X-Men 3

I went to see X-Men 3 last night and I still can't get over how truly awful the film was. There were two things decent and watchable: The special effects weren't bad. Most amazing, given the dreck for dialogue, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, and Kelsey Grammar all manage to turn in decent performances. I guess that's the power of a true actor. The same can't be said for Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry who both milked their awful dialogue for all the bad acting it was worth.

I wasn't even expecting a good movie, I understood that it had a hack director (of Rush Hour "fame") and a hack writer (of the just barely tolerable as an action film but awful in writing, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but I was absolutely shocked oat how much they shat upon all of things that make X-Men great. Instead of telling a single decent story they appear to have sat down to tell as many stories as poorly as possible. (Bringing in as many X-Men characters as they could think of, solely to stupidly discard and destroy them.) They removed the subtlety and the characterization. They took the bad Rush Hour approach of every action sequence ending in a stupid punchline. They threw logic and dialogue out the window. It wasn't even a decent action film! The cinematographer seems to have come straight from the world of Hispanic Soap Operas, attempting to fake intimacy with the characters with extreme close up shots. Just about every shot was too close. Unfortunately you really can't fake decent action or decent characterization by shooting bad action up close.

Boring News that is Exciting to Me

We got the cable internet set up at our apartment. I've been able to download the 2200 or so email backlog and the CoH/CoV I7 content is preloading...

Today was spent hanging out with my roommate, Matt, and his parents. The last roommate, Jose, showed up late tonight. Yesterday I finally bought my bike, there was a nice bbq amongst some interns, and Matt and I visited the Pro Sports Club (Mercedes Benz of Gyms), which we'll probably be visiting again soon.

Intern Life at Microsoft: Week 1 Anxiety and Excitement

We're still waiting on the DSL setup materials for our apartment, so I'm quite behind on my less important and/or interesting personal email (no offense meant by that, though).

So, Microsoft, huh? Things have already been wild/fun, and I just started on Tuesday. I'm still having a hard time shaking the big company anxiety/cynicism that my previous employers scarred me with, but fortunately I think most of that is washing off. Not to mention the trepidation that comes from feeling so fortunate and so afraid to screw up lest the fortune vanish.

I'm amazed at the level of trust here. I have administrator priviledges on this box here at work and have been able to set things up the (weird) way that I like them. I can't explain the morale boost of just having such niceties as Vim 7, the Consolas font (quickly becoming my font of choice in every plain text situation), Foobar 2000, or a local copy of my entire music collection copied from my MP3 player. I was even given the chance to grab a copy of the latest Office 12 (2007) Beta. (Office 2007 rocks, by the way. I love the keyboard-friendliness of the very pretty and functional Ribbons, among other things.)

Today included a morale event (Picnic), and I was entrusted with (given) armaments (nerf weaponry)...

I'm really excited to see what next week might be like... The weekend alone may be reasonably busy.

The Lambda Chronicles

Honestly, I too worry that I have way too weird of a breadth of knowledge, albeit not much depth, and sometimes worry if that will actually ever really pay the bills (Luckily, I have very secret and cunning plans that I hide in the darkness of my laboratory, simply waiting for the right moment...). In part 2 of the saga, I have posted the mjbcalc simple (untyped) lambda calculus symbolic calculator. A small, almost worthless, user guide is included in Word format. Code isn't the greatest, but it should be readable. Like all my other code releases consider it licensed under the GPL/2.0. I'd love to hear if anybody actually finds this useful. People don't realize how easy it is to build such simple "real programming languages", and, I hate to sound too mean, but classes like the worthless CECS 530 Compilers here at the University of Louisville don't do much justice to the topic. Like I said, I wrote it to spite the Professor who passed out something (SymCalculator2 in this archive, don't even bother looking at the horrible code in the other half) with much uglier, less readable code, poor API, poor encapsulation/abstraction, etc... that had a fraction of the power of this toy I built from scratch in a weekend... A little bit of clean up work, decent documentation, and optimization work and this baby might actually be pretty useful, and is capable of "real" programming. Then we can start talking about fun things like additional types (strings, tuples, lists), continuations, ...

If anyone is curious about the interesting background of the Lambda Calculus, check out the readable wikipedia article of the previous link. You might also find this paper on Proofs as Programs (via Lambda the Ultimate, a language ...

Spring Semester Wrap Up

I finished my last final for this Spring Semester. As of just now none of my grades have been posted, and frankly right now I could care less. Not that grades are important its just that I'm tired of stress; I had enough in the last two weeks. Also, this semester in particular I have a bit more work that I can show off proudly and claim that no matter my final grade I did some good work.

The prime example this semester is the work I put into the new Speed School Student Council webpage. This work is now accessible at fridge.speedcouncil.org and will eventually (hopefully later this month) replace the current speedcouncil.org. There are still a few loose ends to tie up, and as the Director of Administration for this year I'll continue to hold responsibility for it and hope to continue to improve upon it this year.

For anybody curious the code was written in Python using the Django Framework (the magic-removal branch which is, as of Monday, the new 0.95 Trunk). The backend is Apache and PostgreSQL. It was an entirely from scratch rewrite of nearly a decade's worth of accrued PHP, and very nearly all of the functionality is there, with new added dynamism and functionality. All of our major design documentation can be seen in the Colophon/Development section, including the addresses of the Darcs repository (GPL/2.0).

The SLOC metric, as of today: 4,301 lines of Python + 3,622 lines of HTML templates, versus 43,861 lines of .php and .inc files, plus at least 8,292 lines of seperate templates (just those that I knew of that ended with .html or .htm), which were used in rare places (most of the HTML is ...