I long ago came to grips with the fact that the new G.I. Joe movie was going to have precious little to do with the G.I. Joe of my youth. I still have an attic (note: not my attic) full of G.I. Joe toys, so the compulsion to see it eventually overrode common sense and generallyawful meta-ratings.
I usually like MovieBob’s reviews over at the Escapist, but before actually seeing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I just assumed he had lost the thread when he posted a positive review of the movie given the overwhelming negativity of others. Having now seen the film, I think he’s absolutely spot on.
This is the type of fun summer movie that I haven’t seen in ages: a decent plot that is coherent and doesn’t expect me to check my brain at the door, larger-than-life characters in over-the-top action sequences, and enough cool tech for 2 regular action movies. If someone had just thought to take the lips off of Snake Eyes’ costume, I dare say it would have been damn-near perfect*.
* “Perfect” in the summer movie sense. This movie won’t be winning any Oscars, let’s not kid ourselves here.
Current Tunes: of Montreal - Id Engager (Mad Decent Remix) | Filed under Movies
The roll-out of nightly l10n updates has been…bumpy. The primary user-visible symptom of this has been that nightly updates for en-US have sometimes been delayed by many hours when compared to when they would have been generated previously.
I hesitate to say that these consequences were unforeseen, but rather that we were initially unsure how/if the various systems we use to generate, store and serve updates would even cope when they had to deal with more than one locale. Continue Reading…
Poach Motel’s statistically-aberrant winning streak came to an end after 4 games on Sunday. We won our first game of the day against another tough opponent to make it to the tier finals, but we ran out of gas in the finals, losing 12-15 to new tier champion, Fresh.
Considering we weren’t even supposed to be in *this* tier, I’m not overly broken up about it. Finishing 10th overall is the best showing ever by this team or its core of players. Kudos to all involved. Can’t wait to pick it up again with most of you in a few weeks for Fall league.
Poach Motel always starts the season seeded (by request) 21st out of all the teams in our Monday night ultimate league, and every year after playoffs, through some great, often heroic, accidents of chance, we always end up seeded…21st. Inertia is strong, at least until this year.
On the strength of two late-season victories against stronger-on-paper teams and the inevitable attrition of higher-tier teams before playoffs, we managed to sneak from a top seed of tier 3 up to the bottom seed of tier 2. That should have meant a quick smackdown from the top seeded team in tier 2 when we played them tonight in the first round of the playoffs…except that we won, and it wasn’t particularly close.
The best part for me is that the last 3 games have also been some of the most fun I’ve had on the ultimate pitch in a long time. We’ve been playing smart ultimate, some of our new players are really coming into their own, and we even convinced the occasional visiting alumnus to suit up for us. Most tellingly, for the second year in a row, Poach Motel won a spirit award for the entire Monday league, so I guess it looks like we’re having fun out there to others too.
The spirit prize involves free beer/food tickets, so no matter how the rest of our playoffs go on Sunday, we’ll all be going home happy.
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 282 - Andy Moor - 2009-08-21 | Filed under Friends, Frisbee
Last week, Armen flipped the configuration switch to turn on nightly updates for l10n builds on mozilla-central. After a few downtime-related hiccups last week that tanked nightly builds across the board, this morning we were finally able to serve partial updates to l10n nightly users on all platforms.
This is another huge step forward. Nightly testers who use localized builds no longer have to download an entirely new localized browser every day, but can instead rely on the Firefox update service to automatically download a much smaller binary partial update for them. Aside from allowing us to make sure l10n nightly testers are always testing the most recent code and string changes, this may also allow us to recruit a new batch of nightly l10n testers who were previously worried about the bandwidth involved in helping us test on an ongoing basis.
Over the coming weeks we’re hoping to enable l10n nightly updates on the newly-cut 1.92 branch as well. We are dealing with many more builds passing through the staging server to the update generation machinery now, so there’s some housekeeping to be done first to make sure that no builds, mars, or snippets are piling up in dark dusty corners anywhere.
Thanks to Armen for daring to touch the update code at all, to Nick for his update support, and to Axel for his tireless l10n work.
High on the lists of things you probably don’t want to try: moving your iTunes music library to an external hard drive while your iPod is connected. The library move (using Consolidate Library) works just fine, UNTIL the next time you try to sync your iPod. Continue Reading…
In honour of (or perhaps in spite of), the G.I. Joe movie opening today, I thought I’d post something Cobra-related that doesn’t suck or yell “RETREAT!” when the wind shifts.
I’m loving thesixtyone, even more so now that my external drive with my ITunes music stash on it is on the fritz, and this is my current favorite song:
The Mozilla RelEng team was having one of our patented digressional discussions in IRC yesterday when we got around to the subject of hg irritations. My personal annoyance was that I frequently need to check-in patches for other people who don’t have commit access, but I don’t always remember to check before pushing to make sure I didn’t miss adding any new files created by the patch.
Because Ted is more about solving problems than bitching about them, he suggested I write a hook to prevent myself from missing files. Here it is:
[hooks]
precommit = hg status | (! grep '^?')
Add that to your .hgrc file (and setup some good global hgignore rules) and you’re golden.
Kris hasn’t posted anything in a while about our ongoing house project, so I’ll pick up the slack. We’ve chosen our architect! It was not an easy decision. Continue Reading…
This is quite similar to one of my favorite spots in Paris: the Promenade Plantée in the 12th arrondissement. I love it when cities decide to re-purpose surplus infrastructure like this rather than simply tearing it down.
Current Tunes: The Postal Service - We Will Become Silhouettes | Filed under In The News, Travel
I long ago came to grips with the fact that the new G.I. Joe movie was going to have precious little to do with the G.I. Joe of my youth. I still have an attic (note: not my attic) full of G.I. Joe toys, so the compulsion to see it eventually overrode common sense and generally awful meta-ratings. 
Poach Motel always starts the season seeded (by request) 21st out of all the teams in our 
