Year: 2004

U.S. Marshals

“U.S. Marshals” was on TV today. I am sure everyone has seen a movie where a guy was working for the government doing some dirty work (aka “special operations” and “black ops”) and then he got set up with a couple of homicides hanging on his neck, so he has to escape from prison to avoid capital punishment and clear his name. And there is usually this smart detective that is chasing him and finds out all about this guy’s story and wants to help him, but he still has to catch him. And so they run until one of them doesn’t kill the bad guy who masterminded the setup. Sounds familiar?

Well, “U.S. Marshals” is exactly this kind of movie. But it is properly done. I mean when the story is not a surprise anymore (about 10 minutes from the starting titles, and it took me so long because I was 8 minutes late) the audience is occupied with paying attention to everything else except the plot. So, what’s there? The first thing that gets discovered is that the film is full of celebrities: Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Robert Downey Jr., Joe Pantoliano and more. Further on, after all celebrities are recognized and remembered, special effects come to mind. And they are good too. I mean crashing the regular-sized aircraft is not the cheapest way producers can go help the guy escape from prison. :) Music was great (reminded me of the Rambo’s first blood somehow). Pace was good. Dialogs are natural (film-kind natural) and entertaining. Good acting.

Films like this don’t usually score high on my list, but I am pretty confident that 7/10 is a fair grade.

Groovy, a Java-like Scripting Language

By means of Linux Weekly News, I came across Groovy. Groovy is a Java-like scripting language. It is JRE compliant, has Java syntax, supports existing Java objects and libraries, has dynamically-types variables, and some more. It has templating system, simplified interface to JavaBeans, works with SQL, and can be used to write Java servlets.

Here is what they say about it on their website:

Groovy is designed to help you get things done on the Java platform in a quicker, more concise and fun way – bringing the power of Python and Ruby inside the Java platform.

Groovy can be used as an alternative compiler to javac to generate standard Java bytecode to be used by any Java project or it can be used dynamically as an alternative language such as for scripting Java objects, templating or writing unit test cases.

Overall it sounds rather interesting. It seems that it feel the niche between Java and Perl/Python/Ruby, providing an acceptable compromise for all those people participating in the holy wars. :)

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

The recent post about bad things that can happen to you seemed like a good therapy. But it was mainly focused on an individual. Now, if you think that your relationship/marriage goes down the drain because you argue too much, you should really visit “Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About” website. Yup, it’ll teach you some truth.

If you don’t argue that much, then you should visit the site anyway, because it will help you appreciate the unity of opinions.

Archives of Edsger W. Dijkstra

Archive of all Edsger W. Dijkstra works can be found here. For those of you who don’t know who he was, here is a quote from the site:

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the most influential members of computing science’s founding generation. Among the domains in which his scientific contributions are fundamental are

  • algorithm design
  • programming languages
  • program design
  • operating systems
  • distributed processing
  • formal specification and verification
  • design of mathematical arguments

In addition, Dijkstra was intensely interested in teaching, and in the relationships between academic computing science and the software industry.

During his forty-plus years as a computing scientist, which included positions in both academia and industry, Dijkstra’s contributions brought him many prizes and awards, including computing science’s highest honor, the ACM Turing Award.

Most of his papers make for a rather entertaining read. (For example, the thingy about hungry professors and semaphores).

Fixing comments

I have received a whole bunch of complains that comments are not working properly. There were few problems:

  • Registered users could not post comments, because they were redirected back to blog’s main page.
  • Replies to comments didn’t work for the same reason as above.
  • Replies to comments couldn’t be added in some browsers.

After a few dirty hacks and brilliant fixes by yours truly, I think these probems should be mostly over. If you still cannot comment or reply to comments, let me know via email or, well, comments. :)

P.S.: Stupid ‘Preview comment’ thing is gone. It was causing too much troubles.