My Favorites
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Updated: May 11th, 2008
This page contains my favorite items in categories like Movies, Music, Restaurants, etc (work in progress).
Quotes:
- "There are two ways to argue with women… neither one helps"
- "The most dangerous word in Atomic Physics is: Oops…"
- Somebody was complaining about how hard Perl was to learn. Response: "If you have trouble coding in Perl, just let your cat walk on the keyboard for a while. Then you just have to debug it." (non-Perl coders won't get it)
Movies:
Sort list by: title | rating | view date ↓
May, 2008
-
2008-05-10 20:24
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Usually a movie with such actors enters the "watch me every few months" list, but this one will not. The only 2 things that deserve a repeat is Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell.
0.3 -
2008-05-03 22:43
Excellent movie, very well put together Marvel Comic. Great ending and a surprise scene past the end credits, be sure to stay and see them!
0.3 April, 2008
-
2008-04-12 13:52
Great foreign movie about an ordinary man who is forced to choose between life and death of his own child.
0.3 -
2008-04-08 21:38
Above mediocre but it still failed to capture me. Of course, the topic is tough and serious, but something is lacking.
0.3 -
2008-04-05 13:57
Unique and brilliant. Norton Pitt = killer combination. Classic.
0.3 March, 2008
-
2008-03-16 17:24
Interesting and witty dialog between the only 2 actors in the whole movie, but it eventually gets too weird and dumb. It's worth watching just to see Michael Caine's house, however.
0.3 -
2008-03-07 20:42
As somebody put it on imdb: "This movie was not what I expected, but in a good way. I saw that Kevin Costner was in it, and figured it would be a light-hearted drama. Then I read that it was suspense, and figured he was a good-guy spy or something. Not so. I don't want to spoil exactly what Mr. Brooks is (even though it's revealed in the early part of the movie), but let's just say he's not a good guy. He is cold, brilliant, methodical, and heartless. Definitely not the traits we normally expect from Kevin Costner. And yet, it's fascinating to watch. I found myself rooting for him, and then had to kick myself because his character is so despicable. Top notch acting from him. Dane Cook seems an odd casting choice for a suspense thriller, and yet he is believable in his role as a cowardly average joe trying to get the better of Mr. Brooks. This movie is surprisingly graphic and brutal in some scenes. Yet it is so engrossing that you will be hooked on every twist and turn (and there are some good ones). Not for the faint of heart, not your normal Costner flick, but a very good movie."
0.3 -
2008-03-07 20:36
A movie about being awake during a heart transplant surgery? Jessica Alba? I was about to throw it away but watched it anyway and it was a lot better than expected. In fact, it was suspenseful and had a few nice twists. 1h24min well spent.
0.3 -
2008-03-03 01:54
Quite an interesting action movie, gayed out by the last 5 minutes. Otherwise, I would have given it an 8. Why, oh why did the ending have to suck so much?
0.3 February, 2008
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2008-02-28 23:01
What's the word I'm looking for? Ah, rubbish, that's the one. A bunch of pointless bullshit, that's what this movie is.
0.3 -
2008-02-17 19:34
Great, insightful, sad movie. Well put together, it puts life in perspective.
0.3 January, 2008
-
2008-01-28 02:33
Very good acting by all members of the cast, especially by Daniel Day-Lewis but the movie definitely needed more editing and less randomness. 158 minutes are unnecessary.
0.3 -
2008-01-20 11:25
If you don't see this below average chick flick comedy, you are not going to miss anything at all. Only points are for Isla Fisher.
0.3 -
2008-01-20 11:21
If there's a movie worse than this in 2007, it's Evan Almighty. Extremely dumb. Only stars are for Milla Kunis.
0.3 -
2008-01-13 01:44
As someone said on imdb: "It Can Never Make Up Its Mind What Movie It Wants To Be". It's mildly entertaining but absolutely something one can live without seeing.
0.3 -
2008-01-07 00:45
Having no expectations going to see this movie, I was absolutely blown away by Hilary Swank (I usually don't like her) and Gerard Butler. The story and plot are great and the whole movie is very well put together. I guarantee, it will have you sobbing at least several times throughout the movie. Another must-see this year.
0.3 -
2008-01-06 01:19
Brilliant freaking movie, showing the truth about CIA, the Soviets, and the war in Afghanistan in the 80s. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks are superb, as is Julia Roberts (I can't believe I'm saying it). I absolutely loved the dialog and the plot. Highly recommended.
0.3 December, 2007
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2007-12-28 01:47
Absolutely amazing. I don't even like westerns, but this movie is a 10/10. Performances by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are out of this world. A must-see.
0.3 -
2007-12-26 23:34
Predictable dialog that tries too hard to be smart but falls short of expectations. Nice work by Ellen Page though, she's going to be quite a star.
0.3 -
2007-12-26 23:29
Suspenseful, but lacking. All the southern accents didn't help the rating either.
0.3 -
2007-12-16 02:12
Could have had a much better plot but for a movie with 1 main character and... well almost no one else, this is pretty good.
