Well, they finally pulled through. iTunes Music Store has opened in Canada. To use it open up iTunes and click on the Music Store item in your Source list. If it isn't there, then chances are that you have it turned off in the Preferences.

As predicted the songs are $0.99 and the albums of 11 or more songs are $9.99.

Wow, that was one of the saddest episodes of Without A Trace that I have ever seen. It was about a junior high school kid who goes missing — but it turns out that his depression has finally caught up with him.

Really makes you think just how awful kids can treat each other. Personally it makes me glad that I didn't have to deal with very much at all as far as being picked on in school goes.

Remember the Newton? Sony probably does. The Sony Vaio Type U is a small form factor microcomputer that is equivalent in size to the Apple Newtons which were the pioneers of the PDA world. Only this device is a full featured computer. I guess this is what 11 years will do. :)

Like the article states, this isn't something that most people need, but more of something that they can't help but want.

I have finally done it - I have redesigned rhuvok.com. Unfortunately this isn't going to be a 100% transition right now, but I thought that I would change the front page and see what people thought about the new look. For the time being, the forum and other pages on the site will remain looking like the old version of the site, which I had previously dubbed lambda. This version, called omikron is quite different - much more modern.

Obviously the redesign is table-less as is the layout standard these days. I am pretty sure there are some issues with my shadows on the right hand side of page with IE, but at this point, I don't really care. This page also treats those users using Safari to a little bit of CSS 3, but no one is missing any content. There are also provisions and plans for a software rewrite - the issues I had getting this new template in place sealed that deal. That will have to wait at least a few days. It is amazing what exam/assignment procrastination will result in.

So send me your thoughts (via the forum) and hopefully everything will get resolved. If you notice a serious layout issue with a particular browser... let me know.

Ever.

Today I attended what was my last official class in my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I am careful to qualify that because obviously there will be other classes in something — even without grad school, professional development is certainly going to have to take place. I must say that it was a little bit nostalgic to think back on all of the classes that I have attended — many with Chris and Kieran. So it was fitting that the last class I had was also with Chris and Kieran. A picture was take to commemorate the event — and when I get my hands on it I will make sure it is posted.

I'm not sure how long they have been available, but Apple is selling iPod Socks which are essentially little cloth sleeves that you pull over the iPod to prevent scratches when you have it in your pocket.

Dalhousie's PCPC is selling them too, but if you would rather one than 6, you can buy a single sock for $7 — and now my iPod is warm and happy. :P

For those nostalgic folks, I just went through my entire archive listings making sure that all the photos showed up properly and that most of the links work. I even added updates to a few and fixed a couple of spelling errors.

Also the More Archives... link now takes you to a page that actually has content — content that links to each month I have posted and counts the total posts for that month.

OK I think I've figured out some sort of Christmas list for those people who have been bugging me for one. Obviously, not all of these items are feasible, but when you ask for what I want, you get what I want.

• iSight
• iStopMotion / iVeZeen Christmas package
• Apple 23" Cinema Display
• iLap (probably selling well after this article)
• Various movies
• Replacement battery for 12" Powerbook G4
• slippers

Notes for those who might be interested:

• I generally don't like long sleeved shirts
• I won't wear red.

I'm sure that many of you know of my love for decorating my living space for Christmas, especially the famed, "Nuclear Christmas Lights". However, this year I am actually packing all of my stuff into boxes in preparation of moving out of my apartment after I finish exams.

So I haven't really had the desire to put up my usual decorations - considering that I don't even have them in the city and although Mike's decorations look nice, I wouldn't go out a buy a whole lot of decorations at this point. Obviously the story would be different if my apartment felt a bit more like home and I was going to be staying there over the holidays or at least into the new year.

But Chris and I did go all out last year decorating our office, so I'll leave you with those pictures in case you missed them before.

That was Srini-riffic. And the third last undergraduate exam I will ever have to write. :) Of course I am talking about the Network Communication exam that I wrote at 3:30 this afternoon. As is Srini's style it was long and thorough, but not too stressful.

After my exam, my mother who was in town stopped by and — after talking my brother and I out to supper — took some of my boxes of junk off my hands. And these were the half dozen boxes of stuff that I really didn't need here — and although it is a bit more tidy in my room, it likely won't look any cleaner until I get the crap off my desks.

