return void;

i was tempted to use a play on words and title this “march of the pigs”, but it just wouldn’t be a fitting title. crystal and i saw “march of the penguins” today in plano. we had trouble finding it still in theatre’s but eventually found it. after having seen “super size me” for the first time and marked it the best movie i’ve seen in 2005, i feel i may have to recall that statement (keyword: may).

the movie was 90 minutes, and before i initially saw the movie, i thought that this would prove to be 45 minutes too long. that was clearly not the case. the movie is about the emperor penguin’s pilgrimage to parenthood. every so often (i believe once a year), this penguin will march to certain areas in the antarctic where the ice is thick enough to support their weight for a period of time and shield them from the upcoming winter.

the movie documents this penguin’s struggle for life. it is narrated well by morgan freeman since he always has had a narrator’s voice (so does the guy in the allstate commercials). the style of photography was awe inspiring. they showed that even though they are simply birds that swim, these animals clearly must have a soul. man of these animals show emotions we only thought capable in humans. the directors were able to show how majestic and beautiful life in a desolate area can still be.

they steered clear from the “gore-fest” style of animal documentaries, and rather focused on the love and strife that is so profound, you would swear that these penguins have what humanity claims sole ownership of (souls). they show you despair and agony, love, hope, humor and playfulness. several times, there are scenes where the animals show gut-wrenching pain over lost children since the cold is an unyielding and malevolent force. they show how two strange creatures can meet and show undying love for one another, brief as it may be. the animals bear through this childbirth ritual for 8 months.

this movie was superb and well shot. the photographic element was of national geographic’s quality. something as simple as childbirth (everyone does it, so it can’t be that bad) became an emotional ride. if your heart is not warmed by this movie, you have a black heart that pumps oil. animal lovers beware, there are scenes that reflect how much of a struggle this ritual is for them (i.e. an older penguin dies, and they film it’s last seconds as it’s eyes close for the last time).

this movie’s rating (of 10): 8

for the last two months, i have been reading a book called “Imajica” by clive barker. since i get 2 hours per day to myself on the vanpool that i ride, i figured i’d spend that time reading a book. this was my first endeavor. when i originally picked it up, i thought it would be closer to horror. clive barker is the mind behind the hellraiser series (book titled “hellbound heart”). i picked up a reprint of this set, which was combined to form a single book of massive proportions that was divided in two sections.

[spoiler]

the story is about a man named Gentle who has a mysterious past. a close friend of his dies and his ex-girlfriend has a hit taken out on her head (by her ex-husband). he then meets the assasain who takes him to another world, which is actually another Dominion or plane of existance. he travels in these strange lands with his new friend and meets many people on his way. in his journey, he finds out that everything he is doing is all apart of a masterplan that begun over 200 years ago. Gentle is of a higher power and it is his work to make the worlds whole.

[/spoiler]

the story deals with issues such as sexual desires, destiny, religion, and the existance of a benevolent God. until the ending, the story has a gloomy forshadowing that things will come to a screeching halt. clive barker does a fantastic job of describing the unreal. many things in the book cannot be seen and can only be described in ways in which he did so. for example, one of the characters let out a shriek and it was describe as “being loud enough to shake color from the air”. then there was a massive riot in the middle of a barbaric public execution (it was a raid that turned out to be where the soldiers shot at many of the victims even as they fled into the audience). his description of how the crowd instantly escalated into a riot was so well, that i read it as fast as i would’ve seen it in a movie. it was almost like i could hear the crappy hard rock in the background while he describe thousands of citizensunleashing hell and destruction.

at many points in the book, the story dragged on. several things were described that had little to no effect on the story. the second (of 2) main characters (Jude) seemed to always act irrationally. every decision she made almost came out of left field. barker did a very good job at describing Gentle’s thought process and every route his character took made sense. Jude on the otherhand seemed to constantly be winging it and always without logic. her character rather annoyed me and i think it hurt the overall plot.

all in all, i would say that the story was mediocre, but the writing was supurb. never would i have thought that reading about the boring things in life could come to life on the pages of a book. next time, i will make sure that the book i start is indeed the style (horror, not dark fantasy) that i want.

book rating (out of 10): 8

there were some developments with the readdir incident that i found worthy of blogging. this should be brief, but amusing none the less.

so this person continued to debug their program for a majority of the day. around 2, i saw that they had enlisted the aid of another team member to fix the problems with this program. the thought that 2 people were working on this crap-ass code and logging those ever precious contract dollars to solving something as simple as getting a directory listing irked me to no end.

