Archive 10/2006

Well, first let me say, that I honestly don't know, why we have to celebrate this in Austria ... aside from pleasing the industry ... which shouldn't really be a reason for doing something like that ...

At least this year's last day of October seems to have been way more quiet than last year. Only 3 groups turned up with the first one consisting of what looked like 5-7 year olds in nice costumes. They appeared as happy about the chocolate I gave them as if I'd have given them the most delicious or expensive thing in the world It was really great seeing them happy even about the small things in life

Dries Buytaert announced this afternoon the first beta for the upcoming Drupal 5.0. If I remember correctly he first planed to release it some time last week, but it seems there have been some obstacles.

Sometimes when you compare Django with other (perhaps) more popular frameworks like RoR you hear people saying, that there is too little literature esp. in the form of books out there for the Python web framework.

This seems now about to change. Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss have started opening up their upcoming book about Django to the community under djangobook.com.

From what it looks like, they will release 2 chapters every week and are requesting comments, suggestions etc. to improve the book for the planed "physical" release in 2007.

Everybody who has a Mac knows, that burning DVDs/CDs works out of the box if you have a superdrive in your favorite box. But at least for me the whole process wasn't really intuitive esp. with when you're working with re-writable media where you have to first erase the whole thing using the Disk utilities . I'm also not really a big fan of the whole Burning folder idea (although it is great, that it automatically works with symbolic links). If I want to keep a copy of what I burned on my harddisk, I use ISO files

Nintendo's playing a dangerous game right now. They just confirmed a report by Edge saying that there will be another version of the Wii capable of playing back DVDs. It's still not certain, to what regions of the world this edition will be limited since the DVD-Wii is currently only planed for the Japanese market.

In my opinion it wasn't such a great idea to confirm this so close to the launch of the "normal" Wii console because it really might have an impact on the sales numbers until next year. If people start wondering "Hmm.... I could wait 6 months and get a Wii that can also playback DVDs" then Nintendo can only lose.

Done Finishing the game wasn't really hard after upgrading the shield and the Heavy Bouncer. I guess it took about 3 minutes to finish the final boss. After surviving the outro I got the choice between moving back in time before I bet the boss or restarting the game in a challenge mode where all my weapons are still there and every bolt I get is multi-folded. Well I guess I will still spend some time in the challenge mode to upgrade every weapon and then move along to R&C3

Well, I guess I was a little bit optimistic when I thought that I could make a new theme for zerokspot.com in under a week This might have even been possible, but yesterday I got a book that I have to read until next Thursday. Would normally be not really a problem since the book has only about 160 pages, but this one is more on the business computer science side of things, something that I never really liked ... so I guess it will be tough 4 days until I have to return the book.

So my apologies for this, but this doesn't mean, that there won't be any redesign at all, just that it has got a little bit delayed. Probably ... meh, I better stop throwing around with dates

Today I finally did the Glider level on Grelbin and also got the 16 moon crystals for the Zenmaster to get the first part of the Hypnomatic ... Strange, there are still 2 parts left and I had no idea, where to go until I noticed, that I hadn't really finished the missions on Planet Smolg So I went back there and inspected the docked ships to get the coordinates of Damosel.

Fighting the Protopets there actually seems like a good way to upgrade weapons, health and fill your purse with bolts

After finishing off that whole army of protopets I went to the railways to get one of the missing Hypnomatic parts. When I got it, an info box appeared telling me, that I now had all the missing parts and could go searching for someone to put them all together. Hmm.... 2 out of 3 equals all? Seems like the scripted events in this game are really a little bit strange

It might be strange to start a dairy at the 7th page, but I was somehow motivated I think I'm already fairly far in the game so I will also use these posts to review some parts of it.

So far I've finished off the gang leader in his shiny mech and now I should be off to meet with that spy girl on Greblin, where I arrived yesterday. It's actually quite nice there ... quite a lot of bears though. Strong bears, cute bears, bears messing with dragons ... ey *g* Anyway, it looks like kind of a repetition to the desert area where you could quite easily level up your weapons and in general. Seems to be the case here as well, but only a couple of weapons seem to be useful here. These would be the Minirocket Tube where you need 3 shots per bear and I think 5 for the dragon. And there is the Bouncer, which is in my opinion the most effective weapon against the bears. One shot that detonates directly on it, will most of the time hold if off enough to let the minibombs to their work

Today I opened the newspaper and guess what I saw in the ads? It seems like X-Men 3 is finally out on DVD So I went to a local store and started looking around a little bit in the DVD section ... and went out with 2 DVDs