lightning strikes twice

It all just finally clicked this morning while cleaning the house. I’m sure this has been apparent to everyone but me for a long time, but it was a mini-revelation when I realised it.

The sooner all apps offer REST APIs, the sooner I can just worry about the scripting the glue BETWEEN applications, rather than worrying about having the right applications to interact with each other.

Up till now, I’ve always considered that REST APIs would often be interacted with by custom scripts, but not till now did the next logical step become clear: the custom scripts do not need to be an end in themselves, but can simply be an intermediary step between more hardcore applications (web or not, as long as they are networked).

Of course, big vendors are unlikely to offer this functionality – they’d much prefer user lock-in, but hopefully the smaller ISVs will start offering this, and we can all start using Ruby & Python for our interactions.

Starring Jet Li & Aaliyah

Its been a while since I’ve seen an action flick, but as I’m an aspiring martial artist now, I figured what better to see than Jet Li’s first english language film.

Obviously the title references Romeo & Juliet, but aside from the feuding families, there’s not much to this. Jet Li’s brother is murdered, causing Jet to break out of prison and seek out his murderer. In his investigation he runs into Aaliyah, the daughter of the man warring with his father. Set with a flimsy backdrop of negotiations for an NFL franchise, Jet & Aaliyah are thrown together as the murders continue.

The major theme is betrayal, but its all pretty light, as its more of a vehicle for fight scenes with light laughs and romance interspersing the action.

Another somewhat average film, but I’ve definitely seen worse in the action genre.

6/10

Nursing a killer hangover, I watched Dune, the 1980 movie of the classic Frank Herbert novel.

The year is 10191, and the spice of a giant-worm riddled planet is the most valuable commodity in the universe, as it allows interstellar travel. The Harkonnen family are bitter rivals of the good Atriedes, and the cruel emperor sides with the Harkonnen. The son of Duke Lito of the Atriededes, Paul, leads the people of the spice-planet against the Harkonnen and the Emperor.

It has similar nutiness to other David Lynch films, including crazy voices, interlude clips full of symbolism and verbalised thoughts. It also seemed to be too long. For a relatively simple plot, a running time of 137 minutes seems a mite lengthy, but the Frank Herbert book was rather long too I guess.

Intriguing, but not a great film by any means. Could have been a 6 or 7 if it had been edited a little tighter.

5/10

Last night heard a fantastic track played by Phil Smart — it was “walk right back” by Zoo Brazil, and I guess I could order it from Juno if I wanted to throw it on the old record player, but I’m not sure I’m that fanatical about it.

Really good track though, wish I could find it in digital form.

As a William Gibson fan, I read this book a long long time ago, and unfortunately its largely faded from my memory. Anyhow, I’m told that this movie doesn’t really resemble the book all that much anyway.

Johnny is a data smuggler/courier, who has swapped the space in his head where he kept his childhood memories for free space to carry information. He has some sort of brain failure, meaning his head is likely to meltdown in the very near future. He has to get the data out to save himself. Yakuza and big corporates are hunting him down.

I loved the styling… just what I would have imagined cyber-punk to be all about. Keanu Reeves was totally mechanical, but it wasn’t too grating until the latter parts of the show. And Ice-T has a big part. Love the Ice, its like a prelude to his Law and Order years, except the part is completely different – he just acts it the same.

Not too bad a flick, but the last quarter gets a little silly.

5/10

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day creating an NAnt script to build our reporting hooks.

I’d never used NAnt before, but as an Ant user it was a fairly seamless transition. The one hassle was the use of the “version” task from the NAntContrib task library. It reads a build.number file, and increments the build and revision numbers. The problem was I didn’t know what the initial format of the version number was supposed to be, and NAnt kept telling me my version number was invalid. I spent enough time on this for it to be annoying. Of course I should have just looked at the source code, but I was sure the guessing method would eventually get the right answer. (And it did! Eventually)

For all time, the format must be:
majorrelease.minorrelease.build.revision
e.g. 1.0.10.6457

The next issue will be that we’ll need to use an external tool to build and deploy Reporting Services reports, which is a bit of a hassle. Worth writing a custom task for?

Stalking February

What he’s after is an “All-Player” game, not an “All-Star” game.

Same discussion every year – but the fact is, it makes sense for the public to vote on who they want to see, to vote on the biggest stars, though as a basketball game I’ve got the same reservations as the LockerRoomCancer dude.

Vintage Poster from www.vintageposters.com.au

I’ve no idea how he found it, but as usual William Gibson has another killer entry