i sat down and told myself, “you get 5 minutes jason, churn it out and how them how easy something like this is”. in the span of one (yes, 1) minute, i had written a program from scratch that took in a directory and, without memory problems, filled a vector with the file names. in case you’re wondering what the function looked like. the solution was a total of 13 lines, including lines with open/close braces only.

i did have it here, but decided it was probably best to remove it. to summarize, that function (C version, this is a C++ version using STL) is freely available in the stevens book. however, both people that were working on this fought me tooth and nail on this. i printed it and told them to use it if they wanted to save each other and the project some time. it wasn’t being used and i basically refused to help this person any further (not so much refused, more like i acted as if i was unable to help them).

i dropped the issue and moved on. i gave a working solution, they can use it if they didn’t want to continue to flush tax payers’ money down the drain.

the other day, we received the ‘super-size me’ dvd in the mail from netflix. today we watched it and it changed our perceptions on food forever. this is the best movie i’ve seen in 2005. granted the year is only half over and it technically was released last year, it’s still the best flick i’ve seen in 2005. the following may contain some spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie, do so immediately.

so to give anyone a rundown of what the movie is about who hasn’t heard of it, morgan spurlock wanted to see what would happen if he tried to live entirely on a mcdonald’s diet for 30 days. 30 days isn’t for very long and initially, i wouldn’t have thought it would’ve had a major impact. boy was i wrong.

he setup regular visits with 3 doctors to monitor his health for the month. they checked his health and he appeared to be a very fit and healthy man. that all changed.

on his third day of this new diet, morgan was puking in the parking lot. 3 days, lord knows how he felt in the end. he traveled the country and ate at many different restaurants. he covered issues mainly concerning america’s morbid obsession to be as fat as possible. some of the statistics that were thrown out were appauling (nutritional content, garbage generation, etc). he even tried his best to debunk the cheeseburger bill by going to many restaurants and seeing if they were able to provide nutritional facts to their customers (you guessed it, most are incapable).

by the end, he wrecked his body. he gained 14% body fat (or 25 pounds) in 1 month. his liver was in poor shape, his mental health had degraded in such a way that he was only happy when he ate, and he rendered his penis “worthless”.

the 2 most disturbing things in the movie are the following. first, he sat man children down and asked them to identify some people (in pictures). he was on a rant about how the targeting of children is similar to the “fake cigarrettes” in that they are trying to breed customers for life. he showed several famous people: george washington, jesus, wendy of Wendy’s (TM) fame, and Ronald McDonald. none of the children recognized jesus yet every single one recognized ronald mcdonald instantly.

the other thing in the movie was a bonus feature on the dvd and was not included in the actual full-length film. morgan wanted to show how the food aged to give you an idea how it aged in your body. he put many mcdonald’s meals in seperate clear jars as well as a “normal” restaurant’s burger and fries and left them for weeks. by the end of 2 weeks, the normal restaurant’s food was rotten beyond recognition (it was actually removed after 5 weeks due to putrid stench). the mcdonald’s sandwiches decayed at roughly half the rate as the normal food. the big mac did not show signs of decay until something like 5 weeks. the utterly harrowing discovery was with the mcdonald’s fries. after 10 weeks, they looked as fresh as the day they were placed in the jar. there were no signs of decay and looked almost exactly the same. after 10 weeks, the odor was so horrid, the food was thrown out, so the french fry (“smoking fry”) experiment was never completed.

i think i would like to complete this experiment, documenting it along the way. i need to find a way to make sure that my experiment cannot be tainted or scewed. i will also have to have control and test groups. i will post more on this as i work out the details. if anyone has any additional ideas, please forward them to me.

this is something i meant to blog about the other day, and since i took the day off (dentist and optometrist appointments), i figured i’d use some of my time to post it now.

i dont usually discuss my work with people given its need for security. it’s a cleared job, so i do my best to not say anything that can be interpreted as detail. i also don’t do this as a way of keeping business and pleasure separated. but something at work irritated me enough that i feel required to mention it here. all names and details will be stripped that do not need to be present.

i won’t say who did this as to aide in my vagueness. a function was written that pulls a listing of filenames contained within a directory. not anything that challenging, especially in POSIX/ANSI. lil readdir and dirent usage and you’re done; quick and painless. the author of this function originally wanted to make a system() call to ‘ls’ and parse the output into a data structure. …. enough said.

once i convinced them that using readdir was as simple as reading a file (DIR pointers rock), i then discovered my work was far from over. inspecting the code that was then checked into the repository, i found it to be much worse than originally expected. they placed the filenames into a single char pointer, colon delimited (strcat()’ing them along the way). ….

