WarGames 25th Anniversary

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie “WarGames” it’s showing in select theaters tonight at 7:30pm! You can use the event locator to see if it’s playing near you.

Unfortunately I just found out about this today and have prior plans so I can’t go … but I totally would if I could. As I mentioned two weeks ago when I was reunited with my old Atari 800XL, “WarGames” was the movie that really piqued my interest in computers and got me started down the technology path.

This is also a promotional event since the new sequel, “WarGames: The Dead Code” is being released on DVD next week.

Blast from the (computing) past

When I was up in Ohio on vacation last week, my mom presented me with a cardboard box she found while cleaning out the basement. Score!

The Atari 800XL was my first computer, given to me by my parents as a Christmas present in the early 80s. That, combined with seeing the movie “WarGames“, is what steered me into computers and eventually, my career. This particular 800XL isn’t my original unit. I sold that one and “upgraded” to this one, which had the RAMBO XL memory upgrade to a whopping 256k (from the original 64k). So technically it’s my second computer. 😉

The cardboard box also contained my two 1050 floppy drives, a KoalaPad (no stylus), and an ICD P:R: Connection. I also had a 256k ICD MIO but sadly that was missing. I used to run a BBS on all of this hardware and with the 256k internally on the computer and the 256k external RAMDisk I was able to load the entire thing into memory to minimize floppy disk access. The 1050s were not the quietest drives and since the whole setup was in my bedroom, I could get woken up in the middle of the night when someone on the BBS saved a message board post and the disk drive would grind to life.

I managed to get the Atari hooked up to a Sony LCD HDTV in my home office:

Seeing and using the Atari again, compared to my Eee, really drives home how far computing has come in the past 25 years. Wow.

Now if my mom could only find the other box filled with game cartridges and disks …

“WALL-E” is great!

We took my daughter to see Disney Pixar’s latest animated feature, WALL-E, tonight, and it was great. For a film with only a few characters and almost no dialog, it tells a story anyone can follow and understand. It’s not as cartoonish or cutesy as Pixar’s previous fare but will still reach out to all ages (there were several over-55 couples in the theater we went to).

For a box with tank treads and a pair of binoculars stuck on top, WALL-E himself is amazingly expressive. EVE was obviously designed by someone (Jobs?) at Apple with her smooth, white, iPhone-ish appearance (in other nods to Apple, WALL-E’s boot-up sound is the same one used on the Mac, an iPod video makes a cameo, and according to IMDB the voice of AUTO was done by MacInTalk, Apple’s text-to-speech program). My personal favorite was MO, the little cleaning robot who is just trying to keep the Axiom clean despite WALL-E tracking dirt everywhere.

There are plenty of sci-fi references in the film for the older crowd. AUTO, the Axiom star cruiser’s auto-pilot has a HAL-like red eye; Sigourney Weaver is the Axiom’s computer voice; “Also sprach Zarathustra” (also known as the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey“) is used at one point. I’m sure there were others I missed but there was a lot to take in with just a single viewing.

Oh, and the magic hat/rabbit short at the beginning was hilarious too.

Two thumbs way up … I highly recommend it.

Fix for local radar image in Galleon’s weather app

A few weeks ago, the Local Radar screen in Galleon‘s weather application started showing “N/A” instead of the image from weather.com. Galleon has been dormant, development-wise, for a while. It was updated late last year with some bug fixes and HD support by s2kdave and jtkohl, but has lapsed into the realm of unsupported (but really useful) applications.

s2kdave pointed me in the right direction as to which piece of the code contained the URLs for the local radar image (WeatherData.java). I’m not really a java programmer, but I can code, so I decided to take a look and see if I could figure out the problem. It took me a while, but the fix ended up being rather simple.

In the determineLocalRadar function there are two try blocks. The first section grabs the weather page for the user’s specified ZIP code:

GetMethod get = new GetMethod("http://www.weather.com/weather/map/" + mZip);

It then parses through that HTML looking for the following strings:

String REGEX = "var mapNURL = \"(.*)\";";

or

REGEX = "src=\"/maps/local/local(.*)\"";

This was used to detemine the URL of the web page containing the local radar image. The second try block then grabbed that page:

get = new GetMethod("http://www.weather.com"+ radarurl);

and parsed it for the URL of the image itself:

String REGEX = "NAME=\"mapImg\" SRC=\"([^\"]*)\"";

What I found is that the first web page (the ZIP code-specific one) now contained the local radar image, so there was no need for the first try block anymore (the one creating the radarurl variable). I removed the block and re-compiled the code.

It worked! I tested with three different area codes in Galleon and the proper local radar image was retrieved each time. Of course, I can’t stop weather.com from changing their layout again, but this should work for now.

You can download my new weather.jar file and place it in the apps directory where Galleon is installed. I also posted about my fix on the TiVo Community Forum here.

Vista SP1 “reliability” update

Microsoft has released “a reliability and performance update for Windows Vista SP1-based computers.” According to the KB article, the update specifically addresses a problem with e-mail clients and ZoneAlarm, so maybe it will fix my Vista woes (no mention of a VPN fix, though).

I’ve downloaded and applied the patch, but I’m in no rush to attempt running ZoneAlarm again just yet.