At a recent conference, futurist Ray Kurzweil made some new predicitons.

• Within 5 years the exponential progress in nanoengineering will make Solar power cost-competitive with fossil fuels
• Within 10 years we will have a pill that allows us all to eat whatever we feel like and never gain any unwanted weight
• In 15 years, life expectancies will start rising faster than we age
• In about 20 years 100% of our energy will come from clean and renewable sources, and a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

Original article

Can't get enough classic sci-fi from the 50's and 60's and even earlier? Burned out with the really good but sometimes overly-heavy Battlestar? Just want to watch some cheesy effects and have some good old fashioned pop-corn movie watching fun?

Ignore the horrible 1990's website design, and click here! This page has hundreds of hours of old tv shows and movies like Flash Gordon, Land of the Giants, Twilight Zone, etc..

Thanks

This is certainly THE blockbuster for the summer this year. There are many other great movies, to be sure, but nothing to compare with a fourth installment to Indiana Jones. When the first reviews began to come out they were either downright hostile, or luke-warm. This worried me only slightly because hey - it's supposed to be a big over the top popcorn movie with outlandish plots - it's Indiana Freaking Jones for goodness sakes! Finally someone who gets it has written an excellent review (don't worry - there's no spoilers). Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an absolute triumph, and a picture-perfect tribute to one of cinema’s great action franchies. A conscious decision in production was made to steer clear of CGI effects when possible and perform stunts the old-fashioned way, and it’s certainly paid off – everything, from sword-fights on duelling jeeps to motorcycle chases and mad dashes through ancient ruins and treasure-filled warehouses feels suitably weighty and satisfying. It’s everything an Indiana Jones film should be: stunning action sequences, a silly – yet riveting – plot, Russians, curses, tombs, caves, jungles, whips and Fedoras, allied with a mountain of adventure and a truckful of nostalgia. I can't wait to go see it this weekend!!!!

I got off from work early so i could rush home and pack for the fathers and sons outing. After a frustrating day at work i was looking forward to a little R&R away from it all.

Hmm, what to take? pillow, small tent, sleeping bags, some bug spray (i hear there might be mosquitoes), the telescope, the laptop, and a book just in case. After looking around a few more times, i realize i haven't packed any food or drinks. Oops. Throw in some drinks, some candy bars, and a can of peanuts for good measure.

"Alex, are you ready? Let's go!".

"I hope i can find it," thinks Scott. I have a general idea of where the campsite is, but the directions were rather vague. Diamond Fork #3 (or maybe it was #5). Away we go! On the way up to the campsite, i notice the huge new windmills at the mouth of the canyon. Turns out they're the largest in the country. Pretty cool. Too bad they're not spinning. Rather odd, considering the wind is blowing. *shrug*. Hope they didn't cost too much.

Just as the car passes the windmills the radio DJ informs us that "bean farts don't smell. It's the vegetable farts that really give off the nasty odor." Who knew? Sounds like it would make a good jeopardy question.

We get to the Diamond fork turnoff and turn off. I turned off. I reminded Alex that a few years ago during the winter this is where we went tubing and saw the mountain lions. "I know dad." He also informs me that he went on a field trip here last year and planted a tree.

We get to the campsite, turn in and begin to drive around. I spot campsite #3 but it's definitely not the campsite we're looking for. After driving around throw the entire campsite (which is quite large), i decide that we're lost. "Luann, do you have anyone's phone#?"

"No Scott. You stole my phone so you could get on the internet tonight. You'll have to look up the numbers yourself.". Hmmph, not very helpful :P Nobody seems to be answering. Doesn't anyone else have a signal up here??! Finally I spot someone else from the ward looking lost. I begin to follow them around. After a while we run into a 3rd lost party member, and finally someone decides it might be a good idea to stop and ask for directions.

"Oh sure, the group campsites are further up the canyon. This is the wrong campsite. Keep going up the road a few miles." Well, that's easy enough. Off we go. After a few more campgrounds that turn out not to be ours, we finally spot a group of people we do know who apparently got the memo about where to meet.

