I never liked any zombie movies until now, especially serious zombie movies. The only non-comedic zombie I would rate higher than a three is 28 days later but that’s only because its more of a horror movie than a zombie flick.

The other two zombie movies I enjoyed Shaun of the Dead and the Evil Dead, both totally different, were good/great. ( Of course, I haven’t seen Evil Dead since I was a kid and even then I think I saw the sequels first, either way I thought they were cool. I digress. )

Zombieland had the feel of a video game: it setup the characters well, it had a focused plot and it was short. The most important piece that made me relate it to a video game, all the zombie killing humor.

Short and sweet: the story is amazing and I bet the book is way better than the movie. The only thing that kept me intrigued was thinking about time traveling and how awesome the plot/story was.

One side argues for user rights. I like JaredB’s comment in a recent Google Reader/Buzz thread about the topic:

… I (and every other web user) has absolutely no obligation to justify our actions in this regard. When I request some data via an HTTP request and it comes back to my browser for viewing, I have every right to filter and choose to not see / read any portion of that data that I wish…

I and Ken argue that the effects of doing whatever you’d like hurts,

It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content.

So is the internet too young to decide this ethical dilemma? As everyone knows by now the internet is us, People Magazine called us the people of the year ( ha ha ); maybe ”we are to young” to decide what we want.

I thought we all want a free internet, I don’t think you can argue against that ( unless you’re a repressive government ); internet content creators like Ars are feeling the same pinch digital media struggles with now — but it’s a not exactly piracy.

… [content providers are] well aware of the existence of ad blocking technology when they chose that revenue model, so they were (or should have been) well aware of the risks involved. As a matter of observable fact, they were aware, and that’s why they chose to do it anyway, because it’s worth it for them (according to them, since they’re doing it) even taking the blockers into account.

What the solution then? Pay walls.

Even if I didn’t think ad-blockers are ethically wrong, I’d be worried about the revenue model websites would need to adopt if ads cannot. If sites follow in the foot steps of digital media they’d find DRM isn’t an option but a subscription or mixed model would work.

Ars talked about a mixed model, where content is ad free for subscribers but is that really the future?. I can’t image it lasting, in a mixed model the subscribers are donors and the people with the “right” to filter will not all donate subscribe. My worry, as soon as the provider gets this point the walls will be built.

Instigating pay-walls is counter intuitive to a free internet.

Place this after get_header() within your page template.

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? (int) get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$page_link = get_permalink($id);

Not sure what type of loop you want to create but here’s what I recently used under the page content.

<?php
	$events_query = new WP_Query('category_name=Custom&amp;paged='.$paged);
	while ($events_query->have_posts()) : $events_query->the_post();
		// post markup would go here, e.g. the_excerpt();
	endwhile;
?>

I also wrapped my page content so it only showed on the first page and not the paginated pages.

<?php
	if($paged == 1){
		// all the page content markup, e.g. the_content();
	}
?>

After those updates you’ll have a page template that returns a loop of posts under the “Custom” category.

The last step is adding the pagination links. Here’s the markup I used.

<div class="pagination">
			<span class="previous">
				<a href="<?php echo $link ?>page/<?php echo $paged + 1; ?>">&amp;laquo; Previous</a>
			</span>
			<?php if($paged != 1): ?>
			<span class="next">
				<a href="<?php echo $link ?>page/<?php echo $paged - 1; ?>">Next &amp;raquo;</a>
			</span>
			<?php endif; ?>
</div>

So, is there a better way out there? I hope so, since the previous and next links show regardless if there’s posts or not, and I don’t feel like writing those queries for this tutorial :).

My only complaint is the charging. I tend to always forget to charge it every night and having it stop working in the middle of the day is awful. This really shouldn’t happen with battery technology these days, I should be able to let it go for a week before I’m forced to recharge the thing. This isn’t a new occurance, these mice had the issue from day one.

Yes, I did say ‘mice’. I bought an extra for my office a while back and now I have two. But with the battery issue its good to be able to switch off instead of having a forced break from work.

Maybe Logitech will bring this model back instead of trying to pass the Performance Mouse as the next generation.

[This review was also posted over at gdgt.]

Download the Apache Tomcat

Found under Binary Distribution as a tar.gz under ‘Core’

Move and untar

$ cd /usr/local
$ mv ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-6.0.24.tar .
$ tar -xzvf apache-tomcat-6.0.24.tar
$ mv apache-tomcat-6.0.24 tomcat6

Starting and Stopping Tomcat

$ mkdir bin
$ cd bin

Create a file under called start_tomcat ( e.g. ~/bin/start_tomcat ) with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat6
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh

..and another for stopping tomcat ( e.g. stop_tomcat )

#!/bin/sh
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat6
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh

Make the files executable:

$ chmod ug+x start_tomcat stop_tomcat

Now you can start and stop tomcat with commands these commands:

~/bin/start_tomcat
~/bin/stop_tomcat

Apple has some good docs on tomcat, even if they’re out of date.

If you’ve seen a preview you know Sandler is terminally ill and you can guess he starts soul searching and finds a girl; well, don’t get disappointed there’s definitely more to it and without spoiling anything I loved how it unfolded.

Even if you don’t like Sandler’s style of comedy, I can’t stand the voice bits, there was a lot of laugh-out-loud moments and I’d recommend this movie to anyone that can laugh sit through a dick joke.

The premise of the movie is simple: everyone uses a robot to live out their daily life. I have mixed feelings about this movie; I really liked the plot but I couldn’t enjoy the story the movie presented.

The robotic acting was a little overboard at times, it seemed like the actors just didn’t know how to express at certain times and actions and reactions were not consistent. This ended up being distracting and contributed to me not liking the movie as much as I’d would have liked.

After watching this movie, my non-stop work habits and lack of getting out of the house some days made me think of how computers are our surrogates right now. I’t only a matter of time before this type of thing comes true, even if its more like the halodex in Caprica.

Overall, I did rate it pretty high because I’d still recommend it as a rental — if you like sci-fi and nothing else is available.