Y: The Last Man movie coming soon

Y! The Last Man is one of my favorite comics and it looks the director of an interesting short movie on YouTube is going to direct it.

Dan Trachtenberg pulled in 11.5 million views with his moody seven-minute fan film Portal: No Escape, based on the popular puzzle platforming game by Valve, a project that has spring boarded the new director to much bigger things: He’s now been tapped by New Line Cinema to direct the long-gestating movie adaptation of graphic novel Y: The Last Man for his first feature film.

The long-running Vertigo comic book series by brainy sci-fi writer Brian K. Vaughan pictures a future in which a plague kills nearly all males. Escape artist Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand survive as the only creatures left with Y chromosomes, forced to navigate their way through post-apocalyptic gender politics.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/01/y-last-man-movie/

How I used Yahoo Pipes to filter CodeRush videos

Alex Skorkin from the DevExpress CodeRush team is on a mission to bring you all sorts of interesting news about CodeRush. And he’s working on bringing you a new CodeRush Facebook page.

Since I created and now help maintain the DevExpress Facebook page, he asked me how we could add a feed for CodeRush only videos from the DevExpress YouTube channel.

Now the best approach is if I could just add a query parameter to this YouTube RSS feed:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/DeveloperExpress/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published&client=ytapi-youtube-profile

 

Sadly I could not add the query parameter. Either that or I don’t know the specific parameter for it.

So to solve this problem quickly, I decided to take a look at Yahoo Pipes which allows you to "aggregate, manipulate and mashup content from around the web".

Since Yahoo Pipes has been around since 2007, there are a ton of existing pipes which you can either use or copy and modify to suit your needs.

After a little searching, I found this "YouTube filter user’s video by title" pipe which allows me to send 2 parameters:

1. YouTube User
2. What do you want to keep? (Keyword to search title, description, etc.)

 

So after a quick clone to make a custom tweak, I had the optimal RSS feed that only grabbed CodeRush videos from the DevExpress YouTube channel.

Yahoo pipes is simple, fun and powerful.

What about IFTTT?

There’s a new service called "If this then that" (IFTTT.com). Unfortunately, I’m not that familiar with it but if you know how to do something similar with IFTTT.com then please leave a comment below, thanks.

How To Resize A VirtualBox VM In 3 Easy Steps

VirtualBox does not make resizing a VM easy. Luckily, I’ve collected the 3 necessary steps that you’ll need to resize your VDI files:

Step 1 – Create a New and Bigger VDI file

Use the VirtualBox ‘Virtual Media Manager’ GUI to create a new VDI file that is larger in size.

Step 2 – Use the ‘VBoxManage CloneHD’ Command

This command will copy the original to the New and larger VDI. Open a command window and call this command from the VirtualBox directory. Be sure you properly reference the correct files, for example, here the command I used:

C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>vboxmanage clonehd –existing E:\virtualboxORIGINAL.vdi C:\Users\Mehul\.VirtualBoxHardDisksNEW_BIGGER.vdi

Sun VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.1.8

(C) 2005-2010 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100%

Clone hard disk created in format ‘VDI’. UUID: 7099c645-15c2-4656-bf90-27a444444444444

Step 2 (optional) – Call ‘setvdiuuid’ in case of an issue

Try to start your VM now that points to the NEW_BIGGER.vdi file. If you get an unusual error like this one:

Cannot register the hard disk ‘PATH’ with UUID {id goes here} because a hard disk ‘PATH2’ with UUID {same id goes here} already exists in the media registry (‘PATH to XML file’).

Then use the following command on your NEW_BIGGER.vdi:

C:\Users\Mehul\.VirtualBoxHardDisks>”C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBoxVBoxManage.exe”
internalcommands setvdiuuid MHDXDT1_Laptop.vdi

Sun VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.1.8
(C) 2005-2010 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

UUID changed to: d4c86bf9-3739-4894-9fee-0ec8342432a

Take note that I ran that command from the directory location of the NEW_BIGGER.vdi file. For a good explanation of this command, check out this post.

