As the summer is just around the corner, I’ve decided to buy me self a pair of new shiny shoes. Ain’t they beautiful? Yes, indeed they are!
Ryłko Nikbut Nexx 582
Now I know that this is only one shoe, but I believe you can imagine the other one ;)
Introducing movie ratings
Those who know me are also familiar with my love for movies. That’s why I’ve decided that it would be great to write a web application, that would let me easily rate them. That includes, but is not limited to: AJAX, automated title fetching from imdb and a firefox bookmarklet. Original inspiration came from Kottke. He had this kind of system on his blog for as long as I can remember (besides the sole idea, I might have also stolen those star images, I’m not quite sure now, though). It took me a little while before this project came to realization. Implementing it as a WordPress plugin seemed like the best idea. This way I can share my movie ratings with the whole wide world. And so I have finally dealt with my procrastination and simply wrote it. You can see the result just below the first note on the front page. In the foreseeable future I plan on releasing this plugin to the public (GPL). There are still some things I need to implement (RSS feed, for one). Although, if there’s any demand (at all), I might release it sooner rather than later.
UPDATE: WP Movie Ratings has been released as a WordPress plugin.
Google ban lifted
For the past two or three months this blog has been sandboxed by Google. Searching for terms, which usually put my page high in the results lists, yielded my blog at the very end. Googling for my own name became disgraceful. I was last on the list!
I believe it might have had something to do with my Google Ads. While experimenting with them, I might have overcrowded my page, so ads to content ratio became too high. Although it doesn’t make much sense for Google to ban me for using their own ads, yet I still believe it to be quite possible. Conspiracy theory in its fullest.
However, it’s all in the past now. Sandbox is lifted. My AWStats are showing me a 8x-10x increase in traffic coming from Google in the last 24 hours and my page is back at the top for few essential queries. All of that makes me a very happy person.
2006 Oscars
I was very pleased to hear this morning that Crash managed to snatch Oscar in the most prestigious category – Best Motion Picture of the Year. After all, it was the second best movie of 2005 (in my opinion). Unfortunately, I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain yet, so I cannot say whether it’s good or bad that this movie has received only one Oscars in major category – Best Achievement in Directing (snatching the other two in Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published and Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score). I’ve heard a lot about Philip Seymour Hoffman performance in Copote, so I suspect it’s a well deserved award. Too bad I haven’t seen that one either.
The most undeserved Oscar this year went to Reese Witherspoon. Just like Nicole Kidman got hers for not looking like Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Reese Witherspoon got her for having a voice not like her (very annoying southern accent). Her performance in Walk the Line was just good, nothing out of the ordinary.
Surprisingly, Memoirs of a Geisha, which I reviewed just yesterday managed to grab three Oscars (same number as both Crash and King Kong) in the following categories: Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design.
Some deserved their awards, others did not. Was it controversial? Hardly. All in all, Oscars this year were just like any other year.
Review: Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances.
She sings. She entertains you, whatever you want.
The rest is shadows. The rest is secret.
Supposedly Geishas are not prostitutes, but how do you call selling your virginity for 15,000 Yen? I’d say it’s prostitution in one of its purest forms. But, apparently, there is a difference between the two. It’s subtle, sometimes blurred, but it would be a grave insult to call Geisha a prostitute. Are they or are they not? That is the question you have to answer for yourself. Maybe watching this movie will help. Maybe.
Geisha are not courtesans, and we’re not wives.
We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another
secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word
Geisha means artist, and to be a Geisha is
to be judged as a moving work of art.
Sad truth is, American movies about Japan are much better than the Japanese ones. Such was the case with The Last Samurai, and so it is with Memoirs of a Geisha. Hollywood has mastered to perfection the art of entertainment. This one is a perfect example to support this thesis. Easy to follow story with lots of twist and turns, stunning visuals, memorable music, sweet ending and the most fitted cast you could imagine. Divinely gorgeous Zhang Ziyi, devilishly beautiful Gong Li and deadly handsome Ken Watanabe. What more could one ask for? It’s not me complaining that the movie is sometimes far off from the historical truth (The Last Samurai, once again). I mean, it’s entertainment. The sole meaning of this word is to have a good time and I, personally, had a really great time.
The only flaw I could name in Memoirs of a Geisha is the use of English as a main movie language with occasional Japanese terms here and there. Other than that, it is, yes, breathtaking from the very first scene till the end.
Rating: 9/10
Yet another anti-PHP rant
I’m quite surprised to see this great stir in the blogosphere caused by Tim Bray and his essay On PHP. I mean, what’s the deal anyway? We all know that PHP is a lousy programming language. So instead on focusing on the big picture and trying to list as many of its faults as I can remember, I’ll stay on one specific problem, which is really a pain for me.
I’ve been programming in PHP for the past five years (I’ve started using it in the beginning of 2001, during my Computer Science studies). PHP is (was?) both my love and hate. My biggest complain about it, and probably about all other programming languages used for web development, is that there is no decent way of producing HTML code from your application. No matter how hard you try, you’ll always end up having spaghetti either in your HTML or in PHP code (or even worse, in both places). Sure, separating business from presentation logic is a common practice which helps the cause (apart from the fact that most PHP folks mix HTML with PHP whenever and wherever they can). Problem is, that it’s not good enough.
It would be all much simpler if you didn’t need to put any logic into your presentation code. The moment you introduce loops or conditionals – bam – you either get unreadable code or spaghetti HTML with way too much whitespace (or without any whitespace at all) and improper indentation. Not to mention that I am probably not the only one sick of typing all those nasty angle brackets all the time. But what about all that specialized templating engines? Frankly, they are not any better. Besides the fact that some of them require a certain overhead (like defining the variables you wish to use in your templates – Smarty, anyone?), they all still carry the same burden – they either produce spaghetti HTML or have spaghetti templates.
