The last post made me remember one of my favorite stand up comedians thoughts on fast food:
"A failure pile, in a sadness bowl..." -P. Oswalt
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Nemesis or Nemesi? : Burger King and Hasbro
Almost being thirty years old, I find myself curious that I still find interest in things from my childhood, things like Star Wars, Transformers, Robotech and other great products that were marketed and crammed down our throats in the 80's.
So while realizing I don't always make the best decisions on an empty stomach, I decided to go to a Burger King by my house. (And no, Burger King is still gross in the United States, in fact I might go as far as to say it's actually more gross than some of the places I ate in London.)
My girlfriend and I hopped out of the car, with low expectations - When low and behold! - Transformers product placement everywhere! The kid in me screamed "Free toy inside!", and the adult in me was sadly beaten up and silenced by the inner kid.
Looking at the menu and being the "Optimist" that I am, I noticed a sweet deal on a value meal called the "BBQ Bacon Double Stacticon Medium Sized Value Meal" - not only did I find this hilarious, so hilarious in fact that I felt I should order it on the basis of so many syllables alone, but this meal was to come with a bunch of silly Transformers crap.
So I placed the order, and chuckled inside when listening to the 2nd generation immigrant girl behind the counter try and state my order verbatim. She handed me the receipt - my girlfriend got a chicken sandwich - and with that we waited about four minutes for our order to be processed.
But wait! Hold on... No Transformers tickets, what's worse, now we've got to eat this crap which looks NOTHING like the photo, and more like my High School's Jailhouse grade hamburgers.
My only response is that this experience reminds me of what Stephen Spielberg did to the Transformers franchise, much like Burger King did to fast food.
So while realizing I don't always make the best decisions on an empty stomach, I decided to go to a Burger King by my house. (And no, Burger King is still gross in the United States, in fact I might go as far as to say it's actually more gross than some of the places I ate in London.)
My girlfriend and I hopped out of the car, with low expectations - When low and behold! - Transformers product placement everywhere! The kid in me screamed "Free toy inside!", and the adult in me was sadly beaten up and silenced by the inner kid.
Looking at the menu and being the "Optimist" that I am, I noticed a sweet deal on a value meal called the "BBQ Bacon Double Stacticon Medium Sized Value Meal" - not only did I find this hilarious, so hilarious in fact that I felt I should order it on the basis of so many syllables alone, but this meal was to come with a bunch of silly Transformers crap.
So I placed the order, and chuckled inside when listening to the 2nd generation immigrant girl behind the counter try and state my order verbatim. She handed me the receipt - my girlfriend got a chicken sandwich - and with that we waited about four minutes for our order to be processed.
But wait! Hold on... No Transformers tickets, what's worse, now we've got to eat this crap which looks NOTHING like the photo, and more like my High School's Jailhouse grade hamburgers.
My only response is that this experience reminds me of what Stephen Spielberg did to the Transformers franchise, much like Burger King did to fast food.
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Roku Amazon / Netflix Player is the Death of Humanity!
Anyone that has met me knows I'm a bit of a "B" movie freak. I spend my time trying to find strange independent movies online, and talk with my friends about off movies mentioned on sites like bloodydisgusting.com and IMDB.
Recently I've been on a Troma kick, I just watched Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and loved it, though some parts were over the top just a bit too much, it's a Troma movie, that's how they always are!
There was a very depressing bit at the begining with Lloyd Kaufman speaking out against the piracy China has been doing wih his movie, and how they were able to get "their" version, directed by the same guy that gave us Crash.
With all this in mind, I've also recently purchased a Roku Netflix player. It was quite a tough decision for me, I love my Mythbuntu install, but since I picked the 64 bit install using applications Boxee - http://www.boxee.tv, and having to just through the hoops of DRM and emulation of a Windows machine, I figured my time was better spent trying out something that is KNOWN to work, rather than praying for compilations and tweaks to pan out, and hopefully pretty moving picture stories on my TV screen...
Boy does the Roku player ever work! It's got about nine million outputs, HDMI, RCA, Optical Audio SPDIF, Wifi, Ethernet, for $99? Something seems a bit fishy... I guess somewhere someone is eating a bit of the cost.
I tried to watch just a few movies at first, then I thought "Hey this thing is actually working!" I didn't have to goto any forums and read what might be a solution, or see about 32 bit vs 64 bit hacks, just plug it in, setup your Netflix and Amazon accounts and go!
Now that I can see my queue, I have about three Troma movies on Netflix, and I still wish there were more available online.
