September 2004 Archives

With the filming of the new Doctor Who series in the UK, there's been talk of a regeneration story. I have to agree with the idea it would be silly to have a regen story (I'm going to abbreviate this to save typing :P) at the start of the series, due to the fact that after a regeneration the Doctor almost always starts out with an unstable personality and it'd be better to start out with an established Doctor so the audience have a better idea what to expect.

OTOH, I'm all for them doing a flashback to a regen story later in the series. Of course, it's unlikely to be like any regen story we've had before.

Most regen stories are along the lines of "The Doctor regenerates at the start and then has this unrelated adventure". I would think that a modern regen story would make the regeneration part of the story. Little really has been done with the concept of regeneration during Doctor Who's run, other than to use it as a plot device to change the leading actor occasionally.

You could have a story, for instance, where the bad guy tortures the previous Doctor to death, followed by regeneration, then the Eccleston Doctor kicks the bad guy's arse and steals his leather jacket. Or my favourite concept, where the previous Doctor and Eccleston Doctor meet up at the start of the adventure, and at the end the previous Doctor is wounded and sent back in time to the start of the story where he regenerates into Eccleston and encounters his previous self. Just to make things confusing.

It can already search for text within files on a disk, but it also needs to have an option to search in zip files... Though that would mean hunting down code to decode zip files. Hrm.

I did a quick Google for applications, which do this already, but they're not free. WinZip 9.0 doesn't appear to do it (Why not?! That would appear to be an invaluable tool!) and there isn't even an official add-on to do it.

I believe Window XP does that already, which might be why it's not in WinZip. But still, needs to be in Yikes, definitely.

My LiveJournal mood icons have turned up in yet another place: Allyn Gibson's WordPress blog. Perhaps I should just retitle them mood icons. :)

No doubt there's a plugin for Movable Type to use mood icons. I should hunt it down.

Textual @traction

What makes the film unique is that the audience does not actually get to see the messages on screen. Instead, by pre-registering, they receive the texts to their own phones at the same time as the characters on screen.

The chorus of text message beeps would be deafening.

Am about to turn 31 in about 25 minutes time. Gah.

I'm shamelessly ripping this idea off of Google Zeitgeist. :)

Popular DiscContinuity Guide entries

1. Creed of the Kromon
2. Living Legend
3. Scherzo
4. Zagreus
5. Davros

Popular albums

1. Era, The Mass
2. The Celtic Circle 2
3. Era, Era 2
4. The Celtic Circle
5. Enigma, Voyageur

Popular NZDWFC archive items

1. Web of Fear/Wheel in Space Clip press release
2. Who Killed Kennedy E-book
3. TSV 21 - I Exterminated JNT!
4. TSV 21 - Who's Who in Blake's 7
5. TSV 13 - Review: Build the TARDIS
6. TSV 58 - Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr. Who

Today's lesson: get the right tool for the job and the job will become much easier.

A long while ago now I opted to mirror Paul Harman's Web Guide to Doctor Who in order to avoid having to maintain my own directory of Doctor Who links. This didn't quite work for two reasons:

1. People still emailed me to ask me to add a link to their web site, despite the word "Mirror" in large letters and a link to the page for adding sites to the Web Guide, and
2. I ended up volunteering to assist Paul in maintaining the Web Guide.

The Web Guide has 21 sections and almost 700 sites listed in it. It's pretty kick ass and I don't think there's another comparable Doctor Who directory in existence. Most other sites mirroring the Guide would simply use a copy of the HTML-Version Paul sends out on a mailing list every update, but I had to be different and split the guide into sections, thus making my job slightly more difficult.

My first technique for doing the update was as follows:

1. Take the HTML web guide and...
2. Replace all the links to graphics to point to the same graphics on my server, avoiding the sticky issue of stealing bandwidth.
3. Copy and paste each section separately into the individual pages.
4. Process the pages into real HTML.
5. Upload all the pages.

But this took too long, and I decided to write a program to make things easier. The technique now became:

1. Copy and paste the HTML web guide into a file with my site format.
2. Feed the resulting page into my Windows-based program, which produces some CSV files to be used to generate the section pages dynamically on the site.
3. Copy and paste the compile date into the mirror index.html.
4. Copy and paste the changes into the changes.html page.
5. Process the pages into real HTML.
6. Upload the three pages and CSV files.

This resulted in a process which was not actually a hell of a lot faster than the first process. Tonight I wrote a completely new perl-based program to turn the process into the following:

1. Upload the HTML web guide.
2. Run the script to process it into all the separate files.

Leaving me more time to play Unreal Tournament 2004, swim the Amazon, invent cold fusion, achieve world peace, etc. Teh skillz.

Bruce Simpson writes a pretty good article on the current state of broadband in NZ. Telecom still had the market pretty much to itself and is making the most of it.

Ironically there was an item on TV1 news tonight about how Auckland University is offering streaming video of lectures over the internet so that students can attend lectures without leaving their home. In my experience, streaming video works very poorly over dial up. Are they suggesting students, many of whom have no other source of income, should borrow even more from the government in order to afford broadband?

From the Weekly World News: How to tell if your prostitute is an extraterrestrial - a classic.

Electoral Vote Predictor - all eyes are on the US for the upcoming election.

I spend some of this weekend getting TSV 26 ready to go online. There is some pretty good material this issue, including:

• The Comic Connection - an item examining the use of concepts from comic books in Doctor Who.
• Part 1 of Murder at Midnight, one of Jeff Stone's fanfics.
• Doctor Who in Advertising - the Prime Computer commercials.
• And an item on the making of Shada, the unfinished Doctor Who story.

In addition to a bunch of other cool stuff.

The Doctor's Dilemmas are difficult to do without them looking like just a bunch of paragraphs of text. I have bolded the first three sentences of the paragraphs in which a question is begun, but it still doesn't help much...

There is also the problem created where the article going online has been revised and no longer matches the description in the index (e.g. the Doctor Who in Advertising piece is described as containing the transcripts of two Prime Computer adverts, which is accurate for the copy which appears in the print issue, but the revised version has transcripts for all four adverts). I have opted to leave the descriptions as is, purely to keep it consistant with the rest of the index, but this leaves the description not quite matching the archived piece.

...And that completes the 1991 set of TSV issues, or Volume 5 as it is referred to in the front cover.

(Via Nostalgia) Lucas still can't leave Star Wars alone, so the new DVDs coming out have even more changes as shown here

Greedo still shoots first. Come on! With Han shooting first, it make him look like a rogue. When Greedo shoots first, it make Greedo look incompetant and makes Han slow on the draw.

Just don't mess with the classics, hey?

Nos' is right though, the fact they're fixing Jabba so he looks more realistic and less like a Playstation game character is good. Even though that scene is pointless and just covers the same one as the previous scene with Greedo.