Goodbye Roger Ebert

The legendary acclaimed movie critic Roger Ebert is gone... sad for Chicago and for the entire movie industry. I liked watching Siskel and Ebert... both are gone. If they end up in heaven I hope they can still view movies on earth... but they probably have even better things to do there.

I agree with most of Ebert's reviews. I sometimes need to read Ebert's review after a movie to try to understand what I watched.

Alas, if you go to rogerebert.suntimes.com to dig out an old review, you will get some embarrassing error:

SOSEScript: bossV2Searchjson.php5 failed executing with the 
following error: Error on line 954 position 1: 
Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

"Powered by Yahoo". This is EMBARRASSING. Fix it!

Alas, cancer stole his jaw.

My dad at one point says, "look, you don't need to excel in all subjects to become a legend, if you do ONE thing well, very well, you can get all the dollars and fame you want" and he pointed to some legendary comic artist. Ebert watch movies and be able to write about and talk about it intelligently and voila become a legend. Others tried and just never quite achieve the status of Ebert.

I suppose those who miss Ebert's reviews would want to search for it. Sun Times better fix it. Come on, how hard is it to do a search in your php?

Delphi Revisited

So some recruiter from nowhere basically sent me a one-liner, he needs someone to: "Upgrade Delphi code from 3.0 to current version XE3."

XE3? I have not even heard of it. I have not even seen Delphi in this millenium. Delphi is like a ball: over the years it has kicked from Borland to Inprise to whatever and now landed in a company known as "Embarcadero". See its history here

Back then, in version 1... it was the best tool around to build Windows apps. Even Windows was kinda new back then. The hardcore C API was hard. This is what I mean. If every program must be written like this there will not be that many programmers out there. Visual Basic was the ground breaking alternative... alas, the language was the toy language Basic? Definitely a wrong choice if you ask me. Delphi was Pascal based, much better choice, and blazing fast. At that time, Java was a new untested baby useful for doing blinking applets. "Enterprise" apps meant CGI little programs. You probably have not seen a sad C compiler including thousands of lines of <windows.h>, among tons of other lines, I have. MFC is hard too. I am glad I don't have to do this for a living.

Microsoft hired the guy who created Delphi (and Turbo Pascal)... The .NET framework has shadows of Delphi all over the place.

Forward a couple years, most people don't need to make .EXE for Windows now. And, if you have to develop for Microsoft you use Microsoft Visual Studio... and put up with its new versions every couple years. Other products if there is such a thing would be hard to keep up. It is quite amazing Delphi is still alive after all these years.

The gentleman is as excited as I am about Delphi: See here

This latest XE3 thing even suppose make Windows 8 and iOS apps! (what abou Android)

Ok, Windows 8 is not Windows 3.1. It is not, gosh-I-need-to-get-out-of-DOS-to-go-to-this evolution taking place.

Objective C is so difficult so I welcome a new way to write apps for it... but is HTML5+PhoneGap a better choice?

Just like in late 1990s, I do not see need to write Windows .EXEs, especially I don't need Windows 8 wacky apps.. I think the world would continue to prefer web apps. Look, even Microsoft is doing web apps. Look at that Sky Drive thing. Microsoft Office is there! Who needs to make native Windows apps now?

Visual Studio Express can be downloaded for free. Java/Eclipse download is free. Even XCode is free... I am not sure who will pay for development tools now. Turbo Pascal was a winner because it was powerful (in its days) and cheap. I am afraid not many people will pay for Pascal these days.

Death of the Windows desktop coming

Alarming Microsoft news... the end is near for the Windows desktop: See Why Windows Blue heralds the death of the desktop.

