Smash, Season 1, Episode 1

Smash, S01E02

Smash is a new series. It is classified as Drama, but for now I do not think Drama is the right classification. It is not a comedy, is not action, is not horror, probably it is not romance, but drama.. ok, why not. I am not sure if I will continue watching it, but I will give a second chance, and wait for the next episode. Why not? The story is not bad (Broadway backstage), there are some nice girls, and it is completely different from the other series I am watching at the moment. So, wait for more posts about it in the future.

Natural Language Processing course

I signed up on a NLP course in the web. Today I received an email from them, and now I wonder how many languages they will be able to teach to process if they are unable to cope with UTF8…

NLP classes with UTF8 problems?

Sucker Punch (2011)

Sucker Punch (2011)

Right, I have no idea why I watched this movie. OK, I confess I know why. Because a friend said I might like it, as there were lot of girls. I confirm, there are girls, and some are hot (although not really hot during the movie, but I googled them). But that doesn’t make it a good movie. There are a lot of special effects, but most of the times there are too much special effects, and it is not easy to really see anything. There are portions of the movie that are boring and, it seems that those movie parts are the ones that the director think are cool. Meh!

If you want to see something good in this movie, watch the first five minutes. They are great. Really. Nice music, nice acting, nice recording. More than that, the movie is bad, but the sound track is interesting. Voted 3/10 at IMDB. 2 for the sound track, 1 for the girls.

A lot of Google results to be paged

Sometimes Google has so many document hits that he needs to paginate them. Some other times, Google has so few documents hits… that he needs to paginate… huh? something strange here…

Google paging no results...

The Pillars of the Earth (miniseries)

The Pillars of the Earth (episode 1)

I am reading the book The Pillars of the Earth (in Portuguese), almost at the end of the second volume, and started today to watch a miniseries that was created based on this book. It is (they say) the master piece of Ken Follet. If it is or not, I can’t say, as it is only the second book I am reading by Ken.

Back to the miniseries, this is always a problem to comment on a movie or miniseries after reading a book. Mainly because you imagine things, places, characters, and then you get places and characters with other aspects. But I started watching the series knowing that.

This episode shows that the director is cutting some scenes (like the supernatural sex scene between Ellen and Tom the Builder), and changing some bits of the story (Jonathan is found by Philip and he delivers him to the monastery in the forest, and only later he goes to Kingsbridge, taking Johnny Eightpence with him to take care of the baby).

But, hey, we can’t expects things to go exactly as in the book. In any case, I expect to watch the next episodes soon.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)

Fun! This is the first word coming to my mind. The second, is probably blood. Yeah, if you can’t cope with blood, just do not watch this movie. It is not an horror movie, but you need to be prepared. Especially if you are not very strong of your stomach.

Anyway, fun! Oh, and college girls. That is also relevant, of course. But we will come to that later.

The story is not relevant to review the movie. It is nothing really new, but the result is fun. I will not give spoilers, but Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) is about events that happen and that, when viewed from the wrong angle, can be interpreted in bad ways.

More, Dale reminds me of me, big fat guy, fun, and without luck with girls. But Dale ends the movie with Allison (Katrina Bowden) that makes me think, when will I have that luck?

Well, back to the movie, or better, back to the girls, you have two other girls going around. Chelan Simmons (as Chloe, also stunning), makes the typical Barbie girl, on hells, blond hair, and moving her harms like… well… a typical movie-blond…

I can’t end this post without makes you wish see the movie. If humor and fun, comedy and blood, doesn’t do it, probably a capture of Katrina Bowden will…

Voted 9 in 10 @ IMDB

Rio (2011)

Rio (2011)

I confess my idea was not to post here this picture, but a picture of Blu, the bird, the main character on Rio. But after seeing this (and other similar) image I couldn’t resist to show you the nice Portuguese cobblestone. Isn’t is nice? Ever in 3D animation? I love it.

Anyway, back to Rio (2011), the movie story is the standard for an animation family movie, nothing big there. But there are some jokes (plenty of jokes) that make it fun to watch. An then, there is the detail in the animation, the detail in the scenarios (just like in the picture above) and the mimed reality. You know, the view of Rio de Janeiro from the top of the Cristo Rei is just like the one in the movie. Instead of just inventing a new reality, the producers choose to make it seem really like Rio. That makes the picture yet more interesting, and it is (I know it is) a challenge for animation artists.

Voting 8 in 10 @ IMDB. Would vote 9 in case of a really new story…

Firefox vs Safari on Mac OS X

I confess I use Firefox, and I really prefer firefox user interface. But this is just stupid! I never had problems with Firefox before, and now that I have a fast machine and 8 GB of RAM Flash acts like this? OK, I know it is Flash.. but.. :-/

Also, no idea why I can’t get my Quicktime plugin to manage .mov files. It just does nothing. Check below how it behaves in Firefox and in Safari.

Firefox 9, Mac OS X Lion and Apple Trailers page

I am having some trouble with Firefox 9 (well, I had it already with Firefox 8, and after the update the behavior continues) and Mac OS X Lion, when trying to download a trailer from Apple trailers page. I have no clue about what is going on, so if you have any idea that can solve my problem, please leave a comment, or contact me directly.

First, choose a movie from Apple trailers page. Any movie will work. I chose Prometheus, just because it is one of the first in the list, and Science Fiction. There is a small bar at the left that reads “View Trailers (4)”. I expand it clicking the arrow. Before continuing, I activated the Web Console for Firefox, that shows what is going on (that is, lists the requests that are sent to the server, and the received response).

Next step, choose one of the trailers. Let’s say, the first. In the small arrow in the “watch now” button, you have two sections. One of them is named “watch” and the other “download”. Let’s try to download one trailer (or watch it in QuickTime, instead of watching it directly in the webpage). Click the 480p (20MB) link.

What happens?

Well, for most users, it will open QuickTime and start loading the video. For me, nothing happens. The Web Console just issues GET http://trailers.apple.com/movies/fox/prometheus/prometheus-tlr1_h480p.mov as it should. And logs the answer as [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 118ms]. And it is all. No further messages in the watch window, no QuickTime starting, nothing. Rien!

I have no clue about what is going on. If you have, please let me know (and if you say not to use Mac or to use Safari I’ll be punching you in the teeth).

GTAiv: Lost and Damned – first impressions

GTAiv: Lost and Damned

I just started to play Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City. It took me some time to get back to GTA controls after some Red Dead Redemption. My first impressions start with the knowledge that there are two episodes. I did not know they were two. Thought it would be just one new story. Also, I didn’t know you are not playing with Niko. Started with the first one (well, the one that appeared at the left in the monitor, thus, the first, for me that read from left to right), named The Lost and Damned, that is about a group of bikers. Wanna know more? Well, buy it and play.

Main differences from plain raw GTA? Well, bikes are easier to ride, but still a lot unpredictable… second main difference, is that now you do not need to take care of your life, but of your friends. And your friends can get behind you and the enemy and, as far as I could dig, there isn’t any visual hint on whether a character is friend or not. That will make things harder. In half an hour that I played around, already noticed I am pretty good on killing my friends…