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For the Blu-ray Disc (BD) (aka Bluray) addicts out there, Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra is out in version 8. It is sporting a brand new user interface, and allows playback of BD+ titles. I bought the upgrade yesterday - and I will answer the question of why here.

A must have for PC Blu-ray playback is AnyDVD HD, as this will remove the incredibly annoying regional zones. Furthermore it will allow ripping your purchased BDs to hardisk for more quiet playback; the Pioneer BDC-S02 player has many nice qualities, but ultra quietness is not one of them. Furthermore, having backed up your BD, you can safely store the original out of harm’s way and instead use the back up for playback.

Unfortunately for us, that’s not the way the studios see the picture - instead they want to make it as difficult as possible for us to do this by way of DRM. (There’s little wonder why hardly anyone is using their HTPCs for Blu-rays!) Continue reading »

For the bloggers out there, Wordpress is out in version 2.5 as of a week ago. I just upgraded my own blog at Bluehost; pretty painless thing, however rather than deleting, I simply renamed wp-includes and wp-admin to include an _ / underscore, then copied the files across and touched on the upgrade.php file.

One issue was that the maintenance mode plugin didn’t let me go to upgrade.php, so I simply renamed the plugin directory and I was fine. Continue reading »

I am currently reading this interesting article over at MSDN on the MVC framework that is being developed by the asp.net people. To someone who has been using the ColdFusion based MachII for several years, this is pretty interesting stuff as I’m now making the transition across.

In an unexpected stint of house keeping, I decided to updated to a newer version of Wordpress - just using Bluehost’s auto update function. Now, whilst doing this I realised that my old template was getting old; the new version of the otherwise stunning Vistered Little theme was performing even slower than the last, so I set out on search for a new template.

I finally found Yichi’s Resurrection - which is fast performing and very beautiful. A couple of things were broken due to it not being a WP2.3 template, however when I got rid of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and replaced it with Reciprocity’s Configurable Tag Cloud - things were much better.

I also set up a twitter account, which looks like an interesting thingie - I will see how I go with it, on top of Facebook, Google Talk and other places to set my current status.

After a multi year long break from dancing I’m happy to have found Melbourne Music Academy in Melbourne city. I discovered that they offer a fantastic range of classes, on a whim I went there the same day 3 weeks ago, and immediately bought a multi pass card. I’m aiming for two hip hop and one popping session per week - all coming under the street dance umbrella.

Continue reading »

Perhaps ironically, at least from a certain point of view, the Star Wars theme song was playing as I entered the premises of Microsoft’s Heroes Happen 2008 event.

I wondered, had the empire turned into rebels (in their own view)? Who is the new empire to rebel against? Or were they just blissfully aware of this angle? Continue reading »