This movie was so uniformly bad I couldn’t even finish watching it. It’s basically a really bad Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler. It has people in it who have otherwise been reliably funny, so it’s difficult to fathom the odds of that many funny people making an entirely unwatchable movie. Wow. Horrible.
Inside Fenway
I was lucky enough to take part in this year’s “Yaz Day” at Fenway Park. This is a fundraiser by The Genesis Fund where you get to go on the field at Fenway and take part in various baseball-y activities.
They said the infield was too wet for us to get on, so we were relegated to taking BP in the batting cages, but it was pretty cool regardless. Hopefully next year it will be drier!
Interesting Fact: The warning track is made of crushed red brick, not dirt. See more pics here.
52 Word Review: The Dark Knight
The best Batman movie since the first, The Dark Knight was everything fans of superhero movies could want. Cast, music, and effects were up to expectations, while the real highlight was the writing behind Ledger’s excellent performance. Comparisons to Empire are deserved, will the next one fare better than other third movies?
Missing Java Annotations
@SelfExplanatory – I’d love to be able to turn on JavaDoc warnings in Eclipse, but I can’t. Why? Because 90% + of the code is self explanatory. Do I really need to see that getName() “Returns the name”, or that setName(String name) has the utter audacity to “Set the name”? No, I don’t. Put a @SelfExplanatory and JavaDoc can create these braindead comments without cluttering up my code, while Eclipse can reserve its warnings for the more interesting methods.
@NotNull – Other languages may have solved or avoided this problem, but I’d like to be able to dictate that a variable can be set to anything except null, and also that a method will never return null. It would just save so many headaches (of the onerous Runtime variety, no less), as well as lots of “if (foo == null)”…
The ulterior purpose of this post is to test the upgrade to WordPress 2.6.
Gordon Ramsay & The White Barn Inn
I’ve lately been fortunate enough to eat at two amazing restaurants. The first was Gordon Ramsay at the London in New York City, the second was The White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, ME.
Ramsay’s was quite simply the finest meal and dining experience I’ve ever had. Reeny is a big fan of his show, and I’ve watched it here and there, so I had some confidence he knew what he was talking about and that he had very high standards (important since he is not actually the chef there). The food was astonishingly good, from the artichoke soup to the Black Cod to the Kobe short rib, everything was A+. The highlight was either the soup or the scallop, both were so good it’s impossible to pick. The service was perfect too, we never felt like we were waiting nor did we feel rushed. If you’re even in NYC, make sure you visit this place, assuming you can make reservations two months ahead…
The White Barn Inn, a recommendation of Dina, was also memorable. While not quite as good as Ramsay, it’s easily the best place I’ve been to in New England. I opted for the lamb, Reeny for the beef, and both dishes were great as well as the other courses. The atmosphere is cozy, the service was very good, highly recommended when you’re down east.
Register My Login to Join Your Account
One of the details that can be tough to keep track of with a large or fast-moving website is language consistency. Of course, to be consistent, you need to decide what to use. I did an audit of the most popular English-language sites (as determined by Alexa and Compete), to see how three key phrases were being used. These were:
Login/Log In/Sign in – The action of authorizing your account.
My/Your – My Movies, Your Account, etc.
Join/Sign Up/Register/Create – Creating a new account.
Here is the raw data, see below for some analysis.
| adultfriendfinder.com | login | my | join |
| aim.com | sign in | my | join/get |
| amazon.com | sign in | your | start |
| aol.com | sign in | my | sign up |
| bankofamerica.com | sign in | your* | enroll |
| blogger.com | sign in | my | create |
| craigslist.com | login | N/A | sign up |
| deviantart.com | login | N/A | become/join |
| ebay.com | sign in | my | register |
| facebook.com | login | my | sign up |
| flickr.com | sign in | your | create |
| fotolog.com | log in/login | my | join |
| friendster.com | log in | my | sign up |
| go.com (espn) | sign in | my | register |
| google.com | sign in | my | create |
| hi5.com | log in | my | join |
| imageshack.us | login | my | signup |
| imdb.com | login | my | register |
| live.com | sign in | my | sign up |
| mininova.com | login | my | register |
| msn.com | sign in | my | sign up |
| myspace.com | login | my | sign up |
| neopets.com | login | my | sign up |
| photobucket.com | log in | my | join |
| pogo.com | sign in | my | register |
| rapidshare.com | login | my | join |
| store.apple.com | login* | N/A | create/set up |
| veoh.com | log in | my | register |
| walmart.com | sign in | my | create |
| wikipedia.org | log in | create | |
| wordpress.com | login | my | sign up |
| yahoo.com | sign in | my | sign up |
| youporn.com | login | my | register* |
| youtube.com | log in | my | sign up |
* Inconsistent
“My” is the clear winner over “Your”, with 27 mys, 3 yours, and 2 that avoid using possessive pronouns.
