Picture of the day

Mediterranean Hotel

Trying to be a little bit less lazy than usual, I decided to take tripod with me, when Olga and I went for an evening walk at the seaside behind the hotels in tourist area of Limassol. Nighttime photography is something that I enjoy, but don’t feel very comfortable doing. It turned out that seaside promenade behind Four Seasons Hotel, Mediterranean Hotel, and Amathus Beach Hotel has lots of strong lights and projectors, which make photographing those places very real. There are few stone embarkments which go few meters into the sea. These help to create an illusion of photographing from the boat. Very nice!

I had a feeling that I mad many pictures, but when I came home, I saw that these were just a few. Probably, I got a false feeling because of the long exposures (around 30 seconds per picture) that I had to use. Also, I completely forgot about the bracketing. I should have bracketed for a half stop or so. That would give me more pictures to post here.

Anyway, after filtering and censoring the absolute crap and a bunch of duplicates out, the results were uploaded into this album. Hopefully, I’ll push myself to practice more.

Sending a hash to perl’s scalar function

While writing a test suite for one of my applications today, I came across an interesting result. Perl’s scalar function, if given a hash as an argument, will return something like “2/8” or “5/16”. Results can be identical for different hashes. There is no obvioius trend in changing of these results. As it turned out, scalar(%hash) returns information about hash buckets. The first number indicates the number of occupied buckets in the hash storage and the second number indicates the total number of buckets allocated.

I wasn’t sure in my guess, until I got a confirmation from Perl monks, which also pointed me to the “man perldata” bit describing the result.

The Gift

Yet another just above average movie was on TV today – “The Gift“. It is a movie that seems to want to please everyone: crime lovers, detectives, adrenaline junkies, celebrity fans, and some more. The story is simple as in any horror movie, but the way they show it, like in detective investigation slowly unfolding films, makes it slightly more enjoyable. Dead bodies and creepy moments were minimized to allow kids to watch most of the film.

All the acting was pretty usual. Keanu Reeves was as emotionless as ever. Cate Blanchett was as unloved and lonely as usual. Giovanni Ribisi played yet another mentally confused kid. While Greg Kinnear was as pathetic loser as he can usually get. No surprises here.

6 out of 10. Watch it on TV next time. Don’t spend your pound to rent it though.

King Arthur

Olga and I went to see “King Arthur” today. I was somewhat waiting to see this movie although I didn’t expect anything great about it. The trailer was rather cheap.

The movie was OK. I could feel some budget deficit when it came to massive battle scenes, but other than that it is pretty good. The story is romantic and stuff, exactly how it is supposed to be in the knight movies. Acting was pretty good, although the film is not that deep anyway. It is a nice fairy tale to see with kids, who don’t get sick from the sight of blood.

Knight duels were a little bit boring. Maybe they were realistic, I don’t know. But there was no martial arts or choreography to enjoy. Soundtrack and sound effects were slightly over done. You could hear some really magnificant and meaningful orchestra bits at times when a bunch of guys were driving their horses from point A to point B. If they would add better fighting and better battles to it, it would be a great flick. As it is, I’d place it slightly above average.

Rating it as 6.5 out of 10. It’s seriously on the way to 7, but not just there.