0.3 -
2007-12-13 21:48
Great movie that shows life lessons on so many levels. Even though it has a lot of Bengali references, traditions, and language, The Namesake is a pleasure to watch. I didn't want it to end.
0.3 -
2007-12-12 00:25
Great, touching movie. Little Abigail Breslin is what makes this movie so special and touching. I love her performance and I think she's got a LOT ahead of her.
0.3 -
2007-12-09 18:51
Civic Duty is excellent. I love the camera work, the controversy, the plot, and the ending. Brilliant!
0.3 -
2007-12-03 23:54
I don't know why but this is a great movie to watch on a lonely (insert day of the week here) night.
0.3 -
2007-12-03 23:52
Surprisingly good movie about tough high school years in certain neighborhoods, racism, and persistence.
0.3 -
2007-12-03 23:50
Great movie, brilliant performance by the Chris Cooper. Extra points for being based on a true story.
0.3 -
2007-12-03 23:46
Instant classic! American Pie meets 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
0.3 November, 2007
-
2007-11-04 20:40
Good action, but cheesy at times and completely pointless to the end.
0.3 -
2007-11-04 20:35
Fits right in the middle of Ocean's 11 and Ocean's 13. Rating-wise.
0.3 -
2007-11-04 20:23
Amazing CGI, really, best one I've seen so far, but other than that, this movie is regular Hollywood junk. The stars are mainly for the graphics.
0.3 October, 2007
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2007-10-17 22:38
There's a new James Bond in town. This movie is massively entertaining, in a non-hollywood way. It's very sharp and brutal. Highly recommended.
0.3 August, 2007
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2007-08-04 17:10
Loved it. Matt Damon is one of my favorites since this series came out. This is the perfect finale for the Bourne series. Go and watch it.
0.3 July, 2007
-
2007-07-07 11:46
Meh. Just another action movie with a large quantity of [lame and fake-looking] special effects. McClane needs to retire his ass and the Mac guy, oh come on, he's the supporting role?
0.3 June, 2007
-
2007-06-30 17:44
A great Woody Allen movie with an interesting plot, great acting, and humor. Plus it's got Scarlett Johansson!
0.3 -
2007-06-30 16:29
One of the funniest and my most favorite movies of all time. Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, and Seth Rogen is the most hilarious crew in town. Love it and can watch every day.
0.3 -
2007-06-30 16:28
Genuinely funny and smart film from the crew that was in "The 40 Year Old Virgin". Great laughs.
0.3 May, 2007
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2007-05-31 21:15The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Loved this movie, it makes you realize how many things we take for granted every day. Will Smith gives a powerful performance. It's based in San Francisco too.
0.3 -
2007-05-18 12:50
Absolutely phenomenal movie. Hugh Jackman's performance is stunning. One of my most favorite movies of all time.
0.3 -
2007-05-07 23:56
Not having great expectations, I actually liked this movie quite a lot. A comedian running for president? Very entertaining and politically thirst-quenching.
0.3 April, 2007
February, 2007
-
2007-02-05 11:40
This movie has absolutely the funniest scene I've ever seen. Hands down.
0.3 January, 2007
August, 2006
July, 2006
April, 2006
September, 2005
List generated by WP Movie Ratings.
TV Shows
- The Big Bang Theory
- Entourage
- Family Guy
- Rescue Me
- The Unit
- How I Met Your Mother
- American Dad
- Californication
- 24
- Prison Break
- South Park
- Journeyman
- …
Music
- Trance/Goa
- Drum and Bass
- House
- Chillout/Ambient
- Flamenco
- Some rock
- Some hip-hop
Restaurants:
- Limon (Outstanding South American food.)
- Bubba Gump (Cajun shrimp, mmmmmm!)
- Cattlemen's (steak, cheese wedges, bread)
- Chick'N'Coop SF (awesome chicken, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw dinner for $6! Serve it yourself)
- Mikuni's (great sushi)
- Palomino on Folsom and Embarcadero (great Paella, excellent shrimp and pasta)
- Birley's Sandwiches in SF financial district (awesome sandwiches)
- Ichiraku (2nd and Geary, great affordable sushi, fun chefs)
- Bursa Kebab (West Portal, really good kebab and, really, everything on the menu)
- …
Things I own and recommend:
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Related Posts:
A Better diff Or What To Do When GNU diff Runs Out Of Memory ("diff: memory exhausted")
Monday, May 12th, 2008
Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.
There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff - rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).
The upsides of rdiff are:
- with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
- it is also MUCH faster than diff.
- rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas and apply them using the same program
The downsides of rdiff are:
- it's not part of standard Linux/UNIX distribution - you have to install the librsync package.
- delta files rdiff produces have a slightly different format than diff's.
- delta files are slightly larger (but not significantly enough to care).
- a slightly different approach is used when generating a delta with rdiff, which is both good and bad - 2 steps are required. The first one produces a special signature file. In the second step, a delta is created using another rdiff call (all shown below). While the 2-step process may seem annoying, it has the benefits of providing faster deltas than when using diff. In fact, you can pipe the first step into the second one without any trouble if you want, which is what I ended up doing).
