General

Asus EEE PC 900 Launched!

Finally, the Asus EEE PC 900 has been launched. Yay! It is initially priced at P24,995. Way better than the rumored P33,900 before the launch. Some would say the price is still high especially since some full-featured notebooks are already within that range. But remember that the Asus EEE PC is way smaller and lighter (and cuter!) than these budget notebooks. Besides, you can be sure prices will slide down after a month or two.

Appleseed: Ex Machina

I was browsing through my sis’ DVD collection when I saw Appleseed: Ex Machina. At first, I thought it was just the original Appleseed. I got a bit nostalgic and watched parts of it. It didn’t seem familiar and I realized I was looking at a sequel :P As expected, hot warrior chick Deunan Knute is back along with his metal hunk of a boyfriend and the rest of the boys of ESWAT. This time around they’re fighting a mysterious affliction that ravages cyborgs, bioroids, and humans alike turning them into violent sociopaths. If you’re familiar with the original Appleseed (and you should be) then you can expect the same high-intensity anime action sequences, this time it’s powered-up with the presence of John Woo in the production team. I said it with Appleseed and, though the story is less riveting, I’ll say it for Ex Machina: Awesome!!!

Rating: 4/5

Juno

Finally, after a long time and quite a few recommendations from people whose taste in movies I agree with :P, I watched Juno. And I wasn’t disappointed, high expectations notwithstanding. The movie is about a teenage girl, Juno, coping with an unplanned pregnancy. Ellen Page is wonderful as Juno, a cool chicklet spouting wit and dry humor every line. The supporting characters also did very well in their roles including Jeniffer Garner, who seemed cold at first but turned out to be quite warm. Warm, yes. It’s one of those movies that give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Ironically, althought the movie is about a juvenile, the story as well as the humor are serious, mature, and intelligent. This is so unlike some movies, like say the similarly themed Knocked Up, whose story is about adults but the humor is juvenile (that’s about as much as I will write about it).

Rating: 5/5

dhcpd

Not a good day. And it didn’t even start good. I got a message from Erik that the Internet connection was down. I hurried over to check the pertinent server and found out that the disk was full. I noticed that the messages log was HUGE so I truncated it and restarted services. Presto! Problem solved. Or so I thought.

A few moments later, Erik told me that in addition to the Internet connection, DHCP clients were unable to acquire addresses. I checked the messages logs and a found repetitive stream of DHCPDISCOVERs, DHCPOFFERs, DHCPREQUESTs, and DHCPACKs: It was the reason why the messages log grew so big! DHCP clients were trying over and over to get an IP but couldn’t. I tried everything I (and Google) can think of and more.

All the while and even through working lunch, people were calling asking why there’s a problem and worse, telling me that it shouldn’t happen (duh!), and generally whining. I hate it when people do that. Can’t they see I was doing something?!? Can’t they just let the crisis pass then whine later?

Worse, by the end of the day, I wasn’t able to fix the problem. Instead we worked around it and just manually configured all the DHCP clients with IPs. What a pain!