Inutilities

Evan Almighty

2008-07-23T16:14:10Z

And today's movie was... Evan Almighty. Yeah, I know I need to stop watching movies and doing more interesting work. I promise I'll try.

Now, on the movie details: the story is simple. Evan is a congressman. God tells him to build an Ark. He builds the Ark. There is a flood. Happy? I am just not sure why building an Ark on XX century is done using traditional tools.

A final comment: Lauren Graham is really nice on this movie. She is 40 and very attractive, and sexy.

Young People Fucking

2008-07-22T16:52:52Z

Young People Fucking is the name of a strange movie. While classified as a comedy, on some situations it feels like an erotic movie. Not that you see too much of the fucking. In fact you don't, and that might be the reason about it.

In any case, the movie is about a set of couples, and how they react to a sex night, in different situations. For instance, one couple that lost the interest, a couple that are apart for some time, a couple of best friends that never saw each other as a possible mate, and so on.

I think the movie is interesting and can give some clues on all problems that a relationship can raise.

Acer Aspire One

2008-07-22T11:45:47Z

I just bought an Acer Aspire One. This is a small and cheap laptop with an Atom based processor, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of flash disk, card readers, USB slots. A small webcam (but interesting quality), sound, et al. It runs a fedora 8 based distro, but I'll probably install another linux on the next days.

At the moment, my only complain is that my big hands have some trouble using that small keyboard. But that will go with time. Oh, and I feel it to be unacceptable to ship a linux distro without an ssh client.

Bee Movie

2008-07-20T15:14:42Z

This time I got an Animation movie: Bee Movie. I was tired of zombies, and the movie of yesterday was too much a drama to me. So, a comedy and animation movie was the choice.

Now, what can I say about Bee Movie? The animation is excellent as we are used to, when the movie comes from Dreamworks or Pixar. The voices are good as well. Although one of the main advertisers for this movie was the voice from Jerry Seinfeld, I really didn't found it to be any special.

The story on Bee Movie is the usual: showing that the nature is something to respect, and that animals have feelings as well. In fact I am really convinced that flowers, vegetable plants and fruit trees, all have feelings. That is why I do not get vegetarian. If we need to eat life forms, why to distinguish them? (lol).

A good movie. 7/10.

Reviewing ImageMagick book from Packt Pub

2008-07-20T09:30:00Z

Thanks to Packt Publishing I have the ImageMagick Tricks book to review. Although the book is from 2006 I am expecting it to be quite up-to-date as ImageMagick exists for a long time, and the interface is the same for some years.

Also, I expect to learn a lot with it. I use ImageMagick for a long time as a command line tool to convert image formats, rotate and scale them, but never did anything more complicated. Now it is the time to do it.

While I read the book I will edit the extended version of this post. So, you can bookmark it and check it periodically if you wish. When I finish it, I will republish in a new post, anyway.

(Reposted for new content)

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My first incursion in the book was to look into it as a whole, without really reading. You know, the book is about an image software, so it is full of nice images. Thus, yesterday I looked to some pictures, and to the book organization. I found it quite strange that a book about image processing is all in gray scale. I was really expecting at least two or four colorful pages in the middle/end of the book, where all the images where color is relevant might be put together. This might not be important, as it all depends on the real content of the book and image processing techniques. But I can quickly think on two or three filters where color might be important.

This was followed by the first chapter. It basically tries to explain why one might need a command line tool to process images when we have so many image manipulation software, like Photoshop. I think that the author failed a little on this task. Somebody that already uses ImageMagick will get the idea, as she is aware of the way ImageMagick works. For somebody comming from an outside world it might be quite strange to talk about a image manipulation software that works on the command line. To help on explaining why this is good, the author could have added some command lines to do some tricks. He didn't need to explain the real content of the command line: just show what it does. This same chapter ends with a brief description of what commands are available on ImageMagick installation and what is their intent. One more time, I would probably add some examples to these small paragraphs, trying to convince the reader of the power of the tools.

Now, some weeks later, I got the time to read one more chapter. This book's second chapter is about installation and/or configuring and compiling ImageMagick. While this might be important, I am not sure of its importance in a book of this kind, and specially, a chapter of that size. My first note goes to the two pages of invalid (or outdated) links. A list of two or three URL for the ImageMagick download page would be enough. A list of links to specific ImageMagick versions is just crazy. Note that while a web page is easy to update, to update a book is too expensive. Regarding the installation and compilation details: they are relevant, but the author falls in a specific problem: you never can cover all the compilation details for every system. It would be better to just explain how to install on Windows, and refer to each specific Linux distribution for details on how to compile and/or install the ImageMagick package.

