Star Wars Weekend at Disney 2013

The last time we went over to Disney’s Hollywood Studios for Star Wars Weekends it was the 30th anniversary of “The Empire Strikes Back.” How appropriate, then, that we were back among the Star Wars faithful this Saturday (also Geek Pride Day and Towel Day) celebrating the 30th anniversary of “Return of the Jedi” (which was released on May 25, 1983).

The park was packed, which we expected, but it’s always fun to see all the Star Wars t-shirts and costumes people wear for the festival weekends. With the acquisition of LucasFilm by Disney last year (and the planned new movies), I expected a lot more “Disneyfication” of the franchise and thus wasn’t surprised at the sheer amount of merchandise and Disney/Star Wars swag available at Darth’s Mall and around the entire park.

The parade/motorcade was pretty much exactly the same: a long phalanx of characters from all of the movies with a health sprinkling of their Disney counterparts (Jedi Mickey, Darth Goofy, Chip & Dale as “chipwoks,” etc.). The special guests were Warwick Davis (Wicket the Ewok), Ray Park (Darth Maul), James Arnold Taylor (the voice of Obi Wan in Clone Wars), Ashley Eckstein (the voice of Ahsoka Tano in Clone Wars), and Jim Cummings (voice of Hondo Ohnaka in Clone Wars). We didn’t see nearly as many wandering characters as last time but my daughter did get to give a Wookie a high-five after the motorcade.

Of course we rode the new Star Tours, which had a relatively short standby line (we got through in 15 minutes!). We missed out on a photo opportunity with R2D2 and C3PO again (they were hidden in Darth’s Mall and by the time we got there we had little time before we had to leave and the line was very long) but did wait in line for a photo opp with a clone trooper and Darth Goofy with storm trooper Donald. In Darth’s Mall they had a LEGO-by-numbers exhibit where you could put together a tiny square of colored LEGOs and then add it to the larger mosaic creating the different “Return of the Jedi” movie posters … pretty cool.

Release of the Raring Ringtail

Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) was officially released today, although I was able to download and upgrade my server from Quantal last night, avoiding the rush.

Upgrading to the latest Ubuntu server release is really becoming a non-event for me, which is great news especially since support for non-LTS releases has been cut to 9 months. Starting with 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I have had pretty much no issues to deal with after an upgrade. Just run ‘do-release-upgrade -d’ from the command-line and sit back and wait. Then clean up a few config files to re-apply customizations, reboot, and you’re done.

Since I run just the basic server software (no GUI) I can’t comment on the latest Ubuntu as a client desktop, but check out this article on PCWorld.com for more details.

Next up in October: Saucy Salamander. Saucy!

WIJFR: The Mongoliad: Book Two

The Shield Brethren, an order of warrior monks, search for a way to overthrow the horde, even as the invaders take its members hostage. Forced to fight in the Mongols’ Circus of Swords, Haakon must prove his mettle or lose his life in the ring. His bravery may impress the enemy, but freedom remains a distant dream. Father Rodrigo receives a prophecy from God and believes it’s his mission to deliver the message to Rome. Though a peaceful man, he resigns himself to take up arms in the name of his Lord. Joining his fight to save Christendom are the hunter Ferenc, orphan Ocyrhoe, healer Raphael, and alchemist Yasper, each searching for his place in history.

Today I finished “The Mongoliad: Book Two“, a collaborative effort by Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and Cooper Moo. This second part of the Foreworld Saga picks up immediately from Book One (which makes sense since it was originally one long online serial story that was later split into three parts for publication).

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Using my iPhone with Toyota’s Display Audio system

A few weeks ago I traded in my trusty old 2003 Toyota Highlander (174,000 miles) for a new 2013 SE model. In addition to all the automotive and mechanical advances in a 10-years’ newer SUV, I finally have built-in Bluetooth and iPod integration! (I know, welcome to 2008, right? 😉 ). Toyota’s Display Audio system has a lot of cool features, but as with any “new” technology, it’s not without its share of end-user frustration.

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Farewell Google Reader, hello Feedly

Why does Google keep killing the stuff I actually use? First iGoogle and now last week they announced they will be shutting down Google Reader on July 1st.

I immediately went on a quest to find a decent replacement. After trying out a few alternatives like The Old Reader and NewsBlur, I got a recommendation from a friend to try Feedly. I wasn’t the only one making the switch as the site supposedly gained 500,000 new users in the days after the Google announcement.

