Viktor Narovski is from
Krakozhia and gets stuck in
The Terminal (2004) of
John F. Kennedy International Airport due to a revolution in his homeland. He is in NY to fulfill a promise to his dead father - to get the last autograph for his fathers jazz musician autograph collection based on an old picture of a group of musicians. Well thats about it. Not much of a story, great original idea and Spielberg makes a really great movie out of it.
Definitely check the
Web 2.0 Workgroup at some future time. Seems to be a great resource hub.
Behold - the
ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix. Kind of cool but maybe a little short on content? Come back later.
As I strongly suspected -
Ruby is a great tool to
Create Happy Programmers. After me (1) being a couple of abstractions too low (doing Java) for some years now, (2) creating a databaseaware class from scratch with
Ruby on Rails (that I didn't know about at all) in less time than it would have take me to create it in
Java (been working with for 8 years or so), (3) browsing through the wonderful
why's (poignant) guide to Ruby and (4) being tired from all the
Java buzz I strongly ponder the option to go for it. Stop being a Java developer and turn into a Ruby developer. It is such a nice language and the missing types are really making it just so much nicer to read. When doing the test-driven thing it doesn't really matter much if the language re typed or not, good tests will get the bugs anyway. Now this is a cool quote by David Heinemeier Hansson creator of Ruby on Rails:
Rails is better suited for the applications that most people do most of the time. It has its eye on the big 80 percent. There are 15 percent of the applications that are so tiny that they might make a better fit in PHP [it's available on every $2 host, you can have your entire application in one page] and then there's the most complex 5 percent that needs advanced integration with legacy systems or have other specialized needs. Java is definitely a great fit for that.
Now thats a thought. Seems like we are using Java in all the wrong places and will all the wrong techniques. I am currently stuck in a project with a webapp publishing read-only data: Tomcat on Hibernate (?!) on top of SQL Server. It is working but I believe the same app with Ruby on Rails could be written 20-40% of the code.
Wow - look at this.
Lulu is a book publisher that comes with no costs for the author. Lulu just grabs 20% of the profit and of you go. The dream of being an author
and actually getting the book printed is now more real than ever..... The book still needs to be written though.....
Saw
The Manchurian Candidate on DVD the other day. This remake of a 1962 movie was really worth the 2 plus hours spent.
Denzel Washington is good as always and
Meryl Streep splendid - this time playing a pure bitch which may be a bit uncommon. Cool quote:
The assassin always dies, baby. It's necessary for the national healing.
It is a shame that I have been to both souther france (late july) and prague (early october) without notifying my blog. And I even have my Nokia setup to make emailing happen. (Finding an internet cafe is far too much trouble....) An oldstyle diary has been written as always though. The stuff that goes here is the extras - maybe a note on a painting or a contemplation on history and culture or just a note of praise to the adriatic breeze.
Visited the magic
Royal Opera of our beautiful capital last week for some ballet. 3 small pieces in one night. The first piece (Dreamland) was performed to a clarinet concerto by Aaron Copland and was the one we liked the least. It was kind of sterile but not entirely bad. It had its points. The best piece was the middel one called Por Vos Muera made by spanish choreographer Nacho Duato to spanish music from the 16th and 17th centuries. It was suggestive, dreamy, vivid and just very beautiful. The last piece was called Before Nightfall made by Nils Christe (originally ordere by Nurejev) performed to a concerto by Bohuslav Martinu. Also nice but not as good as the previous one.
[more info | scentidningen nummer | eskilstunakuriren | expressen | göteborgsposten | google]
Being in a state when only new music is interesting and purchased records gets boring too soon
Radio Paradise is the ultimate rescue. Most of the time playing songs that I want to hear. Which is strange. I mean - how can they know what I like? Me and the otherlisteners rates songs so maybe they run some wares on it to get the utlimate play list suiting most of us. Hmmm. The LRC (Listener Review Channel) makes sure that only good tunes gets added to the list. And then there is the taste of the station owners/DJs/gods. Brilliant.