Alex immediately jumps off and melds into the throng of kids while i go searching for a spot for the tent. The campsite is in a beautiful little opening. "It's brand new,", we're later informed by the campsite manager (who shows up to make sure we've paid our fees no doubt). I spot a nice little area down by the river and setup the tent. I didn't bother having Alex help - he was having fun. Besides, he knows how to setup a tent and will get lots of practice on his scout camps.

"What did you bring for dinner," someone asks. "Oops - were we supposed to bring our own food?" Not to worry - plenty of people around to mooch off :) Dennis was nice enough to let me have one of his hamburgers. Alex had a hamburger bun. "Can't we go to the gas station and get something?" Hah... This is camping my boy!

After dinner while everyone is milling about, I head back to the car and hop online to check for geocaches nearby. There are plenty. I pick up that's about a mile up the road and Alex and I head out to find it. We invited everyone, but no one seemed interested. After about 10 minutes, Adam B. comes riding up on a bike to join us (he didn't bring a bike, btw... must have 'borrowed' it from someone). Alex soon takes over the bike and Adam and I have a nice little walk up the canyon.

We talk about various things, including his writing. Adam is 17 and is the most prolific writer i've ever met. He writes 6000 word short stories before breakfast on a regular basis. He is a member of a website that does author peer review (you should check it out. critters.org He's also quite an accomplished artist. I'm sure if he goes into a creative writing field he will do amazingly well.

"Oh oh; there's a bunch of people camping right where the geocache is." ("And they're smoking and playing hackey sack," says Adam). Well, i ask them if they wouldn't mind if we cut through their camp and have a look at the tree over there. They don't seem to mind and we quickly locate the cache.

When we get back it's starting to get dark. Dennis' son has setup a projector and is using his laptop to play a movie. "The princess bride". A classic. Love it. It's also starting to get breezy and a little chilly. While the movie plays, i setup the telescope. There are no clouds, no trees right near us and we should have a perfect view. Oh ... except for the fact that we've got almost a full moon that's so bright it's casting shadows. Oh well. We spend a few minutes looking at the moon, and then i pack up the scope for another day.

After the movie ends, everyone heads off to bed. Except all the elders who ask me if i can get online and check the Jazz score. It's game 6 vs. the Lakers. I get online, there's 2:25seconds left. "The Jazz are down by 11!". Oh wait, 60 seconds later the page refreshes and now they're only down by 3! Wow, i'll bet crowd is roaring. We are all huddled around the laptop in the freezing cold wind watching the screen refresh every 60 seconds. Man that was a long 2:25. Took almost a half hour for the game to finally end. Jazz lost by 3.

I head for the tent. Fortunately Alex is already there asleep. I lie down and decide to read for a while. I brought along my trusty head lamp. Works great as a reading light. The ground is rock hard. Mostly smooth, but just uncomfortable enough to be annoying all night.

After a long night, i get up, eat breakfast - the traditional eggs, bacon and pancakes that we always have whenever the elders are in charge of food. While everyone is milling around again i take down the tent, pack the car and wait for Alex to get tired of the mountains.

"Dad, can i borrow the walkie talkie? We're going to hike up to that rock cliff way over there." Oh boy, looks fun. I'll just sit here in this chair and listen to the chatter while you hike around. They didn't quite make it to the cliff. But they did have fun. They got back, we left, picked up something at the gas station on the way home for Alex, and arrived at home, just in time for a day full of honey-dos outside. But that's another story.

I just love this line from Babylon 5, season 4, episode 3: The Summoning Drazi: Captain? We're sorry. We thought you were dead. Sheridan: I was. I'm better now.

One thing that i absolutely cannot stand about the MAC is the non-standard behavior of the home and end keys. Every other OS i've ever used, when you press Home, it takes you to the beginning of the line, and when you press End, it takes you to the end of the line. If shift is pressed, it highlights to the beginning or end from your current location.

