Britney new music video Till the wold ends premiere

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Britney released her new video Till the World Ends.

Watch it right here

Britney Spears - Till The World Ends



Its pretty awesome and continues to impress just as most of Britney Spears's videos do.

I did not care much for her performance on GMA a few days ago. It was a bit lethargic and failed to impress. I did not care much for her Hold It Against Me video as well. It is such an awesome energetic beat but the video seemed like an ad for sony, perfumes, dating site and the like. The lyrics and beat should make it an awesome club scene video with her trying to woo a guy across the dance floor .. but the video turned out to be her standing in a long dress and promoting products. Or maybe I am just too dumb to understand the creativity in that video, who knows. The only upside was the Britney fights Britney clip.

But Till the World Ends, delivers and its very impressive.

First Impressions: Crackle

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Summary: Dont plan on discontinuing any of your existing services yet. Highly buggy, unpolished and very unusable.

As posted earlier, I eagerly went home and hooked up my laptop to the flat panel and fired up my browser to watch Seinfeld on Crackle.

Apart from the annoying startup clip about Crackle, it started up alright. So far so good.

Like on TV, it stopped right after the clip of Seinfeld's stand up sequence and an ad came up. Ok ... not even 30 seconds in to the playback and I am seeing two ads (Crackle, some thing else). Interesting to note, adblock plus was not able to block the ads on this site.

This episode is one of my favorites, The Chinese Restaurant. The playback continued after the ad. Went on for 15 enjoyable minutes. At that point, it stopped and played another ad. Playback resumed and abruptly stopped after few minutes and declared

"You have been watching The Chinese Restaurant". "Next up ..."

Seems to me this should show up AFTER the episode finished. Before I could act on it, it started the next episode in my queue. I attempted several times to complete the previous episode but was not successful.

The default resolution for the playback is 360p. You are offered the choice to switch to 480p. But I was not successful in watching 480p playback. The playback would just freeze when 480p is selected. I have a high speed connection from cable company (12 Mbps), so bandwidth is probably not the issue.

So, being a good user, I tried to provide a bug report of all these issues using their "Have Feedback?" link. I diligently filled up everything and hit continue. Nothing happens. I try again, nothing happens. Cool, even the bug reporting system is not working. The bug reporting system is handled by GetSatisfaction and I have had amazingly good experience with that system having used it before on other services. But apparently on Crackle, even that doesnt work.

They certainly do have a great collection of movies and TV series. But the overall user experience is terrible. Yes, the site is brand new and they need to polish it up, but this feels more like an engineering sample than something that is suitable for mass consumption by early adopters. And they definitely need to get rid of the very annoying clip at the start of the playback. I think I watch that clip more than any content.

Crackle is a direct competitor to Hulu rather than Amazon VOD or Netflix.

Here is my suspicion -  Crackle wants to make the online / streaming viewing experience so bad that customers will stick to traditional means of delivery.

Unfortunately for them, Netflix offers an amazing online viewing experience. Of course, everyone is slowly starting to choke Netflix access to content. Lets see how this plays out.

With that, I say goodbye to Crackle for at least a couple of months. Sitting back and enjoying Trial and Error on Netflix.

Google April Fool Pranks

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If you haven't noticed already, here is this years Aprils Fools Day prank from Google

Gmail Motion

And here is the one from Linkedin

• screencap 1
• screencap 2

Happy Aprils Fools everyone.

Seinfeld available on Crackle

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Crackle is a new service offering free streaming movies and TV series. However, the streams are not ad-free. Your viewing experience will be like that of TV with ads every 15 minutes or so.

However, todays announcement is that Seinfeld, the most popular show about nothing is now available on Crackle. They are starting with 10 iconic episodes that include

• The chinese restaurant
• The bubble boy
• The pick
• The junior mint
• The puffy shirt
• The marine biologist
• The hamptons
• The soup nazi
• The bizarro Jerry
• The yada yada

I love Seinfeld. And I love that it is streaming on crackle. This is probably what I will be doing this weekend. 

If you like to purchase disc versions of Seinfeld, here it is with all 180 episodes

What to watch on Netflix tonight?

