Anyways, I’ve been playing around with Tumblr recently and have created my own tumblelog: Phewse. This is more the style I like to post things—a collection of a bunch of short entries/links—so we’ll see how it goes. If I like it, I might go ahead and transition to only using that (although I barely use fidgeting.net, anyways). First task is creating my own Tumblr template, so watch for updates in that department.

Oh, and I’ve been receiving lots of email about Ultimate Category Excluder, and apparently it doesn’t play nicely with WP2.2. I don’t really have any time to devote to improving it, so if someone else wants to take over, let me know.

Instead, the best way is to have everything visible by default in your CSS file and use Javascript to “unhide” it. To illustrate this concept, I’m going to go through a quick example utilizing the excellent jQuery.

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That being said, I think it’s time for me to switch gears a bit with this site. I’ve decided I want to go in an almost completely different direction and create a site with news and reviews for movies. I really love movies, and I also really like researching them as well, reading reviews, trivia, and so on, so I think that a movie site will be a more natural fit for me. Right now, I’m not sure on the details—the site may still inhabit fidgeting.net, but I might also decide to create a completely new site for it.

Posts here are likely to become rare as I think about the new site, but hopefully in a little bit I will be able to launch a far more interesting site (for me and for visitors).

As you may or may not have heard, Sony and Stanford University released a Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3. This is awesome in itself, but what’s more is amazing is the effect it’s had on the computing power of F@H. If you look at the current numbers, the PS3 has almost tripled the computing performance (in teraflops) of every other operating system.

This absurd amount of processing power is primarily due to the fact that the PS3 is designed to produce beautiful graphics, which seems to have the same sort of needs as folding proteins. Video cards, in general, seem to have a tremendous ability to process these sorts of numbers, because if you look at the numbers, although there are only about 700 GPUs (other than PS3) crunching numbers for F@H, they are doing the same amount of work of around 25,000 Linux boxes.

Hopefully this move by Sony will encourage Nintendo and Microsoft to implement similar clients on the Wii and Xbox. By allowing these machines to fold proteins in their spare time, it may very well lead to significant advances in research of diseases such as cancer. Pretty amazing that playing video games may very well lead to a cure for cancer.

So far, I’m really liking the controller—it just feels much more intuitive. For instance, yesterday I got my sister and parents playing Wii Sports with virtually no instructions: all I had to say is “do it like you’re playing tennis,” and they played Wii Tennis with ease. Were this a regular controller, they would’ve had no chance of learning with so little instruction. As of right now, there really aren’t too many games out for the Wii yet, but I think as soon as developers start figuring out how to best use the new controller, there will be a heavy flow of innovative titles. Personally, I’m really looking forward to First Person Shooters on the Wii (there’s a good article over at Joystiq about possible controls), but I’m even more excited to see how many new ways game developers find to use the Wiimote.

Hopefully I’ll pick up a more few games soon—Excite Truck looks like it should be lots of fun, as will Mario Party 8 when it comes out.

Classic.

Keep it Simple, Stupid

With the redesign of the site, I really wanted to make sure everything was reader friendly—I hate sites with overfilled sidebars and inaccessibly content. I (hopefully) made it easy to read and browse—the simple 2-column layout helps this, and I tried not to go overboard on extras. I also reduced the number of full entries on the front page to 3–this way the it isn’t as intimidating, and it will load (slightly) faster.

This Redesign Brought to you by…

A lot of the underlying code was inspired by Cutline, a fantastically modifiable WordPress theme. I also referred to the SimpleBits stylesheet if I ran into trouble coding the design.  Also, all the icons are from the Silk set.

What Comes Next?

I’m certainly not done tweaking the site—there are a lot of things I still need to play around with until I get them right. I’m also taking this as an opportunity to go back and rewrite my static pages. Once I finalize how I want to do it, I’m also going to have a portion of the sidebar dedicated to the recent movies I’ve seen. I have that featured pretty much finished, I’m just working on how to best implement it. Beyond that, who knows? In a few months’ time, I’ll probably be fed up with this design and ready for a new one. Also, as far as cross-browser compatibility, I’m sure this design sucks. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it accessible to many browsers, but for right now, I only know that it works in Firefox and IE7. Enjoy!

