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Jen, Little Miss, mum, my aunt Brenda and I went to see The Nutcracker: The Story of Clara last week. It wasn't good, which is a pity because the Nutcracker is a fantastic ballet.
The first 45mins were interminable. The story had been completely re-imagined so Clara was an ageing ex-prima ballerina living in Melbourne in the 50s, poor and alone. Then a bunch of old people come to celebrate Christmas with her and there was much old-people dancing. I think it was meant to be hilarious but I was bored witless. The grand expression of ballet, where dancers in military precision create imagery on the stage you can't see the like of outside an olympics opening ceremony was replaced by inept and arthritic dancers shambling about the stage in mockery of the music being played.
There was lots of mucking about with skrims, which I'm not a fan of. The main problem is that for the full-dress rehearsals (which is what we go see) the pit lights are up much brighter than on a performance night, and the musicians aren't all in black. There's a lot of spill therefore from the pit onto the front of the skrim and everything looks gaussy and slightly indistinct.
They also used a lot of projected filmstock, which didn't work to terribly great effect.
There's probably an element of cultural cringe there too. There were kids squabbling (with pre-recorded dialogue) and reporters for The Argus making idiots of themselves. The whole production seemed to be a thinly-veiled attempt to get the audience to go "Fuck yeah! Melbourne!" and for that to somehow make the story more entertaining.
10NAULS
Yesterday Jen and I went to see the new Terminator movie. It was pretty, entertaining and the acting was solid. On the other hand, the writing was so bad I was giggling at some of the horrendous lines. Lots of little nods back to the previous movies in ways that were fun. Helena-Bonham Carter was the perfect choice for her role. If high production values are enough to make you happy you'll enjoy the movie and should probably go see it at the cinemas. Otherwise it's one to download and watch with the other three in sequence.
It's interesting to see the evolution of the roles of women in the series of movies. The fourth movie continues the slide into cliché the third movie started, and this adds to the very formulaic development of the film.
Because it's so formulaic, it ends up quite a lot like a burger from Macdonalds: it's certainly not a great meal, but you know what you're going to get and you'll at least be reasonably satisfied afterwards.
4.1NAULS
Work has been a bit of a slog this last week. I've been doing a lot of Windows application development. The language is Delphi (pascal). I hadn't done any Delphi programming before, but I've done enough of similar stuff that it's just a new set of keywords to learn. That doesn't bother me. The problem is that the IDE / language (the two are closely tied when it comes to Delphi) has a number of little problems and "features" that make it very east to write sloppy code. And the thing I'm working on is to add a feature to one of our existing products. The boss wrote it originally and "sloppy" is a kind word for it.
It took me days just to figure out how the program actually worked. There were functions called Mainform.SendStr and CoreCode.SendStr that did exactly the same thing in very slightly different ways, and some code called one and some code called the other. There's a function called PortOpen that closes the port. (and one called PortActivate that opens the port). There's been a small effort to use functional parameters (the PortOpen function takes parameters) but most of the internal communication is done using global variables, making the whole thing one huge state machine. It took me days just to go insane enough to start to understand it.
And every function has its own indent style, which drives me nuts, because he loves structuring things as many layers of embedded IF statements. The IDE lets you insert the cursor in any white space and start typing, so instead of tabbing in one, he's just clicked in a place that looks about right and continued. By the end of the function there are 7 "end;"s all bunched up and you've got no hope of figuring out where you are.
But perhaps what breaks my brain the most is the user interface. Controls are just thrown into windows. Labels don't line up with text fields. Buttons labelled "Exit" are everywhere, and none of the exit the program. (The most egregious example of this was a registration dialog that pops up when you start the program. The text is something like "This copy is unlicensed. Please enter your registration code to continue" and the two buttons are "Register" and "Exit" but the "Exit" button not only doesn't exit, it's starts the program with a 15-minute demo time limit.
So, some of these things I've been fixing as I see them but some are just so entrenched that I can only roll with it. When writing code for microcontrollers it sometimes makes a lot of sense to use a global variable or two (especially when you've got interrupts) but in an application it feels very, very dirty. And because this program is so dependant on them, I had to just add a few for the feature I was adding, because spending the time to completely re-write is out of the question.
But, I have been doing other things at work. My level monitor is up for sale. I did a little charge-pump board (basically a relay that switches on when there's a 12.5kHz heatbeat from the CNC controller) and a few other bits and pieces. There've been a few custom designs through as well.
I have been remarkably sick for the last week. It was probably the flu, but not the famous one. It's done horrendous things to my voice - I currently make Ned Gerblanski sound mellifluous. I'm on the downhill stretch of it though. |
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