Year: 2009

District 9

District 9

I couple of days ago I went to see “District 9“.  I’ve been waiting for the movie and finally it hit the Cyprus cinemas.   I’ve seen the trailer and heard a lot of people spreading good word of a mouth about the film, but wanted to see it for myself.

It turned out to be an excellent movie.  First of all, it didn’t follow those typical Hollywood storylines.  It actually had an orignal story, which it told in a rather original way of pseudo-documentary.  Not that we didn’t have pseudo-documentaries in the movies before, but I don’t remember the genre used for an alien story.

Secondly, it was nice to see action taking place somewhere else.  Not New York, not London, not Paris.  Not even US or Europe.  Not even Mexico. Africa.   And not the bushmen Africa, but a rather large city of Johannesburg.

Thidly, there was plenty of good acting.  Most of the actors are not the mainstream well-known faces.  But the talent is there.  Interesting, how unknown actors together with an original story make this film so much more realistic and believable.

Fourthly, there is a whole lot of special effects and CGI.  With Peter Jackson being one of the producers, you wouldn’t expect anything else.  But all those effects were integrated in the film in a very natural way.  After all, the film was about people and aliens, and not about special effects.

Overall, I enjoyed the film quite a bit.  It was engaging, original, entertaining, and gave me something to think about.  And I don’t ask for anything else from a movie.  5 stars.

Enforcing coding styles in PHP

I came across a plugin for CakePHP which helps to check if the certain code follows CakePHP coding style.  While I haven’t tried it, I think the better way is to utilize CodeSniffer.  As per PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR page:

PHP_CodeSniffer tokenises PHP, JavaScript and CSS files and detects violations of a defined set of coding standards.

Which basically means that PHP_CodeSniffer is a generic tool for validating your code.  You can use for CakePHP, WordPress, or any other PHP project that you are working on.  The best part is that you can create your own set of rules regarding coding style and then make sure that your team follows it. If you don’t care that much for your own rules, then you can use one of the many existing rulesets.  Some of these come together with CodeSniffer package, others are available on the Web.

Setting up CodeSniffer for my team at work has been a long lasting TODO item, however it looks like I will be able to start working on this next week.  Once it created, tested, and everyone is happy with it, we’ll have it in the pre-commit hook in our Subversion repository.  This way, we will prevent commits of any code that does not follow our rules.  Of course, I plan to only run CodeSniffer against the code that we wrote in-house.  There is no need to re-format all the third-party code just for the sake of it.  Plus, we are rarely doing any modifications of the third-party code at all.

Bits and pieces

Once again I’ve noticed that my blogging is getting behind.  Busy at work, lazy, and going through the mood change for the upcoming Christmas holidays – that all has a role to play.  But that’s not the major issue.

Thinking of what am I doing differently these days, I realized that my blogging activity got spread out all over the web, and therefore became less noticeable on my own blog.  I do more of Twitter, which is now integrated with the blog in the form of daily briefs.  I favourite more videos on Youtube, which now notifies the Twitter, and later still ends up in the daily briefs on the blog.  I do more bookmarks on Delicious, which also end up via Twitter in daily breifs.  And there is something else I do, which doesn’t come back to the blog – shared and commented articles in my Google Reader.

Actually, as far as writing goes, Twitter and Google Reader happen to be the only two places where I write at all now.  Once I realized that, I wanted to find a way to pull the comments and shared items from Google Reader into my blog.  But then I doubt if that’s the right approach.  The alternative being blogging and commenting about things not in the Google Reader, but in the blog itself.

I am still undecided on the matter.  Google Reader provides a really good interface for commenting and interacting with other people who read about similar topics.  On the other hand, my blog has more exposure than my Google Reader shared items list, and has better interface for discussions.  Perhaps, I should try and see how it goes.

What’s your take on comments in Google Reader vs. blog posts?

Day in brief