I had some problems installing the heroku gem on Leopard:
$ sudo gem install heroku
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing heroku:
heroku requires json_pure (>= 1.2.0, < 1.5.0, runtime)
So I tried to install the json_pure gem first (sudo gem install json_pure), but this always seemed to install/update the json gem instead of the json_pure gem.
I eventually managed to install the correct gem by providing the version number on installation:
sudo gem install json_pure -v 1.2.4
This installed the json_pure gem and I was also able to install the Heroku gem afterwards.
Watching a lighting talk of the Mountain West Ruby Conf, and this guy walked up and demoed this one command!
git instaweb --httpd webrickautomatically launch a web server and browser to your get repository!
Way Cool!
Pretty cool indeed!
Sizzling Keys lets you control iTunes from the keyboard.
One of my favorite little apps. I have it running all the time.
Lake Harris from Conical Hill
I took this picture on the Routeburn Track (Mt. Aspiring/Fjordland National Parks) and it’s easily one of my favorites from this trip.
Fuck yeah. ;-)
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“Try to avoid burdening your users with choices on how to perform an action. Giving them lots of options may seem like a good idea but it isn’t. It ends up bloating an interface and burdening your users with decisions they shouldn’t have to make.” — How To Critique An Interface « Aza on Design
You wouldn’t drink 9 year old milk.
So why use a 9-year-old browser?
When Internet Explorer 6 was launched in 2001, it offered cutting–edge security – for the time. Since then, the Internet has evolved and the security features of Internet Explorer 6 have become outdated.
(via Upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 | Microsoft Australia )
So we know that ID’s are the most efficient selectors. If you wanted to make the most efficiently rendering page possible, you would literally give every single element on the page a unique ID, then apply styling with single ID selectors. That would be super fast, and also super ridiculous. It would probably be extremely non-semantic and extremely difficult to maintain. You don’t see this approach even on hardcore performance based sites. I think the lesson here is not to sacrifice semantics or maintainability for efficient CSS.
Good to know.
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I learned about ‘Extended Takes’ a while ago, and yesterday I watched one movie from the list ‘20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History’: Children of Men.
This movie contains a lot of these long scenes without cut. Two of those immediately got my attention. But first, here’s some context on what the movie is about:
Set in the United Kingdom of 2027, the film explores a grim world in which two decades of global human infertility have left humanity with less than a century to survive. Societal collapse, terrorism, and environmental destruction accompany the impending extinction. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom—perhaps the last functioning government—persecutes a seemingly endless wave of illegal immigrant refugees seeking sanctuary. In the midst of this chaos, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) must find safe transit for Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a pregnant African “fugee” (refugee).
The first scene, I’d like to share is the ‘roadside ambush’:
[Director Alfonso] Cuarón’s initial idea for maintaining continuity during the roadside ambush scene was dismissed by production experts as an “impossible shot to do”. Fresh from the visual effects-laden Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Cuarón suggested using computer-generated imagery to film the scene. [Cinematographer Emmanuel] Lubezki refused to allow it, reminding the director that they had intended to make a film akin to a “raw documentary”. Instead, a special camera rig invented by Gary Thieltges of Doggicam Systems was employed, allowing Cuarón to develop the scene as one extended shot. A vehicle was modified to enable seats to tilt and lower actors out of the way of the camera, and the windshield was designed to tilt out of the way to allow camera movement in and out through the front windscreen. A crew of four, including the DP and camera operator, rode on the roof.
So please note: these shots are without cuts!
Here is an article where you can see how the car looked like when they filmed the scene: Children of Men - Hard Core Seamless vfx.
Even longer is a scene “in which [main character] Theo is captured by the Fishes, escapes, and runs down a street and through a building in the middle of a raging battle”:
The creation of the single-shot sequences was a challenging, time-consuming process that sparked concerns from the studio. It took fourteen days to prepare for the single shot in which Clive Owen’s character searches a building under attack, and five hours for every time they wanted to reshoot it. In the middle of one shot, blood splattered onto the lens, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki convinced the director to leave it in. According to Owen, “Right in the thick of it are me and the camera operator because we’re doing this very complicated, very specific dance which, when we come to shoot, we have to make feel completely random.”
Now watch this. It’s one take until the 6 minute mark.
That’s just amazing, even if you read that the final product doesn’t seem to be one single shot:
However, the commonly reported statement that the action scenes are continuous shots is not entirely true. Visual effects supervisor Frazer Churchill explains that the effects team had to “combine several takes to create impossibly long shots”.
All quotes taken from the Wikipedia article on ‘Children of Men’.
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I’m all for pointing out the iPhones flaws: it may be polished, but we’d all agree it has some. But to sting it in reviews based on the promise that a third-party will ship a media plugin at a yet-to-be-determined date, seems petty. […]
I guess judging a device based on actual features and user experience, instead of its ‘inability to run a hypothetical, hither-to-unseen media plugin’, isn’t particularly exciting…
I so share this observation…
Duncan's Journal: Android VM Performance is not a Factor -
A faster VM will certainly help things out. But Android’s eventual fate will have little to do with how fast the VM is or how long method dispatches take on the iPhone. Instead, it’ll have to do with harder things like user experience, service plans, interoperability, and excellent applications.
A lot of developers - and tech folks in general - seem to be so obsessed with benchmarks and raw, measurable execution speed: ‘The new Android OS will be faster than the iPhone’, ‘How fast does this piece of code run compared to this one?’, ‘The new version is much faster.’, ‘Ruby is slow!’, etc., etc.
Do these people actually choose their platforms/gadgets like this, without also looking at other not-so-easily-benchmarked factors? I don’t know. But I believe the whole ‘speed’ discussion is way overrated.
Bonus: I wrote this on my almost 6 year old PowerBook G4. ;-)
Now go, read the article.
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