And in celebration of the holiday spirit and because I can't really decorate my room, I have decided to decorate my website. I realize that I just changed the design, but as you can see - a standard compliant website is much easier to tweak on a global sense. I didn't have to change any of the templates, just the style sheets.

It sounds like Adobe has started forsaking its original and long time client base — Mac users. Dave's experience downloading Acrobat goes to show how sad the situation is especially given that the user-base for Macs is actually growing.

I saw the Blade: Trinity movie today and I must say that I enjoyed it. Wesley Snipes was Blade - and did just as well as in the previous movies, but what brought it together was the comedic styling of Ryan Reynolds (of Van Wilder fame — although I think of him from the context of Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place). Despite this being a gory vampire movie, his jokes were delivered in a way only Ryan could pull off. The soundtrack was great — like the other Blade movies — and they were pimping the Apple products wherever they could. Not only did they have the usually sexy Apple Cinema Displays (both the vampires and the 'good guys') but Jessica Biel actually had two scenes where she was prepared an iTunes playlist and downloaded it to her iPod — because she "liked to listen to music while she hunted".

Well IE really doesn't inherit well. I've managed to fix a few style bugs that IE6 was introducing for itself. In the process I introduced a lot of redundancy into my CSS, which definitely defeats the part of the purpose for having it in the first place. And at this point, I have managed to fix the forum too... except for one small issue. The author's name and post number are obscured behind the blue div that contains them. I'm not sure how that happened, but I will investigate later. It looks fine in Firefox and in Safari so I'm not too worried yet, because Windows users should be using Firefox anyway.

I also figured out what was fucking up the shadows on the right. Apparently IE doesn't like it when you tell it too many things at once. Changing background: url(...) bottom right no-repeat; into background-image: url(...); background-position: bottom right; background-repeat: no-repeat; seemed to fix the problem. The weird thing is that when the position is either bottom left or top right, the former condensed style works OK. Is it any wonder why Firefox is gaining so much popularity?

If any of you haven't seen the new show House, then you don't know what you are missing. It airs on Tuesdays at 10 PM AST on Global. The brief synopsis: it is a medical drama which adds a serious biting sarcasm that is provided mostly by the title character, Dr. House. I have laughed out loud on multiple occasions and yet the show maintains a credible medical presence.

Long story short, if you are on Dal campus I have the first four episodes online and the 5th one just aired tonight so I will be adding that when I get it.

Well... I have my first serious interview for real life today. It is with CGI which is an IT company with an international presence. Fortunately, Chris had his interview yesterday so I got to hear a bit about what to expect, so it takes the edge off if you will.

I also finished off my second [last] exam — which also happens to have been my last Computer Science exam — yesterday afternoon. It wasn't too hard, but definitely different than the one I wrote last week and it still feels good to have it behind me. Only one more to go at this point, Natural Disasters. :P

There has been some discussion regarding iTunes and its Music Store from Sarah and Isaac recently and I wanted to throw my hat into the ring as well.

There was question as whether the songs would actually only cost 99¢ when it actually got to the credit card. Indeed it does. And the albums do actually cost $9.99 as well.

As for the AAC format, I agree, the music from the iTunes music store is intended to sell iPods, that was its original and continued purpose. And as someone who uses iTunes all the time I didn't even think about the format that it was in. I rip my CDs in that same AAC format because of the quality gain over MP3.

I also want to clear up what I have become aware is an increasing misconception. "iTunes" is a piece of software. Originally you could think of it as the Mac version of WinAmp — ie. it let you organize and play your digital music collection. This collection presumably came from decoding CDs that you owned (aka. ripping) — a function that it could perform for you. Lets face it though... in addition to our own music, most people acquired a lot of music (MP3s) from various other sources of varying legality. I'm not going into the ethics of all that now — but that was what iTunes did. It was a music player. Not only was it a music player — it let you organize your music as well. When you add music to your iTunes Library it can be copied into a directory structure which files it by artist and album name.

