Ok, off topic...but neat.

C’était un Rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch.

Most likely you have seen this video, it was titled various things on the video websites...but it seems the videos are now pulled...it is out on DVD.

The film is shot with one camera mounted to the front of a Mercedes sedan and in 10 minutes goes from one part of Paris to another. The story is that the driver was late to meet his girlfriend. The driver is driving fast, is running red lights, going the wrong way down streets...and the whole thing was done in one shot. Also it was done without any approval or support of city officials...and nobody to stop the regular traffic on the roads.

A making-of documentary...actually the filmaker retraces the steps in another Mercedes.

This Mashup is cool...it has the route painted on a Googlemap in time with the video (but I think the video link they are using is broke)...no matter, the mashup doesn't actually use the video, it just runs in time with it.

Here some math folks calcuate the actual speeds accomplished.

Here is a translation of an interview with Mr Lelouch.

I am impressed by it, I have ordered the DVD, hopefully the quality is way better than the online videos.

Now that I have been to Paris, and seeing the video again I actually recognize part of the path...the next time I go I will try to make my way to the overlook at the end of the film.

WinXP Home...sucks?

So I got a second Dell Mini 9...this one for the wife. I decided (and she agreed) that OSX will be the primary OS on her machine (easy plug and play for her camera for viewing and printing).

Well it arrived in the mail from the Dell refurbished warehouse about 2 days after I ordered it with free shipping.

Unfortunately I was heading out of town that afternoon and couldn't do an OSX install in that short amount of time, so I decided to simply set up the XP Home with the house network so she could do some surfing.

Well I found out to my horror that the install that came on the machine was UNABLE to access my WPA encrypted wifi network. For comparision, Ubunutu immediately logged in, XP Pro immediately logged in, OSX immediately logged in.

I downloaded all the upgrades (took a couple of hours) still no WPA. Reading some forums gave some solutions, but I had run out of time, so it sits there on my desk, in front of the two 22" LCD monitors plugged into an ethernet cable...pathetic.

I could attempt to figure out what the problem is...maybe old drivers...but I don't care, I will put a fresh install of XP Pro on a small partition of the new SSD drive, and OSX on the rest.

Whatever the issue is, the Mini 9 should have shipped with the latest patches and drivers...

OpenVPN tunneling revisited

Well first I used the default standard VPN tunneling port...it was blocked.

Then I tried to use port 443 (SSH)...it was also blocked.

So finally I set the VPN to port 80 (HTTP)...that one worked! Only drawback is I have a webserver that can only use port 80...well I simply have my router...route a different port to that machine...and that worked fine.

Ubuntu is still a challenge

I finally got around to updating my Ubuntu install (8.04) on my desktop (not the mini)...so I do the "update my version to 8.10"...and needless to say it broke it hard enough that I can only boot in rescue mode to terminal...I am sure it has something to do with the ATI display. But I haven't been able to fix it.

So I used some unused space on the drive and installed 9.04 (cleared out my unused OSX and WinXP partitions). 9.04 installed nicely and even has dual monitor ability...unfortunately there are no ATI drivers with this version, and the default drivers only allow a virtual screensize of 2500 wide...so the screen size control limited the size of my 22" screens to 1200x1050 on both...yea, great. Then no matter what I couldn't get one screen to be regular size (1680x1050). So having given up all other options, I installed the ATI driver and completely crashed Ubuntu.

I read some more and found that 8.10 still used the ATI drivers and would run two monitors in mirror mode (which was all I needed for now) in full screen size. So I wiped 9.04 and installed 8.10...works good. Interestingly during the install 8.10 recognized my other linux install and copied over some stuff...9.04 did not recognize any other installs. I then had to copy my ./evolution directory and I instantly had a fully working Evolution email setup (the install had copied all my email address info).

All I had left was VMware...first of all apparently the current version only allows a 30 day free use in workstation...but player is free? I could see the virtual machines directory in the other drive, but I couldn't copy it.

So I had to do a bunch of typing with a 'sudo cp' command...pita but it works.