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Zap's Digital Lighthouse is
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Blosxom

       

Sun, 29 Apr 2012

The Avengers

We went to see the movie The Avengers this morning.

Wow.

A truly fun movie: 143 minutes of high energy entertainment.

Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, brought together by Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. to fight the bad guys. It's over the top comic-book style... a great success! We enjoyed it tremendously.

If you've ever liked superhero comic books, I recommend that you see this movie.

P.S. As ever, my favorite Avenger is Iron Man. The whole gang is fun... reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons in my youth.

P.P.S. It's unusual that an American movie is released in Europe before it is in North America... not sure why the studios (or rather the distributors) chose to do so this time.

/misc | Posted at 18:48 | permanent link

Finishing the StarCraft II campaign

I have finished the StarCraft II campaign today. In Normal mode... Yes, I know, I should have done it in Hard mode, but I've been at it for over a year in Hard mode, and was making very little progress (ok, it had mostly to do with the fact that I was stuck, and had stopped trying)... so I tried again in Normal mode, and there I make regular progress and finished it eventually.

StarCraft II is fun, but I haven't tried the competitive games yet: the fact that they're played at Faster speed tells me that I will not do well in ladder games :-( It's a bit too quick for my fingers.

But it's fun to complete the campaign scenarios & play some cooperative games against the A.I.

And now, it seems that the next expansion StarCraft II - Heart of the swarm is on its way... of course, it will come out after Diablo III which will come out on May 15th!

P.S. So many version 2, version 3, or version 10 games these days... need a few fresh version 1 concepts! (heck, even Diablo 1 was a reheated rogue/moria clone :-)

P.P.S. 2 days off coming up, but lots of work to do regardless. Let's get that schmilblick moving :-)

/misc | Posted at 18:34 | permanent link

Wed, 25 Apr 2012

2012 Presidential elections in France, part deux

The first voting round has passed, with the two expected candidates moving on to the second round (albeit with some slight surprises in the relative weight of the 3rd to 10th candidates).

Now the pollsters and the press have been claiming for months that the result of the second round is easily predictable -- that may be so, but then again French people often don't like to feel like they are being led down a predictable path like that.

It is fascinating to observe. Good luck to both candidates... and to us all :-)

| Posted at 22:29 | permanent link

Sun, 15 Apr 2012

2012 Presidential Elections in France

Next weekend will be the first round of the 2012 French Presidential election.

Most analysts believe that this first round of voting will bring in the expected result, with Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande being the two candidates moving on to the second round. This seems to be the most likely scenario, but one has to keep in mind the 2002 election where the most likely scenario did not play out.

Hmmm. Also, from an economic point of view, we are not out of the woods yet!

| Posted at 11:22 | permanent link

ZFS and USB disks

Having played with ZFS and USB disks over the past few weeks on FreeBSD 9.0, I have come to the conclusion that multiple USB disks + ZFS raid-z is not an excellent combination... USB disks can appear or disappear dynamically, and ZFS does not deal with this beautifully.

ZFS does deal with devices appearing and disappearing, but with an understanding that devices are mostly stable. So, I will use ZFS on internal disks, and for USB disks, I will limit myself to single-disk volumes (which seem to work fine).

I would be interested in a filesystem that would deal with disks being plugged in (or plugged out) dynamically (USB disks or otherwise), but I am not sure that this exists. I will hunt around for something like this.

/FreeBSD | Posted at 11:13 | permanent link

Sat, 14 Apr 2012

Almost one month without a blog entry

Well, it has been almost a month to the day since my last blog entry. Lots of work at the office, with long days (waking up around 03:00 on a occasion) have been keeping me very busy.

Things have been moving forward with my microserver and my ZFS experimentation. I have also dug up Starcraft 2, which is interesting (and somewhat frustrating at Faster speed).

More later.

/misc | Posted at 06:27 | permanent link