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-James

Salt

Posted by james on Sep 4, 2010 12:00 AM

6

IMDB     Apple Trailers

This one I really expected to hate. It had Angelina Jolie (-2 points) and had bad reviews (-1 pt), but we needed an action movie to see in the theaters so we went. And paid full price for it, too (no matinee or discount tickets), so I was prepared for severe disappointment.

I was really shocked. The movie was very good... great action, there wasn't a slow moment in the first 30-40 minutes of the movie. The story was a bit fun, and you kept guessing whether people were who the seemed to be (especially Jolie's main character). Everything was very intense, but not overdone. And that's what I really expected it to be - overdone. There wasn't much "try hard to be sexy" from Jolie, which most movies try to do for all their female action leads, and there wasn't over-the-top unbelievable flashy action (excluding, of course, the fun car-top chase). But I most expected the characters and dialog to be painful and cheesy, but thankfully it wasn't.

So overall, a really enjoyable movie. I remember saying to someone just a bit ago that I can't remember any recent movie that I've liked Angelina in - now there is one. It helps when she's not a) getting naked all the time, and b) trying to act cool/sexy. And Liev Shrieber? Always fun.

Green Zone

Posted by james on Aug 13, 2010 12:00 AM

7

IMDB     Apple Trailers

This looked good - from the makers of Bourne Identity. Indeed, from Jason Bourne himself (Matt Damon). It was very suspenseful, and had a nice mix of middle-eastern city warfare action and political intrigue. The political side reminded me of Tom Clancy movies, but not as heavy.

Overall, I liked this one a lot. It's not one of my favorites, and doesn't nearly hold up to the Bourne-series (which have a lot more heart), but still a very good movie.

How to switch from dmigrations to South

Posted by james on Jul 27, 2010 12:00 AM

I used to use dmigrations for django. Dmigrations is a database migrations library that makes keeping DB schemas up-to-date so easy & reliable. When you're a single developer, with only one dev machine and one server, this isn't as much an issue. Once you have teams (or multiple servers), this becomes necessary. But even for the single dev, once you use managed migrations you'll want to use it for everything.

I first started using dmigrations, which was nice but had a few bugs. One of the glaring ones: there's a typo in the codebase (which can only be checked out via SVN) that has existed there for a long, long time, and prevents normal operation. Why hasn't this been fixed? Because dmigrations has been abandoned. Supposedly, even the authors recommend using south instead.

So along comes South. South addresses the same problem, but is much better in just about every way (with the caveat that it's slightly more complicated, but not much). South handles more, better, cleaner, etc.

So here's how I took my dmigrations webapp and converted it to use south instead:

1. Backup your mysql database!


2. Now edit settings.py:


3. Remove 'dmigrations' from INSTALLED_APPS, add 'south'.


4. Remove the DMIGRATIONS_DIR and DISABLE_SYNCDB (if you have that) vars.


5. From the command prompt:


6. > del migrations\*


7. > manage.py schemamigration app_name --initial


8. > manage.py syncdb


9. > manage.py migrate --fake

Canon SDK update - EDSDK 2.8 is out (Windows 7, finally!)

Posted by james on Apr 25, 2010 12:00 AM

For those that are interested (probably not many out there), Canon just released an update to their EDSDK library. This update includes support for Windows 7 and the Rebel 550D/T2i, and hopefully supports live view on DSLRs.

The good - finally, support for Windows 7. What took so long?

The bad - I fully expect to find documentation written by monkeys, and example code littered with typos and calls to non-existent functions. Please surprise me, Canon...

Fill out the application for the Canon SDK.