Sorry for the overwhelming quiet here on RealJenius.com - I’m getting married in two weeks now, and it has been a bit of a time-consuming ‘project’.

Unfortunately, that probably also means that the next two to four weeks will still be quiet.

Rest assured, I haven’t died.

…. and I also got Mass Effect, which might also be a slight additional time-sink in my life ;)

Boyd Coddington (whom many people know from American Hot Rod) has died at age 63.

Boyd was a very influential member of the custom car/hot-rod industry in America, and it’s sad to see him go.

Tonight I officially kicked off the process of moving to Google Apps for my email, calendar, and also for google docs, which I use quite a bit.

I plan to blog on it more, but for now I will say the process was relatively simple, although moving from a fully configured GMail account to a Google Apps account should be less painful than it is.

Okay, so I guess my CAPTCHA has been broken on realjenius.com for a while now. I don’t know how long because nobody was able to comment or for that matter contact me through the contact form… because the CAPTCHA was broken.

I’d say I’m sorry, but… well, I’m not really. Anyway - you can comment again - enjoy!

Autoblog.com has posted that a live-action adaptation of the Akira manga is in the works.

Amidst all the great animes we’ve been exposed to, Akira stands out. Set in post-apocalyptic Tokyo, the neo-classic featured everything we’ve come to expect from Japan’s animation wizards: stunning artwork, imaginative plot lines and absolutely killer conveyances - particularly the bikes which easily put Tron to shame.

Well, at least according to C|Net Crave the format wars are now over. Toshiba has (unofficially) closed the lid on the coffin for HD DVD.

Overall, I’m glad that this is finally happening; the industry doesn’t need competing, incompatible media formats for long. It’s just a shame that I dislike Sony so much…

In a personally unexpected, but not-suprising-if-you-think-about-it announcement, Holley has filed for bankruptcy (the company with a name synonymous with carburetor for so many years).

Hopefully this cornerstone of the aftermarket automotive industry will be able to turn things around as the decade winds down.

Drupal 6 was released today after several months of development, and over 1600 issues being closed. Drupal 6.0rc4 was just released on February 8th, leaving the final release a mere week in the future. As is typical, contributed modules (many of which are fairly integral functionality for many users) are not all up to spec to the 6.0 infrastructure. As such, for some Drupal users, 5.0 may still be the best release for some time yet. Also of note, Drupal 6.0 is the last major Drupal release that will run on PHP 4 - as part of the Go PHP 5 initiative, Drupal is using their clout to help push the industry to PHP 5.2 - and Drupal 7 will be PHP 4 incompatible.

The changes in 6.0 are significant as usual - here are some of the interesting ones:

This weekend I became exponentially more wired by picking up a Blackberry Curve, and so far I’ve been very happy; the keyboard is very intuitive, and the connectivity is very good with an unlimited data plan.

I’m actually with T-Mobile, so the network speed is rather lousy on EDGE, but the Curve supports WI-FI, so it’s quite fast in my house and at hotspots.

…And yes, this blog post was done from my Blackberry.

As many of you may have seen by now, Ubuntu 7.10 - a.k.a. the Gutsy Gibbon has been released into the wild.