If you haven’t seen the movie, go and see it now. It is the best movie I have seen lately, and one of the best I’ve seen ever (if not the very best). There are several trailers available.
I must be getting old and sentimental—I nearly wept many times through the film. It felt so good. WALL-E is a fantastic and amazing movie.
There are many heart-warming scenes in WALL-E. One of the best, in my opinion, was when Eve was reviewing her (its?) security camera footage and saw how WALL-E took care of her while she was on stand-by. Another one was when she thought WALL-E had exploded together with his rescue ship.
There were some good gags, too—like the sound WALL-E emitted when fully charged with his (its?) solar panels, which is the Mac start-up chime. The repair department for robots, which was like an insane asylum with all kinds of crazy (broken) machinery isolated in cells.
There is a happy end, too. No nasty surprises. I’m a bit tired of my life presenting me with all kinds of nasty surprises, and to not get any in such a good movie felt good.
We sat through the credits and were the last to leave the theater. The credits are a piece of work, too—I advise you not to leave early and watch them to the end.
People of Pixar, I salute you. Thank you for the wonderful experience.
In this time of financial and economic turmoil every penny counts. So here are my tried-and-true tips on how you can save electricity with your shower and bath.
Take Navy Showers
A “Navy shower” is called so because on military ships there is always a lack of fresh water, and to conserve it, sailors to this day often use a water and energy-conserving showering routine, which comes down to turning water on to wet the body, then turning it off while soaping up and scrubbing (or applying shampoo), then turning the water on again to wash the soap and shampoo off.
If you have an electric shower, it often consumes 8+ kW of power, which is necessary to heat the fast flowing water very quickly. But this also means that it really burns your electricity up like there’s no tomorrow. I can imagine an electric shower being one of the top electricity consumers in a home. So when showering, consider turning the tap off while you are soaping up. You’ll conserve water as well.
Was browsing Reddit the other day and saw this:
An evidence of the collective intelligence of a bunch of time-wasters (including myself, of course).
This just in: Borland sold their programming tools division, CodeGear, to none other than Embarcadero Technologies. Makers of cross-platform database tools, for God’s sake. Face it, folks: Borland is no more.
It all started with Turbo Pascal, an amazing tool that introduced me to programming. Then I switched to Turbo C, Turbo C++, Borland C++, which at that point became garbage, so I abandoned it for Microsoft C++ (which at that point was somewhat less of a garbage.)
Being pummelled by the competition, Borland decided that the best strategy to show they were really enterprisey was to rebrand. The world-famous brand Borland became “Inprise” (WTF?)
Oh, they also bought dBASE at the time when it became garbage, too (the linked article compares it to Windows Vista, which is only fair.) The garbage levels in the company started to raise. The greatest tool they ever produced, Delphi, became garbage too, because Borland/Inprise decided that a tool which produced the smallest and fastest running Windows programs in a fraction of time of any other tool on the market was not enough. Not enterprisey enough, perhaps. Or maybe their marketing folks just sucked. So they said, “let’s compete with Microsoft on their own turf”, and produced Delphi for .NET which nobody wanted. Then there was Kylix (sort of Delphi for Linux), which nobody noticed.
I participated in beta testing of Borland’s new Builder X, or whatever it was called, a Java-based multiplatform multilanguage IDE. It sucked big time. They abandoned it.
And so it went: Borland became Inprise, which, after someone pulled their head from their @$$ for a short while, became Borland again, which saw it impossible to compete with Visual Studio and produced an offspring called CodeGear, which gave birth to Delphi for PHP (which again nobody noticed) and at the end of the line was sold to the first bidder foolish enough to pay money for it.
I firmly believe that selling CodeGear to Embarcadero is the last nail in the coffin of once great developer company (and I don’t mean Embarcadero.) I had to work with RapidSQL (the “Rapid” part of the name is a cruel joke, I’m sure.) It is horrendous. The interface is clearly done in Delphi, which shows that you can screw up your programs even when using great tools. The performance is not great, to say the least, and the damned thing crashes regularly, or fails to launch. And now they must be thinking that by buying the company that did their tools they will somehow magically improve their products. Good luck with that. One thing I don’t understand: how they get huge enterprises (banks etc.) to use their software? Their marketing division must be really great.
Anyway, sad story, really.
P.S. I wrote this from memory, so if there are any factual errors, please do comment and let me know.
As part of learning LaTeX, I made a cheatsheet for the workflow described in my post about using Git with ClearCase. I used VIM to write LaTeX code and MikTeX to typeset it. The power of LaTeX is amazing, and I’m just starting with it, so I’m pretty excited.
Download the cheatsheet (one-page PDF, 40 KB): git-clearcase.pdf
Download the LaTeX source, 8 KB: git-clearcase.tex
Git is the future of version control systems and maybe even more.
