the largest established HD platform in the UK (Sky HD) they choose to go with the unproven service that just launched.
There is no technical need for it to be exclusive to Freesat. It all comes from the same satelite orbiting the Earth regardless of which service you sign up for. BBC HD which is available on both proves this. As far as I can see the only thing they need to do is maintain two EPG formats - thats it.
We all know how well it went the last time ITV were a platform holder (hint: horribly) and it looks like they are well on their way to screwing things up again.
Not that I watch anything on ITV.
Here is my progess so far. Been hitting it hard 
I have been saving this rant since last week due to the blog issues. I still think it’s relevant.
When I read this blog post by the BBC’s Darren Waters last week I started to get very angry. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I can make a cool rational judgement - something I suggest Mr Waters tries.
“The BBC’s announcement of a deal with Nintendo to put the iPlayer’s streaming service on the console makes something of a mockery claims by Sony and Microsoft that their consoles are the true multimedia machines.”
I don’t care which side he is on but the fact is that he and the BBC should not be taking sides. It’s all very well to brag about how amazing your online video service will be on the Wii but it’s another thing to shit all over Nintendo’s competion. It’s called impartiality buddy.
Now to the techie meat of the issue. Any browser that supports the latest flash can play iPlayer content. So that’s why Wii and PS3 support is on the way - they have browsers. The catch is that this is the low quality version, the high(er) quality video must be downloaded. Unlike that BBC blogger I have a PC connected to a large screen and attempted to watch Doctor Who via the flash player this week. It looked horrendous. I couldn’t watch it. The same video I couldn’t watch will be what is offered on the Wii and a download option can never be implemented that platform.
People don’t mind watching YouTube videos on their PCs in tiny windows but when you stretch it out on a huge screen they will not be impressed.
![Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511PW90lDhL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]")
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