May 31, 2011

May Movie Review

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Short blurbs and A-F school-like grading of movies I’ve seen this past month, plus initial reactions to any upcoming movies for which I’ve seen trailers. My grading tries not to account for my enjoyment of the movie (i.e. Plan 9 would get an F but I'd still laugh a lot).

The Green Hornet*
C+ Everything about this movie was just okay. The acting was passable, the script could have been worse, and the action and special effects were certainly there, I guess. It wasn't a waste of time, but...
Martyrs
B An interesting mix of real psychological horror and more traditional monster fare and it's mostly well done and sorta plausible even, removing most of the supernatural suspension of disbelief usually required. Thankfully it tends to favor the unnerving/creepy over the cheap spooks. Felt like two movies, though, what with the very different second half.
Mikadroid
D+ Low-budget, bizarre, hokey, and Japanese — yes, it's got all the ingredients for a niche cult flick and I see why it holds just such a status. While it's god-awful, you can tell the creators were having a ball being mostly-independent and that it was a labor of love. Especially enjoyed the character designs in the DVD extras.

* I actually saw this last month but forgot to include it in April's movie reviews.

May 27, 2011

Implicit Stance

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Last month I sent in a short essay that basically introduced my idea of implicit stances to The Bible Geek. It was read on the April 18th podcast. (This wasn’t my first question/commentary sent in and responded to, though.) I plan to elaborate more on implicit stances in the future, as it is sort of one of my pet ideas I’ve been mulling over on the side for some time now.

What follows is my email to him copied mostly verbatim.

May 26, 2011

The Post Apocalypse Post

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By now you’ve probably heard that the Christians are still here.

I enjoy The Thinking Atheist’s videos. They’re always impeccably produced, with an air of quality and refinement far above what you usually get on the Tube of You.

That said, I always get slightly unnerved watching them. They always feel as though the writers are barely holding back jumping for joy when they get to slam Christianity on something (in this case, the false prediction of Harold Camping). That often-thinly-veiled jubilation at making digs at religious folks always irks me, but admittedly never enough to turn me off from watching them.

I guess it is because even if I agree with them on the whole there not being any gods thing, I don’t find any joy in making cheap shots at “the other team”…

You gotta admit: with as much trashing as Christianity gets every day, there are next to no violent acts performed in response. Unlike certain other religions, Christians seem to be pretty good sports at taking it and respecting free speech. I’m not saying heated debates don’t rage on YouTube every time any religious video is posted, but that’s a far cry from shootings or, worse, beheadings.

Of course, if you ask me, I think that Good Natured Sport quality stems more from the kind of people that tend to be Christians rather than anything inherent to Christianity itself (or said unnamed religion). Christians tend to come from well-to-do, relatively-free countries like the US and UK, which I think explains most of the tolerance displayed. It is inherent to the culture rather than the religion, really, since I don't think most people take their faith that seriously.

May 11, 2011

WCF: pilot license required

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Listening to this Hanselminutes yesterday, I heard some great stuff from the always sagely Glenn Block on WCF. He’s apparently moved to that team (after working on MEF) to do something called Web API.

Boeing 767 cockpitHis analogy of WCF to a Boeing 747 cockpit had me fist pumping in shared understanding. I’ve spent enough painful hours flipping switches and knobs hoping for that one combination that will make it work, half the time not really knowing fully what I’m doing. It really did feel like being sat in front of the controls to a commercial aircraft and told “Okay, make it take off.” A seemingly simple, everyday thing for a plane to do, and it probably only takes a few flips of switches and a gentle movement of the controls to do it, but knowing which out of dozens of instruments will do it… well…

The sheer cliff of a learning curve with WCF has always put a sour taste in my mouth. RIA Services is wonderful if what you really want is just a data source for, say, your Silverlight app, but for anything else it’s not so helpful.

And as soon as you need to set up service credentials/certificates and/or a security token issuer and other “advanced” stuff it really starts to hurt.

That and there’s no way to encapsulate stuff into helper assemblies since so much of it must be done in the config file and referenced assemblies can’t have their own config info.

May 6, 2011

Paternal pessimists

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The other day, my significant other was describing a conversation she had with a friend. The topic meandered into politics in which they got into a bit of a debate on various issues, mostly ObamaCare and current things. After a bit of this, she told her friend "You don't seem to have much faith in people."

This simple statement succinctly sums up exactly my issue with most conservative and liberal opinions.

May 4, 2011

April Movie Review

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Short blurbs and A-F school-like grading of movies I’ve seen this past month, plus initial reactions to any upcoming movies for which I’ve seen trailers. My grading tries not to account for my enjoyment of the movie (i.e. Plan 9 would get an F but I'd still laugh a lot).

Sucker Punch (IMAX!)
A- Visually and aurally stupendous. Home theater won't do it justice. Yes, there's a lot of geek pandering, but it's surprisingly more deep and meaningful. A few problems with its convoluted story and, in particular, ending hold it back from being perfect; it nevertheless delivered everything I want in a movie.
True Grit
B+ The acting is solid, and I see why it's the girl's break-out role, but the whole thing is still a remake with a limited scope. It ends up lacking the punch that a revenge story should have and has a rather unsatisfying end. Decent as far as Westerns go, though.

May 3, 2011

The dreaded 'has not been pre-compiled' message

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If you're "in-the-know" you've probably since stepped up to Web Application projects over the more ASP Classic-style Web Site projects. Along with that comes the Web Deployment Projects, which have had a version out for every Visual Studio since 2005. This project is basically a nice(r) front-end to MSBuild that lets you pre-compile the app, leaving only .aspx marker files instead of the raw html/code.

During your travels, you're bound to come across the infinitely misleading error after deploying your site using said deployment project:

The file 'MyPage.aspx' has not been pre-compiled, and cannot be requested.

Your first thought, like all of us, is "Umm, yes it has been pre-compiled. I just built the deployment for it, the page is a marker file, everything is in a .dll in the bin folder!"

And you're right, the page was properly pre-compiled. So why are you still getting this message?

It's a misleading one because generally the problem involves missing references on your deployment server/location. Something isn't installed into the GAC that your app is expecting to be there or you didn't include all assemblies in the build (Copy Local was set to false or something like that). What happens is the ASP.NET engine locates the marker, goes to find it in the assembly, fails to load it (because of missing reference) and thus is left with nothing, so it ends up throwing a "cannot find file" type error. That's not entirely true, but it doesn't know the difference. It went to load a page and got back nothing (because the loader failed to load it due to the missing assembly references).

Nine times out of ten it's a missing reference, though. Make sure all of the non-framework assemblies you've added have Copy Local set to true. If you've installed stuff into your development machine's GAC (ASP.NET AJAX Extensions was a common one back in the day) that hasn't been installed into the deployment server's GAC, either install it or include the assembly outright instead of relying on the GAC. ReportViewer references often cause this too since each Visual Studio version uses a different one (and generally doesn't include older versions).