This page tells how to get that behavior in most OS X applications. The long and short of it is this:

Create (or edit) the following file:

~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Add the following to the file:

{
        /* Remap Home / End to be correct :-) */
        "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";                   /* Home         */
        "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";                         /* End          */
        "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + Home */
        "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";       /* Shift + End  */
}

One notable application that does NOT respect the KeyBindings is Eclipse. Fortunately, Eclipse has its own mechanism for changing KeyBindings. Go to the preferences -> General -> Keys, and then change the Start, End, Select Line End, and Select Line Start mappings to be what you want.

Happy typing!

At my new company we use AccuRev for source control. The license fees are insanely expensive and it's extremely complicated to do such a simple thing as "check in some code". Here is the process to do a check-in. AccuRev actions are in bold. (I'm documenting it here so i can remember it later on):

1. Get the latest changes from upstream by doing an update. (Click the green lighting bolt - that's the update button).
2. If there are overlaps (i.e. conflicts that couldn't be resolved automatically), do an overlap search, go through each file and manually merge (i prefer to use Eclipse's merge tool here). When done, do a merge on each file. This will mark it as merged on your machine.
3. Now that you're up to date with the stream (i.e. branch from which you are working), do a modified search to see which files you've changed.
4. For each modified file, do a Diff against Backed Version to see your changes and make sure you like them. Once satisfied which the changes, do a keep operation on each file to mark your local version of the file as being ready to send to the stream.
5. Don't forget to do a external search now so that you can see any new files that you've created that haven't been added to the repository yet. For each file in this list, do an Add to AccuRev Depot operation so that the local files are ready to add to the stream.
6. Now do a pending search to get a list of all files that are waiting to be promoted (i.e. moved from your local machine to the stream where others can get your changes).
7. Select each file in the pending list and do a promote to actually commit it to the repository. Add your comment, and oh yes - you must have a bug # that you enter in order to add your code. Pretty much this is meaningless - everyone just makes a bogus bug # with some generic error like "scott's code changes for iteration 2" and uses it over and over.

All done. That was easy, wasn't it? HOLY CRAP!

My friend and co-worker Bruce has posted a blog entry talking about why we're using AccuRev. Click Here for his review, which includes phrases such as "crazy expensive", "arcane and fragile", "steep learning curve", "doesn't make it easier".

So why use it? It does do one thing very well, and that is merge changes effectively, accurately, and automatically when you have a huge number of engineers concurrently modifying large parts of the code base - thus avoiding "merge hell". And that's why we use it ...

---

Update: I'll add a few tips as i find them.

Tip #1: Another annoying 'feature' of AccuRev is that each workspace is associated with a hostname. And for some reason, the hostnames seem to change on me once in a while. I don't profess to know why this is. But once it happens, you can no longer access your workspace to do updates and promotions. To restore your hostname, right-click on the workspace, click edit, then click finish. Walla - hostname updated back to your current hostname.

I just recently wiped one of my test machines clean and installed Windows XP (with SP2) and then installed SP3 to try it out before i install it on my other machines. Although the update went well, after I installed SP3 and then tried to install other Windows Updates (WU), they would all fail to install.

It turns out the problem lies with the Update Manager (UM). I found a blog post here that tells how to solve the problem. You basically must upgrade to the 3.0 version of the UM and then WU will work. Uhm, ya - but SP3 doesn't bother to do that for you. Really smart Microsoft ... I was about to reinstall without XP3 until i found this blog entry. Perhaps you should consider makes UM 3.0 part of your XP3 update process?

Here are the steps:

1. Manually download the UM 3.0. It is located here:
   http://download.windowsupdate.com/WindowsUpdate/redist/standalone/7.0.6000.381/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe
2. Open a command prompt and execute the following commands:

1. net stop wuauserv

2. "/[wherever you downloaded the file]/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe" /wuforce

   Don't forget to include the " marks if your download path has spaces.

3. net start wuauserv

That's it. You should now be upgraded to the latest version of the UM. In the comments to this post, someone said you don't need to bother typing the net stop and net start commands. *shrug*. I guess if you don't and it doesn't work you can always try it again with them.

