July 2008

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Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

July 16, 2008 in Blog, Movies | No comments

Oh Joss Whedon, you’ve done it again.

Ok, so it wasn’t actually that great. But for a < 15 min. musical comedy vlog, it was worth my time. Neil Patrick Harris came across surprisingly good (I hate Malcolm in the Middle, for the record, which affects my judgment). Uber-cool Nathan Fillion was actually kinda douchey, but I guess that’s his character. Although, it was amusing to hear both of them sing (Harris – again, surprisingly good). Felicia Day I don’t really find attractive at all, which kinda ruins her hero’s-romantic-interest potential in my books, but she has massive geek cred so it’s ok.

Overall it was campy but enjoyable, quirky but watchable – and touched actual emotions just enough (laundromat scene/song) to make me want to watch Act II when it drops tomorrow.

The inflated-popularity is hugely attributable to fellow browncoats looking for some of that Whedon+Fillion magic to be revived again (that was my reason for tuning in), and although Firefly can’t be bested, seeing Fillion again, in anything with Whedon’s name on it, is almost good enough. The key word being “almost”.

’twas the twelving day of Everfair

Tags: Blog, Movies

Amy Thiessen

July 16, 2008 in Music | No comments

No relation!

So I stumbled across this Calgary-based acoustic folk indie babe through a Facebook invite, and after checking out her myspace page I gotta say I’m sufficiently captivated to go see her live sometime soon. She has tons of local shows, and beyond satisfying my new-found fandom, it’s nice to feel (or at least to intend to feel) like I’m helping the local indie music scene. I mean, Feist and Tegan and Sara were probably in rather similar positions at some point, and look at them now. Not saying Amy Thiessen is as good as those other ladies (who are amazing), but she has potential.

So I’m a sucker for melancholy, folksy female vocals and simple acoustic accompaniment. (Ladies: take note :P)

left all my regrets back home with my cigarettes

Tags: Music

Weak typing in VB

July 16, 2008 in Code | No comments

So I scribbled this post down on a piece of paper back in November or so, and going through my old stuff found it again today. At the time I had grandiose ideas of regularly blogging on random programming stuff, but I suppose that idea was abandoned in favour of irregularly blogging on random introspective stuff :P

Anyhow, this was back when I actually had to use VB (2005) for mech engg in Edmonchuck (dark days). I noticed this interesting thing:

Say you’ve got two combo boxes, A and B, and the value of A is “1″ and B is “2″.

Redim myArray(cboA.Text + cboB.Text - 1) myArray.GetLength(0)

And you’ll get 12 for the array length.

But, like this:

Redim myArray(cboA.Text - 1 + cboB.Text) myArray.GetLength(0)

You’ll get 3 for the array length.

Which totally violates the possibly-expected commutative property of add/subtract, because f(a + b – c) != f(a – c + b).

But, I guess what’s actually happening is that the “+” operator, when given String + String, simply appends the two strings together, thus “1″ + “2″ = “12″. Then, the String – Integer ends up being implicitly converted to Integer – Integer, so we get 12 – 1 = 11, and an array length of 12.

In the second case, the String – Integer ends up doing the same implicit type conversion on the String to make it Integer – Integer, so we get 1 – 1 + 2 = 2, and an array length of 3.

I guess it all boils down to VB being rather weakly typed. It’s progammer-friendly in that it doesn’t require a lot of typecasting, but also dangerous in that it gives you zero feedback on what it’s implicitly converting. In this case, I think I spent at least a few hours being super confused about some calculations messing up, before I realized my mistake.

Anyhow, that’s my random VB tale for today. C# ftw!

it’s not me, it’s not my family

Tags: Code