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Vard the psychopath DJ sent me this today. One of the most freaky things I’ve ever seen.

The video begins with a doctor reassuring a visibly disturbed baby named Johnny, who seems to be asking for his mommy. When he gets violent, the doctor is forced to inject him with a calming sedative. The film then flips to the familiar Drukqs introduction and then proceeds to go crazy with Johnny dancing in his wheelchair, doing wheelies and tricks for the amusement of his dog, and transforming into a variety of nightmarish shapes, like a someone tipping a wheelbarrow full of butcher’s shop scrapings, entrails and brains onto a window.

The film is stunning, harrowing and disturbing in equal measure. The visuals match the frantic pace of the music and the experience is quite exhausting, leaving you breathless by the end.

See the movie for yourself here..

Edit: SecureMart just emailed me stating the video card wouldn’t be in stock until 08/25/2005… Like I believe that BS.

After weeks of procastination I finally bit the bullit and bought a new video card. I really wanted to use my older ATI 9800 Pro but my new Dell 8400 PC only supports a PCI-E BUS so I was bound to get a new video card.

After doing some research I ended up buying a MSI nVidia Geforce 6800GT 256mb PCI-E. SecureMart.com had it extreamly cheap at only $268 bucks. NewEgg, it’s next cheapest competitor was selling it for $100 dollars more.

Now I can finally play Battlefield 2 with ultrahigh settings with a resolution higher then 800×600.

Some Reviews:
HardOCP
PCStats

Ever had to create a sequential numbering system and the requirements defined a prefix of 0’s? (00003433).

Below is a function I wrote to automate the number generation:

Function AddLeadingZeros(OriginalNum As String, TotalLength As Integer)
AddLeadingZeros = String(TotalLength - Len(OriginalNum),"0") & OriginalNum
End Function

The first parameter is the number you wish to use as the base before the prefix of 0’s. The second parameter is the total length you wish the number structure to be.

Eg.
MyNumber = AddLeadingZeros("55",10)

Will return 0000000055

These guys on IRC today were raving about this mp3 tagging program called MusicBrainz. So after hearing all the good things said about this versitle app I decided to give it a try. After you download the free application you’re required to sign up with a simple username/pass and an optional email address that is apparently required if you’re going to make use of the full functionality. In any case, Once you load the app you’ll be fronted with a very simple interface with a few options to either add mp3s or add a folder containing MP3s. I decided to try a test folder containing a variant of 6 mp3s ranging from very popular to extreamly rare. To my surprise it picked up 5 of them, recognizing them as available to tag mp3s. WOW!!! When you double click on the recognized mp3 it will bring up a listing of what it guesses is its origin, be it a compilation or artist CD. You can then confirm that’s where it belongs or if you’re sure that that it doesn’t belong you have the option to submit changes to the main MusicBrainz database; thats where your email address is required.

I strongly suggest anyone with a large digital audio collection that is in dire need of tagging (adding m3u and standard file names) to their collection give this a try.

Download the MusicBrainz Tagger! [Windows]
Download iEatBrainz! More info… [Mac OS X 10.3]

MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the ArtistName, the AlbumTitle, and the list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public so that music players can retrieve information about the music that is playing. For instance, most audio CDs do not contain the name of the artist, album, or a listing of the tracks. A music player can use the digital characteristics of an audio CD to look up the correct metadata and show it to the user during playback.

It appears the Empire Series Media Center PC from Expansion Solution has redfined HTPC. With a 1000 Watt built in amplifier, integrated 7.1 playback and 110 db signal to noise ratio you’ll be hard pressed not to be satisfied with this audiophile grade HTPC system.

There is a nice review of it here

The past few nights i’ve been struggling trying to get my VOIP working in the newly released Battlefield 2. Every time I would go into Options | Audio and enable the VOIP checkbox and click apply then go back to the Audio options it would be disabled. After hours of researching I finally have a remedy:

It’s apparently linked to the SoundMax sound cards which are commonly distributed with newer Dell PC’s.

1.) Update your SoundMax drivers to the latest release
2.) Run dxdiag.exe (Start | Run | dxdiag) and go into the Audio options and lower the hardware acceleration slider to “Basic”
3.) Load Battlefield 2 back up and enable VOIP (Options | Audio) and confirm it stays enabled

When I first started doing Lotus Notes/Domino I created a database to capture all of my “Notes On Notes”… Basically Hints, Tips and things I learned or crafted that would help me out in future projects. So with that said, here is Tip #1.

Call an Agent Using Javascript Passing Parameters

1) Create a COMPUTED TEXT field called DBServerPath and add the following code to the value:

"/" + @ReplaceSubstring(@Subset(@DbName;-1);"\\";"/")

2) In the onClick event of your button add the following Javascript Code (substitute “AgentName” for the name of the agent you wish to run):

var dBPath = document.forms[0].DBServerPath.value
location.href = dBPath + “/AgentName?OpenAgent&Parameter=WhateverHere”

NOTE: that in the agent the context is not the document that called the javascript but the agent itself so you cannot access the DocumentContext.

The Supreme Court today has handed movie studios and record labels a sweeping victory against file swapping, ruling that peer-to-peer companies such as Grokster could be held responsible for the copyright piracy on their networks. In a unanimous decision issued Monday, the nine justices said companies that build businesses with the active intent of encouraging copyright infringement should be held liable for their customers’ illegal actions.

Does this mean the end to P2P? I think not… There are plenty of new encrypted and private peer-to-peer file sharing applications spawning monthly. Rodi, an anonymous Torrent application and several other p2p apps will succeed in Grokster’s demise..

What is so funny about this situation is just as the MPAA takes down 1 p2p app, 5 others spawn, some even offshore or opensource, immune to the MPPA and RIAA ridicule.

I feel quite bitter now having just recently booked our hotel room at the MGM Grand.

Rocky Oliver over at LotusGeek did a killer job quantifying Notes/Domino developers into a bell curve of such. So good infact, I have mirrored the data here:

A friend of mine asked me about my thoughts on the “breakdown” of skills and abilities of Domino developers - what is the spectrum of the skills and abilities of the Domino developer community? I have been giving this some thought, and I have come up with a table that describes the “Notes/Domino Developer Bell Curve”,
as shown in the graphic above. Before I send this back to my friend, I thought I would post it here for comments, suggestions, etc.

How do you see the Domino development
community breaking down? Did I miss a key skill? How is my percentage of
distribution? Keep in mind that there is a much larger development community
than we see interacting in blogs, etc. - I see this when I speak at conferences,
as there are still 40-50 people in the “Jumpstart: LotusScript”
sessions, which means we still have newbies coming into our community.

Help me tweak this table, and then I’ll
send it into my friend.

Thanks!


Rock

Microsoft was very very quiet on this one. This will be their second release after purchasing Giant software earlier last year.

Build 613 provides better documentation about unwanted software, fixes bugs that make it difficult to read alert messages and reduces the likelihood that its Winsock LSP removal mechanism will trigger unintended network disruptions.

download it here.