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If you are looking forward to a relaxing night at home, cuddled up with some warm soup or a cold beer and enjoy something on Netflix instant, here are some recommendations:

• Old is gold (Relatively old movies)
• Drama: Leaving Las Vegas
• Thriller: Shattered
• Comedy: Risky Business
• Foregin
• No One Killed Jessica
• New Movies:
• Eat Pray Love

Grab a glass of wine or a cold one and kick back. Have fun and enjoy  your weekend! 

If you are looking for a Netflix player, Roku is a great choice. If you already own a PS3, you already have the best Netlifx player available.

Dinner and a movie

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Today we settled in for a good home cooked dinner and a relaxing movie. I love Indian dishes and today was Bisi Beli Bath, its a dish from southern India. Its made of pulses (lentils), rice and vegetables. The spice level can be customized to your taste and its packed with flavor, proteins and loads of good stuff for your body. Here is a sample recipe.

And for the movie, picked a recent romantic comedy - Life as we know it. Its a pretty light hearted movie perfect for relaxing evenings.

My rating: ***   3 stars

Here is a link if you are interested in the movie
Video on Demand
Blu-ray disc

Installing Firefox v4.0 on Mac OS X

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Summary instructions to install Firefox 4.0 on Mac OS X:

• Download Firefox v4.0
• Quit any open windows of Firefox 3.x
• Open a terminal
• Type
• sudo rm /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/*.dylib
• Open finder window and go to the Downloads folder
• Double click the downloaded Firefox disk image (dmg file)
• Click on the Firefox image and drag it to the Applications folder
• Click on "Replace" when the installer asks if you want to replace existing package
• Eject the Firefox disk image by clicking eject in the finder window
• Open Firefox from applications folder
• Enjoy Firefox 4.0

Errors encountered:

• This operation cannot be completed because the item "libsmine3.dylib" is in use
• This operation cannot be completed because the item "libplds4.dylib" is in use
• Culprit: Cisco AnyConnect VPN

The release that everyone was anxiously waiting for, Firefox 4.0, is available now.

I had the Firefox home page open and it was announcing proudly and calling to me in bold colors "Download now".

Anxiously, I fired up Firfox 3.6 and hit Help->Check Updates.

Seconds seemed minutes as I restlessly tapped my fingers waiting for the progress bar to reach 100% and show me that it is now ready to download v4.0. Finally, the update check completed and stared blankly at me saying there were no new releases. I quickly dismissed it as server overload and clicked check updates again. No luck again. I gave up and clicked on the big green graphic on Firefox home page and waited for the Mac OS X disk image bundle to download.

Already irritated with Firefox 3.6 for failing to automatically update to 4.0, I mounted the freshly downloaded dmg file and dragged the icon to Applications folder to install. But my joy was short lived. Mac OS X now took the turn to dampen my excitement and complained

The operation cannot be completed because the item "libsmime3.dylib" is in use.

I tried again completely quitting Firefox 3.6 and everything else I could think of. No luck. Angered by the endless roadblocks, I fired up the mac terminal and tried to find out which application was using the libsmime3.dylib file.

The command lsof - list open files, commonly found on all Unix based systems (UNIX, AIX, SOLARIS, Linux, BSD and of course, Mac OS X).

sudo lsof -V | grep -i mime

showed that a service related to Cisco AnyConnect VPN client was the root cause. Cisco VPN client is a commonly used software to remotely establish secure connections to work place, also called a virtual private networking client software. This is very common and popular way to secure connections from anywhere in the world to work places.

I tried killing the process with kill -9 and killall. But the process respawned immediately. There was no way I was going to kill this process with any success.

Typically if an application has a file open, it is not possible to move or remove that file due to lock issues. But since there were no other options and I did not know of any limited service mode in Mac OS X, like safe mode in Windows or single user mode in Linux, I tried to delete the files held open by the Cisco AnyConnect Client (vpnagentd)

sudo rm /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/*.dylib

I tried installing again by dragging the icon to Applications folder. Lo, Behlod! it worked.

For some reason, Cisco AnyConnect VPN service (vpnagentd) is holding open several dylib files in Firefox folder.

There you go, simple steps to work around Firefix installer errors.