Michael Caine can f*ck off

Every film so far. Can anyone think of a film where he hasn't hammed it up to the max, embarassing the professionally trained actors around him, whilst getting as much cash as possible from the "gor blimey spare arf a shillin' for a lonely faggot" accent? Damn his eyes, especially for his part in the film I just finished watching: Mona Lisa; a great film with some smart acting by Bob Hoskins and Robbie Coltrane, a solid script with intelligently balanced sympathies (a rare quality in modern films). Caine shits all over it with his twitching, arm-waving overacting, making a set-top box with a fast-forward feature a must. For UK viewers, buy this: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/97845. For an 80G HD and reasonable features, it's well worth the price. Currently mine is recording Battle Royale for later viewing; along with 28 Days later and a smattering of other choice films (mostly from Film 4), I now have a good Saturday night selection for when the time comes.

None of which features Michael Caine. Because he's an embarassment to every movie he has ever been in, and succeeds because Americans believe him to be "authentic" "English" (punctuation deliberate).

What would be good would be a Battle Celebtrite - I reckon the winner would totally be Simon Amstell - in extremis,I reckon he would be be both tactical and ruthless. Cunning fuck.

Michael Caine can f*ck off

Every film so far. Can anyone think of a film where he hasn't hammed it up to the max, embarassing the professionally trained actors around him, whilst getting as much cash as possible from the "gor blimey spare arf a shillin' for a lonely faggot" accent? Damn his eyes, especially for his part in the film I just finished watching: Mona Lisa; a great film with some smart acting by Bob Hoskins and Robbie Coltrane, a solid script with intelligently balanced sympathies (a rare quality in modern films). Caine shits all over it with his twitching, arm-waving overacting, making a set-top box with a fast-forward feature a must. For UK viewers, buy this: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/97845. For an 80G HD and reasonable features, it's well worth the price. Currently mine is recording Battle Royale for later viewing; along with 28 Days later and a smattering of other choice films (mostly from Film 4), I now have a good Saturday night selection for when the time comes.

None of which features Michael Caine. Because he's an embarassment to every movie he has ever been in, and succeeds because Americans believe him to be "authentic" "English" (punctuation deliberate).

What would be good would be a Battle Celebtrite - I reckon the winner would totally be Simon Amstell - in extremis,I reckon he would be be both tactical and ruthless. Cunning fuck.

You know Microsoft Outlook?

It can unequivocally Fuck Off.

Too many hours in your day? Time hanging a little heavy on your hands? Then try this and your spare time will disappear, like a fart in a high wind.

Get an Outlook 2000 PST file that silently corrupted and try to recover as many emails as possible from it. The best way to do this is to use the Microsoft's PST Crop Circle tool (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=296088), named after the way it turns up, flattens large tracts of your email in an almost logical pattern, then buggers off laughing. To find the maximum number of mails recoverable, start by excising 50Mb, run the humorously titled Repair Tool, wait 30 minutes, then wince. Try again with a smaller amount, and repeat. What do you mean you haven't got an arbitrary number of half-hours available?

Be warned, the result won't generally have less than 25M of email gone. If 85% of your mail is less than 50K long, you stand to lose over 500 emails. Just as well you have a good memory, because otherwise you might have been slightly inconvenienced.

Now, get the emails out of there and into Outlook 2003, which you have purchased at eye-watering expense to prevent this situation occurring again, because (like me) you are beautifully sweet and naive and believe the assertion that problems like this do not occur in the more up-to-date product. No, don't try and import them directly from the old PST - that doesn't work. Don't export them to a PST with OL 2K and try and open them with OL 2K3 - that also doesn't work. What you do it export them with 2K to a new PST, then separately import them using 2K3. You also don't want to stress the poor thing too much, so copy emails in batches of 1000 at a time. But don't expect the cursor to remain on the last file you viewed when you return to the folder!

Then, import using the "Humble Supplication to Gruppenfuhrer Gates" button and watch the progress bar zip to completion. Wow, pretty quick! I guess the £180 I spent on the upgrade to Office 2003 is worth it after all! Hang on.. why did the progress bar start over? Maybe it's doing a consistency check? Like fuck; after it runs through the progress bar 14 more times one comes to the conclusion that it ain't working. This is confirmed when you go to the imported folder - a truly random assortment of your emails have been withheld, presumably wedged up the computers digital ass.

So now, import again, using smaller slices of the inbox. And I mean small. When you hit the file that's causing the problem, the whole copy operation will fail, so you want to minimise your exposure by taking chunks of 500 at a time. Yeah, an inbox with 25000 files at 500 at a time - go on. Like you said, time was hanging on your hands. So why not use it for the computer equivalent of shovelling shit?

