It looks like Twentieth Century Fox is just not willing to let it's 'Alien' franchise die. Maybe the money shelled out by sci-fi and horror movie geeks over the years since the first Alien movie was released in 1979 is too good for the movie studio pinch off just yet.

The first movie, directed by Ridley Scott, rocked our worlds. The second movie with James Cameron at the helm was like a wild fire. The following four movies in the franchise, two of which were Predator crossovers, received luke warm approval from the sci-fi geek crowd with their marginally acceptable levels of 'suckyness'.

This time Fox appears to be trying to minimize the risk by tapping Scott to sit in the big chair and spin a yarn for the movie going masses that will be set sometime before the flight of the Nostromo.

I have not heard anything about the script or the plot of this prequel. As far as I know, Ridley Scott and writer Jon Spaihts are plumming the depths of their creativity to come up with something that I hope will be just as cool and immersive as the first film.

I got a call a few minutes ago from a self titled 'webmaster' asking me why all of his directory indexes on his website showing in Google search results. I did a search on Google for 'site:<his domain name> "index of"' and sure enough, I received a bunch of links that I could click on and then start navigating his sites directory structure.

I called him back asking him to send me a copy of his .htaccess file to look over. His response 'My H-T What?!?!'.

Oh brother.

He could have avoided having his sites internals laid naked before the web browsing and Google snooping world easily by doing the following.

Create a default index.html in every directory of his website. Make sure a .htaccess file is present .. if not create it. Add the following two lines to the .htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex index.html
Options All -Indexes

What else could have done?

I don't know ... maybe RTFM!

'... Another profession dominated and ruled by men'. That is what a lady friend of mine commented recently about the IT field.

Though, I have to agree with my ultra feminist friend that the male gender is in the majority when it comes to computer and internet related jobs - I also have to point out that without the brilliance and priceless contribution of many women the industry that it would would have been completely different.

One such woman was Grace Hopper. She was a one women powerhouse of geek. She was the first to postulate that because computers should be easier to program for their users, a higher level programming language could be created and then compiled into low level machine code.

In the early 1950's she began working on the first compiler while working on the UNIVAC I.

All compilers today can trace their roots back to the work Grace Hopper did over 50 years ago. Every time I have built applications from source or tweaked my kernel - I am invoking a little bit of that magic Grace Hopper made possible.

'Bugs' is a term used to referred to errors in ones program code. Another contribution to computer science from Grace. While working on a Mark II at Harvard University a moth was discovered in a relay preventing it from working properly. The bug was removed. Later she tapped that bug into a log book with the comment 'First actual case of a bug being found'. It is open to debate as to whether the term debugging orginated here - but after this moth and the log entry, the terming debugging was set firmly within the geek lexicon.

Comic Con is not just your average collection of comic book geeks gathering in a hotel over a weekend to scare the 'straights' with their personal odiferous hygeine and heated debates on socially relevant topics like who would win if Spiderman and Batman fought it out.

It has evolved into the place to premier the latest high gloss productions from the entertainment and gaming industries. This year Disney blew everybody away with a screening of a trailer for Tron Legacy.

Many sci fi geeks will remember the 1982 release of the first Tron movie. At the time it made much of the movie going public crinkle its nose. But in geekdom it became a cult classic over the years and inspiring at least two video games that I know of. I can only imagine the number of quarters a sacrificed to the original arcade game.

The trailer released by Disney at Comic Con this year gave an all to brief glimpse into a new and darker visage of a computer generated realm where the games where more like gladiator matches. The sleek, ominous and polished feel of it made me wonder how much inspiration the art directors took from the Timex Indiglo designs.

I am really looking forward to catch this one on the big screen. I hope it gets a run at my local I-Max theater when it is released in 2010.

Until then, I am just going to have to be content to watch this trailer a few dozen times and keeping FlynnLives bookmarked. High definition trailers can be downloaded from the site too.

Or, you can just enjoy this one (the trailer will be after a very short commercial):