Archive for January, 2010

Netflix + Wii = My Whole Home Covered!

So I have had the Xbox360 streaming my Netflix selections for a while now, and it was kind of annoying to have to move it to the living room if I wanted to watch a movie downstairs instead of in the comfort of my bed.  Well now I don’t have to make such a decision.

No, I didn’t get a Xbox360 for the living room, but now the Wii is getting streaming from Netflix! Here is a snipplet from the New York Times about it:

Nintendo is bringing Netflix’s online streaming video service to its Wii gaming console, the most popular in the industry, the companies plan to announce Wednesday. The service lets subscribers choose from a catalog of generally older movies and television shows and watch them instantly.

It sucks because the rumor is that you will have to use a disc to start the service (ala the PS3), which is sad since Nintendo has a market that in theory should be able to provide such a software sans-disc.

Furthermore I hope the rumors are wrong and the disc is a one time channel install. That would be acceptable in my mind. Otherwise watching videos on the Wii will still be cumbersome as I will have to protect another disc from the kids.

Update: You can now signup to be notified when the streaming disc is ready for Netflix @ https://www.netflix.com/NRDInfo/Wii

Let’s Get Open!

Being that it is Monday and I am really not feeling it today I thought I would dig up what is happening around the nets and share with you.

Chrome OS Zero

Looks like Hexxeh has been hard at work getting a cleaned up version of Chrome OS called Chrome OS Zero out to the masses. Reading through the Wiki and FAQ things look pretty nice and clean. I may take a stab at playing with this in the next week or so. Thanks Hexxeh!

Droids

Tim at CTRL-ALT-DEL Comic has this silly for us today:

Thanks Tim!

Nexus One

We all know about Google’s latest move in the Android field by now, right? Well it looks like the Nexus One is selling well, and people are having problems with the 3G service that T-mobile is offering on the Nexus One. Being a T-mobile customer myself I can tell you the problems are not limited to the Nexus One. My phone refused to stay on 3G this weekend too, oh well.

PHP

References

Johannes Schluter discusses how references in PHP work, and suggests that maybe we should not use them anymore.

Last year I spoke at eight conferences and attended a few more multiple times at most of them I found myself in discussions about references and PHP as many users seem to have wrong understandings about them. Before going to deep into the subject let’s start with a quick reminder what references are and clear some confusion about objects which are “passed by reference.”

Patterns

Giorgio Sironi has two new blog posts about patterns in PHP. The first is on Abstract Factory patterns:

The major problem that creational patterns try to solve is that objects need collaborators: we often pass them in the constructor of a Client class to aid decoupling, as every class should know only what it really needs to get its job done. With the verb know I mean that they just know that the other part exist at all.

The second is on Builder patterns:

The Builder pattern’s intent is to encapsulate the details (the new operators and other wiring) of the object creation process under a common interface. Though, the Builder can actually change the internal representation of an object, as it is not a black box.

Both blog posts were great reads, and I suggest all my UPHPU buddies hit them up.

Announcing the Announce List!

Fellow nerds, listen up, if you want to know about the nerd, open source, or just plain awesome things happening in Utah, then you want to be a subscriber to the UTOS Announcement Mailing List

From the Official UTOS Blog:

The idea behind this mailing list is to simplify the announcements that UTOS provides to the community.  While we do a fair bit on our blog, we’d like to keep the mailngs going, but it has become complex to send mail to each Local User Group (LUG) every time we need to advertise an event or announce something.  In addition, sending mail to more and more LUGs will make it difficult as we grow the free and open source community in Utah and the Mountain West.

Go ahead and hit up http://mail.utos.org/mailman/listinfo/announce to sign up for the list, and then you can meet me at one of the announced meetings, activities, or just plain awesome somethings!

Another Awesome Mom SMS

Mom writes:

Forgot to tell you… got an Invisible Shield on my phone last night… this is an undercover message!

Gotta love her wit!

Just watched Valkyrie

Am I the only person who thinks that Tom Cruise and Kurt Russell look alike?

Quick Weekend Wrap Up (Saturday Night)

Just got done with a marathon (over 4 hours) of Super Mario Bros. Wii… freaking awesome! You must purchase if you own any classic Mario title. Also saw an ad for Super Mario Galaxy 2… exciting!

Watched “The Goods” — great flick.

Watch “Paranormal Activity” — pass, next time.

Finished Shadow Complex. Gotta do it again to finish some achievements… argh! Good game though.

That is about all… for now.