# Tuesday, May 11, 2004

I've watched a couple of new movies in the last week or so, and it's been a pretty mixed bag.  I don't post about it all that often, but I'm a pretty serious moviephile, and so's my wife, so we see a lot of films. 

  • Kill Bill (vol 1): I thought it was pretty good.  You can tell Tarantino worships the genre, and it fit well.  Vikki thought it was too gory, but I thought it was genre-appropriate, given what he was going for.  I think Uma is critically underappreciated since she tends to take off-beat roles.  Lucy Liu was great as the trash-talking ganster boss.
  • Master and Commander: I was totally prepared not to like this film, but I was quite favorably surprised.  The role suited Crowe well, cinematography was very good.  Peter Weir has a great feel for composition.  I thought it had just the right level of realistic violence.  It conveyed the horror of combat without being gratuitous. 
  • Van Helsing: yuck.  spit.  hack.  It sucked.  I knew it would be bad, but I didn't think it would be bad.  Jackman was totally underutilized.  The special effects were cool, but not enough so to carry the film past the wretched dialog and lack of coherent storyline.  I saw one review on the web that compared it to Battlefield Earth,and I don't think I'd go quite that far, but still, majorly lame.  All the supporting characters were overacting without being melodramatic (which would have been genre-appropriate), especially Frankenstein's monster.  What a ham.  Bah!  The werewolf effects were novel, but again, not cool enough.  Check out Dog Soldiers if you want a good werewolf movie.  The guy who plays Dracula could have been good if he'd stuck with Lugosi instead of occasionally lapsing into Oldman.
  • The Last Samurai:  OK, there were totally no surprises here.  It's exactly what you'd expect.  Dances with Wolves, only set in Japan.  But it was well executed.  Good cinematography, decent enough acting, great artistic direction.  The sets and costumes were very well done, and pretty accurate.  I really liked the job they did on the Samurai's kimono.  Don't expect anything dazzling, but a good solid film.  I wish Cruise wouldn't keep taking the same role over and over again though.  He can actually act (witness Magnolia or Eyes Wide Shut). 

I'm looking forward to seen Troy this weekend, although I'm sure it's going to suck.  As both a movie and history buff, I can't really stay away.  :-)

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 11:06:37 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Monday, May 10, 2004

Upgraded smoothly to dasBlog 1.6 this weekend.  Went perfectly, no hassle.  Seems a bit faster, and the styles look better under FireFox.

Kudos to Omar and the rest of the team.

Monday, May 10, 2004 9:41:33 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Friday, May 07, 2004


The foremost proof of which (even more so that road rage) is the office coffee pot.  The fact that so many feel that they can take the last of the coffee and then blithely walk away is evidence that we've fallen on un-civil times. 

My employer is kind enough to provide three different kinds of coffee, and on more than one occasion I've walked up to find all three karafes completely empty.  I rage, swear, cry to the heavens, and then set about making three pots of coffee, as is only fitting and civic-minded. 

I understand that in some circles it's seen as stigmatizing and degrading to have to "make the coffee" at the office, since someone is just supposed to attend to it, but come on people, the 50's are long gone, and administrative assistents have no more duty to make coffee than do each and every one of us. 

So be civil, thoughtful, respectful of others, and make the @#(@*$% coffee!  The 20 seconds it takes are worth the feeling of pride you can take in not being one of those non-coffee making so-and-sos.


Friday, May 07, 2004 12:45:18 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  | 
# Thursday, May 06, 2004
I've long said that the internet knows everything.  Now the internet has everything too.  All I have to do is mention the idea for a T-Shirt and low and behold (thanks to Greg) my wish (and my son's) is granted.  Thanks man.
Thursday, May 06, 2004 2:55:04 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 

Scott makes a comment about people being born coders.  I wholeheartedly agree.  I've known lots of people who have had reasonably successful careers as coders, but who've never been extraordinary.  Plenty of people pull down a paycheck doing competent work as coders, but never achieve greatness.  I agree that it's something inborn.  Maybe it's the ADD and dyslexia.  :-)  Whatever it is, my experience has shown that some people just don't have it, and no matter how hard they work they'll never get over the hump. 

I recently spoke with a psychologist who was musing about the idea that the high level of coffee consumption in the NW is due to the fact that many if not most coders are ADD, and caffeine works to calm them down enough to work, in the same way that Ritalin works on kids.  Not scientific, perhaps, but it makes some sense. 

My son thinks it's pretty cool to be a geek.  He's started referring to himself as “geek, son of geek”.  He's a little miffed that there aren't any T-Shirts that say that.  In his case it's tough to distinguish nature from nurture, since I was out as geek before he was born. 

Maybe someday in the near future they'll map out the geek gene. 

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Thursday, May 06, 2004 11:30:12 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Thursday, April 29, 2004

OK, usually I try to stay out of the whole MS/OSS thing, but I find this interesting enought to comment on.  Just to get this out of the way, I'm all in favor of OSS, and I think both Linux and Gnome are pretty cool.  I'm a dedicated Firefox user personally.  (I realize that sounds a lot like "some of my best friends are gay".)

