The Matrix Special Edition DVD

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Story from slashdot

“IGN.com is reporting that Warner Bros. is releasing a 2-disc special edition DVD of The Matrix (loaded with extras) on April 29th and The Animatrix (An Anime series set in the world of the Matrix) DVD on June 3rd.”

Unfortunatley, the IGN site is slashdotted (unavailable because of massive numbers of slashdot readers). One slashdotter managed to snaffle the text from the story:

Warner Home Video will be repackaging The Matrix as a 2-disc set. The new edition will essentially contain the current film and The Matrix Revisited discs. Revisited will be padded out with new promotional features like “Preload: On the Set of Reloaded,” episodes 1&2 of The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance, a preview of The Animatrix, “What Is the Game?” trailer for the new Infograme “Enter The Matrix” videogame , a sample of music from Reloaded, and a Marilyn Manson “Rock Is Dead” music video. The set will also include a free ticket offer to The Matrix Reloaded. The Matrix: Special Edition is due on April 29 and will retail $27.95. Oh, and the packaging will be “foil-wrapped” (insert eye-rolling).

Speaking of The Animatrix, this more ambitious project will be released on June 3rd. This disc will include nine short films conceived by the Wachowski brothers, delving into the world of the Matrix and its characters. The collection of shorts, ranging from traditional anime to full-blown CGI, will come from world-renowned anime directors Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Koji Morimoto, Mahiro Maeda, Takeshi Koike, Peter Chung and Andy Jones.” Episode include “The Final Flight of the Osiris,” “The Second Renaissance Parts 1 & 2,” “Kid’s Story,” “Program,” “World Record,” “Beyond,” “Detective Story,” and “Matriculated.” The Animatrix will retail $24.98. As for the two actual sequels, the Reloaded and Revolutions DVDs are already in production and are being promised as “breakthrough discs”.

I may have to buy this one; I’ve held off buying the DVD since I already have the VHS video, but this may be too tempting. 🙂

Monthly Statistics

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I can’t report on my monthly statics for last month. 🙁 My hosting service are upgrading their stats package(s). They assure me that no data will have been lost when it finally comes on line, but in the meantime I’ve had no stats updates since the 18th.
I have managed (thanks to gzip and a cron job) capture all my log files (they are re-started daily). I think I only missed one day, so I am going to look around for a stand alone stats package which will allow me to do off-line analysis from a series of Apache log files. Maybe I’ll have some figures soon.
One rough figure: This page has had more than 49,000 page views this month! Cool!

Weird Snow

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Tonight we started to get some of the snow that has been troubling the rest of the country. Anyway it started snowing around 6:45pm, but very light and melted immediately. Eventually it started to stick. Round about 8:30pm Jan noticed this pattern of un-melted snow out of the kitchen window.
snow
Is that weird or what? Does it look like a dog to you?
A larger version, along with a couple of new pictures can be found in the Miscellaneous – January album on the second page.

Charmed Life

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I’ve just finished reading Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, part of The Chrestomanci Series. I really enjoyed it. It’s another kids book (11+), but I didn’t find it too simple. I liked the main characters, and the plot was good too. I wouldn’t rate it up with the likes of Harry Potter, but still, a good read.

Merge Mania

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I’ve spent all day merging code streams together today. It’s been quite painful because I’ve not been able to use CVS‘s automatic merging, and had to do it all by hand. Basically, half the stuff on one branch has already been merged, and now they want the other half, except for one change. But I think I’ve got it all done now. I just need to test it thoroughly.

Making a Living From OpenSource

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There is a nice article over at NewsForge called Making a Living Saving the Government Money about how a small company, Devis are making a modest profit developing large scale solutions for the US government based almost entirely on Open Source applications.

Peter Gallagher is president of devIS (AKA Development Infostructure), a Virginia-based company that designs, develops, hosts, and operates large-scale custom Internet applications for government agencies and private consultants. He says devIS saves its clients a minimum of $100,000 per contract by using Open Source Software. Gallagher also claims none of the Web sites or Web applications devIS has produced have ever been hacked. And here’s the real clincher: devIS makes money.

The devIS business model is one Open Source and Free Software proponents have been advocating for years, namely selling software services instead of selling software products.