A little while back, I wrote about Netflix “Watch Now”, the movie streaming service from Netflix. Today, I was finally able to test it out, as my account had it activated (how, I’m not quite sure—the tab just appeared). Overall, I was fairly impressed: my thoughts on the good and bad follow:

The Good

• Generous viewing time – For every $1 you spend on Netflix each month, you get 1 hour of online viewing. This means that I get 15 hours per month that I can watch movies online—not bad! There’s even a potential for bonus time.
• Good video quality – For streaming video, the quality was quite good. I had no problems with skipping, although the soundtrack was a little off during portions of the movie (Word Wars is what I watched)
• Quick and easy installation – To get the player running, it took at most five minutes—I fired up Internet Explorer (which unfortunately is the only supported browser at the moment) and Netflix installed everything for me. The only little blip was that Windows Media Player had to be upgraded, but that was as simple as pressing “Upgrade”.
• Easy to use player – The video player was dead easy to operate—play, pause, fast forward—all of the basic controls you need.

The Bad

• Limited selection – At the moment, only 13 of the 156 movies in my queue were available to be viewed online and, with the exception of Word Wars, they were all fairly old. I’m sure this will improve with time, but at the moment, it’s a little disappointing.
• No advanced features – I was unable to find any way to display subtitles, and there certainly weren’t any special features—just the movie.
• No auto-resume – Unless I’m mistaken, there is no way to resume a movie where you left off. For instance, I watched a few minutes of the movie and then exited. It would have been nice if it restarted right where I left off, but instead, it went back to beginning. Annoying, but not terrible.
• Only supported on Windows in Internet Explorer – This is a real downer, but hopefully they’re working on other systems/browsers. I really don’t like opening up IE any more than I have to.

The Ugly

• Watch Now crashed my browser twice, and I had to reboot my system. – When I started the movie, I exited out once or twice, to see what would happen. The second time, I had to force quit IE, and open it back up again. The movie still wouldn’t play, so I had to do a reboot. After that, everything went fine, but it didn’t leave the best first impression.

I’m really interested to see how this service plays out—it could either be a huge flop or a big success. I think that, as long as newer movies are released this way, it will take off. Otherwise, I don’t see it gaining widespread use.

I was pretty impressed with the Academy Awards in general tonight: Ellen DeGeneres did a great job hosting, the in between acts were interesting (the Snakes on a Plane silhouette was classic), and, well, Jack Black and Will Ferrell did a duet—need I say any more? A few comments on the winners (and losers):

• I have to see West Bank Story. The tagline says it all: “A little singing, a little dancing, a lot of hummus.” Unfortunately, Netflix does not have it (yet), but I’m hoping they’ll have it available soon.
• Hollywood loves Al Gore. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it seems like no matter what he did, whether presenting or accepting awards, the audience loved it. An Inconvenient Truth won both of the categories it was nominated for.
• Even if you have a 3 out of 5 chance of winning, it’s not a guarantee. Somehow, despite having three songs nominated, Dreamgirls failed to win Best Song, to, you guessed it, a song from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
• Rags-to-riches stories are in. Between Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland and Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls, we got our share of impossible childhood dreams coming true. But, I guess every year there’s always a story like that.
• It’s too bad most of the movies aren’t on DVD yet. Because of my limited mobility without a car here, I haven’t been able to get to the movie theater very much, so I wasn’t able to see many of the films that were nominated (and also because of the insane prices charged for tickets). Since most of my movie watching is through Netflix, it would have been nice to get some of the films on DVD before they won the awards.

Not much more to say than that other than congratulations to Martin Scorsese; he certainly deserved the award. For more coverage, Wikipedia, naturally, is the place to go.

UPDATE: Here’s the Jack Black and Will Ferrell bit (unceremoniously stolen from YouTube):