Chatter Of The Squirrel

Dexter

“No blood… What a beautiful idea…”

Indeed, it is a really beautiful idea.

Dexter is a new TV show, just ended its first season last month.

Dexter is a blood splatter forensics guy by day.

And by night, he deals a more violent brand of justice. He tracks down serial killers that have escaped the law.

Captures them. Confronts them with their crimes. Then kills them.

Ritually.

Keeps a trophy. Chops them up. And drops the pieces in the ocean.

Dexter is a monster. Pretending to be a man.

His crimes are gruesome. But in this unique light, you can find a dark humour in it.

The actor is the gay funeral home guy in Six Feet Under. He’s just the right kind of creepy to pull off this role.

And the story is amazing. The character development is nice.

But what’s really cool is the conflict!

Who’s the nemesis of a serial killer that kills serial killers?

Watch it and see!

Scrubs, Season 6 - Epi 06

The _MOST_ awesome episode of a TV show I’ve ever seen in decades!!!

Zach wasn’t blowing his own trumpet on his own blog.

I dropped in to check out his blog again after watching Garden State, to see if his recent movie might be worth watching, and caught his comment of a musical episode.

It’s just plain freaking BRILLIANT!!

A patient has a brain aneurysm, and started to hear everything as singing. So when she’s in the scene, the entire cast puts on a broadway musical with brilliant music, lyric and cute dancing.

Again, it’s just plain freakin’ BRILLIANT!!

I’m already watching it a third time… all in a row.

There’s a lot of interesting story behind this episode too.

In that story too, it seems that a character is going to be killed off, although it’s not revealed who. And quite possibly an important character too. And there’s a question of whether Zach Braff will be able to hang around for another season too. He might want to, but he may have scheduling problems.

Catch the YouTube of one of the better songs. And Guy Love is an incredible song too.

The lyrics happen to be available here.

Windows Server 2003 x64 Weirdness

Running the new Windows Server 2003 at work… the 64-bit version no less…

Using it to develop web apps, and learn ASP etc.

Had this weird problem when I use IIS 6.0…

The “Default Website” won’t run. Unless I change it from port 80 to something else…

Which is kinda silly. What’s stopping the IIS from using port 80?

That’s like having a convertible that doesn’t run when the top is down. What’s the point of a convertible if you can’t feel the wind in your hair?

Thought it was some virus or something that’s using the TCP port. When I manually start the Default Website on IIS, I get the following error: “The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.”

So…

C:Documents and SettingsAdministrator>netstat -ano

Active Connections

  Proto  Local Address          Foreign Address        State           PID
  TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1004
  TCP    0.0.0.0:81             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1656
  TCP    0.0.0.0:135            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       828
  TCP    0.0.0.0:443            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1004

Then…

C:Documents and SettingsAdministrator>net stop http

The HTTP service was stopped successfully.

C:Documents and SettingsAdministrator>netstat -ano

Active Connections

  Proto  Local Address          Foreign Address        State           PID
  TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1004
  TCP    0.0.0.0:135            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       828
  TCP    0.0.0.0:443            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1004
  TCP    0.0.0.0:445            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       4
  TCP    0.0.0.0:1025           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       476 

Something is still occupying port 80.

Using Task Manager, I finally found out that PID 1004 is Skype!

Opening Skype -> Options -> Connections, I find this little check box for “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections.”

Unchecking the box, restarting Skype, and restarting Default Website fixes the problem.

Home users won’t notice anything when Skype is using up port 80… but it matters a lot to a server machine that’s using IIS.

Pretty basic stuff… But it still puzzled me for a bit before I figured it out.

TM Net blocking Peer-2-Peer Downloading

P2P downloads have been suffering of late, even before the Taiwan submarine cable fault.

TMNet has been upgrading their networks, and purchasing new equipment to block P2P packets.

Before it all began, downloads of 100+ kB/s were possible. Needing merely hours to get a movie.

Then, they started throttling the bandwidth. Speeds dropping dramatically.

It first appears that they throttle back connections going out of Malaysia that had been identified as P2P connections. Speeds dropped to a small fraction of its glory days. But occassionally, you can still get good speeds when the program locks on to a local peer who  has the file you’re looking for.

And then suddenly in the last two days? Connection dropped to zero.

Completely blocked. Getting SocketException errors.

Well… Have to applaud TM Net for taking multiple approaches to curb such rampant broadband abuse.

I can’t fix the bandwidth throttle…

But the SocketException blocking can be successfully bypassed via this link.

A trickle is still better than going completely without.

A Cygnar Army

A friend just came back from the States. He went there for several weeks to visit his girl. And since he was there, I thought that it couldn’t hurt to buy something on eBay and ask him to bring it back for me.

My initial plan was to get a new GPS. I had sold my GPSMap76 a few months ago, and could’ve upgraded to something newer. Something with the new Sirf III chipset, which is more accurate than the older models, and can even operate under moderate forest cover.

But while looking for a vendor, I thought it couldn’t hurt to search eBay for some WarMachine stuff. Occassionally, people quit the hobby and sell off their collection for cheap.

And I found such a deal, alright…

One guy was selling off a huge collection of Cygnar, in order to get his kids a Nintendo Wii for Christmas.

I placed my bid, and bought the goodies for such a steal!! For RM 1.1k, I got more than 4k worth of goodies!

It was terrible to impose on my friend to bring back so much stuff. There was even more stuff than I expected. The guy threw in extra goodies even.

With this big buy, I think I’ve got more than half the range of WarMachine models! All factions put together!

Can’t help boasting about what I got, so here goes…

• Lt. Allister Caine
• Capt. Allister Caine
• Capt. Maxwell Finn
• Capt. Victoria Haley
• Major Markus Brisbane
• Major Victoria Haley
• Commander Adept Nemo
• Commander Coleman Stryker
• Capt. E. Dominic Darius
• 6x Arcane Tempest Gun Mages
• Field Mechaniks
• 10x Long Gunners
• 6x Stormblades
• 10x Trenchers
• Trencher Chain Gun Crew
• Journeyman Warcaster
• Gun Mage Captain Adept
• 3x Stormsmiths
• Charger
• 2x Hunters
• Sentinel
• Ironclad
• Stormclad
• Lancer
• Centurion
• Thunderhead
• Kommander Sorscha
• 6x Doom Reavers
• 4x Widowmakers
• Kodiak
• Alexia Ciannor
• 2x Thrall Warriors
• 10+ Risen
• Gorten Grundback
• Gorman Di Wulfe
• Ashlynn D’Else
• Cylena Raefyll & 7 Nyss Hunters
• 6 Devil Dogs
• Eiryss - Mage Hunter of Ios
• 6x Greygore Boomhowler & Co.
• 6x Hammerfall High Shield Gun Corps
• Reinholdt
• 3x Grundback Gunners
• Ghordson Driller
• Mule

5 years from now, I’ll still won’t have finished painting everything.