This week-end my wife and I watched the movie “3:10 to Yuma“. We streamed it via netflix. It’s a very good film. It’s not too long, 93 minutes or so I think. The story is pretty simple, but in that short time and with a short narrative, the film explores a lot of different aspects of human nature. The film is based on a 1953 short story that I wouldn’t mind reading, to see how it compares. We both enjoyed it quite a bit and I think it has held up well over the years. I recommend checking it out.

In 2007 a new version of “3:10 to Yuma” came out. It had two big names for the lead roles, Russel Crowe and Christian Bale. I saw it shortly after it was released in the theater with a friend of mine. At that time I had never seen the original and did not know what to expect at all. I enjoyed the film. The ending though left me a bit conflicted and confused. Now that I’ve seen the original, I see that the new version ends completely differently.

The films are also very different in how they get to that end. There is a lot more action in the newer film. The new film is longer, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the additional time is mostly bullets flying everywhere and such. (It’s been over 2 years since I saw the original so I could be mistaken. My memory fools me quite often.) I think Crowe did a good job of developing the bad guy and Bale was given more to work with as the hero. The original film isn’t nearly as confusing, as things are stated more directly. But even with things being simpler I think the acting from Glenn Ford and Van Heflin is better. This may reflect some prejudices of mine though. I think there’s a lot less moral ambiguity in the older version and I like it a lot better.

That said, I think the new one was a pretty good western and I’ll probably watch them both again at some point.

Ran into Netbeans bug 163029 today. Wish I hadn’t spent a couple hours trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work.

Netbeans has a nifty template system and I decided that I would take advantage of it. I found a handy tutorial to take it a step further and create a template module that could be distributed. Even if no one else ever used this, it would make it easy for me to put the template in on any new install, system, etc. So I went through the steps and things worked nicely, then I decided to change the header to include the license. I went to set my default license and that is where things stopped. I was supposed to be able to add a line to nbproject/project.properties that would cover this. I did, but the template kept loading the default. I thought it was me, but it isn’t.

There is a work-around but it takes place at the user level and requires altering the template in a way that isn’t going to work for anyone else unless they’ve monkeyed with their settings too. Hopefully it will get fixed soon.

The older I get, the tougher it is to keep my weight where it should be. This summer I got on a diet and started exercising regularly. Progress has been slow but steady for the most part. The holidays were a bit tough, but I escaped without too much damage. Coming into the new year, I’ve been able to get things rolling again. It’s fun to finally be hitting a point where I feel better. I don’t realize how crummy I feel when I’m heavier until I get the weight off and I can feel the difference.

I’m not in great shape yet. I still need to lose another 25 or 30 pounds. (Though I just started lifting weights which is shifting my focus to body composition as opposed to purely weight. I’d been doing pure cardio before this.) I tried to run 3 miles yesterday. I made it 2 before I needed to stop and walk every so often. Not bad though, last time I tried it, 1.5 was about all I could put together.

If I can keep getting better at it, and my knees hold up I may run the Corporate 5K in April. Barring injury or some other unseen issue, that’s a very doable goal.

There is an editor called Ommwriter that looks very interesting. I’d try it out, but at the moment it is only available for Macs. But there is a project Marave that is essentially working to build a similar editor using PyQt. Which means it is cross platform.

I downloaded it yesterday and have played with it just a bit. The Google Code site doesn’t have a ton of information but there is more background and info in this blog post about it.

Basically the goal (and this is communicated in a much more elegant way on the Ommwriter site) is to allow the writer to write free from distraction. So the app launches full screen and covers up the entire desktop. The few controls that are there disappear when one is typing. They are shooting for a back to the typewriter days type of experience so it makes clicking sounds when typing. There can also be background music. I turned that off right away. I don’t really want either.

This is a brand new project so there are some rough edges. I emailed in a problem yesterday and it was fixed last night – did an svn update this morning and I’m good. There are no binaries available – just source. Still – installing Python and PyQt is easy – and then it’s easy to run.

I’m partially interested in this because I want to learn PyQt better, but it looks to be a really useful tool as well. Here’s a screen shot with the menu items showing.

I’ve been getting my Fedora 12 machine set the way I want it. I had done the upgrade from 11, ran into problems with my video card and ended up doing a full install. Now I’m putting it all back together.

My favorite Twitter client is Tweetdeck – which is an Adobe Air app. Installing Air went without a hitch but getting Tweetdeck, or anything else for that matter, was not working. The error message the installer gave me was, “Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGV” and then it would point me to a log file that was full of information. Unfortunately none of that information helped me to understand what the problem was. So I turned to trusty google and found my answers at this Technology and Investment Blog.

The answer to my issue was about half way down under the heading “Problems Running AIR Application”. It says there is an issue with SELinux – which I don’t totally get because I thought I turned SELinux off – but either way, I ran the command there and it fixed my issue. (I think it is probably an Adobe Air certificate issue – not SELinux) The blog links back to this Fedora Forum thread about Air – which also has some good information.

I’ve been running Fedora 11 for a while but the upgrade to 12 was highly recommended here, so I kicked off the upgrade per these instructions. To put it simply, the instructions require typing a single word in at the command line. Even I could get my head around that.

First I backed everything up. I’ve got an external drive that’s large enough to hold everything that matters. If something were to go wrong with this I wouldn’t be rolling back to the previous state. I’ll just wipe the machine and do a fresh install. But I’d like to see how this process goes.

I am a bit bummed that it’s not done this morning. I kicked it off last night and went home. Shortly after I left it stopped, to prompt me about something and so it really didn’t make any progress last night. That’s a bit disappointing and there is probably a way to do a silent install – but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not like the whole thing blew up on me – it just waited for me to come back. I’m in HR type meetings all day, so I’m hoping things are done by the end of that.

I’ve got a Drupal install with just under 300 users. I needed a certain type of node created for each user. Didn’t feel like logging in as each one and creating a node. Didn’t feel like looking for a module either for a few reasons. Decided I’d write my own little script to handle it. The tough part was just making sure I had good logic figured and a solid understanding of what Drupal did when it made a node. It ended up involving 3 tables which isn’t too bad.

I have a little, local Drupal install that I used to write and test. Today I made a copy of the production environment, on the remote server and tried it out. It didn’t work. It ran and made the nodes but nothing showed up. It made me sad inside.

It took me a little poking around to figure it out. The nodes contain a bunch of Arabic in the production environment, but not in my test. My script was not handling the unicode correctly and a single line added to my script fixed it.

This is what I had:



$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'drup_user', 'drupal')
or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
echo "Connected successfully. \n";
mysql_select_db('nmsdemov3') or die('Could not select database');

And this is what fixed my problem:



$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'drup_user', 'drupal')
or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
echo "Connected successfully. \n";
mysql_select_db('nmsdemov3') or die('Could not select database');
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link);

As mentioned, I wrote the script in Netbeans. I’m not sure if I liked that experience or not. A full IDE might be a bit of overkill for a single file script. But it wasn’t horrible or anything. I may keep doing it just to spend more time in that environment so that I learn it better for the other stuff I do.