Category: ]

The wife and I went to go get a movie on Friday. It was the first time we brought the kid to the video store. 6pm on a Friday was probably not the best time to go, but at least we found a flick.

My wife loves, loves, loves The Devil Wears Prada. I have to admit after a number of repeat viewings the movie has grown on me. Our favorite character from that movie is Emily played wonderfully by Emily Blunt. Blunt doesn't have that big of a role in Prada, but she is definitely a scene stealer. So at the video store we come across this movie where Blunt is listed above the title and so we thought we'd give it a try.

The movie is unique in that it tells a story of a woman (played by Amy Adams) and her Sister (Blunt) who are down on their luck relationship and career-wise and decide to get into the post forensic cleanup business. Basically that means that after a homicide or a suicide and the body is taken away they do the cleanup. There are some scenes in the flick where blood is splattered everywhere, but otherwise it is not too gruesome. You don't actually see anyone killed (although you do hear a shotgun blast go off just after the scene fades to black).

In essence the flick is about re-defining yourself and coming to grips with your past. Emily Blunt's character is the eternal screwup. Amy Adams' character is the sister who always fixes things, but can't seem to fix her life. In that regard this fare isn't unique, but at least it wasn't boring.

The movie was pretty enjoyable even though we had to watch it in starts and stops (that's life with a 3 month old). It was more drama than comedy, but there were some funny bits.

I give it 3 out of 4 stars.

Category: Visualization]

Last week I bumped into this blog called Information Is Beautiful. The owner of the blog, David McCandless, showcases visualized data (both his own and other's work) in unique and fascinating ways. This site is totally my cup of tea. I quickly added it to my RSS program.

Visualizing data was one of the reasons I focused in college on Graphics and UI programming. One of my first UI projects was working in X Windows/Motif on a Physics program that dealt with stresses on beams. The user could put a variable amount of horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or rotational forces on a beam and the program would show a 2D view of where the stresses would be. Black would be low stress. Red would be the highest stress with various shades of the rainbow in between. For my first graphical UI program it was really neat. It made me realize two important things:

1. How important color is to representing data.
2. How a good visualization could allow the user to intuitively figure out how the program worked.

Nowadays most of the UIs that I do are a lot more simplistic. Tabs, tables, buttons, and check boxes are usually the extent of my designs. But every once in a while I get a nice little tidbit of UI to create that reminds me of my first program.

Category: ]

I have had some speed bumps with Snow Leopard the last couple of days, but nothing that makes me want to downgrade.

My wife got the Mini to hang with the spinning beach ball of death. She said it hung trying to do something in Safari and Skype at the same time. The only thing I could do was a hard reboot.

Flash has been crashing big time. Sometimes I get the error dialog saying that a plugin in not working. Other times Safari just crashes.

Update 09/03/2009: Snow Leopard downgrades Flash.

1Password has been giving me some problems. I am not sure how happy I am that the program is going to stop using the OS X Keychain for the backing store for the 3.0 version.

Snow Leopard is installed on both my MBP and Mini.

One of the minor new features I think is cool is the ability to minimize an application to its dock icon rather than next to the trash can (System Preferences->Dock->Minimize windows into application icon).

I have never been too much of a fan of task switching via Cmd-Tab. I never really liked Alt-Tab on Windows either. Since I use Spaces pretty frequently, I have a tendency to just click on the dock application icon to switch to the space that the application is running in. With Expose being "exposed" on the Dock, it has made navigating even easier.

So far I haven't had really any major issues. It seemed like it took a lot longer to install Snow Leopard on my MBP than on the Mini. And once I had it installed Spotlight indexing churned again sending the CPU and fan activity way up. However that was only for 15 minutes or so.

Overall it has been a pretty nice upgrade so far. I love the fact that I got 15 GB in HD space back on both machines. When was the last time you have upgraded an OS and actually gained GBs of space?

What a long week. I am glad it is over. I feel like I have been sitting at this desk all week.

I decided to unwind tonight by installing Snow Leopard on my laptop. None of the apps I use on my laptop are on the list I found at this forum, so I think I am safe. We will see though. If all goes well, I am going to upgrade the Mini tomorrow.

