September 2005 Archives
Yesterday in the TV news a portuguese guy was presenting a school equiped with laptops for each student, a tactic big display, and so on. Then, they started showing a flash animation where the student should build an heart. At the end, the heart starts bumping and that portuguese guy claims that: "See? Now it is breathing!!"
Yesterday went to the cinema to see The Island. Friends told me that the movie was nothing interesting, but I wanted to see a movie and got there. Well, it was not that bad!!
Now some comments. If you want to see the movie, don't read bellow.
First, advertisements: Adidas, Speedo and Chevrolet advertisements were kind of simple, just showing some of their products. Then, there is a car they call Chevrolet but that it isn't. The logo in the grid is a Porsche one. Also, you can see an advertisement (a real one, and that was interesting) for Calvin Klein. Also, somebody in the movie mentions Cisco but the portuguese translator writes Sisco. The most advertised company was Microsoft. First with XBox 360. I think kids can understand that the kind of game the movie shows is not real. At least the kids which can enter the movie. Then, MSN Search: they are stupid to accept this advertisement. The search engine finds a person in another state but can't find the contact for one in the same state: Microsoft reallity!
Regarding translation: I wonder why a sentence like "the door at the left" is translated to "a porta à direita" which means "the door at the right".
I don't want to discuss much of the movie argument. I think the story could be better, but it is good enough. The screenplay has some problems which makes the flow of the movie strange at points.
Although the man clone has the memory growing accordingly with the original person, that doesn't happen with the girl. Now, how did she discover sex and kissing? While he went to kill the original man she was just watching TV?
At the end, clones are released. Where will they go? Kill their clone? Make things strange in the planet? And the doctor didn't have a clone? And why not?
Well, enough comments this time.
I have an HP Photosmart (can't remember the model number) with 1MP, 2x of optical zoom, and a stupid interface which does not work as USB storage, which means I can't use it directly from MacOS X.
But this is not the reason I want a new camera. Basically. I want some more resolution and specially, a lot more zoom. Don't ask. I just love to be able to zoom.
Asking a friend, he told me that Canon PowerShot S2 IS was a good choice.
It is a little expensive, but I might buy it...
OmniGraffle is a diagram editor for MacOS X. It comes with Tiger (and previous versions of MacOS as well, I think) and is a very interesting tool.
I didn't play with it enough time to know all its potentials. I just tried to add some objects, and connect them. Placing the objects is a lot of fun. OmniGraffle automatically draws alignment and distance lines between objects while you drag them. This way you can center and dispose objects in the place you want with precision. Connecting objects can be fun when you ask OmniGraffle to automatically display graphs or trees. It includes algorithms to draw vertical or horizontal trees, in both directions, and to draw nice graphs.
Today I found another interesting feature: plug-ins. There are a log of freely available plug-ins in OmniGraffle webpage. Two I found interesting: 1. a tool to create a CD cover based on an iTunes playlist, 2. the Fridge Perl Poesy Kit can be virtually used under OmniGraffle.
Five stars for this nice application. If OmniGroup starts porting this application for windows, Microsoft should take care about Visio.
Tuesday night I went with some friends to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a movie by Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp in the cast.
This is not properly the kind of movie I normally watch. One of my friends would say my standard movies include teenagers. Well, normally it includes girls. Looking to the genre, normally I watch comedy and adventure.
This movie is a Fantasy in the first place, although IMDB says Adventure, Comedy and Family first. You can't watch it as a real history, nor a sci-fi one. It is fantasy from the beginning to the end of the movie. But it includes jokes as well, and is suitable for all the family. Just can't see where is the adventure.
Finally, Jonnhy Depp resembles me of Michael Jackson in this movie. To invite children to visit his factory is... erm... that.
More thoughts:
Why people love so much bananas? First coffee break, we didn't have fruit. So, all cakes got eaten in seconds. Following coffee breaks had fruit. In these, bananas got eaten in seconds. Why not pears? Or apples?
My presentation just sucked a lot. First, I had some problems with my mac. I can't find out why it behaves a lot differently everytime I plug an external monitor or projector. After that, my mobile phone ringed two times. I knew I had to answer it (it was about the coffee for the coffee breaks) but I didn't. All this made me nervous. Also, my examples where not tested and the last changed I've made in the module I presented were not working... oh well.
The only presentation I saw was about Sure Spell, but Paul Johnson. I saw it not just because it was after mine, in the same room, but also because it was the article we chose as the best one. This is another interesting point, as Paul told us he just submited that article because it was under the theme of this YAPC: Perl Everywhere. And, in fact, that was the reason the article was chosen.
More on YAPC later, maybe...
YAPC ended last friday. Yesterday went with some of the atendees to a dinner (Birthday dinner for one of them) and today went with Larry and Gloria Wall to the Airport. So, things are really ending and I just need to clean up the venue and pay all things not paid yet.
Meanwhile, I think it is a good time to evaluate YAPC::EU, or at least, some of its aspects. I'll add some comments, with no special order. It is just what goes in my mind at the moment.
With just two organizers (cog and me) we worked a lot. Given cog has a strict work (I'm doing my PhD, so I have a more flexible schedule) I had most of the work to get things done: tshirts, proceedings, The Perl Review special edition, and so on. I tried to make cog work more in the e-mail and phone contacts, as those can be easily done from work. Magda Joana helped us a lot as well contacting directly hotels and restaurants.
It is true that the less people you have in the organization, the more work they have to do. But in the other hand, you know exactly who is doing what, and, specially, if you really trust your organization partners, you know he will do that.
We had some help during the conference from volunteers. In fact, we can't call them volunteers at all, as we invited them. They was just about 8 full time. It can seem much, but it isn't. If you count three to take care of the cameras in the three rooms, we get 5. From these, 2 were mainly in the registration table issuing receipts. The others were doing what was needed in that moment, specially, taking care of coffee breaks.
As we talk about coffee breaks, is interesting to notice that bakeries have not any idea about how much one person eat. We asked for a proposal for 6 coffee breaks for about 250 people, and they offered 200 croissants. Interesting, huh? Well, we had to pay the remaining 700 croissants, 600 breads with bacon, 450 rice cakes and 450 "pasteis de belém". Oh, we needed to buy water as well as juices. I can't remember how much liters, but trust me, they were a lot.
In the first coffee break all the food gone in... 5 minutes. So, our values were not exagerated. So, we tried to figure out how to get some more food. Good we had a sponsor that paid to get fruit in the coffee breaks. That was fine.
