Rocket Surgery

In the same vein as my list of best books ever, I have decided to make my lists of best movies ever. And this time, for no defendable reason at all, there are 20 entries.

20. Requiem for a Dream

19. Star Wars: A New Hope

18. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

17. On Golden Pond

16. Ordinary People

14. Full Metal Jacket

13. The Shawshank Redemption

12. Animal House

11. Dances with Wolves

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I thought for sure it would be Kaine. Kaine seemed like a better choice to me…safe, southern, seriously up Obama’s, um, alley…..

Biden?! Really?!

I don’t really see how it helps him at all. Don’t get me wrong, I actually find Biden funny and interesting, so I don’t object to the choice, but this is a guy who seems to me like a cross of McCain and Cheney — a more aggressive old bastard of a 20+year Senator who shoots his mouth off and irritates orthodox party loyalists.

True, He won’t having any trouble playing bad cop to Obama’s good cop. I guess what Obama wanted was someone with foreign policy and national security experience (as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) — more than he wanted someone who can bring swing votes or has his own “change appeal”. Without a doubt Obama will need experienced advisors and cabinet members, and Biden would have been a pretty good choice for a number of cabinet posts (perhaps State, or Defense).

But I don’t see how it will help in the election…The draw of Obama is change, and the selection of Biden diffuses that message by giving the appearance of trying to tap into the experience of those who have been running the very things he is trying to change. Seems to me like he’s just trying to mollify the people who worry about his lack of experience by adding Biden to the ticket — which I don’t think will really work.

I was recently writing a program to find classes that had a certain annotation on them:

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

/**
 * This annotation works similarly to the @WebMethod
 * annotation. It is used to indicate that the annotated method is allowed to be
 * made visible on a generated facade, and how to do it.
 *
 */
@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
@Documented
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface FacadeMethod
{
	/**
	 * This is the operation name that the annotated object will have on the
	 * generated facade. This will be used as the value for
	 * operationName in the @WebMethod
	 * annotation as well as the name of the method in the facade.
	 *
	 * @return the name that the annotated object will have on the generated
	 *         facade
	 */
	String operationName();

	/**
	 * This is a description of the method which will be used to generate
	 * javadoc on the facade.
	 *
	 * @return a description of the method
	 */
	String description() default "";
}

Methods annotated with this method look something like this:

@FacadeMethod(operationName = "effectivelySame",
              description = "Return true if the two strings are identical, both null, "
                            + "or equivalent after converting to same case and trimming")
public static boolean effectivelySame(String s1, String s2) {
...

What I needed to do was look through a whole mess of jar files that weren’t in the classpath, looking for classes with methods annotated with this annotation, so I could read the operationName and the description properties of the annotation.

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Here’s my list of the 10 best books (series) ever:

10. Lord of the Flies, William Golding

9. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

8. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

7. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

6. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

5. Harry Potter Series, J. K. Rowling (Of these, Half-Blood Prince is my favorite)

4. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

3. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

2. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

1. 1984, George Orwell

(Also, as a side note, the worst book ever was Billy Budd by Herman Melville)

The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller, Chapter 34

I recently re-read Catch-22 (what a great book!) and when this bit came up and I read it, all the hair on my arm stood up, it was so good.  It’s today - it’s reality - it’s political correctness - it’s modern politics - it’s the Iraq war - it’s bad management - it’s pervasive.

Simply brilliant.

I saw this and it tickled me.

Japanese Bottled Water

Wow.

I don’t like comic books.  I don’t usually like comic book movies.  I liked the original Superman: The Movie from the seventies, and I thought the recent Spiderman movie was just obnoxious.

But The Dark Knight was great.  Heath Ledger had been making great buzz as The Joker, and all the talk about Oscar-worthiness got me interested in seeing it, and I was not disappointed.  At all.  In fact, I was pretty damn impressed.

I like dark movies, and this one was pretty dark - particularly for a comic book movie.  This is NOT the Adam West/Cesar Romero Batman and Joker from the TV series, or even the Michael Keaton/Jack Nicholson Batman and Joker from Tim Burton’s go at it.  This one doesn’t attempt to be fun, it goes for serious - and paradoxically, therein lies the fun.  The Joker doesn’t make over the top corny, campy jokes - any humor that comes from the Joker comes from his being sarcastic.  He’s more disturbing (and disturbed) than funny.  He’s a genuinely threatening villain.

And our hero is forced to examine his own ethics when confronted by the Joker’s complete lack of them.  How far can you go and what means can you use to defeat evil without becoming evil yourself?  Pertinent question for our times (viz., waterboarding).

The rest of the cast is great too.  Aaron Eckhart’s character did not develop as I expected at all - I love being surprised by movies - and I even liked Maggie Gyllenhaal who I normally don’t really care for.  Each actor was fully vested in their characters, and this was a true ensemble piece.

Four stars.

What a dumb movie. Not that dumb is always bad, of course.

But in an action movie, you want to have suspense…you need to perceive that the protagonist is somehow threatened during the action sequences.  When a 67 year old man is blown up by a nuclear weapon and is thrown for (presumably) miles on the inside of a lead-lined refrigerator, then gets out and walks away without a single broken bone or even a bloody nose or lip, he’s basically invincible at that point and some chick with a sword is no threat.  When it happens at the beginning of the movie, how can you possibly care what happens to this guy?

And then when Mutt goes swinging through the vines like Tarzan…my eyes were rolling.

It was amazing to me that Spielberg was involved.  They definitely jumped the shark with this one. 1 and a half stars.

I’ve done something simple, yet cool and useful in our Ant builds to make them work a little nicer with Hudson.  I’ve modified things so our Jars/Wars get stamped with version control information from Hudson.  To do this, I take advantage of the fact that when Hudson starts an Ant build, it puts certain key values in the environment variables, so I grab them and stuff them into the manifests for the jars.

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Well, this may turn a number of you off and make you think I’m some sort of Luddite or something, but I have come to a considered opinion:  I don’t really like Hibernate.

Before you consider me an ignorant fool, here are some of my reasons for you to consider (and I may add to this list over time): Read the rest of this entry »