I had a test today but I was late so I missed it. I hope I won't be late for the next time.

So what happened with the lab? Here's the introduction. In the computer lab we have win2k machines and very limited security - students can barely touch any configuration and every change is wiped after log-off - including files (except for the files in the network drive, which is limited to 15 megs).

Today I went to the computer lab and read slashdot, and then I saw an article which mentioned Justin Frankel (is he Jewish?) so I went into Nullsoft.com and found the "useful" utility called jRes.

It changes the screen resolution, and I thought it's great! Because the lab computers security limitations won't allow you to change it, and they are stuck on 800x600, and I was sure the monitors won't have a problem displaying 1024x768.

So I downloaded that program and tried to change the resolution to 1024x768, and then the screen went black. I guess it can't show this resolution after all.
I tried in another computer and the same thing happened. So I thought that logging off will solve the problem, but it didn't help. Even rebooting didn't help! Shouldn't the computer forget that change?

I even tried to use the source of the program in order to make a program which will just change the resolution to 800x600, but it didn't work either.. (I wonder why.. well I don't know enough about nasty WIN32API). If I reboot in VGA mode I can see things (in 16 colors), but I can't restore the resolution back to 800x600.

If Justin was more responsible he might have programmed jRes to ask the user if the new video mode is visible (just like Windows control panel does), but no.

So, two things might happen:
1. The technicians have some way of restoring the old config automatically without bothering to find out what went wrong.
2. The technicians will take the 2 PCs to the service lab and will find it strange that both of them don't work because some dork set the resolution to 1024x768. They'll find it interesting that user NaveWeiss was the last one to use both PCs. Hmm.. I hope they won't revoke my access.. ;)

I was dissapointed a lot about the "OSDN personals", so I sent this email to Taco and Jamie. What do you think - are there more people in slashdot I should send this email to?

Here goes.

OSDN personals and the alternative

Hello dear admins. It's me, NaveWeiss.

I wanted to express my opinion about the new ads about "OSDN personals":
I'm terribly disappointed about them!
When I saw them mentioned in the top nav-bar, I was excited - I thought that finally you were going to use your vast slashdot userbase for helping people to find dates! And then I was so disappointed to see that it has nothing to do with slashdot or with free users. It's merely a match.com affiliation.

As you know, love should be free. Asking people to pay for love is a very nasty thing. Instead of this sad affiliation thing, you should do something else - and I call it SlashDate.

See, instead of just sending users to another site (were they are supposed to pay), you could do great stuff with the current slashdot userbase. For example, every user who's looking for love can define so in its user info, and then there will be a special mark (like the zoo.pl icons) which tells us so. And you could allow sending private messages and stuff like that. And in order for it to make more money for you, you could make that subscribed users will be allowed to upload a picture and appear on top of the dating search results.

Please don't neglect your fellow geek users. Don't abandon them for match.com - help them instead!

Regards,
    Nave H. Weiss

Update (Jan 8 01:47): Rob actually answered me! He told me that there's no time to code that..

Hi it's me! I didn't get a lot to write because I've been busy semi-trolling other journal sites.

Anyway.. here's what I wanted to write about.

If anyone uses the object-oriented stuff of PHP, she might get the following lovely error message:

expecting T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

It baffles many users. WTF is PAAMAYIM_NEKODOTAYIM?
Well, in Hebrew PAAMAYIM means twice, and NEKUDOTAIM means colon (two dots). So PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAIM is ::

Now it all makes more sense doesn't it?

Acute abdoment pain, vomits and a mild heart attack. Are you gonna leave us at last?

Arafat has been regarded "a phoenix" by several people.. just like Fawkes in Harry Potter, Arafat was able to outlive beyond his determined life expectancy. But is this going to end?

Lately Arafat was sick - he reported his tummy aches badly and then he happily vomitted on his furniture and also had a "mild" heart attack where he collapsed on the floor with great joy, so reports Jerusalem Post and several other newspapers. He also looked quite pale after that ("Oh no, that's only because he vomitted" said his fanboys).

Now does it mean that he gonna die at last? Journalists happily mention that having such a disease in the age of 75 is a serious life threat, so hopefully it will end the life of the idiot Arafat, who stalled all the peace process because he couldn't hide his affection to the terrorist organizations whom he loves so much.

But unfortunately, you can't hope on that much. Can you? Just because he vomitted and dirtied his royal moustache a bit doesn't mean his burden is going to be lifted. He might continue living and tampering with any attempt to make some order in the Palestinian Authority, like he always does. Remember when they found that Hapez Assad got cancer by stealing his urine? It took him several years to die from that. Hopefully Arafat's disease will do a better job.

