Friday, May 31, 2013

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

The Adventures of Tintin (film)
The Adventures of Tintin (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A childhood favorite brought to the big screen in a very appealing fashion. Minus the unimpressive opening title, which reeked of cheesy plagiarism in with more than a passing similarity to the opening title track of 'Catch Me If You Can', The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a great piece of entertainment which viewers will be forgiven for not thinking of as an animated film.

Computer graphics have progressed so far that realism is not too far behind reality. Technical prowess aside, just super talented CG isn't what makes this so engrossing.

Tintin the animation delivers the charm and nuance that captivated an entire generation through its comics and this offering is sure to continue that pull that has had hypnotized many a reader. The sheer creativity of the scene swipes to the constantly engaging, moving narrative does justice to what Tin Tin comics is all about.

This is a definite must watch. And now to peruse the various Tintin comic selection online and memorabilia.
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Movie parallels

RoboCop 2
RoboCop 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Disparate movies at times seem to share similarities. It could be anything from the scene, characters or action sequences and outcomes.
Here is a list of such analogous commonalities found in movies.

Robocop 2 Vs Iron Man 2:

In Robocop 2, the ending battle is between Robocop and um, Robocop 2. The protagonist is faced with a superior cyborg in terms of size and firepower. After ascending to the top of the skyscraper after the new borg was unveiled, both units plummet to the street, subsequently where, the protagonist overcomes his opponent by jumping on the baddie's back and ripping out the brain.
In Iron Man 2, after climbing to the upper limits of the atmosphere, both parties fall to earth, although not in unison. After the culmination of the battle on the ground, Iron Man gets on the back of the bigger suit wearer, and rips out a vital assembly to terminate the monster.

The Incredible Hulk Vs The League of extraordinary Gentlemen:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, plus a lady vampire, has a scene where Mr. Hyde meets up with baddie injected with a substance isolated from his blood sample surreptitiously gained earlier in the movie. The new beast thus created is bigger and stronger than Mr. Hyde and somewhat dis formed. After a romp Mr. Hyde wins out.
In The Incredible Hulk, The Hulk faces the a bigger stronger version of himself. In similar fashion, the technology which causes the "Hulkification" was administered to the captain of the team assigned to capture him and further dosage creates the superior Hulk monster which faces of against the original. Both meet and eventually the Hulk overcomes the superior foe.
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For Loops in Javascript explained

I've been going through Javascript tutorials at Code Academy which I had blogged about a short while ago. Now I'm at the 'For' loops section finishing up the small tutorial on searching for a particular string within a text.

The Situation

The tutorial guides you to seek the first letter of the string your searching for, in this case it's your name, upon which it proceeds to push characters equal to the length of your name into an empty array.

Now I went through the motions and even though the lessons in Code Academy are the most well explained I've found anywhere about Javascript, it still took me a while to figure out what was going on.

So to cement that for me, and hopefully aid others, I will attempt to visually depict the loop structure.

For Loop Structure

The main part of the code is the For loop which ensconces an If loop containing another For loop. I believe Inception had a similar plot, but I digress.


This is the code in question
    for(var i = 0; i < text.length; i++) 
   {
       if(text[i] == "D") 

       {
           for (var j = i; j < (myName.length + i); j++) 

           {
            hits.push(text[j]); 
           }
       }
   }

The outer For loop starts at '0' and proceeds for the length of the body of text in question. Then for every character element in the body of text, which is treated as an array, the code checks for the starting letter of your name. 

The If loop, that follows immediately, checks whether the element at that particular array position is the same as the first letter of your name. If it's true then it executes the inner most loop.

The inner most For loop initializes a variable to the same count as the first loop's count. /* Now this is the part where I'm still somewhat unclear and therefore this blog post */ The loop is meant to stop when it reaches the length of your name. The tutorial achieves that by starting with the position where it encounters the initial letter of your name plus the length of your name. 
Then whatever characters follow will be pushed into the empty array, which isn't shown here but is in the full code. 

I understand the logic behind most of it but some aspects were still a bit foggy.  The way I overcame it was to visualize the logic or try to go through the flow mentally.  And it happened while I was writing this blog.

So verbally the flow goes like this:
The For and If loop - counter iterates from '0' till the array position that matches the first letter of your name. At this point the first counter stops.

Then the inner most loop starts from the position where the first two left off, which is 'i', and continues for the length of your name 'myName.length'. Each of those array elements are pushed into the empty array mentioned earlier.

Now the inner most For loop is completed due to the condition of the length of the name being met, and reverts back to the outer For loop. That cycles through the rest of the characters in the text and repeats the process if the condition is true or runs till the end and finishes the loop.

That's all folks.
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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Sony PRS-T1

I purchased Sony PRS-T1 after relatively short internal debate/debacle with the kindle touch and others. Although the main contenders were the Sony and Kindle, others were only deemed unattainable due to geographical restrictions or price.

First reaction is that this is a great device, especially when coupled with the uber empowering calibre software. However, first grips with the Sony eBook store, as well as trying to register on the store via the eReader itself has been quite perplexing. Trying to sign up to a new account is near impossible as it getting to the accept button for the EULA is not possible by scrolling or other user menu limbering. The only recourse was to go into the browser menu and set the zoom level to farthest to view the button.

However, having overcome that nuisance, I couldn't complete my registration owing to a required information field. It was the 'set your country field' and the only two options are US and Canada. clearly the ONLY countries in the world. Granted Ireland seems to be excluded from most commercial exchanges even though it is a 'First World Country.'

The Kindle was clearly better when it came to these issues with the integrated Amazon portal and sync it was a breeze and a half. The only reason I traded was the touch screen.

However, there's another niggling issue which sees me foregoing ereaders altogether - Poor viewing of pdf files. Let's not forget that PDF's have been a reckonable file format long before any ebook book formats came about. And there are numerous resources which yield readily, if not solely, as PDF documents. Added to that, PDF's are vastly superior when it comes to layout and graphics. Granted they do not flow as Ebook formats do, with a large enough screen that becomes a non-issue.

Having said this far, I've sold the Sony and don't foresee a future with me owning an eReader (unless they become sufficiently powered, colour screens and larger screen sizes).  Next on the horizon is the Samsung Galaxy Note series.
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