Don't Say a Word (2001)

Don't Say a Word (2001) - a distinctly average film, unemotional, and certainly uninspiring. Having said that, it was the best thing on TV for a couple of days........

"When the daughter of a psychiatrist is kidnapped, he's horrified to discover that the abductors' demand is that he break through to a post traumatic stress disorder suffering young woman who knows a secret... "

The Skulls

Just got almost through watching The Skulls, then ITV2 decided to run behind schedule, and TiVo missed the end 8-

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192614/

Great film, so far, can't wait to see the outcome of the duel......

Joshua Jackson plays a college student who joins an elite secret organisation only to find out that all is not as he expected. He should really have figured that out beforehand, if he really was as smart as he is supposed to be, but that wouldn't have been much of a film :)

BiblePod - Interesting project :)

BiblePod Thats all folks :)

The Thirteenth Floor

Saw this again tonight, another great idea, I love these kinds of films :)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

I do have a couple of problems with it though, all around the simulation which they invented. If it had already been running for some time, how could one of the chief developers not know what it looks like inside it. Surely if developing a project like this they would think to integrate the capability to perhaps grab a screenshot or two, perhaps even part of the testing would involve looking through virtual "cameras" into the system. That doesn't sit well with me at all. Not bulletproof (like the matrix ;)

Podcast Playlist Generator

I've just been introduced to the world of podcasting, where anyone can make audio files available periodically, and these can be downloaded to my PC, and then to a portable device, so you can have customised listening material available at any time

I've been using iPodder, a simple aggregator which takes care of checking for new podcasts, and downloads them for me. It also allows the option of running a custom command after each download.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a possibility to create a playlist for each podcast, or an option to create a playlist containing a list of all current podcasts.

Perl to the rescue. A nice simple script, which can be run from iPodder after each download, and will generate m3u playlists which EphPod can then convert for my iPod.

Fun.

use warnings;
use strict;

my @casts = list_dir(".");
foreach my $dir (@casts)
{
        next if (! -d $dir); ##check its a directory
        my @files = list_dir($dir); ##list all the files

        #create the playlist file
        open(OUT, ">$dir.m3u")  die "cant write playlist for $dir : $!";
        foreach my $file(@files)
        {
                print OUT "$dir/$file\n";
        }
        close OUT;
}


#list the contents of a directory - exclude . and ..
sub list_dir
{
        my ($dir) = @_;
        opendir(DIR, $dir)  die "cant read dir $dir:$!";
        my @results;
        while(my $file = readdir(DIR))
        {
                next if ($file =~ /^\.$/);
                next if ($file =~ /^\.\.$/);
                push(@results, $file);
        }
        close DIR;
        return @results;
}

Cygwin / vim / rxvt arrow key problems

On my new machine I installed cygwin, the great set of unix tools for win32, (BTW this is what makes using a win32 machine acceptable IMHO, it just works like a unix box...) and as usual in vi (or vim) my arrow keys pop me out of insert mode and then insert a newline and 'A' 'B' 'C' or 'D' - very annoying.

So the search started.... and I remembered the simple solution from the last time. People say in this situation that it is your terminal, and not vim that is misconfigured. I'm not sure I believe that, because the fix includes vim.

All you need to do is modify your .vimrc file. Copy the example .vimrc file from /usr/share/vim/vim62/vimrc_example.vim to ~/.vimrc then open vi and its fixed :)

Great, thats what we like - annoying problems, simple solutions