That said, I find statements [via TSS.NET] like "Gnome and Mozilla need to align to counter [Longhorn]" to be pretty strange.  That sounds an awful lot like the statement of someone who sees Gnome/Mozilla/Linux as a commercial, for profit enterprise.  Why else is "competition" with MS something to consider?  (One possible alternative is that the OSS community is driven by people who have way too much ego invested in OSS projects.)  I thought the whole "point" of OSS was that it was driven by a different set of concerns that is commercial, for profit software.  Am I missing something? 

Either the Gnome/Mozilla community is being run as if it was commercial, or it's being run by people who are driving the direction of the community for the sake of their own egos.  Neither is very attractive. 

Thursday, April 29, 2004 11:57:55 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Tuesday, April 27, 2004

As previously mentioned, Scott and I are working on some pretty cool stuff involving generating code from XML Schema, and then doing various bits of stuff to those generated objects.  Today what I'm pondering is not the code generation part per se, but the bits of stuff afterwards part. 

For example, if you want to take your generated class and serialize it as a string, there are (at least) three options:

  • Generate the serialization code as part of the code generation itself.  E.g. code gen the objects .ToString() method at the same time as the rest of the code.
  • Insert some cues into the object at code gen time, in the form of custom attributes, then reflect over the object at runtime and decide how to serialize it.
  • Insert some cues into the object at code gen time, in the form of custom attributes, then reflect over the object once at runtime and dynamically build the serialization code, which can then be cached (a la the XmlSerializer).

The advantage to number one is that it's fairly easy to understand, the code is pretty easy to generate, and the resulting code is probably the most performant.  The disadvantages are that the code embedded in the code gen process is a bit harder to maintain, since it's "meta-code", and that if you want to support different serialization formats for the same object, you might have to generate quite a lot of code, which embeds a lot of behavior into the objects.  That may not be a bad thing, since the whole point is that you can always regenerate the objects if the serialization behavior needs to change.

The advantage to number two is that it is the most flexible.  The objects don't need to know anything at all about any of the formats they might be serialized into, with the exception of having to be marked up with any appropriate custom attributes.  You can add new serialization methods without having to touch the objects themselves.  The biggest drawback (I think) is the reliance on reflection.  It's hard for some people to understand the reflection model, which might make the code harder to maintain.  Also, there are theoretical performance issues with using reflection all the time (many of which would be solved by #3) although we've been running this code in production and it's performing fine, but that's no guarantee that it always will.  Scott is also a bit concerned that we may run into a situation where our code isn't granted reflection privileges, but in that case we'll have plenty of other problems to deal with too.  As long as our code can be fully trusted I don't think that's a big issue.

The advantage to number three is essentially that of number two, with the addition of extra performance at runtime.  We can dynamically generate the serialization code for each object, and cache the compiled assembly just like the XmlSerializer does.  The biggest disadvantages are that it still leaves open the reflection permission isse, and (first and foremost) it's a lot more work to code it that way.  Like #1, you end up writing meta-code which takes that extra level of abstraction in thinking about.

Practically speaking, so far I find #1 easier to understand but harder to maintain, and #2 easier to maintain but much harder to explain to people. 

If anyone has any opinions or experiences I'd love to hear them.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004 10:39:53 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  | 
# Monday, April 19, 2004

My wife and I went to see Hellboy last night.  Humph.  I was disappointed.  The hightlights were the art direction, which was very consistent and retro-cool, and Ron Perlman was a fabulous choice for Hellboy.

However, there was little to no character development in a script that really called for some.  Hellboy is supposed to be a much more tragic figure than he comes across as because of the lack of characterization.  And John Hurt's professor was totally one-dimensional. 

A pretty film, and worth a viewing, but I won't rush right out after the DVD when it comes out.

Monday, April 19, 2004 10:17:50 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Saturday, April 17, 2004

I just saw the new Omnimax film that's playing at OMSI here in Portland.  What an amazing film.  I've seen a bunch of Omnimax films, and I think this was one of the more compelling.  It's composed of profiles of four people who go fast for a living: a sprinter, a mountain bike racer, a race car driver, and a race car designer.  All set to Mozart, and hosted by Tim Allen.  Very cool.  Lots of Omnimax-optimized footage of going fast.  Some of the coolest stuff was footage of the mountain bike racer, Marla Streb, who's been clocked at 67 mph, down a mountain on a bike.  That's pretty amazing. 

If it's playing anywhere near you, it's worth checking out.

Saturday, April 17, 2004 5:40:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Friday, April 16, 2004

OK, I realize this is apropos of nothing, but I'm most of the way through The Clash's Clash On Broadway, and I've got to say it just doesn't get any better than this.   

What a great, groundbreaking band they were. 

Friday, April 16, 2004 4:09:14 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |