Classic Horror Movies (1930s)

Currently I have found quite a number of classic horror movies to be available on YouTube:

• Dracula (1931) directed by Tod Browning
• Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian
  
• The Invisible Man (1933), directed by James Whale
• Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (with English subtitles) (1933), director by Fritz Lang
• Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed by James Whale

A team of highly trained monkeys ..

After hitting a wrong URL on You Tube:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information: ...

Anton Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"

Rounders (1998)

That's what I call a sleeper hit movie:

Bapple?

Addicted to Looting

After one of my friends pointed me to Borderlands, an RPG/First Person Shooter, from 2009, I became seriously attached to this game. But see the review by IGN for yourself:

Game of Thrones Season Two

After the marvelous first season, I can't wait for the second season starting in early 2012:

z A z

Nicht!

The Dream

On Spending Public Funds

"Yes, but I think that with Government backing I could make it very silly." -- Ministry of Silly Walks sketch by Monty Python

Firefox 6 Shenanigans

After upgrading from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 6, I had to out quite some work into it in order to make Firefox usable for me again. I had postponed the upgrade from 3.6 for quite some time, because I didn't like the changes to the interface at all (as I had seen in Firefox 4 beta) ..

The major issues were:

• The tabs for the individual pages were on the tab. This is the area I use a lot, so why putting it on top of the program?
• Translucent menus/bars/... (as inherited from the Windows Vista settings). While translucent menus look cool on frame, it totally makes the menus less readable (if at all).
• Order of the buttons in the Navigation Bar. Total random change. Why it not make these buttons movable at all. --> Still needs to fix this
• Lack of status bar. First of all it separates Firefox more clearly from the Windows Status Bar, secondly, I like status information in one neat space (where links point to, how the download status is, etc.)

Steps to fix these issues:

• Right-Click on the Menu Bar to remove the "Tabs on Top" in the context menu there.
• Install an extension ("Status-4-Evar") to get the old menu bar back. An extension for this, Firefox developers. Really?
• The quickest to fix the translucent menus was to install a theme ("Firefox 3 Theme") which brings back the old Firefox 3.6 color schema/spacing/.. The new schema may look cool, but the old schema was just clean and neat.
  

A lot of work for a simple upgrade. Cost me about 2 hours of work.

Horrible, horrible. The Firefox developers should really consider not making such drastically changes to the interface without making sure that you can bring back the existing features/changes configuration. If there are these kind of drastic changes in one of the next versions again, then I am strongly considering switching the browser software. If I have to learn the interface overall again, I can switch to another browser altogether ...

Maybe

Just love this song ..

There's no portal like the next

What a wonderful game is this (like it's predecessor):

Half-Time

Is this half-time?

One in a Million

"Woke up this mornin'
Got yourself a gun
Mama always said you'd be the chosen one
She said, 'You're one in a million'" -- Woke up this mornin' by Alabama 3

Guess what I am watching right now?

Carmina Burana

Aliens (1986) Trailer

One of my (if not the) favourite science fiction films ..

Powers of Ten

A fascinating and (somewhat) educating video on the powers of ten:

On Excellence

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence."

-- Vince Lombardi (American football coach)

Honest Achmed's Request

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.16)
Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16
Build Identifier:

This is a request to add the CA root certificate for Honest Achmed's Used Cars
and Certificates. The requested information as per the CA information
checklist is as follows:

1. Name

Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates

2. Website URL

www.honestachmed.dyndns.org

3. Organizational type

Individual (Achmed, and possibly his cousin Mustafa, who knows a bit about
computers).

4. Primary market / customer base

Absolutely anyone who'll give us money.

5. Impact to Mozilla Users

Achmed's business plan is to sell a sufficiently large number of certificates
as quickly as possible in order to become too big to fail (see "regulatory
capture"), at which point most of the rest of this application will become
irrelevant.

6. CA Contact Information

achmed@honestachmed.dyndns.org

Technical information about each root certificate

1. Certificate Name

Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates

2. Certificate Issuer Field

Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates

3. Certificate Summary

The purpose of this certificate is to allow Honest Achmed to sell bucketloads
of other certificates and make a lot of money.

4. Root Certificate URL

www.honestachmed.dyndns.org/cert.der

5. SHA1 fingerprint to 10. Signing key parameters

See the certificates.

11. Test website URL - 14. OCSP (OCSP is required for EV enablement)

https://www.honestachmed.dyndns.org / www.honestachmed.dyndns.org/chain.p7s /
www.honestachmed.dyndns.org/crl.der / www.honestachmed.dyndns.org/ocsp.asp

15. Requested Trust Bits

All of them of course. The more trust bits we get, the more certificates we
can sell.

16. SSL Validation Type

All of them. The more types, the more certificates we can sell.

CA Hierarchy information for each root certificate

1. CA Hierarchy

Honest Achmed plans to authorise certificate issuance by at least, but not
limited to, his cousin Osman, his uncles Mehmet and Iskender, and possibly his
cousin's friend Emin.

2. Sub CAs Operated by 3rd Parties

Honest Achmed's uncles may invite some of their friends to issue certificates
as well, in particular their cousins Refik and Abdi or "RA" as they're known.
Honest Achmed's uncles assure us that their RA can be trusted, apart from that
one time when they lent them the keys to the car, but that was a one-off that
won't happen again.

Verification Policies and Practices

1. Documentation: CP, CPS, and Relying Party Agreements

Honest Achmed promises to studiously verify that payment from anyone requesting
a certificate clears before issuing it (except for his uncles, who are good for
credit). Achmed guarantees that no certificate will be issued without payment
having been received, as per the old latin proverb "nil certificati sine
lucre".

2. Audits

Achmed's uncles all vouch for the fact that he's honest. In any case by the
time he's issued enough certificates he'll be regarded as too big to fail by
the browser vendors, so an expensive audit doesn't really matter.

3. SSL Verification Procedures
4. Email Address Verification Procedures
5. Code Signing Subscriber Verification Procedures

See (1).

Response to Mozilla's CA Recommended Practices

Honest Achmed promises to abide by these practices. If he's found not to abide
by them, he'll claim it was a one-off slip-up in procedures and that policies
have been changed to ensure that it doesn't happen again. If it does happen
again, he'll blame it on one of his uncles or maybe his cousin, who still owes
him some money for getting the car fixed.

Reproducible: Always
Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959

And So It Begins

I .. can't .. wait .. to .. this .. in .. full .. length !!

The Soup Nazi

This week my attention was brought by a coworker to the Soup Nazi in the Seinfeld sitcom back from the 90s. Unfortunately embedding the video from YouTube is disabled for most videos involving the Soup Nazi, so follow this link to one of the videos at YouTube.

No Soup For You!

Fear

"(..) the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his First Inaugural Address (1933).

Crysis 2 -- Change Language

You cannot change the language within in Crysis 2, but by modifying the system configuration file it's quite easy to do. Make sure the game is not up and running, then do the following:

• Go to the directory where Crysis 2 is installed, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Crysis 2\".
• Open the file "system.cfg" using a text editor (like notepad or the like).
• Go the line (near the end of the file) with which contains the string "g_language".
• Change the settings by changing the language name, e.g. from "g_language = English" to "g_language = German" or vice versa.
• Save the file.
• Restart the game. The changes should be visible immediately.

M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931)

"M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder" is german movie from 1931, directed by Fritz Lang. Just watch this f..ine masterpiece in its entire length.

Winter is coming!

Very, very seldom I root for an upcoming TV series, but this is definitely one of them:

The Game Begins

Starting on April 17th on HBO. Plus (and this is a big, big plus) George R.R. Martin finished "Dance with Dragons" which will be published on July 12th, 2011.

Skyrim

This one game I am really waiting for in 2011. Designated release date is 11/11/11.

The Three Laws of Robotics

The Three Laws of Robotics as first named by Isaac Asimov:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.


• A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.


• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A True McGuffin

'It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh, that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!". So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.'

-- Alfred Hitchcock in an interview with François Truffaut (1966)

Dark Elves

Until I encountered several times the vicuious (and rather annoying) death bug, I rather enjoyed playing "Blood Bowl Legendary Edition" .. and especially coaching the Dark Elves team. Go Witch Elves Go!

He tasks me!

"He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him! I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia, and round the Antares maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up!" -- Khan Noonien Singh in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"

Like a bat out of hell

The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling
Way down in the valley tonight
There's a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye
And a blade shining oh so bright
There's evil in the air and there's thunder in the sky
And a killer's on the bloodshot streets
Oh and down in the tunnel where the deadly are rising

-- Bat out of Hell by Meatloaf