Spiders can definitely f*ck off

I was indulging in a spot of nostalgia gaming over the weekend, with a copy of Little Big Adventure 2, the sequel to the fantastic LBA1 (duh..). Although the graphics, control system and use of so-called FMV are pretty dated, the learning curve is perfectly judged and the visual style is very engaging. Most of all, the game draws you in to its own weird little world by encouraging you to explore without ever losing its sense of purpose (something which the GTA series could learn from). Anyhoo, there I was, fully immersed in the game and wandering through a cave with the occasional bat, when out of nowhere came A HUGE FRIGGING SPIDER which started trying to EAT MY HEAD. Due to my magic ball having run out of juice, I had to attack the damn thing with my bare hands, all the while shaking and pouring arachnophobic sweat. I had to then calm my nerves with a spot of scotch before playing on.

My point is this: there should be a ban on all spiders in computer games. Even relatively small ones, but especially bloody huge ones. Notable offenders include: Resident Evil; Zelda (Ocarina and the forthcoming Princess); and Tomb Raider 2. Spiders have been used in these games purely to artificially add a sense of danger and threat to the game; it is sheer laziness on the part of the designers. With arachnophobia constantly topping the phobia charts, it is a cheap way to get people to jump. And no I am not presenting specious arguments just because a crude representation of a spider made me crap myself. Not much, anyway.

A complaint without a constructive suggestion is just bitching, so here we go: I propose replacing all computer game spiders with other threatening things, like jellyfish, snakes, bank statements and Anne Widdecombe. Who's with me?

LBA2 pics:

Printers can f*ck off

Has there been a printer invented that will just work with different OSes, not break every 2 days, not guzzle expensive cartridges, not crash when it's looked at funny and comes with a network card that actually works (note to HP - this isn't bleeding edge technology; so why charge £200+ for a seriously flaky implementation?)?

I just Googled for this image and couldn't find it - it belongs on the internet, so I thought I'd post it. Printers + Domokuns = bad.

Solaris can f*ck off (kinda)

So Solaris has:

• ZFS
• Zones/Containers
• No download/install/run charges
• DTrace
• Binary backwards compatibility
• LAE

but it's still a crock of shit, despite opinions like this. Having installed Solaris Express Build 40, the following things have contributed to this opinion.

1) The root user has, as its home directory, the root of the filesystem. Yup, that's / . I read a Linux book published in 1902 that mentioned this as a foible of archaic Unices, before saying that all modern flavours have sensibly gone on to use /root. But this is a 2006 OS!

2) There is no top, free, or sudo. You have to Google around to find replacements for these tools - but why should we have to bother? These have been standard *NIX tools since the day dot, if Sun wants to reinvent the wheel it can be my guest, but why chuck these venerable tools out?

3) ksh. A lot of people think this stands for the Korn shell, but it actually stands for krock of shit. Use bash like everyone else: tab completion is A Good Thing!

4) A reasonable package management system. This one's a biggie. How much time do you think I have to fart around the internet looking for software in a format that Solaris will like, only to have to sort out dependancies? Whether it's along the lines of ports. yum, apt, or even (God forbid) YaST, there should be something that gives straightforward access to (for example) an IMAP server package, following all dependencies. This is the 21st century - if Debian can do it, so can Sun.

Can't think of anything else of the top of my head at the moment, but will add to this list as I find further idioshitnesses.

Update:

Why the fuck is the compilation environment set up all arse-about-face? A simple ./configure results in a
*** You must set the environment variable CC to a working compiler
as the CC envvar has been set to /usr/bin/cc - a non-existent file. Changing this to /usr/ucb/cc (today's arbitrary path to the Sun compiler) results in a
/usr/ucb/cc: language optional software package not installed
Do I look like someone who gives a flying fuck about this? Sort your bleeding environment out before releasing code, you twats at Sun.

OpenBSD can f*ck off

I've had it with OpenBSD. Of all the wrongheaded, counterintutitively coded pieces of software I have ever had the misfortune to use, this has to be the worst. I've lost the best part of two working weeks to this pile of crap, and I'm thoroughly fucked off with it.

Theo de Raadt - next time you're in England, keep an eye out, because now IT'S ON. You're gonna get your ass smacked with a menu-driven interface, boy.

Starting off

Can't work, so I started a blog. Can't work due to a) hangover b) Kronenbourg being drunk to alleviate effects of same. Waiting to see if I get inspired as to what the hell to do with the thing. In the meantime, you're only allowed to post to this if you're hungover. Proof may be required.