PC Security Overhaul

I replaced my anti virus and firewall software recently, and the thing that made me do it was ZoneAlarm. The electricity went out during my computer's start up and during that time, just before it happened, ZoneAlarm was doing its loading or something, and after restarting when the electricity was restored, it went bonkers. It lost all its settings and it began blocking some stuff it shouldn't be blocking. So, I decided to overhaul everything, and needed to do it anyway because both my anti virus and firewall are really out of date.

Before this, I was using Antivir anti virus, ZoneAlarm firewall. I haven't updated my firewall and anti virus for more than 2 years, and during those years, the security technologies have progressed a lot. I searched around to find out what's hot right now. For firewalls, I found this page where it has results of leak tests for all of the popular firewall programs. At the top of the list ranked no. 1 is Comodo Firewall Pro, and what's even better is that it's free.

Comodo Firewall Pro

For anti virus, there's this website where it lists out the top 10 anti virus of 2007. No. 1 is Bitdefender. I searched for a download of Bitdefender Anti Virus but every copy that is available for download is a "Plus" version. The "Plus" version includes a firewall with it, and don't want it as it may cause conflicts with my new Comodo firewall.

So no. 2 was Kaspersky. I downloaded it, but decided not to use it as the installation process was somewhat cumbersome. To install the crack, you need to boot in safe mode and stuff, I don't want to go through all that. So I settled for no. 3, Nod32. It's as secure as the previous to firewalls, but its user interface ain't that good. I can live with that. Plus, people say it's lightweight, so it doesn't consume much of my computer's resources.

Nod32 Anti Virus

I've run these two softwares without a hitch so far.

Chain Of Events That Led To Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain and Beyond

It all started with a Digg post about a horse breaking free and joining cyclists on the Tour De France. One of the comments of the post pointed out that the story has already been submitted before and got frontpaged on Digg in this original post. A comment on that original post pointed out that this footage was from a movie called Amelie. Replies to the comment and other comments were in praise of the movie. I became intrigued, and did a search on this Amelie movie that I've never heard of before. IMDB gave it an 8.6, Rotten Tomatoes gave it 90%.

So, I search mininova for amelie, and the torrent of the movie with the highest number of seeds is one with around 70 seeds and 40 leechers. That's a good enough number of peers for a non-mainstream movie. However, none of the torrents from the search results had English subtitles in them. The one with the highest number of seeders only gave a link to an .srt file of the subtitles.

I've never watched a movie with separate subtitles before, so I didn't know what player to use to view it. My google search on this showed VLC can load .srt files with movies, and I tried it, it works, but another player that cropped up in my search was Crystal Player, and there was high praise for this player. I decided to check it out, and managed to find a link for it on IT Hot News. And to my surprise, it is actually a very good media player. Not only can it load subtitle files, but the killer feature of this player is its ability to control the brightness/contrast of the video being played. I've been looking for this feature in a media player for so long, and I finally found a player that can do it. It is very convenient to have this feature, because more often than not, videos that I download, especially tv series like Lost and 24 have very dark scenes where it's very hard to tell whats happening. Couple that with my crappy monitor's low max brightness, it's unbearable.

Now, for the movie review itself. The title Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain more or less translates to The Fabulous Life of Amélie Poulain, at least that's what the subtitles I downloaded said. This film is touted as a masterpiece, as one of the best romantic comedies ever, but for me, it doesn't deserve that kind of critical acclaim. It's good, but not THAT good. It's not a romantic comedy in it's traditional form, because the romance part of the romantic comedy doesn't start until about half way through the movie. Even the guy she's supposed to be romantically involved with appears late in the movie, so I don't think this movie set out to be a romantic comedy.

First and foremost, this movie is about Amelie, and Amelie alone. Even though the other main characters of the movie have their own littles stories in the movie, but the main reason for their character's existence in this movie is to illustrate who Amelie is, what kind of a person she is, and what she is going through.

The movie has an artsy feel to it. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and the camera work complements this approach. And the use of special effects to convey Amelie's emotion was done well too. Audrey Tautou, who plays Amelie is cute. She's the chick who plays opposite Tom Hanks in The DaVinci Code. She looks a lot younger than she did in the Da Vinci movie.

Overall, I feel like the movie lacked focus. There was no pre-destined endpoint to get to. The movie doesn't start out with "Amelie is a lonely woman who's looking for a guy". This is more of a slice of life / coming of age movie. It shows a series of events in Amelie's life that leads her to becoming a new person, and the other characters in the movie are there just to facilitate her (albeit indirectly) to get to that point. The movie itself doesn't stick to me, but the character of Amelie, for some reason, still lingers in my mind.

So, there it is. From a lame story on Digg, to a fairly good movie, to a very good media player.

The Simpsons Movie

I went to see The Simpsons Movie today after finding out that the movie is being shown without any cuts. And the verdict? It was great. It's like a simpsons espisode, only longer, with better animation, and no boring parts whatsoever. The movie is packed with funny bits. Watching this movie, I can see why it took such a long time to make. The time they took certainly was not due to rendering the animation. This a 2-D movie, there's nothing to render. I feel like during all those years of production, they threw in hundreds of thousands of ideas for the film, and finally they filtered it out to only the few best ones to put into the movie, and result was a Simpsons fan heaven.

It's starts off insulting the viewers of the movie, saying they are stupid for paying for something that they watch on tv for free. And in the opening sequence where Bart writes something on the blackboard, He writes, "I will not download this movie". Yeah, like THAT's gonna work. Tom Hanks and Greenday make a cameo, and there's too many funny things to mention, or even to take in for that matter. It warrants a rewatch to get everything.

A Simpsons fan needs to watch it more than once, so for me, I ain't wasting another 7 bucks on it, I'll just wait for the DVDRip and download it. Watching it in the theater kind of spoilt the experience a bit for me.

You see, different people have different kinds of sense of humor. I had the unfortunate luck of sitting beside a girl who thinks every little funny thing warrants a laugh. However, I also have the feeling that her overzealous laughter is because she wants to show her boyfriend that she's having a good time watching this movie with him, while the fact is that she couldn't care less about it. Oh, the things people do for love. And apart from her, the other members of the audience laugh at different times, so throughout the movie, there's constant laughter, and its hard to concentrate on what they're saying in the movie over the laughs. So, I'll definitely need to watch this movie again, alone.

"Grey Image" Problem Fixed in Wickr

My Flickr widget, Wickr, has had this problem where parts of image(s) being displayed are "greyed-out" as if the image is being displayed before has completed its download from the net. The problem is that the images is not from the net, they are from the hard disk. The cause of this problem is the fade animation used on the image. It only happens when the fade animation effect is used on multiple images, or big images. I've tried to get around this problem by creating my own fade function instead of using the built-in fade function in Konfabulator, but it resulted in the same greyed-out image. I've even tried a 2-step fade where the image goes to 50%, then 100% opacity, and even then the problem still persists.

The "grey image" problem.

I posted this problem on the Konfabulator forums, and at first they didn't understand the problem and said that the image hasn't completed its download from the internet, but I keep telling them that it is from the hard disk, not the net. I was somewhat miffed at the fact that they thought I was a n00b at widget making. I told them I know my stuff, and gave instructions on how to recreate the problem on Wickr, and finally the problem is recognized as a bug and has been reported. It's a Windows-only bug and doesn't occur on Macs.

So the "fix" to the problem was to do away with the fade animation altogether. It's a small aesthetic blow to the widget, but a necessary one to maintain a high degree of usability. In the course of fixing the problem, I also decided to update the widget for Kanofabulator 4.0. So, Wickr now has a dock icon, and its id is a UUID. The update also requires me to address the change in the onMouseMove function in Konfabulator 4.0, as it is not the same as in previous versions. onMouseMove is now called whenever the mouse moves over the object, not when the mouse drags over the object. For the drag action, they introduced onMouseDrag.

Wickr dock icon.

I plan to overhaul the whole widget sometime in the future as some parts of the code are really dated, and Flickr have changed their API quite a bit of too. I don't know when I'll get around to doing it though.

Pink Panther Surprisingly Good

I saw the first few minutes of Pink Panther on a HBO or Star Movies, I can't remeber which channel, but I was surprised that I enjoyed the portion of the movie that I watched. I didn't finish watching it on tv, so I downloaded it, and watched it, and liked it.

