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I noticed that they took down Most of the movies I liked on Hulu as my recommendations, a year ago. Only Girl Next Door remains, which brings up a thought of a Chicken-n-Egg situation. Specifically – Do they put Young Guy attracting movies because that is their demographics, or is their demographics this way because they put Young Guy attracting movies?

But, you are not here for brain teasers, are you. So, no fear, as I set out to compile my latest time-killers list of Favorites, to satisfy your fancy (if your taste is anything like mine, that is). Again, available only in USA (most likely). Voila:

• Action: Air Force One – Great suspense, well executed all around
• Drama: Fatal Attraction – Borderline drama, thriller, and will help ensure that you never date again
• Sci-Fi: Virtuality – Something new, made for TV, but heck, why not…
• Science Documentary: Cosmic Voyage – Well spent 36 minutes, if it is that time of day when you brain still works
• Independent: Gamebox 1.0 – I’ll admit it, I haven’t watched the movie, but reviews look promising!
• Kids and Family (free babysitter! ) – Anastasia – Even has a bit of historical authenticity to it

Frankly, the quality of movies is drastically lower than it was a year ago. I think their lack-of-revenue is showing. Of course you can always try crowdsourcing the task of choosing the best movie for you (but see warning from paragraph one above).

Better yet, hit their excellent TV shows selection, which is still very decent. Enjoy!

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The title is all you need to know. The special price only at your local MicroCenter store and only for 3 days. Of you don’t have one, check local Costco. Or, I will have a link to Amazon, which promised to deliver on Oct 22, on here later today.
Posting from my iPhone, so signing off now.

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I’m back, and just posting quick update on little “big” things that are going on with me. Filing this one under “Random Thoughts”, FYI.

Microsoft announced officially last week that they are discontinuing Microsoft Money product. This Really saddened me, frankly. Something in the way they presented it made me especially sad. I was always expecting MS-Money desktop software to die, and to be replaced by cloud based solution (like Quicken.com and MSN Money). But instead of telling us to use Web solution, they just told us to “Go Away”…

Worse yet, I have been buying Home & Business edition for many years, to manage our small business, using their wonderful inventory management tools and invoices, etc. What replaces this? Nothing, really… Only super expensive and complex accounting packages, which I really hate (and don’t need for our tiny business)!!!

Ok, onto next rant… iPhone 3.0 came out, just installed it today. Where is my Video!? I really expected them to provide some video capture support for older handsets. Seriously, I don’t need fancy video editing in-phone, but I should be able to capture low-resolution clips!!! Phones with far lesser CPU were able to do this easily for years – Apple, I didn’t expect this level of incompetence, seriously! I am looking forward to finally be alerted if someone is trying to IM me on Yahoo Messenger or ICQ, etc. I hope it works, as finally latest OS should allow it, but don’t know which Apps implemented this yet… I’ll report on this later.

Final rant of the evening is about email and Twitter. I had a case in the office recently, someone replying to an email with “screenshot” of the issue. All he wrote was “I will check into it”. This resulted in 500KB+ email being blasted to hundreds of people by poor Microsoft Exchange server (and poor people who have to keep cleaning their mailboxes). Ridiculous! We need a better email system, and at least publically Twitter does some of that. Needs more evolution, but exchange Must Die and quick. We must figure out a better way to communicate, both inside the Enterprise and over public Internet. Well, I can blog my ideas on this in the future, if there is interest (hint, post comments!)

There, Rant Done! I’ll try to come back to regular insightful blogging in the near future

Meanwhile, I leave you with MORE RANT! Windows 7 64 Bit Release Candidate STILL doesn’t install on my main PC. No love for me, very sad… Thinking of replacing my Motherboard or something, but it’s annoying to go through all that trouble and expense…

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Today I remembered a curious little application, which I wrote back around 1989, if memory serves me right. So, decided to document this for the future generations and you, loyal readers.

Back then, in mostly age of DOS, it occurred to me that one can easily create “An Engine” which could easily be reused in many different applications without any coding. The simple idea was to combine files with pre-prepared “screens of text”, and have a master “script” file, which describes the flow between the screens of text and tells the engine what to show, and what to do if a user selects X or clicks on Y. The whole thing took less than a week to write, if I recall correctly.

This wasn’t any major breakthrough, mind you. Even back then, awesome Sierra On-Line figured out that by coding single “Game Engine”, and giving it "Assets” (such as graphics, music and overall “story-line” script), you can create myriad of quality entertainment quickly and with consistently high level of quality. The quality comes in because “Game Engine” itself is small and highly optimized piece of software.

Next we fast forward, through the rise of Macromedia, which essentially conquered game makers market by offering a effective pre-built platform with Engine and “Asset Creator” for graphics and animation. No forgetting the Shockwave player and ultimate unification of Macromedia with Adobe, through brilliant consolidation of companies, giving the world a single preferable standard.

The latest chapter in this saga brings us the Adobe Flex Builder with Adobe AIR platform. Suddenly, creating exciting business applications, with pretty animations and fast response time is as easy as loading up “Assets” along with main “Story script”. Well, in reality, business is never that easy, but this is clearly a Leap Forward. And Yep, your business application is running on the same optimized “Game Engine”, at 30 frames per second!

A Wish Come True for us business developers, who always wanted to Make Games!!!

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Poor attempt at a Not joke? I had a rough day, but I want to promptly document it for everyone’s benefit. Our story begins during late night hours, somewhere deep in the tough Ulduar area in World of Warcraft Instance.

My computer suddenly hung, though mouse was still moving, which is highly unusual! After simple troubleshooting failed to recover it, I proceeded to a full power-cycle. World of Warcraft promptly crashed again, much quicker this time, with CRC error. Concerned, I scheduled a full HD check-disk and surface scan, and left it overnight.

In the morning, I found situation to be same or worse. Software was crashing left and right, seemingly randomly. World of Warcraft’s handy Repair utility, told me my installation was “Too Corrupt to Repair”. I tried many different things, at first focusing on Hard-drive integrity, and kept finding pretty much all data written to disk, coming back with CRC errors.

Long story short, I recalled a handy memtest utility right on the boot menu of Ubuntu. I ran it, and voila, my screen quickly filled with Lots of RED errors, thousands, in fact. I proceeded to remove all memory modules (I had four DDR2), and put them one by one to the test, and as Murphy would have it, the last module was the faulty one. All others passed long battery of tests with flying colors. I reinstalled the three good memory modules, and computer is back to normal, as if nothing was wrong!

Moral of the story? I see several here – For example, why didn’t self-respecting Vista OS (ahem, funny!) include some sanity checks, to alert me to memory failures, instead of crashing with blue screens and failing “Host Processes”? (Yea, I know there is ECC memory, but I am not sure it would have helped in this strange scenario).

But even more so, what about Cloud? I had Mesh and Live Sync going! Something may have Synched into the cloud, with corruption on it! Any Cloud Backup, and pretty much everything else, would cause a disaster! Amazon’s entire S3 cluster went down not too long ago, due to corruption in status data being passed around the cloud.

I’ve been long excited about ZFS technology, and while I am sure it would have alerted me to problems sooner, I am not certain it could have prevented real data corruption in this case. With faulty memory module, everything written from memory to disk, will most likely become “corrupt for life”. Even an attempt to rescue such data will likely not end well, unless hard-drive is moved to another computer for rescue.

It seems that as computer scientists we are missing this very fundamental issue. We can’t trust our latest operating system to alert us if our underlying hardware is misbehaving?! And that our files are becoming corrupt every time we touch them?!

Back to the drawing board!

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