what’s wrong with this method you might ask? well i’ll tell you. first, the function returns statically allocated data. the char* that was returned was malloced within the function and thus returned. second, bjarne stroustrup himself (in his official c++ standard book) stated that char* is an outdated way of dealing with strings and the ‘string’ class defined in the STL is the preferred method. it’s no wonder, STL strings are unbelievably easy to deal with. as much of a kludge the idea of STL is, it’s nice to see that they ‘just work’. lastly, why were they colon delimited in a single string?! why not use an array? are they allergic to arrays? to force the person to know what to have to strtok the returned string against (delimiter could be anything) is just plain absurd.

i will not make any comments about this person’s education or their work experience. i will however state what they are and let you infer meaning. after a 4 year degree at University of Texas at Arlington and 2 years at the current position, this is the amateur mistake that is being made by this one person. if the guilty party is reading this, you know who you are and should feel ashamed. laziness is no excuse for creating more work for yourself and others.

on a lighter note, someone pointed out that the term ‘static variables’ is actutally an oxymoron. it’s either one or the other, not both. i guess that’s why i’ve always just referred to them as ‘statics’. also, now that i think about it, why did they come up with the term ‘static storage’? why not use something other than ‘static’; it can get confusing. then again, what jargon in development isn’t this way?

today i watched bush’s speech about his pick for the replacement supreme court judge. in doing so i noticed he shifted his lower jaw 24 times, mostly at the end of a sentance. crystal tried defending him by saying that he must be under enourmous pressure from the public. to that, i question why he’s even a president if his PR skills are lacking. clinton may have been a rotten person, but at least he was able to talk straight, even if it was lying through his teeth.

moving along. i found an article on slashdot about fold ‘n drop. i must admit, this idea looks horrific. if anyone since the dawn of the desktop (not the PC kind, the physical kind) has had paper on their desk, they will attest that this will only make matters worse. imagine a “pile” of windows on your monitor that mirrors that collage of paperwork on your desk that has yet to be organized in the 3 months it’s been there. no thanks, that’s a UI feature i will pass on.

i’d like to make a final note that the spell checker in blogger’s editor appears to not be working (for me), so i apologize in advance for any typos. i’m too lazy to correct them in open office.

on sunday, crystal and i decided to go see the charlie and the chocolate factory remake by tim burton. having been a tim burton fan for a while (mars attacks!, nightmare before christmas, batman returns, edward scissorhands, batman, beetlejuice, pee-wee’s big adventure), i knew what to expect. we found a theatre where matine tickets ran for $2.50 a pop.

i’d to preclude my review with a bit of advice. go to a later showing, preferably as late as possible. i’ll get into why shortly.

we arrived 30 minutes early with our pre-sale tickets and had to wait for 15 minutes in a line outside. come to find out, most parents had never seen (or didn’t recognize the name) a tim burton film. why an 8 year old should want to see this film is beyond me. being a burton film, most parents should realize that it may (most likely) not make sense to children under 13. in fact, the only people to ever laugh during the film were adults.

that being said, it wasn’t the same cheery film originally produced. it was more like a dr. suess book on acid. thankfully mr. burton took many liberties with the film. the oompah loompahs were far weirder than their original incarnations, but i rather missed the lime-green hair. every song they sang was in a different style of music (pop, disco, 60s-ish, rock). the characters were updated and their flaws were magnified. burton decided to spend more time on showing how warped and rotten the 4 children were and painted a scene where charlie was a saint.

also, he took certain liberties with the storyline as well. im not sure if any of this is actually in the original book, so if it is, forgive me in advance. he spent a good deal of time trying to show that mr. wonka had a depressing and lonely childhood. he even changed the ending quite a deal.

the imagery that the movie portrays crosses into the absurd. one second they are in a giant pink dragon boat floating in a river of chocolate; the next, they are in a room of spiraled blue and white with little stations where squirrels crack open nuts. the change from the golden egg to the squirrel incident was a nice change.

also, the comedy was what made the film work so well. short and subtle comments/actions that were funny only if you were paying close attention. they were usually dialog comments made by mr. wonka to aid in his dislike for the rotten children and their rotten parents. since i waited to post this blog a whole day, i am unable to draw any decent quotes from memory, but rest assured that it (the humor) is there.

in the end, i was thoroughly impressed with his take on a demented children’s story. having looked back, this movie was perfect for a burton remake. the casting couldn’t have been better either. johnny depp did a superb job at being a creepy cross between mr. wonka and michael jackson. when this movie comes out on dvd, i am almost compelled to actually buy it.