Shark Night
31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in29 Thursday Dec 2011
25 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in24 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in18 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted Animation or CG, Japanese Movies, Movies
inI like all of 新海 誠’s anime productions. 追逐繁星的孩子 (Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below) (video release 2011-11-25) exceeded all my expectations for another movie from him. Breathtaking visuals. Excellent music. Most important of all is its story – instead of just having people separate from each other, this movie explores death, and how the surviving members face the loss of their loved ones, via an imaginative environment and mythology. This is a very serious and exceptional movie.
16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted Movies
in13 Tuesday Dec 2011
Posted Computer
inLast update: 2012-8-21
The same problem (see below for the original article) occurred again in the second week of February 2012. Seems to be triggered by a kernel header update. (During mid-2012, there has been several months in which this problem did not occur so I originally thought this was fixed. Sadly in August 2012 it occurred again.)
This time I used the following steps when it stuck at Checking Battery State:
Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to bring up a terminal then login
sudo service lightdm stop sudo service lightdm start
This will bring up the ubuntu desktop (but does not solve the problem on reboot), so I can do some web searches if necessary. Please note that I use a Z68 chipset PC with on-board graphics. Any other hardware configuration may very well be different in the steps required to fix similar problems.
I launched a terminal, then type:
dpkg --get-selections | grep nvidia
It only shows nvidia-common. (It is very likely you will get different results if you use a hardware configuration different from mine.) I need to reinstall this, so I typed:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-common
It reported that nvidia-common is used by ubuntu-desktop which is also removed. To get both reinstalled, I typed:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
I made sure it also reinstalled nvidia-common. After it finished, I shutdown the PC and restarted it to confirm it can boot properly.
———————–
Date: 2011-12-13
After Ubuntu 11.10 performed an automatic update, it refused to boot up, and was stuck at Checking Battery State. After some google searches, I tried purging and reinstalling (sudo apt-get install) the following packages:
It still did not work. Installing gdm instead of lightdm would allow logging in, but the interface is different. And some UI things seem strange. Plus unity-3D would not work.
Some people solved the problem by reinstalling the nvidia driver. However, I’m using a Z68 chipset system with on-board Intel graphics (i.e. I have no nVidia hardware), so I should not need to do it. Strangely doing a “dpkg –get-selections | grep nvidia” would show “nvidia-common”. So I tried reinstalling it, then the normal login screen can be shown. (Some people say it is also necessary to “rm -f ~/.Xauthority”.)
At this point, logging in unity-3D would be abnormal (just show a menu on top), but unity (2D) worked. Then I did the followings to recover the unity-3D:
Toke me 3 hours to solve this.
09 Friday Dec 2011
Posted Korean Movies, Movies
inSector 7 (七號異煞) (HK movie release 2011-12-8) is a Korean ripoff of Alien. Although Koreans criticized it for having poor CG, I think its CG is acceptable for a Korean production. My problem with this movie is that it is not particularly effective, the monster design is a mess and uninspired, a certain scene is really fake, the heroine’s obsession is not explained to international audience (it is a common knowledge in Korea but not elsewhere), an important portion of the movie is too dark for 3D, etc.
I knew that Sigourney Weaver was good in the Alien series, but after watching this ripoff, I realize that she was so good that few other heroines can come close.