Atleast, that’s what I’m guessing, anyway. Asok, it seems has telekenesis. The day before, he was doing the concentrate-hard thing that Hiro does.

By the way, Heroes, really does rock.

Having Hayden Panettiere (”Claire Bennet” - aka the cheerleader) and Ali Larter (”Niki Sanders” aka Crazy split-personality webcam stripper) really doesn’t hurt at all. 

Apparently Scarlett Johansson is considering doing a nude scene.

“I’m still making up my mind about when I’ll do a nude scene. I’m not opposed to doing nudity, it would just have to be the right project, maybe some sensational European art film.”

I havn’t actually checked out the article (Work kinda frowns on pr0n, and the site is, from memory - definitely NSFW), so I’m just going on the summary in the Digg story.

In other news: Kitten Huffing is apparently all the rage.

BMW Short Movies - basicly long ads for BMW’s cars - all of them (well, the ones I’ve seen so far) star Clive Owen. This series of seven shorts are all excellently filmed, and actually quite entertaining.

Elephants Dream (1080p HD DivX Version) - short 3D animated film by a community project. www.elephantsdream.org

Yes, these are links to the 3FL File Mirrors - anyone with an ISP who peers at PIPE or WAIX, can probably get them without using download quota.

(I’ll put up a better description later…)

The New York Times has a review, and also a good write-up on a the movie/documentary “Our Daily Bread” by Richard Linklater — The same fellow who did the screenplay for A Scanner Darkly, and co-wrote Fast Food Nation.

It seems like another interesting, albeit disturbing look at just where our food comes from.

(I don’t know what the release details will be for .au, probably very limited release)

Slashdot reports on a media release by the Internet Industry Association a few weeks ago.

Said IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos: “We can’t be sure if this is the government’s intent, or whether there has been a terrible oversight in the drafting of this Bill. Either way, the consequences for the average Australian family could be devastating.”

“As an example,” said Mr Coroneos, “a family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings ‘Happy Birthday’ in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song. And if they go home and upload the clip to the internet where it can be accessed by others, they risk a further fine of up to $1320 for illegal distribution. All in all, possible fines of up to $3960 for this series of acts – and the new offences do not require knowledge or improper intent. Just the doing of the acts is enough to ground a legal liability under the new ‘strict liability’ offences.”

As I’ve written a few times, this bill is terrible.

Edit:
There are some risk matrices available for Families (PDF), Teenagers (PDF), Small-Business (PDF) and Industry (PDF).

Scary stuff, really.

Very cool trailer, Watch it here (Lower Res) - or over Here (higher res). (Both are in Flash, so no quicktime needed, unless you want to watch the HD version)

Someone needs to develop a Vista Sidebar Gadget that incorporates the guide data from IceTV and adds MediaCentre recording info…. (i.e so I can click on something from the sidebar, and it’ll record).

To get a little more fancy, a local P2P network that linked up other MCE boxes so you could say “Record on so and so” == even better.

Who knows, maybe I’ll do it in .NET 3.0 w/ WPF over my forced holidays.

First up, Microsoft has announced “Xbox Live Video” - basicly a download service for TV and Movies. No details on pricing as yet, but it looks like a pretty good deal.

On the TV front it allows you to purchase the shows, and keep indefinitely, and re-download them as much as you like (or your ISP will allow). Given the deployed user base of the Xbox 360, this is certainly a big move for MS, and is a (big) step towards edging out the other pretty much non-existant Movie-Download services.
You can also watch them on any of your other XBox 360’s, or take the movie (on the detatchable drive) over to a friend’s console and watch there.

Movies are currently only “for rent” - they expire after a day or two.
All of the HD content is delivered are as WMVHD, and 720p w/ 5.1 Surround, I assume SD content is also delivered as WMVHD, but with lower resolution.

—————–

Over on the code front - they’ve shipped Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework.
I was only telling my boss on Friday that it’d probably be out sometime in the new year, I guess I was wrong. (Maybe that’ll be the next version of Visual Studio - Orcas?)
Now we can tell the Intranet Platform guys at work to forget about going for .NET 2.0 (Yeah, we’re still on .NET 1.1), and go straight for .NET 3.0.

—————–

Staying on the code front, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2 Library (aka Atlas - which is much easier to say) is out now.
This lets developers (like me) do fancy stuff* on the client side — without having to do a whole lot of additional work in a different development environment, with a different language.

Practical example of what kind of fancy stuff I can do, that actually improves the user productivity: Customer-search-as-you-type.

I can be typing in a customer/service key, it automaticly does a search, and displays the results right there - no page reloads.
Typically the time it takes for the system to do that search is less than it takes for someone to switch to a mouse and click the “Search” button. It’s always faster than waiting for a page to re-load with search results. 

More AJAX goodness == good fun, good productivity increase, happier users, happier management. Being able to do this stuff easily == happier developer.

* = Fancy Stuff is the technical term for it. Other accepted terms are “”Magic” or “Holy crap that’s fast”

Someone please tell me what the background music to this ad is, please?

(I guess it’s an effective ad if it’s succeeded in getting me to think about it)

I won $26 in the office sweeps for the Melbourne Cup.

Yay.