“Login” takes the edge over “Sign In”, 20-14. “Sign In”, however, seems to be more popular with the biggest of the big sites, like Yahoo, Microsoft’s sites, and Google. I’d say this is a tossup, and I have a feeling that in a few years signup with come to dominate. Of those using login, 13 use “login”, and 7 use “log in”, with the space.
There’s a plurality of choices for sign up, with “sign up” being used on 12 sites. 7 used join, 7 used register, 6 used create (an account), 1 used start, and 1 used enroll. This is not an independent choice, however, as “sign up” is often seen where “log in” is used, and sites that use “sign in” use something like “register”. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo use “sign in/sign up”. I suspect that some people think using such similar phrases would be confusing, and I agree, despite the appeal of the general consistency.
My preference is to use “my, “log in”, and “sign up”. “Join” seems ambiguous, “register” seems bureaucratic and expensive, while “create an account” just feels a little dorky.
Dishonorable Mention: The Apple Store, supposed paragon of usability and attention to detail, is the worst offender on this list in terms of mixing and matching the terms, often on the same page. They also fail miserably on one major point, there’s no logout button!
Facebook Invitations
If you’re wondering why people aren’t accepting your Facebook application invitations:
Scratching an Itch: The Open Data Bank
Engineers, especially those of the software variety, have various types of projects to work on. Some pay the bills, some are for learning, some are to help others’ goals, and then there are the ones that we say “scratch an itch.”
It’s hard not to operate in a world of ideas without having a few of your own, and some ideas just keep popping up. If you’re lucky, someone else does it right and you can reap the benefits, but often you just have to go out and do it. These projects are often done at personal expense “to see if it works” or “because I can”, and not for fame or fortune. I have a few of these kicking around, and it was a new year’s resolution of mine to actual get some of them into the wild. So, as the first of these, I’d like to officially announce a new project that I’ve been working on (and one of the reasons for the lack of blog posts). The Open Data Bank.
The ODB is a simple idea. While tinkering with other projects, I’m often in need of data. Sometimes this is to test things out, sometimes it’s to get things started, but everytime it seems like I have to go and find it anew and coax it into some useful format. I assume that others like me have the same problem, and hopefully ODB will be a useful contribution to the tinkering ecosystem to complement other tools like open source libraries.
For the layman, the ODB is a place where we can put “open data”, that is to say, data that can be shared without restriction. Not only is the data open, but the formats it is shared in are open as well. Formats like XML and JSON don’t have to be licensed from anyone, and therefore people are free to write tools to read it.
If you’re interested in participating or just keeping track of the ODB, there’s a Google Group you can join and share info, ask questions, or offer ideas to improve it.
52 Word Review: No Country For Old Men
At some point in your life, your parents probably told you “life isn’t fair”. The Coen Brothers expand on this story with a ruthless, precise rendering that ended up being my favorite movie of 2007. Its not fun or funny, there’s a couple hiccups, but this film will stick to your ribs.
DeepSkyStacker
It was a clear, cold night in the suburbs. I can typically make out most of the major constellations, and other random stuff, and if the moon is down, a fair number more. The moon was about 1/2 this night, and I figured it was worth a shot. I took 9 3-second exposures with a 50mm/1.4 lens on a Nikon D300. The pictures themselves were pretty good, showing several times more stars than I could see with the naked eye. But then my friend showed me how to use DeepSkyStacker. This program basically does some fancy noise reduction to get rid of the haze of each shot and make the stars really stand out. The results speak for themselves.
