UPDATE - 11/11/08 - After some more searching this evening, I've managed to discover that there is in fact already a patch for PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra (build 4407) that resolves this issue. There doesn't seem to be a straight-forward way to find this update just by using Cyberlink's site navigation. But it's fixed, so I'm happy. I just wanted to include this link should anyone be having this same problem.

And on a side note, I was amazed to find my MP3.com profile as the 5th result for the Google search "bond bluray powerdvd" (without the quotes!), which I included as tags for this post. It looks like CNet has some pretty impressive search-engine optimization going on under the hood, though it is odd that my profile for MP3.com shows up and not GameSpot, TV.com, or Movietome... It's either some sort of duplicate data culling by Google, or for some reason the site code for the various CNet media sites is entirely different despite looking almost exactly the same.

=====END UPDATE====================================

I've always been a pretty big James Bond fan. So when I was browsing through Target's DVD section last night and I spotted Dr. No and From Russia with Love on Bluray (with vouchers for free admission to Quantum of Solace) for $19.99 each, it was pretty much a no-brainer. I was getting two Bluray movies for $20, and two tickets to see QoS in theatres. Very cool.

A few months ago, I purchased an LG GGC-H20L hybrid Bluray/HD-DVD drive for my desktop for about $120 when Newegg had them on sale. But I haven't really bought many Bluray movies so far. I picked up a copy of Terminator 2 the day that the drive was delivered. And I bought Iron Man the day that it came out. But other than that, I haven't been too keen on paying $30 for movies. Aren't we glad that there's still no competition to make prices a bit more reasonable?

But anyway, when I got home last night and popped Dr. No into my PC, all I got was a black screen in PowerDVD 7. Not very cool. So I did a little googling, and it looks like there are some issues with all of the James Bond movies that have been released on Bluray. Everyone has theories, whether MGM is to blame for manufacturing defective discs, or it's some sort of issue with the Bluray disc "standard" still not being an actual standard and players are incapable of playing new releases. Whatever the story may be, caveat emptor...

If you want to see 007 judo chop some fools in HD, for the moment you're going to need a PS3. The Bluray consortium seriously needs to get their crap together...

If you haven't already, go see The Dark Knight on an IMAX screen.

It is absolutely worth it. There are actually a surprising number of scenes that were shot using IMAX cameras, and it is without a doubt the most immersive film I have ever seen.

Heath Ledger is pretty much a lock for Best Supporting Actor at this year's Academy Awards. Granted, there are still about 6 months until Oscar season, but if you look at what's come and gone, and what's in the pipe, there isn't exactly a lot of competition. Not to mention that his portrayal of the Joker is absolutely amazing... I honestly couldn't have imagined a better version of the character if I tried.



Go see it. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

always beats manual labor.

So it's been a while since I've posted anything to the old GameSpot blog. But I thought now was a good of a time as any to try and jump back in with another mind-numbingly long soliloquy... When last we left our intrepid hero, he had started a new gig at an Internet marketing firm in the foothills of Appalachia. I'm happy to report that things have gone brilliantly these last 5 months - I've made some fast friends, and the job is a blast.

I actually ran across a fairly interesting problem at work this afternoon. I needed to generate an XML sitemap for a site to be crawled by Google. Prior to today, I hadn't ever had a project that required this sort of thing. So I asked around, and basically I was told that people just recycled the same class over and over again, which required manually copying and pasting the urls into a function that would generate the xml. That just didn't seem like a great method to me. So I tried to come with something a little more flexible.

Essentially, my thought was this - we already have this nice html sitemap on practically every site. So why couldn't I just use that file to generate the xml version? Well, unfortunately it isn't that straight-forward, because the html sitemap is actually using php to dynamically generate the links for data-driven content, and those links don't even exist until the page is loaded into a browser and the scripting is evaluated. After an hour or so of thought, I think I came up with a fairly elegant solution.

Code now, description later...

ob_start();

$ch = curl_init(URL_BASE.'/'.$this->sitemapFile);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$response = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

$begin = strpos($response, $this->sitemapBegin)
 + strlen($this->sitemapBegin);

$end = strpos($response, $this->sitemapEnd)
 - strlen($this->sitemapEnd);

$response = substr($response, $begin, $end - $begin);

preg_match_all('regexp for matching all html link tags',
$response,$links,PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

foreach ($links[1] as $link) {
 test conditions for generating xml
}

So... I remember now how much I dislike using this editor, it cripples usage of quite a few html tags and keywords... Anyway, my solution initializes php's output buffering, uses curl to execute the page and generate the dynamic sitemap links (which are written to the buffer instead of the browser), saves the output buffer's contents to a string, and then cleans and closes the buffer.

Next, I define the beginning and ending point of the sitemap. I made this decision because I figured that 99% of the time, the sitemap links will be inside of a div defining their sty|e (beginning point) and immediately followed by some other div like the page footer (ending point). Using this convention, I could strip out just the html containing the sitemap links and throw away the rest. Eg,

...blah,blah,blah
[div id="sitemap"] (aka the beginning string)
 STUFF I NEED
[/div]
[div id="something_else"] (aka the ending string)
blah,blah,blah...

Finally, I find any matches to a regular expression defining the contents of href link tags and store them to an array. And the last step, and really the only one that should require modification in the future, is defining the cases that determine what sort of flags to use in the xml for each link. In this particular situation, there were 5 cases out of over 120 links.

It might have taken a couple of hours of thought and coding time, but I think this algorithm will prove to be very reusable for subsequent xml sitemap generation, so long as the page conforms to the convention of surrounding the html/php sitemap links with unique html tags. At the very least, I know I am glad I spent my time trying to improve upon the status quo, and I hope it turns out that I've helped to save a lot of time in the future.