A Day in Paradise

I played with Joost way back in January when it was still called “The Venice Project” and beta testers had to sign NDAs (although that didn’t stop a lot of them). Back then while the technology was great, due to the number of users the quality was mediocre.

I got into Joost again at Stella’s request, when she met someone at the library who wanted an invitation.

I installed joost this evening on my 2.4ghz/1gig Vista Home Basic which is connected to my 32″ LG LCD TV and acts as our “Media Center” and not only is the quality great but the selection has grown to include some real shows (currently watching LEXX).

For those of you who haven’t heard about Joost, it is created by the same people who brought us Skype and works using a peer-to-peer model. Peer-to-pear media streaming is drastically different from the server-based media streaming which we are seeing from various news sites, as well as sites like youtube.com. Before YouTube’s acquisition by Google, they announced that they were spending $1 million on bandwidth alone.

Through using Peer-to-peer technology Joost allows the its software to communicate with other copies of Joost software and distribute the media between themselves. Using traditional file serving each additional user viewing a file creates a larger burden on the server, using P2P each additional user becomes another server in the “swam” and shares that file with other peers the initial seed server load is lightened.

I had an interesting discussion with Stella about how the technology behind Joost would handle streaming live content. Because of the P2P nature of Joost, it would be fairly difficult to distribute truly live content without reverting back to the original server based media serving. That is assuming that Joost is only sending data to my computer which I request and am watching.

If my Joost client can receive data that I am not watching, it would allow the main Joost servers to ensure that all the shows that they are streaming can be delivered in real-time and equal quality and if Joost wants to deliver live events this would probably be the only way that this would be possible.

Anyway… I am VERY happy with the progress that Joost has made, and am looking forward to see how it will move forward.

Oh yeah, and the DRM issue isn’t an issue.

What can I say, Leonardo does the South African accent so well he totally disappears as an actor. Between this movie and “The Departed” which I watched two days ago, my opinion of Di Caprio has totally changed. He has transcended (whatever that is supposed to mean).

Blood Diamond is set in Sierra Leone during the bloody civil war. A fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) finds a pink diamond, and a Diamond Smuggler has to travel with him to retrieve the hidden diamond and save the fisherman’s son.

This movie shows the brutality of the war. It shows the extreme cruelty of the rebels and plight of the child soldiers they recruit, it also shows the foreign army’s involvement in the search for diamonds, as well as the role in western cultures and the massive diamond selling companies.

As you watch this movie, you realize that while it is an amazing character study of all the characters involved, the focal point of the movie is the diamond. This is an expose on the diamond industry and exposes the tactics that they use to keep diamonds in demand and the price as high as it is. For more information about this read the article “Have you ever tried to sell a diamond” by Edward Jay Epstein. The article is over 20 years old, but a very interesting read.

I would give this movie an 8 out of 10. It is very well written and produced. Be warned that the movie is extremely violent, and has many disturbing scenes especially those involving the child soldiers.

Short version – Awesome cinematography, interesting action sequences and CGI – the demonization of the Persians and underlying political rhetoric make the movie hard to watch.

spoilers and ranting ahead… click through at your own risk

(more…)

CD Player region free hack.

The ultimate video conversion tool.

These two items have no connection, I’m just in the market for a good region-free dvd player that I can buy in the US so I won’t have a problem bringing the hundreds of region 2 dvds over. Any suggestions?

Woohoo, new Rambo!

John Rambo has been living a secluded lifestyle in Bangkok and salvaging old boats and tanks for scrap for twelve years. But when a group of volunteer aid workers bringing supplies into Burma disappear, a relative of one of the missing missionaries begs Rambo to find them. He heads off with a small team of aspiring heroes to locate and rescue them.

tip from doug

Just got back from watching Crank. What can you say? It’s craaaazzzzy! A couple quick comments.

• The first time I’ve seen google product placement. Between the scenes there were shots from google maps where it panned across the city and then zoomed in on a street/car/house. In the corner was a “Maps provided by google” logo
• Nokia, having phones ring with the “nokia sound” is just as annoying as hearing the windows sound when laptops boot up.
• You really should watch this with proper surround sound set to the appropriate volume
• We have been desensitized to violence
• We have not been desensitized to Sex and Drugs

Now I want to rant about violence in movies. This movie has a lot of Sex, Drugs and Violence. The “funny” thing about it, is that I was really only “shocked” by the Sex and Drugs. This sort of goes along with the rant about how cartoons are being edited to remove scenes where cartoon characters are chugging on a cigar. This is a cartoon where the characters repeatedly blow each other up with various forms of dynamite/fireworks but we’re offended when someone smokes on a childrens show.

So apart from the crazy ride this movie was, I think that this movie has was some form of social commentary. Why is it “alright” to create action and laugh about people blowing each other up, when it’s not “alright” to laugh at people shooting themselves up with huge drug cocktails and the running around town with a huge erection? Obviously when I say “alright” I mean socially acceptable.

Of course combine them all and you have some great scenes, like where he is involved in a car chace / shootout while getting a blowjob. Gives a whole new meaning to shouting “Keep your head down!”

Another highlight was when he needed the poor indian guy’s taxi so he threw him out of the taxi and yelled “Al Quida”, and have the crowd jump on the poor guy and beat the crap out of him. I know, I shouldn’t have laughed… but again, I think this was yet another peice of social commentary by the director.

English movies in Frankfurt

My sister is visiting for the week, so last night I decided to take her into frankfurt to watch the Pirates of the Caribbean.

There is only one Cinema in frankfurt that shows English movies, it’s called Turm Palast, and it is impossible to find on the internet. It seems like there has been a huge influx of spam which buried the website under a pile of domains with names like “kino-turmpalast-frankfurt.gaysm.augustow.pl”. After searching for a while (and having my browser crash after clicking on exceptionally hostile links) I found the yahoo movies page, which showed me what was on. I’m linking to it now so I don’t have to search google again for this.

So anyway, we make it into frankfurt have an ice-cream work our way to the cinema, sit down and wait. The movie started about 15 minutes late, then showed about 20 minutes of commercials and then 10 minutes of trailers and then stops. We wait for a while, a couple people run in and out, and then the light comes on in the projection room and the technicial fixes the problem and we continue with the trailers. By the time we start the movie over an hour has passed.

The movie starts out alright, of course I can’t remember what the first part was about so Angie gave a quick run down. Just when the movie is getting going (after about 20 minutes) it stops again. We wait for another 15 minutes before a guy comes in and tells us that they can’t fix the problem and everyone can come downstairs and get their money back. This is EXACTLY why I watch my movies at home!

The technician had already gone home, and bringing him back would have taken over an hour. So much for german efficiency.

Anyway the good part of the evening that we bumped into Thorsten (from our UG) and his business partner and had a couple beers before the movie started. I promised I’d send him a URL, but I’ve forgotten to what site

type:google engEDU – Google Video

I’m saving this for when I have a couple of days free

Main Page – Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Wiki

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

This is probably one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year. The title pretty much sums up the premise of the movie, there aren’t a whole lot of big surprises as far as the plot goes, but it’s still an enjoyable watch.

We watched the 133 minute unrated version, which while a bit too long, it had plenty of good laughs, and even had some jokes that I hadn’t seen done before. The song-and-dance ending was especially amusing.

First time I’ve noticed Steve Carell, and thought he did an excellent job.