Entries for archive: 2009-02

Found 4 entries.

"Turbine" at Downstage

I went to a preview showing of the play "Turbine" last night. And I'll tell you what, it was pretty awesome stuff.

There was only about 30 people in the audience which made it quite intimate. However that didn't detract from the atmosphere but actually made it better.

We were in row two which meant that in a lot of scenes, you really felt like you were within this family's home, especially so because you knew there were only a couple of people sitting behind you instead of the whole auditorium.

As for the play itself, it was pretty imaginative in some of the things it did (I especially liked the 'dancing' scene with two of the main characters). The actors also did some funny things with their scenery and set (no, not like that) but you'll have to go and see it to figure out what I mean.

Over the years in Wellington I've seen a few small productions either at Downstage or Bats and this one is definitely the best I've seen. The actors in this were excellent all round, especially so when a few of them had to change character for a moment or two.

The preview ticket was just $20 though the regular tickets are anything from $20 up to $42. Getting second row seats for $20 now seems like a pretty good bargain.

I'd heartily recommend going to see Turbine. It was a good play, the script was generally good (though the ending could have been a little better) and had some pretty dark humour at times, the local jokes made some patches even funnier but the acting was the winner for me - they really got it in to and it was emotional at times, both happy and sad.

Have fun if you go along.

Labels: theatre, downstage, wellington

Inserted: 2009-02-13 10:17 (1 year, 5 months ago)

I Love GitHub But...

...sometimes it can only go so far.

The fantastic people at GitHub have released yet another feature to their already impressive hosting service. They are now offering downloads for which I initially became very happy.

Until I read the fine print.

See their blog entry about it and let me know what you think (and yes, you may have already spotted the comment I left there).

It's a fantastic service, GitHub rolls updates out very frequently, I've only ever seen it problematic once and I've consistently been impressed with how much they're doing for the open source community.

So why in the world would you use flash? I quote:

If you’re still one of the holdouts, do yourself a favor and install Flash ... [snip]

I'm afraid it's not going to happen. Not only am I adverse to proprietary software I think it also smells of a closed web, something which I'm sure the GitHub guys are also adverse to.

Also, the only reason they're doing it is so that uploads can bypass their own servers ... something to do with going straight into S3 I presume. Ok, that may be so, but really?

What next?

Having to install Silverlight to perform an upload to a server. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure a pretty early version of HTML allowed uploads of files to servers many, many years ago.

Labels: no-flash, html, planet-catalyst, github

Inserted: 2009-02-11 21:05 (1 year, 5 months ago)

Save Manners Mall

As we all know, kicking pedestrians out of town is just the wrong thing to do. Putting more traffic right in the centre of town is even worse.

Added to the fact that Manners Mall is a rather quaint place (ok, there are some varmints there late at night, but I'd rather be able to walk through it during the day than have to wait for YET ANOTHER traffic light to cross the road).

I hate waiting for traffic, I hate the smell and I hate the fact that this city council only ever does things for motorised vehicles and never pedestrians or cyclists.

So, if you want to stop even more traffic jamming up the centre of Wellington, go and sign the petition (via the council's own website) to Save Manner's Mall.

If you have a blog in Wellington and have some Wellingtonian readers who might also be interested, post this link and let's get the council to rethink.

Labels: manners-mall, walking, wellington, cycling

Inserted: 2009-02-08 21:24 (1 year, 5 months ago)

"Just Stick it in the Same Column"

There have been many times when I have heard someone say that phrase. "Just stick it in the same column". Of course, they are referring to putting two different bits of information into the same column in a database.

And for some funny reason, I don't know why, but people have a strange habit of wanting to put an 'x' and a 'y' value (or a height and width value) of an image into the same place.

For example, if you want to display (76x89) somewhere and the input information you've received from the input source is '76x89', many people seem determined that you just whack that string into a column since the (current) output format is the same.

Please.

That's just laziness. But laziness in a bad way.

Stop doing it and stop telling me that I have to do it too.

Just do what's right from the start. Split it up in the separate bits of information (yes, surprisingly the width of an image is a different bit of data from the height) and store it separately too. You'll be thankful not only that your queries are nicer and faster but that the logic in both the frontend and backend is much easier. All because you decided to parse the input correctly in the first place.

And if you don't believe me, then believe Arjen.

Enough said.

Labels: database, planet-catalyst, doing-it-right

Inserted: 2009-02-04 22:36 (1 year, 5 months ago)