I am going to hold off on my main Dev machine until more apps get fixed. I use CS4 pretty often and sometimes I fire off Word. I still have Snow Leopard on a partition on that machine so if I need to run it, it is only a reboot away.

I did take one break today and we snapped some pictures to commemorate the day. I'd post them, but I am having problems finding my SD card reader.

Interesting flick if you are not expecting an all out action fest. A lot of the same themes have been seen in other movies about World War II. This one is with a Jewish flavor. Even the director and producer were drawn to the story because they didn't think many Jews fought back as a community during World War II. And here is a story where the actions of one family helps save 1200.

I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Yay! It took all week but yesterday afternoon (Friday) I got my Snow Leopard bug fixed.

At the first part of the week, I tried to debug the crap out of the library trying to find out why this one line of code was causing me all of this grief. No dice. What ended up helping me fix the problem was a brute force approach. I created a test command-line application. I then threw all of the appropriate calls in the test application a little bit at a time until I got the crash to happen. Tedious, iterative, and time consuming, that's programming sometimes.

After a full week of using Snow Leopard I am on the fence wether to upgrade right at release. I didn't have any problems with any application that I had installed and the performance increase (especially of Xcode) might justify the risk.

Wow! All these years I have heard about this movie from James Cameron and finally the general public gets to see an extended look at it:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/teaserlarge.html

I have to say up front that it wasn't exactly the movie I envisioned when I first heard about the concept of this movie right after Titanic came out. I guess back then I was thinking it was more of a Tron type of movie.

Way back in the 90s, Cameron said he had to wait for the computer technology to catch up to make this movie and from this little bit he has teased I can only imagine what he has in store, especially in 3D.

I have watched the trailer a few times now and what I love about it is that it really hasn't given much away. I realize teasers aren't supposed to give stuff away, but for a trailer that is over 2 minutes long that's amazing. The less spoilers the better.

I shot myself in the foot today at work.

I was doing a massive rename of one of the components I am working on for work. That meant I not only had to rename things in UIs but I also had to rename a bunch of files and file references in our main development tree.

So I reluctantly fire up svnX and go start doing svn moves. All of a sudden there is a new folder entry in the svnX list called ".". Not thinking, I scratched my head and said "What the heck is that?" and clicked the delete button. About 30 seconds in I realize my mistake. svnX interpreted the item as the current folder and started doing a svn delete at the root of my whole dev tree! I kill the svnX app and then go look at the logs at the damage. The problem is my log scripts are getting errors left and right because my dev tree is in such crappy state.

So I go to the root of the dev tree and try a svn cleanup and svn revert. No dice. svn keeps on complaining about every framework bundle being locked for some reason. After about an hour of dinking at the command line I determine my sandbox is just hosed. The only way I can think to get things back to the way they are is to do a clean checkout. It took 45 minutes to download the dev tree. I run my log scripts and find out the damage isn't as bad as I thought. Luckily I am back to where I started.

I spent a couple hours last night playing with Snow Leopard. I have to say that it really makes it hard to go back to Leopard even after a couple of hours.

Look-wise there still isn't that much different. I bounced around the OS looking for differences and couldn't find too much. Context menus on the dock have a black translucent background. That's pretty nice. The general OS look itself is sharper. I am not sure if it is just a different font that they are using in the Finder, but it really is much more visually appealing than the Leopard Finder.

The one feature I am really starting to like is the new Expose "click-and-hold-on-a-dock-icon" to see all open windows for that application. I know that this is a blatant rip-off of Windows 7, which of course is a rip off of the original Expose, but it is very well executed. I have a tendency to have multiple Xcode windows going and it really makes it a snap to find the correct dev window.

The new QuickTime UI is a little disconcerting at first. It feels almost like a Quick Look window not a real app. I am sure I will get used to it though. Half the time I was just using Quick Look to watch downloaded video snippets anyway.

Speed wise is really where there is no turning back. Most apps just fire off instantly. Startup and Shutdown is jaw-dropping compared to Leopard. When I went back to using Leopard, I got that feeling of slow down. I am not sure if that was just a perception issue or reality.