Ever wonder what it would be like if internet chat rooms were real?

It’s a little long but totally worth it.

Wow.
Amazing.
Superb.
Excellent.
Stunning.

Those are just a few of the thoughts that went through my head as I watched Children of Men. I will be surprised if I see many films this year that even come close to this movie.

I knew next to nothing going into this movie, about the only thing that I knew was that it starred Clive Owen and that he was on the run from something. I am not going to talk specifics about this movie because I truly feel that this is one of those movies that the less you know going in the more you will enjoy it.

This movie is a masterpiece, Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) has created a movie that is not to be missed. One aspect of the film that I absolutely loved was that there was zero hollywood in it. Children of Men is played out like reality not like a hollywood blockbuster and it is a much better movie because of it.

The camera work in this movie is outstanding. There are two scenes in particular that stick out in my mind. I will try not to give away too much because I don’t want to spoil anything. The first scene starts with a car on fire. The scene appears to be shot in one continuous take and is simply amazing. The second scene is later in the movie and involves Clive Owen’s character walking down a battle torn street trying to meet up with someone else. This scene is mind blowing and again appears to have been shot in one continuous take.

I highly suggest seeing this movie, it’s outstanding. I want to see it again before it leaves the theater.

I knew very little about this movie before going into it but an ex-coworker told me that it was one of the best movies that he had seen in the last couple years and I knew that the critics were loving it as well. About the only thing that I knew about the movie was the it starred a little girl, took place during a war and that the little girl had fantasy world that was a reality.

I need to say this right now before I talk more about the movie. This movie is brutal, surprisingly brutal. Do NOT bring your kids to see this movie. I don’t want to go into specifics because I don’t want to ruin anything for you. I will say that the first scene of brutality smacked me right across the face, I totally did not see it coming and truly shocked me.

The movie is quite brilliant. Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, The Devil’s Backbone, Mimic) has created a truly remarkable film and one that I highly suggest you take a look at if you like fantasy and don’t mind some gore. Ivana Baquero, who plays Ofelia, the little girl, is simply excellent in her role. All around the cast was excellent but Ivana and Sergi López, who plays the Captain, are the real stand outs here in my opinion. Ivana for her expressive eyes and young innocence and Sergi for his heartless and amazingly cold performance.

I also need to mention the set design, makeup and visual effects in this movie. If this movie isn’t nominated for a few academy awards it will be a travesty as this is one of the most visually stunning movies I have seen in a while.

I highly suggest Pan’s Labyrinth, but I am serious about the violence, this movie pulls no punches so beware.

The code on Moe’s Realm had been a mess for a very long time. I built the template that the pages used a very long time ago and the web has moved on considerably since then. I have been meaning to update it for a long time but never found the time. After a friend of mine took a look at the code and made a not so nice comment I figured it was time to get off my butt and do something about. He also pointed me to this page which gives quite a few sample code snippets for navigation using CSS. The navigation was the big bloated part on Moe’s Realm so this was perfect for me.

Long story short. The combined total size of all the HTML pages on Moe’s Realm used to be 244 MB. After cleaning up the code and actually improving the look of the site in the process the total size of all the pages is now 48.5 MB, a fifth of the original size.

I also made a few other changes that the user will never notice but will make my life easier when it comes to updating the site and stuff.

Take a look at the new look and let me know what you think.

www.moesrealm.com

It has bothered me for ages that in Windows you can not reorder the items on your taskbar. I often have the same programs open day in and day out on my computer and I like to have them in a specific order. For instance I like Netremote to be on the far left near my quick launch items, it’s always there and if it’s not there it screws up my workflow just because I am so used to it being there.

Yesterday I decided that I had had enough and I went looking to see if there was a solution to my problem. As luck would have it there was. Not only was there a solution but the solution was free as well. The program is called Taskbar Shuffle and so far I am in love.

Not only can I now reorder the items on my taskbar I can also middle click the buttons to close them, something I have gotten very used to doing with Firefox tabs. Taskbar shuffle is a tiny little program and consumes very little resources.

If you are looking for a way to arrange and reorder the items on your taskbar look no further than Taskbar Shuffle

If you are wondering why I stopped making the Spot Seven Puzzles there is a good reason. I decided to make a section on Moe’s Realm that was devoted to it. I am going to be offering visitors a new puzzle every weekday, I am taking weekends off (at least for now).

I could use some help spreading the word about this so if you know anyone who is into puzzles let them know, or if you could maybe mention it in your blog, or in a forum post or something like that I would greatly appreciate it.

Here is the link
Spot The Seven Puzzles

So a few weeks ago I got it in my head that I should share with the world my MP3 collection. I figured it would be interesting, be good for me so that I could keep track of it myself, hopefully generate some income for me, and it would allow me to constantly be adding content to my website since I am always getting new music. The search engines love web pages that update often. I also hoped that viewers would find it interesting and I am including the album cover for all of my albums and I am sure there are people out there like me and it can be a serious pain in the butt trying to find pictures of some of those rare album covers.

This project really made me wish I knew some programming language like perl. If I knew perl or something this whole process could have been much less painless and much more automated but I don’t know it so I had to make do with something else.

Luckily for me I found a program called MP3 HTML Generator which did the bulk of the work for me. I still had to do a LOT of work though. I have pretty much been working on this project day and night for the last three weeks. I mean that literally too, for many of the days in the last three weeks I have been working on this from the time I got up till I went to bed. One thing I definitely am is persistant.

The way MP3 HTML Generator works is you tell it where you have your MP3 files stored it reads through your collection and using your ID3 tags it spits out the HTML source code for you. There are several different templates you can use and you can use your own templates as well (but they are kind of limited). I ended up using a portal type interface for mine which to me makes the most sense. The other style all seem to just spit out a really long list of your entire collection and the portal style first gives you a list of all your artists, you select and artist and it shows you all the albums you have for that artist and then you select an album and it shows you all the songs on that album.

Here are some examples of the different styles that MP3 HTML Generator can do for you.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

And here is the portal example, the style that I used.

Example 4

I have nearly 200gigs of MP3’s, over 30,000 of them so as you can probably imagine this was a daunting project.

When all was said and done MP3 HTML Generator created just shy of 3,000 new HTML pages. Now because of the limitations in the program I had to go in and edit each and every one of these pages.

MP3 HTML Generator allowed me to do this project and I wouldn’t have attempted this project without it. That said the program could definitely use some improvements. You are allowed to use your own templates but you are limited to having the program just stick the code into one place in your template, you just put the following line in your code

< !-- BODY_TEMPLATE_PAGE -- >

And the HTML that is generated is just stuck in your page there. The program would be incredibly more useful if you could make the artist names appear where you wanted it just by putting something like <#artist#> on the page, that way you could put the artist up in the title of the page, in the H1 tags, etc. You should be able to do this will all attributes such as title, genre, length, year, album cover, etc. If this program did this I would have been in heaven.

Another thing that would make this program much, much better would be customizable URLs. As it is right now the program just makes the URLs in sequential order so all of your generated pages are something like music_01.html, music_02.html. music_03.html etc. It would be absolutely fantastic if it used your file structure for the url. That way you would have URLs that looked like music/audioslave/revelations.html or something to that effect, this would make this program worth a fortune to me.

The program is also a bit buggy. You assign the album covers to the MP3s within the program, I had it randomly inserting covers in the improper place. The program was also too smart for it’s own good. On soundtracks and Various Artists CDs it wouldn’t allow me to assign the cover to the entire album in one shot because the artist name didn’t match up. This was EXTREMELY annoying as I had to do each track individually.

If you are looking to take on a project like this I can recommend that you use MP3 HTML Generator because it seems to be the best thing out there but realize that you will most likely run into some limitations. If you know perl or another language and you happen to write a better program PLEASE let me know, especially if you happen to incorporate any of the things I mentioned above that this program is lacking.

Here is the final result of the last three weeks of hard work:

Moe’s Massive MP3 Collection