beer planet

Updated: July 26th, 2008

One of my most favorite movie series is not over yet. This is excellent news!

Producer Frank Marshall revealed plans to begin shooting a fourth Jason Bourne movie next Summer, for release in 2010. Universal announced the project back in February, with director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon set to return. Marshall also confirmed that they will probably be creating an original story for the fourth film.

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Updated: June 26th, 2008

I am usually very skeptical towards new startups, as most tend to do one thing and not so well or many things even less successfully. Zoomii, however, is what I found very useful. It creates the kind of feeling that you get when you're in control, when you can see at a glance what's going on. Zoomii is a virtual bookstore, with an Amazon backend. They took a different approach and made everything very visual, just like in the brick and mortar store – and I love it.

You can browse the latest releases or the top sellers, or perform a search and get hundreds of book covers, uncluttered by any text (until you click on any of them). The interface is amazingly friendly and simple, everything is draggable and zoomable – hence the name Zoomii, and here's the best part: it doesn't use Flash, everything is in Javascript. You can buy books without leaving the site or reloading any pages (of course, how else would they make money?). I think it's better explained through a couple of screenshots I took or by going to Zoomii itself:

My Search for 'Perl':

The Fiction bookshelf (It has Everything is Illuminated, weee!):

What a breath of fresh air, don't you think? Credit to MakeUseOf for the tip.

Hey, it's Matt again from www.wherethehellismatt.com and his 2008 video is absolutely stunning. In short, Matt goes around the world and performs a little dance, purposely bad. The scenes from his videos were already amazing enough but this one absolutely tops them all. This my most favorite video in a long while.

So the Comcast installer just left, and I'm sitting here in my new house, on the floor, with no furniture, testing how fast the internet actually is (because who really cares about other stuff?). Comcast Blast is supposed to be 16mbps down and 1mbps up (2 if you're extremely lucky). I'm still collecting my jaw all over the floor though, because these are the speed test results:

That's a 3 mbit per second upload = 375 KB/s. Wow, Comcast, just wow. I know there are many people having complaints about service but after being a customer for 8 years, I really am happy with everything. Blows the puny DSL away.

If you're like me, most of your Wordpress plugins are checked out into your plugins directory from the official Wordpress SVN repository or some other one. I haven't updated any of mine for about a month and wanted to sync up everything quickly (including SVN externals). Here's a short command I ran to achieve that:

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cd YOUR_BLOG_ROOT/wp-content/plugins;
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec svn up {} \;

What this command does is finds the top level directories in your Wordpress plugins directory, then applies the "svn update" command to each, one by one.

The result is something like

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Fetching external item into 'akismet'
A    akismet/readme.txt
Updated external to revision 50666.
 
Updated to revision 8094.
At revision 8094.
U    share-this/sharethis.php
Updated to revision 50666.
D    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-js.php
D    wp-postratings/postratings-usage.php
D    wp-postratings/postratings-js.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-js-packed.js
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-js.js
U    wp-postratings/postratings-css.css
U    wp-postratings/postratings-options.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-templates.php
U    wp-postratings/postratings-stats.php
U    wp-postratings/readme.html
A    wp-postratings/postratings-js.js
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings.pot
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings-widget.php
U    wp-postratings/postratings-uninstall.php
U    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-ajax.php
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings.mo
U    wp-postratings/readme.txt
U    wp-postratings/postratings-manager.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-js-packed.js
Updated to revision 50666.
At revision 8094.
...

With such mass updating, of course, an incompatibility in one of the updates can break the whole blog. In my case, it happened to be the latest version of wp-sticky. I identified it by disabling wp-super-cache first, then disabling each updated plugin one by one. Once identified, I did the following:

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cd wp-sticky
svn log | head

That showed me the latest commits by the author as well as the SVN revision numbers. I then used this information to revert one revision back by doing:

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svn up -r 50489

The following command showed a diff of what exactly changed in that revision and broke everything:

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svn diff -r50489:50490

Once everything was stable, I emailed the plugin author to tell him about the bug (heya, Lester). Be careful not to run 'svn up' on this directory again until the bug is fixed as it'll persistently update to the latest version.