Star Wars on DVD

A couple of weeks ago we had some friends come and stay and after going out for a meal and having a few drinks we ended up at home with a desire to play Trivial Pursuit. Unfortunately we don’t have the original board game version, however, I remembered that I have the Star Wars Saga DVD Edition that was given to me as a Xmas present a while ago. We played it until the early hours and consumed even more alcohol, although by the end only the men had any real interest in playing the women were more interested in talking!

Playing the game and seeing various clips of the fims reminded me that, as a big fan of the films, I don’t own them on DVD yet. So last week I put this right and ordered Star Wars: Episode IV, Episode V & Episode VI on DVD. I was quite surprised there was so many versions available of the first trilogy (in terms of release) of films yet only one version of the second trilogy of films. I went for the so called “Limited Edition” which includes the original theatrical version as well as the updated version. Hopefully I’ll receive Episode I, Episode II & Episode III for my birthday next month, I think I’ve dropped enough hints!

I would have thought by now there would a box set of all 6 films as that’s what I would have preferred to buy rather than the indiviual films. Come on Lucasfilm your missing a trick here!

iPhone 3G

Dear Vodafone, unless you can offer me the iPhone 3G in the next 3 months I shall be leaving you after 6 years and joining O2.

The 3G version of the iPhone has been announced by Apple and should be available sometime in July here in the UK. I’m assuming it’ll only be available via O2 again. It’s been released quicker than I thought, while the rumour sites had been predicting it would be I wasn’t so sure.

I upgraded to the Nokia N95 last September in the hope the 3G version of the iPhone would appear sometime this year. I managed to get a 12 month contract out of Vodafone (along with the free upgrade) just in case it was released. I was very tempted to get one last year but couldn’t justify the handset cost along with the 18 month contract required, I was also a little disappointed that it wasn’t 3G.

I’ve got to decide whether I go for the 8GB or 16GB version now. Decisions, decisions!

Alternative to iPhoto?

I’ll be retiring my trusty PowerBook G4 very soon and until I decide on what my next laptop will be I’ll be moving all my data onto my Windows XP desktop PC for the time being. I’ve been using iPhoto to manage all my photos so I’m now looking for a Windows based alternative. The first one I thought of was Google Picasa so I’ll try that out. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

Set Group ID permission in Linux

chgrp group /path/to/directory

chmod g+s /path/to/directory

find /path/to/directory -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;

SEO Update

I’ve been tweaking my theme recently to make it more search engine friendly and it seems to have worked as I’m getting a few hits direct to posts from Google searches. In case anyone is wondering I’ve just made sure the HTML meta tags always have values (using the post excerpt & tags) and that the post title comes first in the page title if applicable. I know there are some plugins I could have used to do the same job however I learnt quite a bit about WordPress themes in achieving my goal. I’m more familiar with WordPress and themes now than I was before anyway.

Does anyone have any other SEO tips they can suggest?

Vodafone Mobile Internet Part 2

I’ve just seen this article about Vodafone’s ad over at The Register. I remember seeing the ad in question a while ago while the limit was still 120MB. I couldn’t believe it myself, they were trying to sell a data allowance of 120MB as allowing you to browse any website, any time!

Talk about hyping a service up!

Vodafone Mobile Internet

I tried out the Vodafones Mobile Internet bolt-on when I got my Nokia N95 as it was free for the first month. I used the Internet quite a bit, more than I thought I would while trying out the various features of the N95. I cancelled the bolt-on after the free period was up but quickly found I was running up larger than usual bills due to my continued Internet usage. After a few months I signed up for the Mobile Internet pack again (that free month obviously worked Vodafone!). I thought £7.50 for 120MB allowance was pretty poor compared to what other networks were offering at the time but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.

Recently Vodafone upped their limit to 500MB, not quite up to the deal on offer from other networks but a significant step in the right direction! Vodafone have now informed me that their data allowance is ‘unlimited’, although this is subject to a fair use limit of 500MB! If my understanding of Vodafone’s t&c is right they don’t mind you occasionally going over 500MB but if you do it continously they may charge you for the amount you go over.

I’m against the term ‘unlimited’ when it comes to data allowances or transfer limits and when I found out the fair use limit was still 500MB I was disappointed as it’s hardly an upgrade at all.

With 500MB though I can actually think of using my mobile’s 3G connection with my laptop without worrying about my allowance. One thing having the Nokia N95 has hightlighted to me, is how large some web pages have now become. An eBay listing page is nearly a 1MB alone!

Having said that I do try to use the mobile versions of most sites (Twitter, eBay, Facebook etc.) for their speed more than anything else.

Come on Vodafone get your act together!

Webmonkey is back!

While browsing the blogs on Wired last week I noticed the Compiler blog had moved to the Webmonkey.com domain.  While the Compiler blog has become the monkey_bites blog the site is also providing tutorials & reference documents once again.

Hopefully it’ll become again the resource it once was for web development, as I learnt so much from it in the late 90′s.

Welcome back Webmonkey, you’ve been missed!

Set service to auto start on Red Hat EL

To set a service to automatically start at boot time on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or CentOS) use the following command:

/sbin/chkconfig –level <level> <service> on

<level> is the runlevel, use 3 as it’s the ‘Full multi-user text mode’ runlevel on Red Hat EL/CentOS.
<server> is the name of service, i.e. the script in /etc/init.d/

Or you can use the ncurses-based /sbin/ntsysv utility.

NFL International Series – London 2008

I missed out on tickets for the NFL game in London last year between the Giants & Dolphins but not this year!! I received my e-mail with the ticket PIN code in and rang around to see who wanted to go. On Thursday morning I purchased 4 tickets to this year’s NFL game between the Saints & Chargers.

I went for the £55 seats as I couldn’t justify paying £100 for seats that meant we couldn’t see what was going on in the game. We’re in Level 5 at Wembley but should be able to see more of the game from there. My bro, Dave & Jay will be coming along, just need to sort out hotel & travel arrangements now.

Oh and I’ll be cheering for the Saints in the game, I’m really a 49ers fan but as a true Brit I’ll be cheering on the underdogs going on last season.