End of Days

End of Days” was on TV now. I’ve seen this film before. I think it was a couple or so years ago when it just came out and hit the cinemas. It was always slightly underrated and underadvertised. I agree it is not as bloody as other Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, but it is still pretty good.

The story is a bit original for Arnold this time. The whole thing is based around religion, god and devil, and the church, and stuff like that. Arny plays a security guy from top notch security firm. But since his daughter and wife were killed (who would expect it otherwise?) few years ago, he experiences some phychological trauma that pushes him to kill himself and/or to drink a hell of a lot of alcohol. And eat trash. And you get the idea.

But of course he turns out to be a good guy with kind heard the size of my head and blah blah blah. There is plenty of shooting and killing during the film. Few phrases can be added to quotes databases. Effects are good. Soundtrack is good. And I don’t see everyone thinks it is such a bad movie.

I’ll rate it as a 6.5 out of 10.

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.