Microsoft don't get it. Look! Windows 8 is not selling hot. And there are more of that poor interface coming. Don't listen to your customer = the end is near for YOU. It really is the end of the PC Era as Microsoft is destroying itself. Arise the Mac... people will eventually switch. Face it, people love the IPhone (and not the wacky Microsoft phones, sales numbers says it all). People will eventually get used to the Mac as well (and would soon get over its wackiness like constant one menu outside the app you are running, and put up with the Finder). Arise Linux.. people will find soon embrace vi like their grandfathers than fool around with Metro. Nowadays, it is actually much easier to abandon Windows and install Linux (on your pre Winows 8 machine). Oh and Microsoft dares to make that hard with Windows 8. See here for details.

People will stick with Windows 7 until they can't use it anymore. I do not expect Microsoft's sales will ever go up unless they give desktop users a decent desktop.

Rainbow upon Washington

Rainbow flags waving all over the supreme court. It seems like DOMA is about to be overturned. It is a historic moment in America. You should see mentioning of this in future history textbooks. See here for some pictures and details (or just about any news site).

Candidates for future election had to make sure they announce now they support same sex marriage. The Republicans party who don't want to lose anymore now has to do whatever it takes to get some votes and start supporting it too. It seems like those who oppose it won't have even a slight chance to win. I do not know of a single candidate who loudly dare to not support it.

Articles upon articles have written to convince people to support it... the themes revolve around "government shouldn't decide who you can marry", and "Get Equal".

Why do people oppose it? They pull out the Bible and point to the few couple pages of the first book. Adam & Eve: one man, one woman. The only possible way to "go forth and multiply". (They do not find brother marry sister bothersome) Now, some people don't believe in the Bible so that argument is not valid. And for those who only turn to the first couple pages of the Bible... I'd like to hear what they say about the biblical but multiple wives of their favorite characters Abraham and Jacob, and others. Ok, if the purpose of marriage is to have kids... are we banning people who past their fruitful age to marry or those who can't have babies marry? Of course not, that's not a valid argument either.

"What if 3 men want to be married" asked Santorum and he got blasted for saying that in comparing marriage and polygamy. He got blasted on othing things too, he didn't win and you will probably never hear from him again.

If "Get Equal" takes place, the answer to Santorum's question is a resounding yes! Use this symbol if you like: ≡ Then why not 4,5,6,...n.

What kind of world do we live in if the family is gone and replaced by whatever-combo-you-like. Now that's liberty alright. Ok, marriage itself is failing. How big percent is the divorce rate now? (ok you can look it up yourself)

Oh let me remind you, same sex couple cannot give children that come from both "parents" even if you use surrogate mother and other methods. That makes it different. I am sorry, but same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage is not equal.

So one complaint was that when one of the same-sex couple died, the other one cannot inherit that money. Let's CHANGE that! So that you can leave your $ to anyone. But you don't have to change marriage to make that happen.

Speed of light constant challenged

I was kinda stunned to see this headline: French Scientists: Speed of Light not a constant. This is shaking a foundation pinning of modern science. Even the meter is defined by it. Ok, it is saying "vacuum isn't really vacuum", which I think most scientists can agree on. But if there is a vaccum, the speed of light is constant, ok?

Now, it is blazing fast of course, at 3x10^8 meters per second that is. During that sophomore year in high school I asked the teacher... if it is SO fast, how do we know this value? Can't measure speed with simple v = d/t, right? The teacher smiled, "It isn't so easy"... and pointed me to a location of the textbook containing the octagon mirror experiment. See here for some glorious details.

In science, we often give the ending first. Like we tell students speed of light runs at that speed without telling the story of how people originally thought light runs infinitely fast then calculated that value... We tell students the earth weighs 6x10^24 kg, but often don't tell them how to get this value (by calculating gravity with Newton's formula, google it to find out how).

A science book can be written like a journey of discovery... start with what you see: the sun and the moon and the stars, how I wonder what you are... don't give the modern view yet! Then tell how each piece of knowledge is discovered... point out some old wrong theories (and try not to laugh too hard). Unfortunately I know too little science to write this.

For the record, I never wonder what the stars are like the author of "twinkle twinkle little star". I don't get to see them. I live in a city with too much light pollution.