Boston Legal

I just finished watching all five seasons of “Boston Legal“.  As it often happens with me and good TV series, when I start watching I don’t stop until I’ve seen all of it.   Too bad there won’t be any further episodes.  However, now I am interested in “The Practice” which were TV series preceding “Boston Legal”.

While I got hooked from the first season, I’d have to say that the second and the third seasons are the best of all.  Fourth and fifth are pretty good too, but they vary from episode to episode.  Second and the third seasons don’t.

“Boston Legal” is about lawyers.  I do realize that law system in real life is probably very very different from what is shown here.  But the purpose of this TV series is entertainment, not precise documentation.  And as far as entertainment goes – “Boston Legal” does splendid.  There are many characters, picturing a variety of human quirks.   There is plenty of humor.  And what I consider even more important – there is plenty to think about.  The setup provides for a plethora of cases, which can be argued both ways, and in this TV series many many problems are explored from a number of different viewpoints.  Really, anything goes – abortion, capital punishment, corruption, politics, family values, religion, racism, disabilities, and more.

On top of that, there is something in here that is rarely seen in other TV series – examples to follow.  Not one, but several characters show what a decent human being is, what friendship, loyalty, and humanity are; how one should behave oneself in difficult situations, and how one could correct own mistakes.

With all of that, I can’t rate it anything less than 5 out of 5.  Highly recommended.

Debugging with git bisect

Via Sebastian Bergmann’s blog I’ve learned about git bisect and how it can used for debugging.  Sebastian demonstrates the functionality together with PHPUnit.  I am a git newbie, so that was quite interesting for me.

git bisect can be used to find the change that introduced a bug. It does so by performing a binary search on the list of commits between a known good and a known bad state of the repository. A tool such as PHPUnit can be invoked at each step of the binary search to check whether or not the current state is broken.

Here is a shortcut on how to actually use it:

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect good someVersion
$ git bisect bad someOtherVersion
$ git bisect run someCommand -with SomeArgument

There are, of course, more resources online covering the feature.  I found this section of the Git Community Book helpful.  Hopefully, I’ll remember about it when I actually need it.