Follows a chapter on basic image manipulation. Here, the fact of being a B&W book, makes it hard to understand the tricks shown. There is a package for download from the book page with all the images. Also, the third chapter is available for free from Packt Publishing website in PDF format. Unfortunately the link was not working when I wrote this. Hope it gets fixed before I finish the review. While I know that colorful pages are expensive (and the book is already expensive enough), it would be great to include some pages in color. Most of the examples are small enough, so they could be putted all together in a same page.

Yet on the third chapter, the author claims to explain the difference between mogrify and convert, two utilities available from ImageMagick package. Unfortunately this difference is not made clear in the beginning, and a lot of examples that could use the mogrify command use convert, not making it clear about the availability of two commands for the (almost) same thing. This difference is made clear (and well explained) almost at the end of the chapter, between two tutorials (the chapter includes about five tutorials). While I would explain this difference in the beginning, I could cope with an explanation in the end of the chapter. But I feel quite umconfortable with it somewhere in the middle of a set of tutorials.

(review under progress)

Children of Men

2008-07-19T15:52:45Z

Taking the time of vacations to see some more movies, next one was Children of Men. I should confess I was expecting a completely different movie. Why? Well, I heard about the story: future, nobody procreates anymore, a baby appears. What I wasn't expecting, then? The key work is "future". The movie seems anything, but to be held in the future.

OK, but on to the movie: the story is good enough (nothing really new, but good enough for a good movie), the main actor pretty good as well. The soundtrack was also very well chosen, and there are some moments that almost make me cry...

And again, like the movie watched yesterday, this one makes us think. And that is good!

I am legend

2008-07-18T16:45:49Z

For some time that I didn't see a movie of zombies... well, kidding. Not sure why I am seeing so many zombie movies, but "I am legend" is not yet another zombie movie. While having zombies and guns, there are some interesting details that are not similar to other movies like Resident Evil.

On I am legend, Will Smith has a nive acting. Almost the full movie is with him, and him, and his dog. There are some thrilling portions of the movie, but lots of time are quiet, with no action, but showing us the desolation of cities without people.

Also, unlike common American movies, the main character dies at the end of movie. OK, true that he becomes a legend. But, do we want to be a legend? Will it make us happier?

Resident Evil: Extinction

2008-07-06T16:34:52Z

Today was movie day. I was needing some action. So, I chose Resident Evil: Extinction. So, lots and lots of blood, nice girls, action, guns, and some technology. I can't recall if I saw the previous two movies. In any case there isn't much to tell about the history. I was kind of lost in the beginning about names and faces, but it was fast to know who was the nice girl (Alice).

There are some flaws in the movie. But, that is usual. And when you join zombies, technology and girls, it is normal that the producer gets his eyes just in one of the area. No, I will not say which.

Well, needing to rate the movie, I probably would go for 7 in 10.

Adium and ICQ

2008-07-01T18:52:17Z

To make me contactable I use Adium on my Mac. Adium is nice because it supports lots of instant messaging protocols, ranging from MSN, to ICQ or Gtalk. It is based on an open-source library, named libpurple, and a similar software for linux, named Pidgin.

Today, Adium is refusing to connect my ICQ account. It says something like my version of pidgin (quite strange that is says pidgin and not Adium) is too old, and that I need to upgrade it. Well, I upgraded to latest Adium beta release (1.3b) and I still can't connect my ICQ account.

Is anybody with a similar problem?

Diablo III

2008-06-28T20:07:41Z

I am a Diablo addict. Well, at least I was so, regading Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 (and Lord of Destruction).

Interesting enough, and I am not sure how, I found out that today Blizzard revealed the first details about Diablo III. And I just got.. erm... what is the right word? Oh, yes, I drool a lot. I think I am still drooling.

Accordingly with the movies, it seems quite similar with previous ones in genre (that is good, they did not kill the game already), with new and enhanced special effects. Probably I'll need to buy a few mouses to play Diablo III until the end. But that should not be a problem.

Now, let just hope it works under MacOS.