Step 3 – Resize the local drive in the VM

Your NEW_BIGGER.vdi is larger than before. However, as a final step, you need to increase the local drive in the VM. Windows 7 makes it easy with the disk management.

• From control panel, bring up ‘Disk Management’.
• Right click on your local C: drive (Disk 0 usually)
• Select ‘Extend Volume’

The process is pretty easy to figure out. If you need more info and images then check out this post for a more detail.

And that’s it! You’re done. You now have a bigger drive.

Easy, wasn’t it?

Thanks to this post for majority of the initial guidance.

The year 2008 in photographs – boston.com

Check out this set of pictures from Boston.com. It shows greats photos of events both happy, momentous and extremely tragic.

And this is only the first part. I’ll have to keep an eye out for parts 2 and 3:

The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3)

2008 has been an eventful year to say the least – it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I’ve done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It’s not the story of 2008, it’s certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days. Watch for part 2 and part 3 tomorrow and the next day. (40 photos total)

Where is Matt 2008? – CollegeHumor video

Cool and inspirational video from Matt again. Dancing all over the world. Ahh, if only.

42 countries in 14 months. This explains why Matt couldn’t make the Pork & Beans shoot.

Where is Matt 2008? – CollegeHumor video

FoodFeed.us and Twitter

When twitter first came out, I thought I wouldn’t want to know what my friends were up to all the time. Well, that was one misconception I had about twitter. Twitter is pretty cool, when I have time to pay attention to it.

This new service foodfeed.us looks interesting. It allows you to post from twitter, updates on what you’re eating. I’ll use it as a food tracker for now but part of me wonders if this is like TMI (too much info). [Btw, if you’re mind immediately wonders if there will be feeds for other necessary body functions, then please drop me a line so I know I’m not alone 😉 .]

FoodFeed.us

Educators Corner: Stanford Videos/Podcasts

My iPod has been playing these great Stanford talks from industry professionals. These podcasts talk about entrepreneurship, leadership, etc. Well worth listening to:

Educators Corner: Top 20 Videos

Plan vs Planning

I saw an article on goal achieving (yet again) and one of the items it mentioned was planning for the next day, week, etc. I casually asked my friend if he planned his days. He sent me this interesting quote from Eisenhower:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

I asked him what he thought the difference between plan and planning meant and I like his explanation:

ME: “Does he mean it’s more important to go through the act of planning and then dump the plan which comes out of it?”

Friend: “not dump the plan, but not to treat the plan as a set of instructions. Circumstances often invalidate the plan, especially longer term plans, but the act of planning prepares the planner for the future even when they have to stray from or abandon the original plan.”

Anyway’s, as a little reminder to myself to go through the act of planning, I’ve posted this entry. Thanks goes to my friend Drew.

Lessons from the zoo – applied in the bedroom

I once visited UC Berkeley in the 90s with my friend Sumit. We met up with Sumit’s friend, Bunty, who lived just off campus in a shared house with 3 other guys. Now Bunty was a nice and down-to-earth kind of guy. Even while finishing up his Phd and working on some cool eye technology at the time. What was surprising was the other three guys in the house. They were completely reclusive. Not very friendly, communicative, etc. When I asked Bunty how he could live with these guys who were so closed off/anti-social, he said that it was even worse when he first met them. Bunty said that he had to train them to change. So I was like WTF. In my younger days this was crazy thinking. That you can change somebody. But what he meant was that you can encourage people to change. Of course the change still comes from within but positive reinforcement towards the desired behavior is the key. This article below describes an animal trainer’s approach to this type of encouragement to change behaviors:

The rules are simple. Reward the behaviour you want. Ignore the behaviour you don’t want

globeandmail.com: Lessons from the zoo – applied in the bedroom

Jott’s Web 2.0 Sites Integration

I started using Jott.com this week and it’s useful. I tried it November 07 but the transcription service wasn’t that great and I didn’t get my email very quickly. Seems they’ve worked the bugs and it’s worth checking out again. As I setup more contacts, I noticed that I could even twitter from my cell phone now. That’s cool. They also have a ton of other sites integrated like blogger, Xpenser, and bunch more which I’ve never heard of. Here’s the full list: