Gecko Bloggle

Issue: Network mapped drives that were “working just fine yesterday” are no longer available, but directly connecting to \server\share works just fine. Net Use commands don’t work, and the error “The drive could not be mapped because no network was found” is given in Windows shell or DOS commands.

Possible Solution: Workstation service not running. Started it, and drive mappings work again.

Aliens, man, aliens.

I’d put this out there as a reply on one of the boards out there, but I have to sign up to reply, so I’ll just reply here.

First hit for this error, when pasted into Google in quotes, is this one, which sadly, has only one reply (are your NIC drivers working?)

Hope this helps someone out there some day.

Via Slashdot, the tech sector’s CNN, (or at least National Enquirer)

An anonymouse reader writes “Tom’s Hardware has a feature up on the makings of Tron which may interest latent fans. Through interviews with the creators they explore the makings of Tron, from how it came to be picked up by Disney to how the effects were put together (‘While the majority of the film takes place in the computer world, only 15 minutes worth of footage actually used CGI’, because it would have taken years to make the film otherwise). They then explore why the film flopped at the box office. ‘It was like we put LSD in the punch at the school prom and it was just way more than they can handle,’ said Steven Lisberger.”

If you thought the conversations about Star Trek, Star Wars, and The Matrix got heated (when comparing special effects to plot), check out the commenting threads going on for this story.

One comment [edited here] struck home for me, especially, from tinkertim

I saw Tron, opening night, and its one of the things that made me really, really want to figure out how those nifty looking typewriters with screens could do so much. I didn’t know what memory was, I didn’t know what a processor did, I barely understood how a calculator worked and if you said Binary I’d say “Sure, I have a Huffy!”.
We’re always looking at value as something monetary. Tron made me go get my first trash-80 (Err Tandy TRS-80 heheh) and later my first Commie. I wanted to know how those things worked.
The value of the film wasn’t how much it grossed , if you want to calculate that, then calculate the life time earnings of those who got into computers partly because of seeing it and you may be surprised :)
However only 15 minutes of CGI? I somehow (not sure why, because I know what was available then) thought most of it was CGI.. but yes, that would have been very very difficult at the time. My bubble sort of broke reading that article, never really thought about the making other than being fascinated as a child with the results.
Entertainment isn’t entertainment to most if it requires too much thought.
Tron got to be the pavement others were able to ride in on. So wallet aside, I don’t think the film was a flop. I was too young to remember any hoop-la coming from Disney about the film.. I wonder how it would have done if it had been underplayed before release.
Cool article, if you can wade through the advertisements :)

I remember getting sucked into this movie almost as badly as Star Wars: The Master Control Program made me tremble with fear, and when the old guy died, I’m pretty sure I teared up.

I’m *such* a geek.

Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art (which, if it weren’t for Slashdot and my own site, would probably be my homepage).

ScrambledHackz (Click here to see what it’s about)

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine.

(click the picture to see a snapshot of some of what’s going on)

Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art
Data Transcriptions

Looks very cool.

An amalgamation of image and text parsed from the BBC’s live internet news service is algorithmically recombined into a semi-abstract visual array, which is then back-projected onto a suspended screen situated in the lowest well of the staircase. Beneath the screen, a surround sound system emanates a seemingly garbled newscast. On the ceilings, geometric abstract patterns are painted directly onto the surfaces. These images are visual translations of the equations responsible for creating the real-time audio/visual elements of the installation – scribed in a data-language that, like the fundamental components of the media itself, is opaque to human perception.

None of which I understand, of course, but this is neat.

http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~rdivecha/archives/2006/02/the_world_of_sm.html
Funky multiple-point touch screen goodness.
(don’t try the video unless you’ve got high speed, I’m guessing)
There’s needs to be a long way to write “dope” so it sounds like “duuuuuude.”

…okay, so the upgrade to WordPress 2.0.1 is completed. Not without some seriously freaky stuff happening first.

Not all of the plugins work, but hey, made it through this time, without having to re-re-re-import everything.

If you wanna see what I ran into, you can see the thread on the issue I had here

[Edit: I must be getting better at this, ’cause I just upgraded Arwen’s too, and that wasn’t NEARLY as painful].

Going to try upgrading to the new and improved WordPress again tonight. Hold on to your tinfoil hats, kids.

testing the idea of using footnotes (I just found out about this, so forgive me if this is extremely boring).

Cause when I say stuff here¹, assuming you know what I’m talking about.

¹ there’s a thingie down here to explain it in a footnote.

So, I was talking to my mom on the phone tonight, and we were just catching up on how our collective weeks went, and after telling me about her trip to Florida (let’s just call a junket a junket, shall we?), and she mentioned that the live bookmark in this blog wasn’t working for her as of late.

My mom, the ultimate beta tester.

My mom is not one of those “bad computer mojo” types, who cause computers to throw themselves down flights of stairs, or spontaneously have bad sectors on hard drives in the middle of your dissertation, or just glitch out for not reason at all.

She’s one of those people that will push all the buttons, and fiddle with the knobs, and generally go wherever she can in a web site (or a network, or a conversation, or a job), just to see if she can. This is a very good thing, and means that she stumbles into things like the fact that my RSS feed has been broken on my blog for… uh, quite a while.

So, without further ado, you can all start reading my RSS feed again, now that I’m

So thanks mom, and maybe next time I won’t mention computers. :)

You can download the podcast manually here, if you’d like to hear what JV’s been up to. Should also be a valid podcast feed, so if you enter the RSS link (over on the right column somewhere), then your podcast downloader should just grab the mp3 and push it into whatever you use to play.

Oh yeah, and there’s the odd bit of swearing, so maybe wait until the kids are asleep before firing this one up. :)

We’ll see.

And no, that’s not me.

JohnnyVancouver and I will be doing something together in the near future, but he managed to get there before I did (good for him).