Actually, Rails, being my current weapon of choice, is no better in this area. My .rhtml templates are a complete mess. I strive to have my HTML as pretty as it can be, because (maybe strangely) I find it easier to debug if I have a nice HTML output to deal with, instead of a nice .rhtml template. Too bad that I feel utter disgust when I look at those templates. And just as Smarty is no better for PHP, Liquid and similar projects are no better for Rails. However, there is still hope, with projects like Markaby (which, unfortunately, has its own issues, check the comments).
Just a small digression, to sum all this up. Rails has solved one other, big inconvenience, namely writing your own SQL for each and every interaction with the database. Thanks to ORM provided by ActiveRecord, you don’t have to write SQL any more (at least in most of the cases; the 80/20 rule). This is one of the basic reasons that Rails is so much better than PHP. Markaby tries to do the same to HTML, what ActiveRecord did to SQL. No more those nasty < /> characters! We’ll see how (and where) it goes.
2 million Firefox users in Poland
According to a recent measure (article in Polish) conducted by Gemius (a Polish company tracking internet users in our country) the number of Firefox users in Poland has surpassed the two million barrier, giving it a 17% usage in the browser market. That, of course, does not give us the lead in Europe, but in my opinion it’s a pretty high number. And, of course, it’s climbing. Here’s the chart:
Go, Firefox!
UPDATE: It seems that ranking.pl (the source of this chart) counts each cookie as a user, while in fact there are way more cookies than real users (check the comments for details).
Review: Anthony Zimmer (2005)
I must admit that my jaw dropped after spotting Sophie Marceau in Anthony Zimmer. Her first entrance is simply stunning. Only then I have realized she was basically the sole reason I was watching this movie in the first place. It’s been so long since I’ve seen her on the big screen… Not like she stopped acting, quite the opposite, when you look at her filmography, you’ll see many titles, year after year. The problem is, most of them are of doubtful quality, so I just skipped them. Anthony Zimmer is a single exception since Fidelity (by Andrzej Żuławski), that has caught my interest. I was heading for a big treat and thankfully I wasn’t disappointed.
Anthony Zimmer is not in any way exceptional. You might even go as far as saying it’s just your typical French thriller. And you’ll be mostly right. Mostly, because it is so much more at the same time… First of all it’s not just a thriller, it’s a psychological thriller and there’s a certain distinction between the two. In practice it usually means less shooting and action replaced with more acting and talking. Actually, French cinema is quite good at psychological thrillers, maybe even the best? Red Lights, which comes to my mind, is the closest offspring from that genre – both movies share similar atmosphere and tension.
Second thing, which make Anthony Zimmer exceptional is the perfect cast of three main players. Aforementioned and always exceptionally beautiful Sophie Marceau as Chiara, Yvan Attal as Francois Taillandier and Sami Frey as Akerman, overshadowing the two. We get a glimpse of Daniel Olbrychski too, which was a treat on its own as he is a well known actor in Poland.
The movie starts and the game begins…
I would love to say that Anthony Zimmer left me speechless, but it is not so. Quite the contrary, it gave me a lot to write about.
Rating: 9/10
The whole Chuck Norris meme
It has all started when NBC acquired Universal Pictures (May, 2004) and Conan O’Brien (of the Late Night with Conan O’Brien fame) dug up the archives of Walker, Texas Ranger. He has carefully chosen about a dozen clips from various episodes and showed them to the public, having lots of fun in between. Shortly thereafter someone made the list of the so called Chuck Norris facts and that’s when it all really started. Over the course of one year the trend became so huge, that Chuck himself issued an official response.
Funny thing is, that at first I had though it was only a local, Polish meme, as there’s a huge Polish list of Chuck Norris facts (over 500). It’s such a popular trend in Poland, that even people not using computers talk about it. Only lately I’ve found out the true source of it all.
All hail to Chuck Norris, who has counted to infinity. Twice.
Top 25 music of 2005
Continuing from the previous post, listing top 10 movies of 2005, here is the top 25 from the music industry. The thing with music is, that the more recent the tune is, the more I like it. No matter how good the track was half a year ago, it looses when you compare it to any half as good new track. Usually it’s because I’ve been listening to the older one too much. That’s why there are so many new tracks in the list (new for me, that is). More appropriate name for the list could probably be something along those lines: “top 25 recent tracks”, but since it’s the time of summing up the year 2005, it’s called the way it is.
- Juanes – La Camisa Negra
- D!nation – Shut Up and Dance
- Venice Beat ft. Tess Timony – In The Year 2525
- Stereophonics – Maybe Tomorrow
- Darin Zanyar – Step Up
- Anggun – Saviour
- Elize – Automatic (I’m Talking to You)
- Asle Pres. Frost – Wait for Me
- Ringside – Tired Of Being Sorry
- Shaggy ft. Olivia – Wild 2nite
- Rihanna – Pon De Reply
- Mosqitoo – I Feel You
- Pachanga – Loco
- Kanye West ft. Jay Z – Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)
- Björk – Army of Me (Casey Stratton Remix) (recommendation from Greebo)
- Leonoff ft. Płyny – Ne Positiva Situacjone (link)
- Royksopp – What Else Is There
- Natasha St. Pier – Un Ange Frappe A Ma Port
- Peja/Slums Attack ft. Sweet Noise – Ile Jeszcze?!
- Danzel – Pump It Up
- Bob Sinclair – Love Generation
- Hurt – Załoga G
- Timo Maas – First Day
- Royksopp – Only This Moment
- Prezioso and Marvin – Rockin’ Deejays
That was a good year when it comes to music.