One of the most annoying things in Mozilla was the inability to stop animations (you could disable GIF animation altogether, but still, sometimes there are animations which are worth seeing - especially in comic sites). In Netscape 4- and IE you could always stop them with ESC, but it wasn't possible to do that in Mozilla.

You could stop animations in the nightly builds for a while, but now it's finally implemented in 1.5RC1 version. Yes yes! Goodbye flashing "IF THIS BANNER IS FLASHING YOU'RE A WINNER" banners! I won't have to use IE for annoying sites like that anymore.

Now, would anyone write some extension that stops (or pauses) flash animation as well? Update (22.09.2003) moncyb pointed me to an extension that does a similar thing: It shows a "click to play" button for flash objects instead of letting the browser to play them by default.

I wrote a couple of reviews here, but none of them was positive, so here's a good review for a change. It's about a movie called Whale Rider, and I truly believe it's one of a kind.

The movie is about a female called Paikea who lives in a primitive tribe down there in New Zealand. In this exciting yet sensitive movie, the girl wants to confront her past and change the future, by riding the whale.

You see, there's a very sexy male in her tribe which is called The Whale, and all the girls want to have sex with him. "Oh whale, let me ride on you" all the girls say, but he chooses only the best girls, and everyone believes that the only way for a girl to achive true happiness is to ride on the Whale.

So this movie shows us Paikea's journey to the Whale's underpants. It's hard for her but finally she gets to ride on the Whale and everyone's happy. It's a great movie with breathtaking hardcore sequences which every porn lover would treasure in his ever-growing collection. Warmly recommended for all.

All those american comedies where you can hear the audience laughing in the background (because they see that someone lit the "laugh" sign) are passe. We suffered them for many years, but finally they ended and now it's the age of the more subtle comedies.

Ally McBeal started that (or so I believe), and although Ally is passe herself, other comedies, such as Sex And The City, Malcolm In The Middle and Scrubs, adopted the notion of giving up the forced laughter. This way they don't have to stick a gag into every second sentence, and instead they can work more on the series itself.

When I was young, I was surprised that movies labeled as comedy didn't contain audience laughter, because that laughter actually helped me to know that something funny just happened (and then ask for the meaning of that). But I don't miss that laughter anymore.

So, from now on the comedies will be seperated into 2 genres: the layman/passe genre, such as My Big Fat Greek Life, Ellen, Drew Carey and crap like that; and the witty genre, which is more rare and much more intelligent.

Any questions?

I hate Palm.
I want to do a very simple task: Synchronize the palm with my computer over the internet using a windows program. Macs can do that so why can't windows?

Palm only goes halfway. You can synchronize it over the local network, but you need another computer with a cradle for that. You can also synchronize it over a phone line, but my modem can do only TCP/IP and not real phone-line communication (you know that that phone lines are passe, anyway)

So why can't they let you synchronize over the network? There isn't even a commercial program to do that. With PocketPC you can synchronize over the net with no extra software (so I understood). So why can't Palms do that?

That's only one reason to hate them. I also hate how their accessories are incompatible across different palm models, and how most of their models can't browse the web* decently due to software shortage.

Palm could be a good thing if it had enough support from the company, but without it, they will die, and I hope that happens soon.

___________
* I haven't checked all the browsers - I'll check iPanel sometime.

Would you believe that the previous journal entry has costed me in a friend? He won't respond to me anymore.
Update: No, that person isn't JTS in case you wondered (JTS didn't remove me from his friends list). That's someone else.

I met a girl and she was ugly.
I don't remember exactly how I told her that, but she now knows that I believe her looks are outstanding, and not in a positive way (think of Roz from Monsters Inc).

Before, she was frustrated that nobody wanted to see her after sending her picture. She was sure the problem was in the picture. She was totally surprised to hear I that I believe she doesn't look good.

Now, is that good or bad? She asked me and I couldn't lie to her.. and I think that making her aware of the problem might help her solve things (by plastic surgery maybe.. it's so cruel). I feel so guilty. Now when I think of that... I doubt I did her any good by saying that. Bahh... I hope she won't be killing herself or something.

I sometimes feel guilty for having fans that I don't befriend. So I wanted to explain about it (I doubt anyone cares about this, but many times I befriend people and feel disappointed that they don't befriend me too).

