Chuck is on SciFiNow Covers.

SciFiNow is a science fiction, horror, cult TV and fantasy UK magazine. Inside the issue #56 of the magazine, on stands on July 2011,  Chuck gets a four-page article for its incredible and so far successfull struggle to survive in a non-scifi-friendly tv universe. The covers says : "How tv's hottest geeks beat the network and the secrets to season five".

I scanned the magazine primarily for Summer Glau's photos as Greta; but then i figured out it would be nice to make the scans of the complete article, being a fan of Chuck myself.
Click on image for bigger size (then right-click/display for zoom)

 

Chuck on cover of SciFiNow UK.

 

Promo Photos from episode 3 of Alphas, "Anger Management"

Dark Horse is running the classic River Tam vs Buffy Summers poll

Dark Horse VS: River Tam vs Buffy Summers!

Dark Horse : River Tam (Serenity) or Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer);we're giving you the chance to decide once and for all who would win in a fight;


Credit : Darkhorse

Show your support to Summer Glau and vote for River Tam (Firefly) at :
http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog....summers

For the updated results and more about the fight, go to the Summer Glau Wiki Forum at :
Forum thread : River vs Buffy

NBC's official website has annouced the Winner of "The Cape's Submit Your Villain contest" along with the three Runner Ups

The Cape's Submit Your Villain contest - The Winning Fan Villain is ...Fire Bug

The Winner : Fire Bug by Volyman

 

IMDb daily poll for Monday, February 27, 2011 : We just heard the news that Warner Bros is planning to remake The Bodyguard. Who do you think they should cast in the lead roles?

Summer Glau as the bodyguard

Summer Glau was nominated to be the bodyguard for...Justin Bieber.
Link to voting : Justin Bieber and Summer Glau -- with Summer as the bodyguard at IMDb - Daily Poll

And the results for "Summer Glau as the bodyguard" are :

 
 

Unbeliebebable!

 

This Black Friday I decided to buy some photography-related stuff and among other things was the Wacom Intuos4 tablet. If you ever saw at least one episode of "The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost" you should have noticed that she uses one of those tablets. She even explicitly suggested using a tablet in the "PS - Painting in Photoshop CS5 (part 1)" episode.

So the first question was which model to choose. There are four different sizes available: small, medium (also a wireless model is almost the same size), large and extra large. I've tried to google for recommendations and all I found was people saying that it's basically the matter of personal preferences: if you like to draw on a small area you should look for a smaller one, also the small is better if you are planning to use it in travel. After using it for a while I would add the following criteria:

1. There is a "Lens Cursor" accessory that available for L and XL models only. So if you think you may ever need a digitizer then you should look at those two models.
2. When you use a pen with the tablet by default it maps all screen to the whole tablet area, so for example if you want to use a scrollbar you should slide the pen along the right side of the tablet and to close a window you should tap in the upper left corner (assuming you are working on Mac and have maximized the window size). Even for a medium size tablet that means your hand should cover some significant distance.
3. The small model has only 6 programmable Express Keys while all other models have 8 of them. In fact I did not use those keys much so this difference is probably not that important.

It seems like Mrs. Kost uses the small tablet. I've selected the medium one.

I've already mentioned that the tablet has programmable buttons. It also has a touch ring that has 4 different programmable modes. Besides a pen there is also a mouse that looks like a regular one except that you should use the tablet instead of a mouse pad. Not only you can program any button, but also you can program them for different applications. For example here is a custom radial menu I created that appears if I press one of the pen buttons when I work in Firefox:

Finally I want to warn Mac users that the driver that ships on a CD ROM is very outdated: it is 32-bit version and it has some bug when working with spaces. So you should download the latest driver from http://www.wacom.com/downloads/drivers.php .

Today I tried to import some data into the database. I used dbms_datapump instead of impdp which I usually use for that. Unfortunately I forgot to chgrp oinstall *.dmp, so I've got an obvious error and after an obvious fix I've tried to run the job again... and got ORA-31634: job already exists. I did not want to rename a new job and after a little googling I found this nice blog post: http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-cleanup-orphaned-datapump-jobs.html. So I did like the post says:

> select * from user_datapump_jobs;
JOB_NAME OPERATION JOB_MODE STATE    DEGREE ATTACHED_SESSIONS DATAPUMP_SESSIONS
-------- --------- -------- -------- ------ ----------------- -----------------
MYJOB    IMPORT    SCHEMA   DEFINING      1                 1                 2

I tried:

drop table MYJOB;
purge recyclebin;

and I saw the job was still there. Then I did:

declare
 j number;
begin
 j := dbms_datapump.attach('MYJOB');
 dbms_datapump.stop_job(j);
end;
/

but the job obviously did not want to disappear. I had no idea what else I could do, so... I disconnected from the database. After I connected again the user_datapump_jobs was empty and I was able to import my data! I'm still wondering if it's because the job had attached sessions or it just takes some time to finish a job.