Incomplete TV Shows

Not every TV serie will be successful. So it's possible that some series won't be continued on TV. If this happens, most of the time they have some sort of scenario to end the show. Star Trek Enterprise was one of those shows. The show was killed, and they had 4 (or 5) episodes to end it. Not my cup of tea, but the show ended somewhat decent. Lately, the dutch TV stations are buying new TV shows from the US. These shows are pretty new (Heroes, Day Break, Traveler, etc.), so finally we don;t have to wait 5 years to watch a new show. But there's a catch. Almost every new show was killed prematurely in the States. So the result is a TV show with a crappy ending. [spoiler] Traveler has 8 episodes, and ends in the middle of the action, with a ton of unanswered questions (who was the black bellboy, What happens to the main character's girlfriend?, etc.). At least ended Day Break a bit decent..... [/spoiler]

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'rm -rf *' for Dummies

Everyone who has worked a bit with Linux/Unix/OSX knows that the command 'rm -rf *' is kinda destructive (understatement). Compare it with the old 'deltree.exe' command in MS-DOS. The latter explains it without saying too much about it. Anyway, yesterday I ran into an annoyance of OSX (and it wasn't the first time I ran into it). Every once in a while when I mount a smb share on my MacBook Pro nothing happens. When I try to connect again I get a message that I'm already connected to that share :?: :?: , but there's no visible indication in the Finder of this. The way to see the shortcut to the share (for me at least) is to relaunch Finder (Force Quit). But this is highly annoying. Yesterday I decided to take a look under the hood, and started terminal and opened the Volumes directory. This contained over 30 sub directories, and they all had names similar to the smb shares (ftp, ftp-1, ftp-2, web, web-1, etc). the directories were empty (the +10 I checked anyway), so I wanted to delete al those directories in the hope that my annoying messages about being connected would be gone. First I entered every directory and removed the .DS_STORE file by hand and after that I removed the directory with rmdir. This would take more time than I wanted to spend, so I needed something quicker, and what's quicker than the rm command with all the appropriate switches?? I made sure that I wasn't executing the command from the root of the drive (he, I'm not that stupid). So after I executed the command I heard something weird. I heard the hard disks in my server go crazy.....

Aaaaaarrrggghhhh Somehow there still was a share mounted, and the rm command was recursively deleting ALL content on the share. By the time I realized this (about 5 to 10 seconds) my 300GB drive was 90% empty instead of 95% full.Thankfully I had some excellent undelete tools on my server so I was able to recover the content over the network to my PC, and after that I could copy them back to my share.

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Movie Backlog

The summer is playing up on me at this moment. The long days are killing my movies hours so to say. normally I could watch a couple of movies a week, but the last couple of month I've been neglecting myself (sort of). There are over 15 movies which I have to see, but there are more and more movies released every day. Also the sitcoms aren't helping. At this moment I'm going through the "That 70's Show" like a maniac (3 seasons done, lots of them to go). That Donna chick keeps me going :P .... And now the Traveler series is starting here in the Netherlands.... Even more to catch up to. When will it end??? (Hopefully never :wink: )

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First Skype, now Microsoft

Earlier this month, the skype network went down for more than 24 hours Thankfully I don't use Skype, so I wasn;t affected. The only downside I noticed was that the TWiT podcasts were delayed because of the outage. Now the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage server are down (or are having problems). No updates, and no activations for many of you out there. This is what happens when you rely more and more on the Internet.

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Wireless Standards???

First there were wireless networks, then there was WEP. WEP was the protective layer for wireless, so that your data was (kinda) secure when it traveled through the air. This layer was compromised rather quick, so alternatives were needed. The initial alternative was WPA. This new layer of protection was a lot stronger (there still isn't a way of hacking this quickly). Downside was that it took a while to become a standard, so every vendor was free to use it as they saw fit. This could result into incompatibility issues when you used different vendors in your wireless environment. The final WPA standard became WPA2, and was to overcome the incompatibility issues with the earlier WPA.... NOT!!! Most consumer wireless products in my vicinity just won't connect properly using WPA2 (with either AES or TKIP). The only thing that keeps working is WPA. When connecting to a wireless network which is protected with WPA2, everything seems to go fine, but when you want to transfer data, nothing happens. Also, the wireless base station doesn't show any association with the client. What is wrong with this picture? Does this mean that there are also different implementations of WPA2 among vendors? A quick WPA2 configuration with a 32 character (or 16 character) WPA2-PSK key just won't work, while the client devices all support at least WPA2-PSK with TKIP.

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Do You Trust 'Kozjegyzoi Tanusitvanykiado'?

Updated on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 11:53 by Willem

Perhaps you don't, but your computer does! At this moment there are over a hundred Trusted Root Certifications Authorities in your browser or Operating System. Many of those don't mean anything to me. When a Trusted Root Certification Authority is available in your browser or OS, you don't get any questions/pop-up that your entering a secured Internet connection. This means that the certificate was issued by someone trustworthy. Who decides who or what company is trustworthy? I know most of the commercial SSL vendors like VeriSign, Thawte, Comodo, Equifax, Entrust, and Cybertrust. Those are the companies which sell most of the SSL certificates used on the Internet. But I haven't heard of Kozjegyzoi Tanusitvanykiado or IPS Seguridad. So do I want to trust certificates issued by them? It would be nice if the browser had an extra message box (yes, another message box :-) ) to verify with the user if the CA should be trusted from this point on. This way the (pro-)user gets to decide if he wants to trust the CA (without the trouble of manually verifying the CA details on the CA website), and the basic user may rely on the recommendation from the OS/browser.

This way I can decide for myself if I want to trust some post-office in Japan or Germany.

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Tripods for Sale

My old tripod were a pain in the @ss. The slightest wind made the camera rock like it was on a boat in heavy weather. The need for something a little more stable was there. The original idea was to get a tripod which weighed about half a kilo. Could hold a weight of 10 kilos, and had the most comfortable ball bearing head available. And (not to forget) wouldn't cost more than 100 euros..... Well, that wasn't about to happen :-( . So I bought a Manfrotto 718B tripod (99 euros). It's small, weighs about 1.5 kilos and can hold about 2.5 kilos of gear (which is about the combined weight of my Nikon D200 and Sigma 80-400 OS lens). So my old tripods [1,2] are for sale as of this moment. You may start your bidding. If you're interested, you should ignore the first paragraph ;-) . There's absolutely nothing wrong with the tripods..... UPDATE: The tripods have been sold (sort of), so please stop bothering me :-)

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REAL Universal Access

I'm still in the process of migrating from Windows to OSX. During this process I run into the most annoying things. The latest annoyance is the way different operating systems access (read AND write) files on volumes (internal, external, network etc.). Windows uses the well-known driveletters (C:, D:,) for local resources, and \\<servername\ networked resources while Apple uses so-called volumes for both. If you try to use a Windows file reference on a Mac, you're out of luck. This is also true the other way around. The reason for this 'rant' is that I use photo catalog / manipulation software on both Windows and OSX. At first, I used different programs on the platforms. This became a problem when I added photos to product X on OSX. When I needed to some work on the Windows machine, I had to add the photo again to product Y on the Windows machine. This results into two different libraries with almost the same content. After some searching I found iView Media Pro (which unfortunately has been acquired by Microsoft). This piece of software is used for cataloging different kinds of media, AND the same software is available on both platforms. Unfortunately, even though the media catalogs could be read on both platforms (the catalog holds the thumbnail and other metadata about the original), the reference to the actual media is platform dependent. So the metadata was showing up, but the actual file could not be read on the other platform. The same problem occurs with Adobe Lightroom. Available on both platforms, but the catalogs can't be exchanged. Why is it so hard to have a product which is available on multiple platforms, and uses some sort of database to be able to exchange data between them? Am I the only one running into to this? Network storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. More people are using network storage to have their content online without have the need of a dedicated (workgroup or enterprise) server. These appliances are accessible through smb, cifs, webdav, etc. Every OS can access the content, but every OS/application uses a different markup. Standardization has a long way to go.....

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