So.. when I find that someone is a fan of mine, I check his/her journal to see if he writes about things that interest me, and that his journal isn't updated too frequently. I usually don't add people who just post interesting links they found on the net, because the net is full of links anyway. Also, people who write very long paragraphs scare me.

I know it's silly but I really felt I should write this.

I like animation movies a lot.
I like animation serieses too, but I'm very picky about them, so I usually enjoy more in movies.

Until some years ago, the movies with traditional animation ruled. And then appeared some movies which were made by computer. The first of them, so I remember, was Toy Story. It didn't animate people well, but the toys there were animated in a lovely way, and the plot was nice, so it was real fun to see them. And those 3-d movies were very successful.

Meanwhile, movies with traditional animation didn't have much success. The studios were very disappointed with income brought by movies such as Spirit, Sinbad or Titan AE (because they were sucky movies), Iron Giant (because of poor marketting) or Lilo And Stitch and Treasure Planet (by Disney. I wonder what was their problem.. I didn't get to see Trasure Island yet, but Lilo & Stitch was lovely!).

As a result, DreamWorks decided to stop producing traditional (2-d) animation movies. And it seems that Disney are following their trail [MsGeek, write something in my journal.. are you angry on me or what? ;)].

Now, has it ever occured to them that maybe their 2-d movies were simply not good enough? Especially those DreamWorks 2-d movies which were all sucky. It's not that 3-d movies are instant success. Take Dinosaur or the Final Fantasy aka The Amazing Flop. Both of them lost a lot of money.

The thing is that most of the 3-d movies so far were amazingly witty and cute. And I'm talking about Shrek, Ice Age and everything by Pixar. But this doesn't mean that movies like that will always be successful. Unfortunately, the current trend of Hollywood is to dump traditional amination instead of doing it right. And that leaves the traditional animation lovers with nothing but some student movies and anime!

Oy vei!

Sucky movie. Don't watch it.

More details: It's shipped as a comedy (and you can get mistaken by its colorfull logo), but it isn't really funny... I mean... would you consider a movie where a woman is beaten by her husband a comedy?

No. It's just a sucky movie about a Pakistanian family in England. Although the girl there is hot, the movie is sucky and not interesting. Especially the father figure which is a traditional jerk, who somehow married a british redhead.

Here are some more details about what happens in the movie. Probably it's spoiling:
There's that family. They have a lots of sons, and according to the tradition, the father decides the brides of his children. It may come to the children in total surprise that the father already planned their wedding and stuff.
So one son from this family ran from his wedding and became gay (so he got banished by the father). The father didn't learn his lesson and now he's planning more weddings to his other sons.. and that's after forcing a circumcision on his younger son (because he forgot to that earlier).

So. This film is a piece of crap, just like most of the Film Four company, who provided humanity other atrocities* such as Trainspotting and Dancer In The Dark. That's why that company got closed, and they deserve it. DIE!

-----------
* I actually didn't really hate Four Wedding And A Funeral, also by this company.. but I think it's mostly because you could see Andie MacDowell's boobs there. Have you noticed that it's hard to see breasts nowadsys in movies? It really really sucks.
I kinda liked The Crying Game too. Oh well.

NaveWeiss writes: A company named IO2 Technology claims to create a displaying device prototype that projects images on thin air, just like the holograms in Star Wars (with similar quality, too). They provide images and videos of their product in action, but no details are provided about how does this thing actually work. Is this for real?
------

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this device (called Heliodisplay) yet - even in the journals. I bet it got submitted many times.. but maybe the /. editors are skeptic whether thing thingie is real or not.
I hope somebody will at least review my submission. I think my previous one was "Help me to find a girlfriend.." ;)

Update (20.08.2003) 2003-08-15 18:33:40 Displaying video on thin air: Is that for real? (articles,science) (rejected)
STOP REJECTING ME, YOU EVIL BITCHES!

But I did check some information about this thing. It doesn't really display the image on air, but it rather sprays some kind of particle screen and projects the image on the back of that screen. I wonder what kind of particles are those.. I hope that it's not gama radiation.. ;)

Second update(16.09.2003) After CNN created an article about this, /. posted a story about this subject..

There was that Breakup Girl comic, and the site died but luckily I could check it through the Internet Archive.. and I enjoyed checking it once in a while. I liked Breakup Girl a lot.

But then some assholes bought the domain (breakupgirl.com) and in their robots.txt, they have forbidden the Internet Archive to let users see that site!

How evil! How nasty!!! Let's AVENGE THEM