Ruby En Rails 2007 Conference

Posted by andy

On June 7th the Ruby En Rails 2007 Conference will be held here in Amsterdam. I'm really looking forward to meeting up with the dutch Rails crowd. I'll be giving a lighting talk on Mongrel clustering and will share my experience with this in use on a busy site. Also looking forward to some of the talks, especially the opening keynote. Hope to see you there!!

Update: I just read there are no more seats left, so hope you got in!

Region Free for Free

Posted by andy

Yesterday I picked up a DVD player as part of a bundled deal on some big-ass computer speaker / HTS thingy at the local Mediamarkt. The sales dude offered a 'region-free' version of the player for a €30 premium and added that the usual 'punch in some numbers on the remote' hack absolutely didn't work with this player (Harman/Kardon DVD23). It was only possible with a special CD from the manufacturer which contained a firmware upgrade. Bullshit of course! I declined. As soon as I got home I googled a bit and sure enough:

  1. Switch The Player On
  2. Make Sure Disk Tray is Empty
  3. Push The "OSD" key
  4. Select "Set-up"
  5. Enter Code "3141590" (last digit is region, 0 = region-free)
  6. Display Returns To Normal
After that I tested it with a region 1 Terminator 2 DVD, worked flawlessly!