It’s been a week and I have to say I like Feedly the best out of the others I tried. It’ll take a little while longer to completely adjust my Google Reader usage habits to Feedly, but at least the initial setup was pretty easy as Feedly uses Google Reader in the background (they claim to have a backup plan in place (called Normandy) to switch to their own engine once Reader is shut down). Check out the comparison screenshots in the gallery at the end of this post to see my Feedly in action. It even has a free iOS companion app (I don’t normally do a lot of RSS reading on my mobile device, but it’s nice to have just in case).

WIJFR: The Mongoliad: Book One

It is the spring of 1241. The Mongol takeover of Europe is almost complete. The hordes commanded by the sons of Genghis Khan have swept out of their immense grassy plains and ravaged Russia, Poland, and Hungary … and now seem poised to sweep west to Paris and south to Rome. King and Pope and peasant alike face a bleak future – until a small band of warriors, inheritors of a millennium-old secret tradition, conceive of a desperate plan to kill the Khan of Khans. Their leader, an elder of the order of warrior monks, will lead his elite group on a perilous journey into the East. They will be guided by an elusive and sharp-witted young woman, who believes the master’s plan is insane. But this small band is the West’s last, best hope to turn back the floodtide of the Mongol Empire.

I received “The Mongoliad: Book One” (by Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, E.D. deBirmingham, Mark Teppo, and Cooper Moo … whew!) as a Christmas gift and finally got around to reading it.

“The Mongoliad” apparently started as a social media experiment, a serialized subscription service by Stephenson and his fellow co-authors. Each chapter was published online with related materials (graphics, etc.) and encouraged community discussions. When the story was complete, the “definitive” text was then published in three volumes in the traditional way.

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Microsoft Surface: RT vs Pro

Surface ProFour months ago I bought my daughter a Microsoft Surface RT tablet for her birthday as a laptop replacement. Last month I got a Surface Pro to use at work (also as a laptop replacement). Having now used both versions of Microsoft’s first tablet I wanted to jot down a few of my own observations about the Pro and how it compares to the RT version.

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Expired TiVo cookie causes Galleon ToGo transfers to fail

On February 16, 2013, TiVo owners everywhere suddenly found that they were unable to transfer recordings off of their DVRs. Third-party applications like kmttg and even TiVo’s own TiVo Desktop were suddenly broken. The problem was tracked down to an expired server-side cookie which, inexplicably, was hard-coded into the TiVo software to expire on 02/16/13.

TiVo’s workaround was to set your computer’s clock back to before February 16, but obviously that’s not a great solution. TCF user morac found a way to fix TiVo Desktop by making a change to the curl.conf file and other application developers made similar changes to their software to essentially use a “dummy” cookie to get around the expired one … much better than changing your system’s date/time.

When someone filed a bug in SourceForge that Galleon was affected by the same problem, I decided to see if I could fix it. It turned out to be a simple, 1-line addition to ToGo.java. Before the fix, after selecting a recording to transfer, I would see this in the log:

20:47:28,196 DEBUG [DownloadThread] DownloadThread - Picked: org.lnicholls.galleon.database.Video@c1d7d2
20:47:28,746 DEBUG [DownloadThread] ToGo - Status code: 400

And after the fix:

21:08:47,684 DEBUG [DownloadThread] DownloadThread - Picked: org.lnicholls.galleon.database.Video@1e00f69
21:08:51,977 INFO [DownloadThread] ToGo - Downloading: The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (Recorded Wed Feb 27 2013 11 35PM WFLADT).TiVo
21:18:13,890 INFO [DownloadThread] ToGo - Download rate=4372.78033848837 KBps

Galleon development has been dead for some time (the last official release was back in 2009), so although my code change has been checked into CVS on SourceForge there won’t be a new install you can download. If you need the patch, you can grab my revised jar file here. Rename it to galleon.jar and drop it into the lib directory of your Galleon installation (you might want to make a backup of the original and your configure.xml file first). Restart Galleon and your ToGo downloads should work again.

Hopefully TiVo will fix this soon, but initial indications seem to point to them “fixing” it in TiVo Desktop and not in the TiVo codebase itself, which means workarounds like this one will still be necessary for third-party apps.

WIJFR: Life of Pi

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal bengal tiger.

We started “reading” the audiobook version of “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel back around Christmas time and on the way to Miami this weekend, finally finished it. Too bad Ang Lee’s movie is out of theaters now, guess we’ll have to rent it.

If you’ve seen any of the trailers for the movie, you probably know that the main plot of the story revolves around a young Indian boy named Pi, shipwrecked and trying to survive on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger. That’s pretty much all I knew going in so the rest of the book really surprised me, in a good way.

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