Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Here is yet another way to make your own search engine.

You can kill your boss at http://www.whackyourboss.com/ . Very bloody, messy and violent. But nicely done. If you boss walks in while you are at it, press the ‘Panic’ button. This reminds me of an old game of Sokoban. :)

“Broken Arrow” was on TV. This is one of the world’s most boring movies ever made with an ubelievable amount of bullshit. I mean pretty much any action film on the subject of the “lost” nuclear weapons is full of bullshit. But all of them together compare as nothing to this one.

And bullshit is not my problem. I can take as much of it as the next guy. One just has to prepare it nicely, so that it is interesting to watch or hear. “Broken Arrow” failed miserably in that regard. I think I said “Bullshit!” close to a million times while watching it. Yeah, right.

Also, two parts of the film that could have won a number of fans – boxing scene in the beginning and bomber flying scene immediately afterwards – were done poorly. Boxing scene was the worst. I mean there are Charlie Chaplin boxing scenes from almost 100 years back which are more realistic than this one. Yuck.

I’ll give this film a 3 out of 10.

Watched “Walking Tall” on DVD. It is a good movie, but it is terribly late. If it was made 15-20 years ago, it would be one of the greatest hits somewhere along with “Commando“. Seriously. It has everything a hit action needed 20 years ago: a special forces muscular soldier, a sexy girlfriend, small town, crooked sheriff, and a simple story built upon revenge. It was pretty difficult to do all of this right two decades ago, but now it is classics and they teach this stuff at school. So this movie is late.

The only two things which are fresh here: The Rock and photography. The Rock is not particularly interesting or anything. Camera on the other hand provided me for some satisfaction.

Verdict: 5 out of 10. Pick it up if you are about to do some time travel. Otherwise, get something fresh.

December 4th – the coming Saturday – there will be a party in Rosy’O'Gradys in Limassol. Music will be provided by Albert Semichev and Alexander Doronin. These are the same guys that ruled at the last KSP aka Amateur Song Festival. They will be performing for three hours starting at 21:00. They do play quality music and I guess there will be a mix of English and Russian songs. Entrance fees are promised to be 1CYP instead of the usual 3CYP.

If you don’t know how to find Rosy’O'Gradys, follow the seaside road in Limassol tourist area in the direction of Nicosia. You should find Arsinoe Hotel on your left. It should be before Fours Season Hotel and Hamlet Bar if I remember correctly. I have also pointed it on
this map (large image file).

Watched “Gladiatress” on DVD. It is an attempt of a prank comedy with parodies on all historic action movies of the last 10 years.

There are a few funny moments in the film, but mostly it is very boring and slowly paced. There are simply not enough jokes. Story needs more focusing too. Too many people are moving around without participating in the film in any way. Decorations and costume design were pretty cheap, but these are pretty tought to get right in the historic movie, not to mention a parody of one.

Anyway, a 4 out of 10 rating on my behalf. Watching of “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” for a millionth time would provide way more satisfaction than this one. Skip it by all means.

Watched “Training Day” on TV. I’ve seen this one before when it was in the movies. It does provide for some good entertainment even when watched a second time.

The film is a crime action with Denzel Washington playing a bad guy. That doesn’t happen that often I must say. And even when it does, like in this movie, he does not immediately appear as a bad guy. He is a kind of confused or maybe with slightly messed up limits of acceptable. He acts good anyway. The usual kind of good.

The movie touches on an interesting topic of what is good and what is bad. Like in that South Park episode that asked questions like “Would you kill you father to save your mother?”. In fact this time they were slightly more realistic. How far can cops bend the rules to get bad guys… and along these lines.

Anyway, the film is pretty good and deserves a solid 7 out of 10. Rent it for a Sunday night.

As I have promised before, our new Christmas tree was photographed, postprocessed and published. The lights are not all that good yet, so you’ll have to excuse a lot of close-up flash and Gimping I had to do.

I’ve just noticed that it was a whole week without any submission to ‘Picture of the day’ project. Talk about rainy cold weather and lack of inspiration, eh.

Album location: /photos/2004/2004-11-27_POTD

Naming variables (that includes functions) is one of the most flamed subjects in the computer programming world. Some people say you should use underscore (_) to separate words in the multiword names, like this_is_my_variable. Others believe that separation should be done by capitalizatioon like thisIsMyVariable. Agreeing on what should come first – a verb or a noun (display_form vs form_display)- is yet another question.

This reminds me of an old joke. There is an exam in C programming class at college and one of the students finishes first just a few minutes after the test started. So the professor comes up to him checks his code and says: “Very good, young man. You can use the remaining time to fix names of your variables. Make them all self descriptive.” Student nods in agreement and starts to work. Few moments later he is finished again and shows the result to the professor. And what does the professor see? All the ‘i’s, ‘j’s, and other one letter variables were converted to selfdescriptivevariable1, selfdescriptivevariable2, selfdescriptivevariable3, etc.

Why did I start this post today? Oh, well. Something got me started.

I came across an excellent KDE application – BasKet (KDE-Apps entry). It can sit in the task bar and accept drag-n-drop objects (anything from text and URLs to pictures and sounds). These objects can be organized in several tabs. The convenience of it is that one can use it as a combination of application launcher and knotes. Try it, you won’t regret!

The only missing feature I see now is that it does not accept drag-n-drops from Firefox, but that is something to do with KDE as a whole rather than BasKet itself.