I don't usually find these kinds of goofy physical comedies, like Naked Gun, National Lampoon etc. that funny as I mainly watch them for the sometimes-funny parodies that they have. But Pink Panther is not a parody movie.

When it was first shown in the theaters, I wasn't even remotely interested in it, and the trailers and promos that they showed didn't help either. They marketed it as a physical comedy for kids with Beyonce thrown in to bring in the cool factor. I am not one of their target audience.

Sure the movie has some physical gags and fart jokes and genitalia jokes and stuff, but there is something different to it that makes it funnier than usual. And that something different is Steve Martin. The single most outstanding thing that made me enjoy this movie was Steve Martin's silly French accent. From that French accent alone, numerous hysterical jokes is derived. He portrays Inspector Jacques Clouseau excellently. I'm not saying his accent is good, I'm saying it's funny. And he's the only one form the cast that maintains a French accent throughout the movie, apart from Jean Reno of course. The other casts slip in and out of their accents.

Maybe it's just me having a French accent fetish, but this is one of the better comedies I have watched. Almost everybody else hates it, but like it. IMDB gave it a 5/10, and Rotten Tomatoes gave it 24%. If I have to rate it, I'd give it a 7/10.

I've compiled some of the funny moments from the movie to give you a taste of my sense of humor:

Getting YouTube Videos to Look Good

I've been uploading video clips to YouTube, Metacafe and Veoh for a couple of months now, and I've seen a few good quality clips on the sites which make mine look like abstract art. Somehow they manage to crack the secret encoding settings that make videos look good on these sites.

Yesterday, I found a page that teaches you how to optimize video for YouTube. So, I decided to give it a try. The site teaches you how to do it using almost any of the popular video editing/encoding software available. I'll try doing it with 2 software that I have installed on my computer, Sony Vegas and Movavi Video Converter.

I'll start of with a 22 second video clip of MPEG2 DVD NTSC quality.
The file can be downloaded here.
The GSpot Data for the file is shown below:

Then, the clip is encoded to WMV format in Vegas using these setting:
Save as type: Windows Media Video V9(*.wmv)
Then Customize it with these settings:
Project >
Video rendering quality: Best
Audio >
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Audio 9.1
Attributes: 128 kbps, 44kHz, stereo (A/V) CBR
Video >
Mode: CBR
Format: Windows Media Video 9
Image Size: Animation (320 x 240)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.000 (Square)
Frame rate (fps): 30.000
Seconds per keyframe: 3
Video smoothness: 100 (Sharpest)
Bit Rate >
Internet/LAN: 1M

The video that I referred to for the Vegas settings is here:


The result is a 2.87 MB WMV file.
The file can be downloaded here.
The GSpot data for the resulting file is shown below:

Then, it's time to encode the 22 second DVD quality clip into an AVI file using Movavi Converter. It's much easier to do it with Movavi as they already provide a preset for YouTube encoding. The setting are below:
Output format:
AVI (DivX, Xvid, etc)
MPEG4 Xvid for YouTube

The video that I referred to for the Movavi Converter settings is here:


The result AVI is much smaller (1.75 MB) compared with the WMV created from Vegas.
The resulting AVI file can be downloaded here.
The GSpot data is shown below:

Now it's time for the YouTube results.
Here's how the original DVD quality clip looks after it has been "YouTube"d without any conversion:


Here's what the Vegas encoded clip looks like:


And here's the Movavi encoded clip:

From the results you can clearly see that the DVD encoded video turned out the worst of the three with it's video vertically stretched, and the video substantially pixelated. The difference between the Vegas and Movavi encoded videos isn't very obvious. The Movavi version seems to have more saturated colors compared to the washed out colors of the Vegas one. But I do feel as if the Vegas version is smoother compared to the Movavi version where it is sharper.

Since the Vegas version results in a larger file, I'll only use it when I have the patience to wait. When I want to upload stuff quickly, I use Movavi.

Innocent Voices - Good Movie

Innocent Voices

Smack in-your-face reality of the civil war in El Salvador. Though the acting wasn't that good, everything else was perfect, and more than made up for the poor acting. I found it really easy to immerse myself into the story. I think it has to do with setting. The school uniforms, the shanty houses in the village, the mango trees, the communal and family relationships portrayed are all very similar to that of what you will find here in Malaysia. Really good stuff.