A good trend in movie making will accelerate with digital projectors

Recently our family went to see "Facing the Giants" and really enjoyed it. The acting was uneven, but overall a very toucing movie. The movie is particularly interesting because it shows the trend to smaller budget grass roots films. "Facing the Giants" was made for only $100,000 but has done extremely well at the box office due to word of mouth.
This trend toward the masses being able to make films will accelerate drastically once digital projectors are common in theatres. Without the cost of printing the actual film, anyone with a digital camera and a Mac could make a movie, and with enough buzz get it into theatres.

Transfer to Dreamhost complete

Recently I switched hosting companies to dreamhost.com for cost reasons. I can get a terabyte of bandwidth per month for only $10, pretty amazing. If you enter my promo code, "mitchfincher" when signing up, they will waive the $50 setup fee so you can start for only $10 and cancel anytime. The only downside is the reliability is not as great as some other hosting companies. I've had two short outages in the last few months, but for $10 its been a great deal. Also they are Ruby on Rails ready.

Four ways to play with SqlExpress

You can connect to a SqlExpress instance in many ways.

1. My friend Frank showed me how to use Query Analyzer with SqlExpress.
Select "Start / Sql Server 2005 / Configuration Tools / Sql Configuration Manager "
Then drill down in "SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration" and select "Protocols for SQLEXPRESS" and enable "Named Pipes" and "TCP/IP" by right clicking and selecting "enable".
Now restart the Sql Express service (aka "SQL Server (SQLEXPRESS)").
Open Query Analyzer and add the sql server instance "yourboxname\SQLEXPRESS"

2. You can also download the free SqlExpress tool from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/
by clicking on the link to "SQL Server Management Studio".

3.To connect to SqlExpress inside Visual Studio 2005, select "View / Server Explorer". Right click on "Data Connections" and add "yourboxname\SqlExpress".

4. To connect through the command line osql program
osql -S"mymachinename\sqlexpress" -Usa -P"mypassword" -Q"CREATE DATABASE SD20"

Best thing happened to me this month...

Best thing happened to me this month was my cell phone died. I was forced to upgrade to a wonderful TMobile MDA (which stands for "Mitch's Digital Assistant"). The MDA replaces two and half devices of mine - old phone, old IPAQ, half my camera.



This morning my friend Frank showed me the Opera browser for it. It's amazing, wonderful. Now I can't live without it; couldn't think of going back to the pre-installed pre-cambrian IE browser. The cool thing is you can read a page like slashdot.com into one tabbed window while downloading links from that page into other tabs to read later - no more waiting for further pages to download, they download in the background.

Sometimes it's a happy thing when devices die.

Lessons from History

If we learn anything from history, it's that we don't learn anything from history.Nevertheless, I think the following quote bears on our current national state in the US:

"We have considered ourselves of too much importance in the scale of nations. It has led us into great errors. Instead of yielding to circumstances which human power cannot control, we have imagined that our own destiny and that of other nations was in our hands, to be regulated as we thought proper."

spoken by Virgina Federalist Daniel Sheffey on the eve of the war of 1812 from
The War of 1812 A Forgotten Conflict by Donald Hickey p300


(Remember that in the War of 1812, the White House is burned and the USA is fortunate to get a stalemate from the war).

I meet with a bunch of other guys about once a month to have dinner and discuss a historic event. This month's topic is the Mexican-American War. If you're in Austin on Tuesday Novemeber 28th come by and join us. Email me for more info, my email addresses is on www.fincher.org

Edible cotton breakthrough may help feed the world

Great new creation from my old Ala Mater, Texas A&M at New Scientist.
The cotton plant provides a wonderful fiber for our lives, but it's poisonous seed protein is under utilitzed as cattle feed. Keerti Rathore has manipulated the genome of cotton to remove this poison. Now farmers from developing countries can earn cash for the fiber and use the seed to feed their families.
This is just a hint of the wonderful, fantastic, and dreadful fruits of the new science of the genome. The biotech revolution of the next 20 years will make the computer revolution of the last twenty years look like a child's toy. The revolution is coming, let's prepare for it and not squash its promise of filling the bellies of the world's hungry children.

A couple of web site picks

www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com made me laugh. The name says it all. I like the idea of having a whole community evolve to discuss the ethics of it all. Very web2.0.

For laughs try the humor section of http://www.stumbleupon.com. StumbleUpon is a great idea and a lot of fun.