iTunes keeps extra meta data about the music it manages — more than you can store in the standard ID3 tags. In addition to the standard fare of artist and album name and track and disc info it lets you store artwork, ratings, EQ presets, and BPM as well as the date you added the song to the library and when you last listened to it — as well as a count of how many times you listened to it. And all of this data can be searched on or sorted by or used to create Smart Playlists. Smart Playlists are like ordinary playlists except that they are composed of songs that match a certain criteria or filter and are dynamic in nature so they can change as you add new songs that match the criteria. Examples of these could be 'Top 25 Most Played', 'Never Played', and 'Songs between 5 and 6 minutes long' — for example. iTunes also maintains a list of online radio stations in a variety of genres — a couple of which I listen to fairly often. It can also stream any other Shoutcast radio station and likely a few others as well - essentially any radio station that Winamp can play — so can iTunes.

About a year and a half ago (correct if I'm off on that) Apple released a version of iTunes that ran on Windows. So now, all of the features I mentioned were available to Windows users as well as Mac users. The real reason for the porting — iPods. An iPod when connected to your computer synchronizes with your iTunes library and all of your playlists are transfered as well.

Long story short... Apple wants to create an online music store so the natural place to put it is integrated with it's digital music management software. This is why you need to use iTunes to access the store, it allows Apple to make the process of buying music online more transparent to the end users.

This was in response to comments from someone who didn't realize that iTunes was not just the music store. So whether you want to download music from the iTMS or not, I personally haven't used a better digital music program on Windows or Mac than iTunes. That is my 99¢.

I have just successfully moved the database that holds all of the content for this site from anna, my linux box at home back to torch, which hosts the files for the site. I had moved it off previously because there were often issues with MySQL on torch and I had no control over that. However since I am moving anna off of my UPS and possibly home I thought the stability of torch would be the lesser of two evils.

I think that after or during the break I will start the process of moving the site to a new server altogether — one where my domain name will be able to be virtually hosted. I am also hoping that because of the changes I have made recently this won't be a process that will take forever. In any case the site will likely still be down tonight for a bit so that I can make a few changes to the database structure to add a feature or two. That will depend on whether or not I am comfortable with the lack of studying I have done for my Natural Disasters exam tomorrow morning. :/

I just ordered my usual Friday night pizza (perhaps the last time for a while) and the man who answered the phone at Peter's Pizzeria was possibly the most professional and courteous person I have ever talked to at a pizza place. He genuinely seemed to care about what he was doing. It didn't hurt that his English was fluent and clear even though I suspect from the accent that it might not have been his first language. Now as long as it arrives as prompt as it usually does they are going to have one satisfied customer on their hands. :P

Word has it that Suprnova.org has finally closed its doors — along with sibling site TorrentBits.org. In my opinion it was only a matter of time before this happened. Granted, I used the site just as much as the next person, but I was wondering how long it could last with the RIAA and the MPAA violently lashing out at piracy as they were.

I received this email as a forward and since I found it somewhat humourous I though I would share it in a way that I don't have to broadcast it by email to people who may or may not care.

I am almost settled in here back at home now — I put my desk together and finally got athena booted up. Tomorrow I am going to brave the junk and dust in my closet and likely end up throwing much of it out. Then I can put my clothes in there and not piled up on the couch outside my room.

It kind of feels a bit weird being home for the first time since high school. Of course, I haven't been here long enough yet for it to feel any different than another Christmas visit. But depending on a few variables, I might be here a little longer than I am used to. Given that I am completely finished university — at least my Bachelor of Computer Science, there is a big decision to be made as to what I want to do next. Grad School? Travel? Find work? Work for myself? Where will I live? I guess these are the questions that face a number of people who are in similar shoes to mine.

So even though I am not in school anymore, I will certainly still strive to keep everyone on top of my daily life as it unfolds before my eyes. Oh yea — and web stuff — I am definitely still going to write about that. :)

I was in the city today for the second time since I moved home. This time, there was no school related motive — more of a shopping related motive. The malls are nuts — filled with people who were doing all of their last minute shopping as feverishly as we were. Overall it was a successful trip as my brother and I both got the last few things we were looking for.

