For some reason I’m doing the link thing. This post is a link-a-thon for the Cayman Islands. I ran across the Wikipedia page about Cayman and this sort of prompted me to make this post. I’ve had a bookmark folder full of stuff that I wanted to link to at some point so here it is. Cayman isn’t very net savvy per se so I was impressed to find so much online, things are really improving.

 Web Zen: Cayman Zen

Cayman Net News | Caymanian Compass | Radio Cayman | Vibe 98.9 FM | National Hurrican Center | Weather Underground Tropical | Cayman Phone Book Online | Cayman Islands Entry on Wikipedia

Go see it. I think I can forgive Lucas for the first two episodes after this one. Spoilers start here, ’nuff said.

I was worried about how they were going to morph the look of the ships through this movie to be more like the ones in the original trilogy. You notice the transition throughout the movie, ships and fighters get more square. There are proto X Wings and A Wings with S-foils. If I had to use my imagination I would say there was a war on so ship design was more about function than form. you can take issue with that if you like.

R2 hops around and is much more sprightly than in the later films. He got the ‘Yoda’ treatment. I think its fun but it is going to jump out at you.

I can still spot the CGI characters. Its easy, just look at the feet of the character and see how they move across the ground. It never looks natural unless the feet are points. C3PO looks like he’s floating. The shadows he casts have a constant fuzzy penumbra, they don’t sharpen as the shadow gets closer to him. Don’t tell me the screen was fuzzy either, I saw it in DLP.

I thought the scene where Anakin pledges his allegiance to the emperor was weak. to me it feels as though he accepted the emperor far too easily. I expected him to make some sort of deal and perhaps threaten the emperor, i.e. help me save Padme or your in for it. I think there should have been much more of a sense of foreboding in the previous film that Anakin had tendencies towards the dark side of the force.

I was looking forward to the Yoda fight. I mean, Yoda is THE MAN and had to lay the smack down. Its fun to watch him drop weak minded minions like Mr. T on a bad day. The lightsaber duels and fight scenes rocked in general.

All in all its two thumbs up and I’ll be looking forward to the DVD.

You may notice some subtle changes on this site. I have made the switch from Moveable Type to Word Press. I had outgrown Moveable Type as a platform and found that it was just too hard to hack together the things that I wanted it to do. Upgrading to Word Press was fast and easy. I ported my old layout over to a 1.5 theme in just a few hours. Importing all my old posts was a snap and I love editing the templates and seeing instant results. Now I have nice things like archives that work, calendar history display, and a single dynamic sidebar template. I merged all the posts from the mindshare dev blog into this one.

Comments are open once again. I’m using an MD5 Javascript hack to foul the attempts at comment spam. Comments should work without any disturbance for those of you with Javascript enabled. If you have Javascript disabled your out of luck, you also can’t see my e-mail address either. In fact your probably just a mindless robot, imagine that.

I installed Mepis (pronounced like Memphis) on my second machine last night. I wanted to do a Debian distro because I’ve heard such great things about apt-get. I have messed with several Linux distors before but all were RPM based.

Mepis comes as a live CD, meaning you push it into the machine and it runs Linux. As it turns out this was an extremely useful feature. I was installing on a drive I had previously used to back up some data. The drive had an NTFS partition and I wanted to move some of the data off the disk before I erased it. I was able to use SMB to transfer the files over my network to my windows box. Now this is something new for me, iv heard of Linux reading NTFS partitions but it was always ‘experimental’. Mepis auto mounted the partition and it was a breeze to share out via SMB. Score 1 for Mepis.

I proceeded with the install and weirdness ensued. The partition editor kept quitting or crashing after every operation. I think this had something to do with the auto mounter but I never stopped to figure this out. I set up swap and two reiserfs partitions and finished the install. This was probably the easiest Linux install I have ever seen, aside from editing partitions there are no questions to answer and even that could have been done automatically.

Reboot into my new Linux install and everything works. All hardware got detected even the on-board sound, the PCI NIC & the USB mouse with scroll wheel support working right out the box. Then I noticed that the screen resolution was set to 1024×768 and there did not appear to be any way to change it in the GUI. Off to /etc/X11/XF86config-4 to see what’s the matter. Well the monitor (Hitachi CM812) was detected and had all the correct modeline’s set for every resolution the monitor supports. It was even more correct that Windows which thinks this monitor cant do 1600×1200 @ 85Hz. The display section, however, only had one resolution for all the colour depths; 1024×768. So I mess with this, break it once, make a trip to the shell, reboot several times and finally I’m booting at 1600×1200. Seems some things never get any easier.

The next thing I notice is that fonts just look wrong. In Firefox bold text is being substituted for italics, and the font kerning is way too close. So I discover that Mepis doesn’t ship with descent TrueType fonts, and its not exactly their fault, the fonts aren’t free. So I used SMB to copy all the fonts off my windows box and then told X where to find them. This helped things some but it wasn’t perfect. Firefox would not remember my font preferences when I entered them in the dialog. I made a trip to about:config and set the options there. I also had to set matching options in KDE & Konqueror. Now my Linux box looks almost like my Windows box. The Linux font situation is apparently in flux so I suppose haven’t to wrangle the fonts is understandable.

Stay tuned for day two where I mess with Apache and pimp out my desktop to look like Mac OSX.