After several weeks of development (well, a few hours here and a few hours there), i've completely redesigned the miniature portion of my website. Click here to check it out. If you like what you see, let me know. If you have any suggestions for improvement, i'd love to hear. And if it doesn't work for you, please tell me so i can fix it!

Thanks to my wife who helped with much of the artwork.

As anyone who's visited my main website knows, i'm a big fan of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Last year when he passed away, i posted an article that talked about how i had first came across the series, and how i hoped that the final book "will be finished by a worthy author who truly cares about the work and will do it justice."

About three months later, Brandon Sanderson was announced as the author personally picked by Robert Jordan's wife to pen the final chapter in the WOT saga. I had never heard of Sanderson before, but I looked him up and found that he's written a few books which have all received high praise. He also seemed to be a fan of the series himself, at which i sighed in relief knowing that the novel was in good hands.

Well, it turns out that Sanderson lives about 10 minutes from my house! How cool is that? I found this out when i saw a big sign at our local library announcing a book signing with Brandon Sanderson. I did a double take, made sure it was the Brandon Sanderson of WOT fame, and made plans to attend. All of this was a long introduction to a short report of the event:

There were about 50 or 60 people in attendance (hard to say really; there were lots of people with young kids that kept coming and going). He began by doing a book signing. He had copies of all his books available for purchase, and was more than happy to sign pre-existing copies. He also had a preview "proof readers" copy of the 3rd book in his Mistborn series. It looked very cool (although i didn't read any of it, since i didn't want to accidentally come across any spoilers).

After a half hour or so of signing books, he opened it up to Q&A. Following are some of the questions that I was able to scribble down:

• Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians is available as an audio book through Amazon. You can also email him for a copy if you like.
• When Harriet (Robert Jordan's wife) was selecting authors for the final WOT novel, she read 100 pages of Sanderson's Mistborn book, loved it, and called him asking if he'd be interested. (Obviously the answer was an enthusiastic yes!)
• Dreamworks has purchased the rights to do a movie of Alcatraz. He said it's amazing how much $$$ movie studios throw around like it's popcorn. There's also a tentative offer to do a TV Series of Mistborn, but that's probably not going to happen
• When asked how he gets his ideas, he said that they can come from anywhere. He mentioned that he had an Alcatraz souvenir's key chain that came with his first car. He was once driving through dense fog and liked how the mist swirled. Sometimes he'll see someone with interesting characteristics that will end up in a novel. He just always looks for things and they all stick together, and eventually he's got enough material for a book
• He likes to turn traditional fantasy on its head. "An unlikely hero goes on a quest to destroy the dark lord." That pretty much sums up 90% of sci-fi and fantasy stories. "Why can't the dark lord ever win? What if he did?" He loves to take unusual and unconventional twists and turns with his writing.
• When asked about the artwork, he said that he doesn't get to decide that. He only gets to decide on the words of the novel. He gets to look and can object, but ultimately it's up to the publisher on the artwork. Mostly he's been happy, but didn't like the original cover art of Mistborn. (There was more on this but i'd better not print it here...) ;)
• His deadline for the draft of A Memory of Light is December. The earliest publish date will be in the Summer of 2009, and the latest publish date will be around Christmas 2009. Whatever the date, he will personally be at Waldenbooks at my local mall on opening day giving (well, selling i'm sure) out signed, numbered copies of the book. SWEET; i know where i'll be that day!
• He mentioned that when he was 15, one of his teachers gave him a copy of a fantasy novel and that sparked his interested in, and love for, the fantasy genre. After the meeting, i asked him what the novel was. He replied that it was Dragon's Bane, and highly recommended it if i hadn't read it yet. I'll put it in my queue.
• Finally, in between some of the Q&A he did a reading of the first chapter of Alcatraz (i'm not sure if it was the first or second book; i haven't read either). He also did a reading of the 1st chapter of book 3 of Mistborn, but i left before he began since he said there would be major spoilers for anyone who hadn't read the first two books yet (and i hadn't, so i left).

All in all, a very enjoyable event. He seems like a nice down to earth guy, and i have every confidence that he'll do a wonderful job of A Memory of Light.