Transformers: Animated

Transformers: Animated series are coming to Cartoon Network in Spring, 2008. The preview videos look pretty much good.

Article on Wikipedia

Transformers

It seems that Transformers had caused a great interest… Sure it had: it’s a big movie, based on a great cartoon. Well, I must admit I was just a kid last time I saw the cartoon, so I don’t remember all the details. Though, I’m pretty much sure about few things:

• The cartoon wasn’t overloaded with commercials. Too bad I can’t say that for the movie. It goes like this: “Ok, I’m taking my memory card out of the reader… Let’s wait for two seconds. Ok, everyone saw that it’s a Panasonic 2GB memory card, let’s pass it on.”. Or, how about the scene where the Bumblebee transforms from a piece of crap into a Chevrolet? eBay?
• Megatron speaks English? Well, according to Optimus Prime, they learned English over the Internet. Megatron had been frozen since 1934. Internet existed back in 1934?
• America, the land of free… In my opinion, it was all too political. The US of A’s minister of defense is in doubt if they are being attacked by the Chinese, the North Koreans, or the Russians… The war in Iraq… Not the right movie for that kind of stuff.

Sure, it’s not all so black…

• The music is just great… It fits the movie perfectly. I can’t wait for the soundtrack .
• And the special effects, too. I was astonished. The robots and the transformations are perfect. And the fighters flying between the skyscrapers…
• I want Bumblebee …

Overall, I can say that I like the movie… It’s the Transformers, after all .

Something-something sucks…

I don’t know how and why I got the idea to do this little test, but I got it. Oh, I was bored at the moment, I guess that’s it . So, here’s what I did:

• get a company/product name
• check if there’s a <name>sucks.com site

Among Windows’, Mac’s, Red Hat’s and other *sucks.com sites, I tried what happens in case of Ubuntu and Canonical.

• canonicalsucks.com leads to Ubuntu’s page.

• ubuntusucks.com takes you to Launchpad’s bug page for Ubuntu.

I was most surprised by the last one. See… At Ubuntu, they care for their users :sweetface:.

getString/getFormattedString in JS and XUL

I’ve been working on one Firefox extension lately. As with most of the them, there was a need to work with strings . It had the stringbundleset, with defined stringbundles. We also needed a getString and getFormattedString (gS/gFS) functions for the class. Well, it seemed easy enough: try to fetch from the first bundle, check if the string is null, if it is, try to fetch from the second bundle (got used to C++ )…

I’ve looked up on the Internet to see what does stringbundle’s gS/gFS returns. Their definition can be found at MDC’s page on stringbundles. Unluckily, there’s no info what happens if a string is not found. Luckily, MDC’s tutorial on property file says that gS/gFS returns null in that case. I tried that and it didn’t work. It would just throw an exception.

So, I searched through the code to see if there’s some other gS/gFS (which I should have done in the start). There was one other class that had them. No “if (!string)” testing, but catching an exception . If you bumped upon this problem, here’s an example of the solution:

var result;
try {
  result = document.getElementById(stringBundleFirst).getString(key);
}
catch (e) {
  result = document.getElementById(stringBundleSecond).getString(key);
}
return result;

Happy coding .

You know it’s Monday… (GNOME way)

…if GNOME is celebrating it’s 10th birthday. (yeah, it was yesterday)

GNOME and I met few years ago when I first installed Red Hat, but that didn’t last for some reasons. But, few months ago I stumbled upon Ubuntu, which made me forget Windows… I got addicted to GNOME (and Ubuntu) and it fulfills all of my needs. I hope that our relationship will last for more than next ten years .

So, happy birthday GNOME… Wish you all the best .

You know it’s Tuesday…

Too bad it’s not Monday, it would be a nice cliche…

Last night I went to bed around 5am. I was planning to get up at noon, but that isn’t going quite well. Some car alarm turned on and woke me up at 6am. I slept somehow for the next two hours, but then I got up. I think it turned off now (finally!). I hadn’t thought that there is someone who could leave their car alarm on for almost three hours, even if it’s broken…

So… You know it’s Tuesday when the car alarm wakes you up…

Good morning.

Hello world!

Well, “Hello world” it is …