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“The Book of Eli” – don’t waste your money. *spoilers*

I normally don’t go to the theatre to watch movies (I have a nice size TV and a good surround system) but, occasionally, it is nice to go to the theatre and watch a movie. This was not one of those times.

Watching the trailers for “The Book of Eli” had me believe 3 things:

1. Denzel is a badass

2. He has a magic book

3.  Gary Oldman wants to take it from him

The first half of the movie is spent on establishing my number 1 assumption with Denzel fighting and killing dozens of people with a sword, gun, hands, and what ever else he could use. At the end of everyday he spends time reading assumption number 2. After he reaches the town that Gary Oldman runs the movie starts to go down hill as we learn that this book is “The Bible” not just any old magic book. (queue boredom) Gary Oldman wants to use the words of “The Bible” to make un-educated people follow him, tricking them into believing it, and thus set himself up as king of the world (how early Christian of him).

*More spoilers*

From there the movie gets boring and predictable, the only reason I didn’t leave (I’ve never walked out on a movie before) is that I wanted to find out what was out “west”. Turns out that “west” was Alcatraz where Alex (from “A Clockwork Orange) is a crazed looking old man who prints books to give back to the world. The only real plot twists from the middle to the end of the movie was:

1. The book is in braille

2. Denzel was blind the whole move (but God let him see so that the book could make it “west”, yay God!)

The book doesn’t make it “west” but luckily Denzel memorized the entire book so he could repeat it word for word when he got there (I know, right?).

Summary:

The movie, from the middle on, is shit. The first half is good for action. If you are going to watch it, wait until there is a decent torrent – there is no point wasting your money.

TextMate to VIM and back, why I made the switch.

About 6 months ago I made the switch from TextMate to MacVim because of a couple things:

  • TextMate is kinda, not really being developed anymore
  • Many other options are out there
  • TONs of Python developers post about their editors all the time
  • VIM is hardcore and installed by default on many Linux systems (which I work with all day)
  • I wanted to take a side in the holy war (Emacs vs. VIM)

After doing a lot of research on the editors that were available I tried out Aquamacs and played around with it for a while. Emacs is powerful, as long as you install the right plugins…and know LISP(ugh!). Emacs is just too much pressing of the control button and shift and other modifier keys, I have carpal tunnel  and pressing Control + (modifier key) is too much if I have to do it repeatedly.

I switched to MacVim, fewer modifier keys, much simpler to use and no knowledge of LISP is required. VIM syntax is much better, but still coding to be able to code isn’t really ideal for me. Luckily I found the right plugins and the right tutorials and got everything working, I even switched to MacVim as the default editor for everything. I spent the next 5 months learning how to use MacVim and since, I got a new job, doing support for the best hosting company in the world, using VIM was very helpful.

Recently on Twitter I saw this: http://justinlilly.com/blog/editor-stats/ After looking through the screenshots of all of the different editors that are out there I began to miss using TextMate with its Cocoa-ness and modern feel, VIM is very archaic and keyboard dependent, while being ideal for some people is not idea for me). I installed all of the bundles that I wanted, and, there was a bundle for everything that I wanted. IMO, using “svn co …” is much easier than downloading, unzipping, and copying the files to the right directories and editing vimrc to make sure that the new modules are being used when they are supposed to be.

So now I am back to using TextMate as my default editor and I am enjoying it tremendously. There is no coding involved to change the background color, no command to invoke to have the sidebar open, no navigating with the keyboard only when using NERDTree, no more having to type NERDTree, and most of all bundles are so much better, faster to install and modify than with VIM.

I am still, eagerly, awaiting the release of TextMate 2 but for now I am happy to be able to change things without code so that I can spend my coding time doing something productive instead of configuring my editor.

WTF is with "developers" using Windows to write code? *updated*

Seriously, WTF? Demo? Check out this moron.

I read the #django-users’ list and it seems that, almost daily, there is someone that has a problem installing django on Vista or XP. Who would host a server running Vista or XP? I hope, NO ONE. What kind of moron would trust Microsoft with his/her data? Also, seriously, who runs server farm hosting businesses on Windows? I know people do, but, self flagellation would be a little less painful, really.
I read the mod_wsgi users’ list and it seems that, almost daily, someone has a problem installing mod_wsgi on Windows. (I have had my fair share of mod_wsgi problems (see below)) but a local Apache server on Windows, c’mon people.
Most of the screencasts I have seen about anything django or Python related has been done on Windows as well. Save us FSM (flying spaghetti monster).
I guess I have to applaud their efforts, these lost intellects, I got off the Windows juice many years ago. I have been consistently Windows free for the better part of 6 years. What should they use? Unix, almost any flavor. I was never much for the distros that had BSD in the name, my hardware was too advanced to install it (god I miss those days). Nowadays, I run OS X on my MBP and OpenSolaris on my in home staging server. Both Unix, both very powerful and all that. Both > Windows.
Seriously “developers” get an operating system that will allow you to actually have a key to the hood so you can fix your own itches.
(This kind of ended up as an opensource parade but it is still true; friends don’t let friends use Windows.)