This Summer in Perl

2008-06-27T18:39:34Z

Asus Eee

2008-06-25T19:21:13Z

In the last days Portugal was drown by advertising for Eee PC. I am not sure if this is all an ASUS marketing issue or if all these sellers are happy to see a laptop for about 300 euros.

The truth is that it all started last week with RadioPopular (a known electronic shop in Portugal) saying they will have Eee PC in exclusive. Some hours later I received a similar advertisement from MediaMarkt (also exclusive). Later I knew that FNAC already had one in exposition. Yesterday, another computer store sent me an SMS with an advertisement. Thus, at least four stores with Eee PC and making a lot of advertising.

Now, regarding the laptop itself, it has a resolution interesting enough (although I would like to see a panoramic monitor), is has three USB ports (shame to MacBook Air), ethernet card (shame to MacBook Air again), a full standard VGA connector (erm, should I refer MacBook Air?), WiFi, a small trackpad with two buttons, a full Portuguese keyboard. The operating system is based on Linux (I know, there is one windows based as well), and runs mainly OpenOffice 2, Thunderbird, Firefox, some KDE games and educational applications. There are direct links to web applications like Wikipedia, Google docs and other. It all run fast enough.

OK, now the complaints: I got a shell! I used disk-free in this 4GB machine. The partition had 1.5GB, 150 MB used, 1.2GB free. I wonder where is the remaining 2.5GB. Unfortunatey I couldn't use fdisk to check this more throught. Oh, and I forgot to check if there was a Perl version.

Now, anybody wants to buy one, so I can analyse it better?

WWW Trauma

2008-06-24T19:54:02Z

One of the things I can't understand is why people continue to define hosts and webpages with the www preffix. You know, www.host.com, www.host.org, and so on. I wouldn't mind if the same host, without the www work. For instance, why not host.com working instead of just www.host.com? I can understand that people can forget to do that. I can't understand why contacted webmasters (yeah, I contacted a few) answer that host.com and www.host.com are different things (when host.com returns an error on no website configured for that domain).

Oh well, probably I am getting too old...

Superhero Movie

2008-06-22T14:53:28Z

Superhero movie appears in the continuation of the good old Scary Movie series. Unfortunately Scary Movie serie got a real loss of quality with each new sequel, and this movie, being in continuation of that kind of movie, is also of very low quality.

The main problem to me is the similarity with the Spider Man movie. All of Superhero movie story follows as the Spidar Man one. There are some small parts of the story where other movies are used, as X-Men or Fantastic Four. But in any case, they appear for a small period of time, and the story continues with Spider Man.

Fortunately there is Sara Paxton, and her eyes, that make us distract a little. Of course there is also Pamela Anderson, but she appears for a too small period of time.

I would not rate the movie as 4/10, as it is currently on IMDB, but not much higher. Something like 6/10 would be enough.

Firefox 3: first thoughts

2008-06-19T17:54:08Z

OK, Firefox 3 is installed for two days, download day ended, mozilla website is back online. This means that it is not possible to browse through the add-onds and themes. It is also a good timing to tell you what I think about Firefox 3.

First of all, I do not like its design under MacOS. I think that the design under Windows is very good, but the colors under Mac are too dark. If you put two windows side by side you will notice that Firefox 3 is just too dark. I've tried some other themes but none is good enough at the moment. Note that most of the themes do not work yet with Firefox 3 and those which work require or a Windows installation, or that you register in the addons website. And I am not in that mood yet. Yet on design, I am not happy with the widgets design as well. I know it is more Aquacious, but I do not like it. That was one reason I did not use Safari. Searched on the configuration database for some key to turn off those buttons but couldn't find it.

The two most advertised features are speed and memory. Unfortunately running firefox 3 under a Mac with 4GB of RAM doesn't help to compare with the memory usage of firefox 2, or its speed. But under vmware it seems a little faster. Probably I can get some more about this with some more usage.

Regarding plugins, I do not like this new Del.icio.us plugin. This is not new for Firefox 3, and is not mozilla fault. But I do not like it. I was quite happy with the clear distinction between a web 2.0 website and a browser. Now, things are quite mungled together.

I did not install yet Firebug. That plugin will help me to discover how fixed are the memory holes. With Firefox 2 and Firebug it took me about 10 seconds to open a tab. Hope that gets better now.

Also, I am missing the SwitchProxy plugin, but probably that gets back someday.

To finish, let me advertise myself. You can find my name in the about from the spell checker for the Portuguese (European) language.