The movie has been criticized for the same things that make it a great dramatic story on its own. But there are good reasons for some of the choices it makes.

Warning: Encounter many SPOILERS, you will.

When making a telescope mirror on the machine, two parameters are important: the rotation speed of the mirror, and the rotation speed of the overarm eccentric. Other environmental parameters also matter: temperature and humidity are foremost here. To more easily monitor and display these variables, I've built an electronic device that collects this data and shows it on the control panel. This is how to build the device.

One VPN server not reliable enough? Create more than one, and connect them together.

Building a distributed VPN mesh (multiple VPN servers, authenticating same accounts, having same routing)? Want to give a security boost to authentication? Thinking about multifactor? Here's one of the many architectures that work.

There's a cornucopia of tools for monitoring cloud infrastructure: Sensu, Graphite, Logstash, Riemann, etc. The very, very good news is that most of these tools speak each other's protocols. This opens up a lot of possibilities: from small setups where some components (e.g. the message queue) are reused, serving many purposes at once, to complex architectures where the various functions are decoupled, there are large amounts of redundancy at various levels, etc.

Just a quick link to the polishing log for the 150 mm parabolic telescope mirror:

http://florin.myip.org/ATM/

An ATtiny2313 chip, some C code, a bunch of LEDs and other components - that's your DIY Halloween decoration this year. I'll show you how to do it, and there's a video at the end of this page showing the digital creepiness in action.

A few years ago I bought a motorcycle, and quickly discovered the necessity of trying to predict other people's behavior on the road - profiling, basically, not for the sake of it, but in the interest of my own safety. On a bike, the main source of trouble is not yourself, it's other people. Also, on a bike, trouble is either absent, or very very big. So I started to collect these observations - and continued to do so even later when driving my very boring and average four-wheel sedan.

These are not inflexible rules, but merely "statistical truths". I do think the observations are sound, so I use them all the time as guidelines. Here's the list:

Finally got rid of cable TV today (actually Mihaela did, it was her initiative). Renting movies on Netflix is quite enough, even more so if you consider that you can do video streaming from Netflix directly to the PS3. What with their tens of thousands of titles, I'll never run out of movies to watch. Kids get their cartoons too from the same source. Plenty of fish in that pond.

This is the third part of the review. The second part is here:

http://florin.myip.org/blog/zeitgeist-movie-debunked-part-2

I had no intention to write about "Zeitgeist" at all. I've skimmed it shortly after its release, seeing as it had generated a pretty consistent buzz on the blogosphere and the discussion forums. I've seen references popping up here and there afterwards, but mostly I just ignored them. So I thought the whole affair was dead and buried and I was well on my way to forget it. Except, I was not aware of the impact and influence that the movie still had in the time that followed - and still has today. That was my biggest surprise, and the reason why I'm writing now.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

OK, I'm lying. I'm also writing about it because I need the exercise - you know, to keep that pen sharp, or rather that word processor busy. But regardless of the reason, here it is, my review. Sort of.

Bioshock is a first-person shooter game, released in 2007.

http://www.bioshockgame.com/

The plot follows plane crash survivor Jack, as he enters and explores the underwater city of Rapture, the goal being survival and finding a way out of the city. The game looks and feels like a morality-based Doom, of sorts, but the story has surprising and fascinating connections which are not obvious at first sight.

This is part 2 in the motorcycles series, and the follow-up to my essay "The engines of joy" which has been published here:

http://florin.myip.org/blog/node/22

This time I will examine the same themes, but from a different perspective.

On January 9th 2006, while riding my motorcycle to work, I had an accident. I thought the car ahead of me in the left-hand lane was going to swerve into my lane. That was not true, but I acted upon this false impression and I hit the front brake hard. The front wheel froze, the tire lost traction, the bike fell on the left side. I hit the road and tumbled a dozen times or more. The bike was a total loss. I was rushed to the hospital - the result: broken right ankle, broken left collarbone. I underwent surgery to fix my ankle, which put a metal piece in my foot and several screws to keep together the shattered bones. I had to do many months of physical therapy to recover the ankle, which may or may not be ever the same - it's too early to tell now, about 9 months later, although I made huge progress and the prospects look good. My own god damn fault, this whole affair, but that's not the topic of these pages.

And yet, one of the things I often - nay, I permanently dream about is to get back in the saddle. Keep reading to find out why.

Official site and IMDb page:

http://troymovie.warnerbros.com/
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0332452/

The greatest battle of the antiquity. The greatest heroes. The greatest story.

Troy.

Read on for the full review...