I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, that’s a lot of ads. On the other hand, they’re tasteful and all clustered together so that you’re clear they are ads. They are compact, and don’t interrupt readers who are reading the feed. So in some sense, they’re an excellent example of how to do RSS feed advertising.

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade

As fas as I can tell, the only difference between Home Premium and Professional is that you don’t get their virtualization for XP software support (which is probably like VMWare Fusion on the Mac), no automatic backup features, and it’s missing some enterprise Active Directory thing called “Domain Join” that I doubt I’d ever use. So I’m not paying any $ for that.

One advantage I’ll get out of this is the ability to (a) run DX10 for the latest games, and (b) 64bit support, so finally I can run all 4 GB of RAM properly without PAE and any other proprietary crap. Right now my 4GB only shows up as about 3.4 anyway. Also, SSD support is much better in Windows 7, from what I’ve read. So my Intel X25-M will continue to serve me well!

httpdocs/wp/ -> WP Install
subdomains/gadgets/httpdocs/ -> /elliottback.com/httpdocs/wp/
subdomains/books/httpdocs/ -> /elliottback.com/httpdocs/wp/

This means that from my domain, we’re always sticking an extra /wp onto things, but from the subdomains, they go directly into the wp-content directories from the root , in both relative and absolute sense. I consolidated my subdomains this way so that I could run a single WP install and maintain them together. Here’s the .htaccess file that lets WP Super Cache work on either of them:

# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*=.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/wp)?/
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%1/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%1/$1/index.html.gz -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) %1/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%1/$1/index.html.gz [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*=.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/wp)?/
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%1/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}%1/$1/index.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) %1/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}%1/$1/index.html [L]
</ifmodule>
# END WPSuperCache

Let me know what you think–performance stats show that it’s working fine for both the /wp subdirectory and the other subdomains!

Love Bombing (7 minutes)
Director: Philip Lepherd

Four friends discuss the cult recruitment technique of ‘Love Bombing’. Three of them seem to know an awful lot about it. Is it possible they’ve tried the technique before?

I thought this film was absolutely a blast, from the brilliantly sharp production quality and cinemetography, to the lovely accents and crisp dialog. It’s a great short film on the concept of Love Bombing, a process cults use to attract new blood. Check out the trailer on IMDB, too, it’ll give you some sense of it.

Number Nine (26 minutes)
Director: Brendan Ferrer

Set in an underwear factory called Material World Garments, Number Nine tells the story of Inspector #9, a meek briefs inspector who is color-blind. This could be the worst day of #9’s life, until he meets Miss #9, his equivalent in the brassier department.

An excellent short film, Brendan’s choice to shoot in black-and-white perfectly matches the total colour-blindness of the protagonist. The 35mm gives the film and old-style Three-Stooges feel (although Brendan said he was shooting for Chaplain). At 26 minutes, it’s probably 6 minutes too long, but it rarely drags.

Avatars (30 minutes)
Director: Michael Ofenheim

When Lisa catches her husband, Tyler, cheating on her in cyberspace, HotWetLinda turns the tables on TyMeUp. And, when their avatars meet on a blind date, Lisa discovers that in real-life, two online wrongs CAN make a right.

Although you can buy this movie on Amazon, I don’t recommend watching it. From the start it drags–the cheating husband is so terrible an actor that you feel neither annoyed at him for being a bastard nor sorry for him for losing his love, but total apathy. The mercilessly repeated punchline “So, do you have any Pot?” is Avatars only attempt at humour. The plot itself is tripe, trying to weave together notions of solipsism and internet dating, with a touch of the implausible Nigerian 419 email scam. I don’t know if the director’s brains were addled with pot himself when he did this–but it’s no good at all.

2095 (25 minutes)
Director: Troy Romeo

A young man who falls in love with a woman he thinks is his female co-worker, discovers that his own computer may offer him more than any human ever could.

There’s an interview here. As for the film, it was OK. I felt that too much time and effort ($40,000 and 4 years, according to the director) were spent on the production, leaving the screenplay a bit spaghetti. Its major flaw is that it spends most of the time focusing on the things that don’t matter, and then blitzes by the important developments in seconds.

So, here’s the solution I used:

<?php
class pid {
    protected $filename;
    protected $fp;
    public $already_running = false;
    function __construct() {
        $this->filename = dirname(__FILE__).'/'.basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']) . '.pid';
        $this->fp = fopen( $this->filename, 'w+ );

        if ( !flock( $this->fp, LOCK_EX + LOCK_NB ) )
        {
            echo "FAILED lock $this->filename\n";
            $this->already_running = true;
            fclose($this->fp);
        } else {
            echo "Acquired lock $this->filename\n";
        }
    }
    public function __destruct() {
        if( !$this->already_running )
        {
            echo "Releasing lock $this->filename\n";
            flock($this->fp, LOCK_UN);
            fclose($this->fp);
        }
    }
}
?>

It works fine from command line, but for some reason, doesn’t work when invoked via Apache over the web. But since I’m just using it for cron jobs, this is good enough for now. If you know why FLOCK( LOCK_EX + LOCK_NB ) won’t work when invoked through Apache, let me know!! I’m running PHP 5.2.6 (cli) and Apache/2.2.9 (Unix).