Crank: High Voltage (2009)

Crank:High Voltage

Yes, Crank is just a stupid movie. I think Fu**ing Stupid Movie is more correct. Good things: fun, action, fun, girls, boobs, girls, nude girls, action, fun, girls, girls, and Amy Smart. I think it is a good resume of the full story.

I did not see the previous movie on Crank, but I think I can imagine the kind.

Sorry for not writing much more, but, what can I say? The story is just stupid and unbelievable. The action is just exaggerated.

Ahs, just loved the silicon boobs juicing out…

Zuma’s Revenge

Zuma's Revenge

In an old post I wrote about Zuma. I bought it for the ClickWheel iPod. It is a nice game, playable and enjoyable. Unfortunately it is too small (or I am too good). After 17 runs (yeah, iPod counts the number of times you run an application) I reached The End of the game. I am sure it weren’t just 17 plays, but never more than 25.

Today I was looking into the iTunes store and found that there are no interesting games for ClickWheel iPod. Then, visited PopCap website searching for more games from the same company. I found that there is a followup on Zuma, not for the iPod but for the PC/Mac. Downloaded the trial version, that gives you the ability to play for 60 minutes. After 60 minutes I reached the middle of the game (about 26 levels) and had 8 lives (you start with three lives).

Now, I do not think this game will worth the $20 that it costs for more two or three hours of play… but if run smoothly in the iPod… that would might be different…

Text::BibTeX 0.40 Released

Normally I do not post on every perl module I release. And that is good, or you will be feeling spammed.

Why this module is different?

Because I adopted Text::BibTeX a long time ago, and had a lot of complaints about its installation mechanism. This was mainly due to the fact that Text::BibTeX depended on a C library that needed to be installed prior to the perl module. The C library installation was easy on generic Unix platforms but was a pain to compile under Windows.

After lot of work I managed to include the library C code in the Perl module (now Text::BibTeX has no dependencies on the library), and managed to include code to compile the library in Windows, using the Strawberry Perl distribution (that includes a mingw C compiler).

The package is needing heavy tests, but it seems usable for most users. Probably I will post on the details about its build system in a later post.

District 9 – 2009

District 9

After some time hearing about District 9 I finally saw the movie. It is not easy to comment on it. The special effects are quite nice, as the alien are kind of real looking. The weapons are not that real looking, but they are nice, as well.

Talking about aliens, while the story can be understood without understanding them, probably it would be nice to have subtitles for alien dialogues. Or that would break the story? Well, not sure.

One thing I know for sure. The movie lacks on girls.

Google Indexes TTL

I really would like to know what is the time to live (TTL) of Google indexes. This blog of me changed design and back end in July (OK, end of July). We are in the beginning of February. Being a nice boy, this counts as six months.

And, after six months, I still have lots of lots of missed hits to posts that were published in the old engine and that are, yet, live in Google servers. What I need to do to make Google update their indexes and remove all this crap from there?

American Pie Presents: The Book Of Love

Sunday afternoon, needing to relax, without will to work, without the will to do anything, without the patience for a real movie, probably the time to some teenage sex-related comedy. No need for big brain work, no need to take too much attention to the story. Just relax, smile, laugh, watch some girls, and have fun.

This was what I thought when choosing the movie and I must say it fulfilled the mission. The story isn’t great nor new. But there are some nice laughs.

I just have a complain: it seems that the Book of Love doesn’t work with me

Fast and Furious – 2009

Finally I watched the latest Fast and Furious. First, lets resume the movie: cars, speed, violence, and nice girls. Talking of which, let me complain already. How is it possible that Michelle Rodriguez character dies in the first minutes? (sorry for the spoilers, but this is of significance for the story). Fortunately enough Jordana doesn’t.

About the movie, I think the first minutes are the best. The same minutes that went to the trailer. They are the best. The remaining movie has action, has speed, has girls, but not comparable to the first minutes of action.

I am not sure if the fifth will ever show up. But hope a follow up of the latest Transporter, or then, any other new movie with speed gets in the cinema. Torque followup would be good enough, as well.

Zuma – iPod Game

Zuma is the second game I buy for my iPod Classic 5th Generation. The first one was a car simulator. Let me say it is crap. Great it was just 5 Euros.

In that occasion I saw the Zuma screenshot on iTunes Store and noticed it might be a nice game, as the type of game is very adequate to the iPod touch wheel.

After about one year I decided to buy it. The game is pretty nice and playable. I just have two complains. First, the music. It is always the same. I think it repeats every five seconds or so. Yeah, I know I can make my iPod musics to play during the game, but the music could be better anyway.

My second complain is regarding efficiency. The developers of the game know exactly the hardware where the game will run, but the game still have problems running there. Sometimes you notice glitches in the music, and more rarely, on the game itself.

DBLP Bibliography Database and Scientific Publications in Portugal

In Portugal, Universities are rating researchers accordingly with their publications being or not cited on Internet articles databases like DBLP or ISI Web of Knowledge. Basically, if your article is not cited anywhere, then your article is class C. If it is cited in DBLP, it is class B. Finally, if it is present in ISI Web of Knowledge, it is classified as class A.

That is, if you can persuade DBLP author to publish the information about a conference or a journal, you can get your article to be rated B. Then, if a commercial company includes your article (that is, ISI Web of Knowledge), then you can get a class A article.

I wonder how a single guy (Michael Ley is doing a great job, that is not the problem) can find out if a journal is good or not for all areas. I do not know what Michael researches about, but I do not agree he can discern what conferences or journals are good for Parallel Computation, Natural Language Processing, Bio-Informatics, Artificial Intelligence, etc, etc.

Also, I wonder why there is a journal with a single issued published in DBLP, and without all articles listed. Yes, there is a journal that has more than thirty issues. Only one is in DBLP. And that one is not complete. Just half the articles are listed.

Yes, I tried a couple of times (in fact, more than four times) to send the full information about that journal and offered myself to add the BibTeX entry for all journal issues. Never ever got an answer.

The same happened when I sent (twice) the index for a journal on Natural Language Processing for the Iberian Languages. No answer at all. Is it because it is  bad journal? Probably. But I do not think my mails where read at all.

I can do similar comments about ISI Web of Knowledge. Why is a company maintaining this index? Why is this index paid? If a journal or conference pay for its inclusion, do you think the company will reply that it does not have enough quality to be listed?

More questions can be made. Check the number of conferences or journals on computer architecture. Then, check the number of conferences or journals in Natural Language Processing. Then, check the number of indexed conferences or journals in these areas. Yes, it is easier to be a GOOD researcher in computer architecture than in Natural Language Processing. Go figure why…

Pascal: parameters by reference

I posted some time ago about Pascal, and the nice (and worst) things that Pascal has in its language. I discovered yet another cool thing. Unlike C, where you can pass parameters to functions by value, or using a pointer (and therefore, as reference), in Pascal you can use a value, you can use a pointer, or declare a parameter as a variable. This is similar to passing by pointer, but with a cleaner syntax.

Note the difference between

and

The first procedure does not change anything in the outside world, while the second changes the value of the variable passed as argument.

As expected, the compiler raises an error if you call this second procedure with a constant integer.