Usage:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | $ rdiff signature ORIGINAL.txt SIGNATURE.sig $ l -h SIGNATURE.sig -rw-r--r-- 1 archon810 users 25M 2008-04-23 22:32 SIGNATURE.sig $ rdiff delta SIGNATURE.sig MODIFIED.txt DELTA.rdiff $ l -h DELTA.rdiff -rw-r--r-- 1 archon810 users 82M 2008-04-23 22:36 DELTA.rdiff |
And here's what you would do to reassemble MODIFIED.txt:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | $ rdiff patch ORIGINAL.txt DELTA.rdiff MODIFIED_REASSEMBLED.txt $ l *.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 archon810 users 4,471,493,588 2008-04-23 20:24 MODIFIED.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 archon810 users 4,471,493,588 2008-04-23 22:44 MODIFIED_REASSEMBLED.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 archon810 users 4,403,302,981 2008-04-23 20:20 ORIGINAL.txt |
Just as expected - everything matches.
Now, all of this could have been done in one go like this:
1 | rdiff signature ORIGINAL.txt | rdiff delta -- - MODIFIED.txt DELTA.rdiff |
As far as my usage of such a useful diff program, I was doing CSV dumps of certain fields from a MySQL database, like so:
1 | SELECT * FROM table WHERE some_condition='1' ORDER BY id DESC INTO OUTFILE '/home/dump/dump.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'; |
and then applying rdiff to get the [quite small] daily deltas.
That's all folks!
How To Install The Latest SOAP::Lite Using Perl CPAN
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
Apparently it's not straightforward to install SOAP::Lite, even using CPAN.
Check this out.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | cpan[1]> install SOAP::Lite
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.18)
Going to read /root/.cpan/Metadata
Database was generated on Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:29:45 GMT
CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.66)
Going to read /root/.cpan/build/
............................................................................DONE
Found 149 old builds, restored the state of 109
Warning: Cannot install SOAP::Lite, don't know what it is.
Try the command
i /SOAP::Lite/
to find objects with matching identifiers.
CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.9713) |
Huh? Okay…
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | cpan[2]> i /SOAP::Lite/ Module ResourcePool::Command::SOAP::Lite::Call (MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz) Module ResourcePool::Factory::SOAP::Lite (MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz) Module ResourcePool::Resource::SOAP::Lite (MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchema1999 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchema2001 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchemaSOAP1_1 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchemaSOAP1_2 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::InstanceExporter (SMEISNER/SOAP-Lite-InstanceExporter-0.02.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Packager (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Simple (LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.9.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Simple::DotNet (LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.4.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Simple::Real (LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.4.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Utility (BRYCE/SOAP-Lite-Utility-0.01.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Utils (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) 14 items found |
Wtf? Let's try something else.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 | cpan[8]> i /SOAP.*Lite/ Distribution BRYCE/SOAP-Lite-Utility-0.01.tar.gz Distribution BYRNE/SOAP/SOAP-Lite-0.60a.tar.gz Distribution DYACOB/SOAP-Lite-ActiveWorks-0.10.tar.gz Distribution DYACOB/SOAP-Lite-SmartProxy-0.11.tar.gz Distribution LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.4.tar.gz Distribution LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.9.tar.gz Distribution MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz Distribution MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz Distribution SMEISNER/SOAP-Lite-InstanceExporter-0.02.tar.gz Module Catalyst::Action::SOAP::DocumentLiteral (DRUOSO/Catalyst-Controller-SOAP-0.8.tar.gz) Module Catalyst::Action::SOAP::DocumentLiteralWrapped (DRUOSO/Catalyst-Controller-SOAP-0.8.tar.gz) Module Catalyst::Action::SOAP::RPCLiteral (DRUOSO/Catalyst-Controller-SOAP-0.8.tar.gz) Module Catalyst::Controller::SOAP::DocumentLiteralWrapped (DRUOSO/Catalyst-Controller-SOAP-0.8.tar.gz) Module Net::DRI::Transport::HTTP::SOAPLite (PMEVZEK/Net-DRI-0.85.tar.gz) Module ResourcePool::Command::SOAP::Lite::Call (MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz) Module ResourcePool::Factory::SOAP::Lite (MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz) Module ResourcePool::Resource::SOAP::Lite (MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz) Module = SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchema1999 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module = SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchema2001 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module = SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchemaSOAP1_1 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module = SOAP::Lite::Deserializer::XMLSchemaSOAP1_2 (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::InstanceExporter (SMEISNER/SOAP-Lite-InstanceExporter-0.02.tar.gz) Module = SOAP::Lite::Packager (MKUTTER/SOAP-Lite-0.71.04.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Simple (LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.9.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Simple::DotNet (LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.4.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Simple::Real (LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.4.tar.gz) Module SOAP::Lite::Utility (BRYCE/SOAP-Lite-Utility-0.01.tar.gz) Module = SOAP::Lite::Utils (MKUTTER/ |