While I am on the topic of home... I guess, now would be a good time to mention the fact that my family has finally found a dog that isn't insane. Pictured above, Roxy is a black lab and she is remarkably well behaved. She won't enter the kitchen or go up to the top floor and to the best of my knowledge and experience is quite housebroken. More-so than our last couple of dogs — both of whom bit people and ended up back at the SPCA. We have had a cat for almost two years and he seems to tolerate the dog with a level of indifference that only a cat can muster.

And tonight is the Christmas semi-formal at my brother's girlfriends school so they were over and so I grabbed some photos of them by the Christmas tree. Now might be a good time to bug certain people about dating high school students, but all things in good time. Season's Greetings.

Sorry folks. I just fixed a problem that was causing some issues with icons on the forum and submitting to the forum itself. Turns out that I have some redundant code that has arisen from adding some of my newer features and there were two places that connected to the database — the one that I moved a few days ago.

So... yea. The forum should be good. If you have any other problems please feel free to email me.

I'm going to make this short and sweet because my brothers are calling me to play a board game with them. In case I don't get a chance to do it tomorrow, I just want to wish everyone a very merry Christmas. I don't know if everyone is getting the nasty freezing rain and sleet that we are here, but I hope that everyone stays safe and enjoys the holiday spirit.

Merry Christmas everyone. To those who don't celebrate Christmas, please enjoy the holiday season.

I have just read on the Registrar's website that the date of the Computer Science convocation for May 2005 is: May 25 9:30 am

Since this likely affects a few of you, I thought I'd share. Mark it on your calendars.

Despite having a green Christmas again this year, we are getting our back order of snow all at once — right now. With expected amounts up to 50 cm and winds at 90 km/h, this system is making for some nasty weather conditions. Road travel at this point is not advisable at all and my family has drawn water and located flashlights and candles in preparation for the inevitable power outage. Surprisingly, there has been no loss so far and I am optimistic (knock on wood). The photo above I just took this morning and can be clicked on for a fuller picture.

Located in the shadow of Christmas, today is my Dad's birthday. Happy Birthday Dad.

And while I'm at it, I got another humourous email from my lab email list, this one about writing a thesis vs. having a baby. Enjoy.

Every Christmas — despite the travel risk it provides — people wish for a big snow fall. And personally I am not going to blame these people. If you have grown up with White Christmas' then there is nothing quite like it. I used to pity people who lived in the south — people who didn't know what snow was and never witnessed a white Christmas. Shoveling the driveway yesterday in the -15°C temperature might have turned some of that pity into envy. And although it was another green Christmas, it was still as enjoyable as ever. We did get our snow eventually in the form of a storm system that had the province racing to stock up on water and other provisions for potential power outages. Fortunately — my power didn't go out, and neither did mike's. All said though... it definitely looks more like Christmas outside now.

There are three movies that came out yesterday on DVD that I think would have been better served to come out before Christmas. However, I still think I will be buying all of them at some point in the near future.

o Anchorman o Garden State o Resident Evil: Apocalypse

I went sledding today for the first time in probably 3 or 4 years. It wasn't quite what I remember from when I was a kid — a little bit harder to get back up those hills. We were only out there for an hour and I think I only made it down the hill about 4 times. The light powdery snow wasn't the best for getting good speeds or a nice packed trail so there were a lot of slow, awkward descents. However it was a fun time and I definitely got a bit of a workout trudging through the snow.

I am a little late getting this up — I spent the day shopping and cruising around Halifax. I did end up buying all three of the movies I had mentioned earlier. But as you all may recall from years past I like to review after each year.

2004 brought with it many things — White Juan, Code Optimization, the Graphics project, one last work term with Tech Support (and one last work term report — thank God), my sexy keyboard, wardrobe malfunctions, CSI:NY, getting an RSS feed on my site, breaking ground on the new Management building, "Inspiring Minds", firing Nick and Sarah from CSI, the release of PHP 5, the rise of Firefox, athena (sexy G5 hotness), new furniture in Glengary, Keji trip, the atrocious re-election of what's-his-name as President of the US, ManyHands, iTMS release in Canada, House, new look for the web site and — oh yea I finished university. :)

Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list, but I think it is a fair sampling of the events in my life this past year. And as great as this year was, I am looking forward to the uncertainty and confusion of 2005.