I think the Roku player may in fact ruin my life, that or posting to a blog while putting one down in the bathroom just might...
Recently I've been on a Troma kick, I just watched Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and loved it, though some parts were over the top just a bit too much, it's a Troma movie, that's how they always are!
There was a very depressing bit at the begining with Lloyd Kaufman speaking out against the piracy China has been doing wih his movie, and how they were able to get "their" version, directed by the same guy that gave us Crash.
With all this in mind, I've also recently purchased a Roku Netflix player. It was quite a tough decision for me, I love my Mythbuntu install, but since I picked the 64 bit install using applications Boxee - http://www.boxee.tv, and having to just through the hoops of DRM and emulation of a Windows machine, I figured my time was better spent trying out something that is KNOWN to work, rather than praying for compilations and tweaks to pan out, and hopefully pretty moving picture stories on my TV screen...
Boy does the Roku player ever work! It's got about nine million outputs, HDMI, RCA, Optical Audio SPDIF, Wifi, Ethernet, for $99? Something seems a bit fishy... I guess somewhere someone is eating a bit of the cost.
I tried to watch just a few movies at first, then I thought "Hey this thing is actually working!" I didn't have to goto any forums and read what might be a solution, or see about 32 bit vs 64 bit hacks, just plug it in, setup your Netflix and Amazon accounts and go!
Now that I can see my queue, I have about three Troma movies on Netflix, and I still wish there were more available online.
I think the Roku player may in fact ruin my life, that or posting to a blog while putting one down in the bathroom just might...
Cell Broadband Engine and GNU Octave
I will be posting more soon, but I thought I would put the word out that if anyone out there on the internet is interested in collaborating on getting a good port of GNU Octave with SPE/SPU support started please don't hesitate to email me!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
PS3 - Cell B.E. and GNU Octave
For the past two weeks I have been compiling GNU gcc and octave in Yellow Dog Linux on my Playstation 3. For what ever reason, they both the up-to-date version of gcc 4.4.3 and octave, from a svn branch, both absolutely fail to compile.
Previously I was able to get these to work in my Gentoo install on the same system with little to no fuss at all. It seems like something is really broken in gcc on Yellow Dog Linux.
Why would I be wanting to do this on a Playstation 3 you might ask? See http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43137 -
The PS3 has some amazing capabilities for vectorized mathmatics, I would like to tap into these capabilities to create an octave capable PS3 cluster, then document how it was done so that Universities and poor countries would be able to follow in using the cheap ultra fast power of the Cell Broadband Engine for research.
But given the lack of functions from YDL I might have to switch back to Gentoo which has less built in bang for the buck, and takes a lot more time to setup, but at least the compilers worked!
I ran a copy of obench.m from http://www.reimeika.ca/marco/obench/ and the results without SPU/SPE support were un surprisingly slow. But for what ever reason, Yellow Dog refuses to compile anything useful without maximal effort.
If I figure this out I will be sure to post how I got it working later in this blog.
Previously I was able to get these to work in my Gentoo install on the same system with little to no fuss at all. It seems like something is really broken in gcc on Yellow Dog Linux.
Why would I be wanting to do this on a Playstation 3 you might ask? See http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43137 -
"Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. contributed Vector Math library and SIMD math library as open source under the BSD license. Bullet physics SDK will be the main repository. Vector Math was previously only available to licensed PlayStation 3 developers."For more up to date info, and white papers on the Cell B.E. I have been reading here as well - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/ -
"The Cell/B.E.™ resource center is a good starting point for developers looking for information about IBM Cell/B.E. technology-based software."
"Both libraries are optimized for Cell PPU and SPU, but also provide portable scalar version. This includes PS3 Linux and Cell Blade support. A SSE x86 version of Vector Math has been contributed by Richard Foster."
The PS3 has some amazing capabilities for vectorized mathmatics, I would like to tap into these capabilities to create an octave capable PS3 cluster, then document how it was done so that Universities and poor countries would be able to follow in using the cheap ultra fast power of the Cell Broadband Engine for research.
But given the lack of functions from YDL I might have to switch back to Gentoo which has less built in bang for the buck, and takes a lot more time to setup, but at least the compilers worked!
I ran a copy of obench.m from http://www.reimeika.ca/marco/obench/ and the results without SPU/SPE support were un surprisingly slow. But for what ever reason, Yellow Dog refuses to compile anything useful without maximal effort.
If I figure this out I will be sure to post how I got it working later in this blog.
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