I started my acquaintance with SCM tools many years ago with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (ugh!), then moved to Perforce mainly because the company I was working for (Symbian, in case anyone is curious) was using it. For my personal projects I switched to CVS, then moved to Subversion and continued to use it till earlier this year, when a friend mentioned a new system called Git (written by a self-confessed git.)
After reading about Git and watching the Google tech talk presentation by the man himself I decided to try Git out for my projects, and was hooked. It is so much better than anything else out there, at least for the time being. I’m not emotionally attached to a particular SCM system—if anything better becomes available, I’ll switch to make my life easier (I’m lazy), but at this time Git, IMHO, is the best. It makes my development work much more pleasant and doesn’t get in the way. Its branching and merging capabilities are the cream of all tools I’ve used, and it is faster than any other SCM.
Unfortunately, at the current project I have to use ClearCase. As someone said, it’s an expensive CVS. I won’t be talking about why I don’t like ClearCase here; if you are still reading, it means CC hasn’t found a devoted enthusiast in you either. Don’t despair: there is hope.
Matt Keller wrote an excellent article on how to combine ClearCase with Git and make one’s life bearable again. I’m going to present my own version of this workflow, slightly modified and enhanced for my own circumstances, namely working in Windows XP.
The advantages of this method for me are:
- no need to keep files checked out exclusively in ClearCase while I work on a new feature or fix a bug;
- no need to work in private ClearCase branch and merge using ClearCase tools;
- keeping my modifications (patches) as small as possible and always based on the latest code;
- ability to quickly branch code to test a new idea without anyone noticing it;
- ability to work disconnected (if I were to use a laptop, that would be a killer feature);
- by keeping my changes grouped and submitting them to ClearCase together I can emulate changelist feature absent in ClearCase (without this feature one can often expect broken builds due to partial commits).
OK, enough marketing talk.
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but here is the news: you should wash your hands after visiting toilet, using soap and hot water. At work more times than I care to remember I’ve been a witness to geeks, otherwise quite smart and educated, not washing hands after loo. Let me tell you—it’s disgusting. For God’s sake, people, I don’t need your personal germs on the stuff I touch! When I shake hands with you, I don’t want to think what part of your anatomy did your hands touch a minute ago! And no, just wetting your hands under water for two seconds without even touching soap doesn’t count! It’s not so difficult—soap doesn’t hurt, you know.
(Image source: BBC)
Some series, when killed, should stay dead. Jericho, a CBS post-apocalyptic drama, has been resurrected after getting canned by the network, only to get canned for the second, and I hope, the last time. Not only the plot is one of the worse nuclear terrorist plots around, but the development of that plot has been so badly handled that no closure of any sensible kind (as far as sensible goes in this case) would have been possible. With a plot this extensive, all we get to see is ridiculous small-time conflicts and cheesy love stories. Did the writers expect to get this stuff running for years, so that they could develop the main plotline in between of all the insignificant and boring crap?
And then there are characters. (Were, that is.) Jericho has given me an opportunity to observe some of the worst acting I have ever seen on TV. Most of the actors were bad. Really bad. Really really bad. I don’t know if the bad writing was the reason—maybe it was actually the best acting possible given the lousy script. But the characters of, for example, Mimi Clark played by Alicia Coppola, Eric Green played by Kenneth Mitchell, Darcy Hawkins and Major Beck made me cringe—I struggle to remember seeing actors act so wooden. Not much better were Stanley Richmond, The Sheriff Jake Green himself, even Dawkins. The shop owner guy, with all his phony acting, still came across as totally crooked cutthroat merchant (but maybe that was the idea.)
Some of the decent actors on this show played the parts of Gail Green, Bonnie Richmond, Jonah Prowse and Heather Lisinski. I also liked the doctor, played by none other than Aasif Mandwi.
I must admit I watched all episodes, hoping it would get better somehow. Well, they have now cancelled the show, and that’s the best thing that happened to it.
Before Vista public beta testing started, I expressed my interest in becoming a beta tester. Being a Windows programmer, this sounded interesting; I also had what I thought was a decent PC at the time—Athlon XP 3200 2.2 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, 300 GB SATA HDD, and nVidia 6600GT card I bought on eBay in anticipation of Aero.
So one day I get the invitation and there it is on my Microsoft Connect home page, a beta build of Vista. I went and installed it right away as a secondary system on my PC, leaving XP as the backup solution. The PC became dog slow, I had quite a few problems with drivers (never got my Realtek/nForce on-board audio working properly). Nevertheless, I kept using it and was mostly content with the slowdown, justifying it with all the graphic effects (that is, until I installed Ubuntu, but that’s another story).
A colleague told me that his friend had managed to convince his kid that ice cream vans played their music when they were out of ice cream.