2008-08-15

The Crap Wars

So, today I took Thing 1 to see the newly released "Star Wars: The Clone Wars." Here's my assessment of it:

It sucks. It has all the makings of what it truly is, an afterthought for a TV show pilot.

Before I get into it a word about the clones themselves. They seem to wage war like the French. Only they have about 50% the accuracy rate. They've also started taking liberties with hairstyles (and colors)...whooop de frigging dah! The main thing that saddens me the most is that they won't be able to truly show these things being blown into the bits of putrid waste they are.

The first impression that this whole thing is going to suck occurs as it opens. Like the original series, there is no John Williams score. Only this time it's war chaos (the "Fall Back" was fitting). There is also no Words-In-Space!!!! A Star Wars movie ... without them, think about that.

The animation is meh. There isn't texture to the flat planes, but I think that's "the style." When you look you see exactly what it is ... a television cartoon (which cost you a movie ticket).

The plot has been presented before. Anakin is now a Jedi Knight and is teamed with the blue girl tentacly thing that got mowed down in the funky mushroom patch as a Padawan. They have to defeat a whole slew of droids before they can rescue Jabba's son. The only new droids were the mine-bots actually guarding the shield generator so you can pretty much imagine how it plays out. Oh yeah, just for a twist they're led by Sean Connery and he manages to capture Obi-Waaa.

Dooku apparently rescued Asajj Ventress but neither this nor her becomings are explained. The two of them are using Jabba's Uncle Zero to help them kidnap his son Rotta, and are trying to blame it on the jedi. Even if I didn't know what happened to them, I still couldn't have guessed how this would end up.

There are continuity problems (big surprise) with the whole thing, but when he's already done so much to ruin our childhood movies, why stop now. All in all I'll say this whole thing is going to be as ghey as Jabba's Uncle Ziro. The sad part is that the fan base will still watch it, buy the stuff they offer, and pass this blind following gene onto the next generation. God knows I'm doing my part...

2008-08-10

Linux Tip o' the Day

Today was the monthly meeting of the Charleston SC, Linux User's Group. While people were talking, I took the initiative to configure something that's been bothering me for a while. Basically, I do not like the default settings for Gnome's clock applet. I want it to be displayed in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format. With thanks to Juhaz from Freenode.##Gnome, I was able to do this. Basically, it involves configuring:

~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs/%gconf.xml


This is the XML configuration file for the clock. To change the way it appears, you need to adjust the following settings to the values listed below.


<entry name="format" mtime="1218398125" schema="/schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/format" type="string">
<stringvalue>custom</stringvalue>
</entry>
<entry name="custom_format" mtime="1218398125" schema="/schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/custom_format" type="string">
<stringvalue<%Y-%m-%d %T</stringvalue>
</entry>