Last night I discovered Harry's Pies - a poorly kept secret in Sydney, which due to my life in the burbs and disdain for driving into the city, I neither visited or even knew about until late last night. What impressed me about the pie stand was the cult following that it seems to have, and how everyone hanging around the pie stand seemed to be attempting to lower their blood alcohol level so that they did not get caught at a RBT. I decided that I should try out one of their pies, and after waiting (which was surprising for 1:30 in the morning) in the queue, I limbered up to make my purchase. The first thing that struck me about Harry's pies was the conspicuous absence of pies. They'd obviously run out of pies much earlier in the evening, and were restricted to selling metric bucketloads of hot-dogs. Given my general disdain for the meats found in hot-dogs, I scurried across the road to the local servo to pick up a packet of chips. I will be making a point of returning to Harry's pies to sample their food, if only just to say that I've eaten there.

Edit - It turns out only the public key has been found out, so all we can do is encrypt (sign) music to be played on an Airport Express. Bummer

Over at the CocoaDev Wiki, there has been a recent update to the AirTunes encryption scheme entry. It turns out that friend to many, infamous dvd cracker and general magnet to lawsuits Jon Johansen, has cracked the AirTunes encryption key, and has a client available (in C#) that streams songs in ALE format, and then send them to the Airport Express. It should be a short amount of time before a software AirPort express server is written, and I can have my own low cost pair of remote speakers to stream music to (yay!).

I saw Doom 3 being played for the first time today. It is a genuinely scary game, which has almost convinced me to actually go back to the world of pain that is x86 computing, just to play this game. We got the game installed on a 1.6 Ghz machine, with a pretty average video card, turned the lights off and turned the surround sound way up. Even on such a vastly underpowered machine (running at 640x480!), the game looked great, and the scripted action tied the game together really well. The "pinky" demons have been nicknamed the soilinators, after their first appearance in the game where we're pretty sure Joe Random marine has soiled himself seeing it jump through the window. I'll be hanging out for the Mac and Linux versions of the game, just so that I can at least play the game. I should really just rent a top of the line computer for a month and just play the game till I get completely sick of it.

I don't like musicals very much. I don't know why, exactly, but I just can't get over the format. It seems that recently, in Australia, there have been a torrent of musicals being unleashed to the unwitting public. Some of these musicals actually have some serious credentials behind them, for example Mel Brooks wrote The Producers. Another big name (in the comedy stakes at least) is Ben Elton, who by all accounts is very funny. His musical is We Will Rock You, and looked for the most part particularly uninspiring. Uninspiring that is, until I saw an actual ad for the production. I saw none other than Michael Falzon in the lead role. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Michael's work (and I wouldn't blame you), let me show you a picture of his previous work:

You may remember Michael from the breathtaking portrayal of the hacker Neo in the seminal Australian film "Computer Boy". You can find the film available for your viewing pleasure from here. It's good to see that the fantastic work done in this film has launched him onto the world stage.