Archive for December, 2006
I just stumbled on a Dutch blog (in Dutch) by Lagonda. Really brilliant blog! I don’t always agree, but I wish I could write like that. And the analyses of contemporary (Dutch) society and culture are amazingly good. Despite the fact that she votes for the opposite side compared to me. Among other things a lot of comments about islam and multiculturalism and a nice piece about how modern Western (or rather, West-European) society is deeply Marxist in nature. And how that Marxism is directly related to Christian guilt. Pretty cool. She (at least, I think it’s a she) writes continuously against modern left wing ideology, while I actually vote on the left, but she does it in such a well founded, thorough way, it’s quite impressive and interesting.
December 27th, 2006
Because of a project I am planning with a friend of mine, I have been spending a little bit of time studying Ruby on Rails in more detail. So far, I’m quite impressed. Ruby on Rails is a scripting language similar to PHP or ASP, but it also handles a lot more behind the scenes than any of those languages do. With only very few lines of code you can set up a page to list items in a database, edit them, delete them, etc. By just creating a table in a database and one command you can tell the system to create the scaffolding of an entire application. You of course end up rewriting most of the scaffolding to customize the page to your requirements, but it makes it incredibly easy to test parts of the site, since all is working at least in a preliminary sense within no-time. It’s like a scripting language on top of a game engine - the whole engine for the website is there, you just need to script the particular use you want to make of it.
I’m reading The Pragmatic Programmers - Agile Web Development with Rails now, which shows how to develop a basic shopping cart application, while demonstrating all kinds of good programming practice: separating layout from code; testing habits; etc. Really quite nice and quick to read. After this, I should be able to develop a website using Ruby on Rails in no-time.
December 23rd, 2006
Now that I’m on the subject of movies anyway (I’ve been watching a lot since I have a Netflix subscription), I should also mention the British miniseries I watched last night and this morning. It’s called A Very British Coup and it is a somewhat old series, from 1988, about a socialist leader of the Labour Party who manages to get elected as prime minister. He immediately starts the nuclear disarmament of Britain and demands the removal of U.S. bases from British soil. This of course to the horror of the British military and intelligence establishment who immediately start working on a way to get rid of them. The result is a fairly dark image of the British intelligence community and a very interesting television series. Highly recommended to people who are interested in politics or espionage.
December 23rd, 2006
Yesterday I watched the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch by John Cameron Mitchell. Totally brilliant! About a transvestite who flees from East Germany to the U.S. and starts a career as a (largely unknown) rock star. Totally bizarre story with brilliant music, very cool song texts, very artistic style of filming, very poetic moments and the story and main character is so bizarre, that all the actually very normal human emotions seem amplified.
The movie is totally different from Shortbus, the second movie by Mitchell, which I saw at the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and which was the reason I checked out this one. Shortbus is about the sexual lives of two couples, a straight one and a gay one, and all their complications, centering around this sex club called Shortbus. Many people accuse Shortbus of being more porn than art, which is unfair, although it is extremely pornographic. But just like with Hedwig, the extremism of it, this time in its porn, seems to amplify what the movie is actually about, and so many of the things the main characters experience are so recognizable, and yet so rarely put in film.
So if you can handle very controversial and extremely explicit movies, both of those are highly, highly recommended!
December 20th, 2006