Ong-Bak

Ong Bak Kick

I watched “Fearless”, a film starring Jet Li, some time ago and was very disappointed. Jet Li’s (sword-) fighting skills were completely destroyed by the massive use of CGI and jumps with invisible ropes. The fighting scenes and stunts looked completely ridiculous.

When I heard that Ong-Bak did not use any CGI or rope tricks, then I knew that I had to see it. And I was not disappointed: the stunts and the fighting scenes were outstanding.

Update: I also watched the “Making Of”, it’s quite interesting, they studied every stunt very long before performing it in front of the camera.

Pi

Just in case you are wondering where I got the name from. I watched Pi about a week ago the second time.

Pi is about a number theory freak, who is figuring out a system to predict stock prices. The main figure, Maximillian Cohen, is a mathematical genious, but also a complete freak, obsessed with the goal to describe everything in nature with math. To reach his goal he takes drugs and works all day and night (this reminds me a bit of the biography of some mathematicians like Paul Erdos)

The film is in black and white only and therefore looks very old, also the computer that max uses is very old. To my surprise the film was made in 1998, which is not that far ago.. The soundtrack is mostly techno drum ‘n bass, which fits well to the movie.

I can highly recommend to watch that movie, it’s interesting, exciting and has some relation to the reality. (youtube has it, in case you don’t know where to get it)

2007-09-20 | Posted in: Blog, math | Comments Closed

Firebug

Firebug is really an innovative and very useful tool if you do web development.

For now I used it for 2 things:

  • Debugging AJAX and JavaScript: If you alter the pages HTML with js (eg you send back js from an AJAX request, which alters the html), the page source displayed by Firefox does not change. As a workaround, you can use the Firefox’s DOM inspector and copy it from there. However with Firefox you can track and debug Ajax much more comfortable
  • Editing Style Sheets: Editing CSS with a text editor and a browser can be quite painful, you have to edit it and then reload the site (and if you don’t like it you have to do it again and again) Of course there are WSWYNG tools, but a good alternative is using Firebug. You can edit the css within the browser and see the result immedate. Also a cool feauture is that it displays the color of the RGB code if you move the mouse over it. So far I just miss an feature, which let’s me save the edited css (and select all did also not work..)

Ah yes, I almost forgot. It also lets you execute js code in an interactive shell, similar to Ruby’s IRB or the python shell.

You can get Firebug from here: http://www.getfirebug.com/

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