some things go away expectedly...

like this blog, for example.

i'm going to stop blogging and multiplying(to a certain extent), to give enough time for me to work on my other site which is still under wraps as of right now. once i have a working site, expect to see me there... only. =p

...and i hope it doesn't take me more than a year to get it up... =D

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some things you just don't expect to go away...

...but they do, that's the harsh reality.

it kind of blindsides you to find out that something which you've so gotten used to having around suddenly taken away. its like, waking up one day and finding out you don't have a head anymore. its sad, but at the same time on some level you do know that these things happen sooner or later. its inevitable, unavoidable and definitely not unforeseeable... but it still hurts just the same.

7th Heaven's run has ended. i wish they had a cast reunion or something before they went...

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just my luck, i had a blind date

two movie reviews today, one old and one new: Just My Luck/Blind Dating.

incidentally, both movies have Chris Pine as the leading man. i wasn't a fan before the two movies, nor have i heard of the name either.

first on the chopping block is just my luck, starred in by none other than party girl Lindsay Lohan and Chris Pine. i found it while channel surfing the hbo network. i actually wanted to see this in the theater, but i never got around to seeing it. and i'm sort of glad and at the same time regret not seeing it in the theater. bittersweet.

critics hated it, it is lindsay's lowest grossing movie to date. and i'm going to run to her defense, after all, i do have some affinity for the lovely little girl who starred in The Parent Trap. to say that the movie was bad because of her is not fair. true, she may have amplified its "baddity" but she just amplified what's bad, she did not create it. since she is the star of the movie, her role could make or break the production. in this case, her character was the weakest link. poor judgement calls by the director, producers, and the casting editor.

the first and main reason why a lot of people have problems with this movie is lindsay portraying her character. d-uh. the problem with that is seeing her in this movie confounds people as to who the character really is? i mean, she looks like a teenager, high-school type of gal in the movie. and you expect people to believe she's already working in a bustling public relations firm and is a high-powered, castrated, manhattan bitch?! come on now. her image is party-girl! she's young, she's not someone whom you'd put in that character. what were you thinking?? you'd probably have done better to cast Julia Stiles instead. and for that alone, i do not blame lindsay. she acted her age, her image, the image the studio bought, and that, obviously resulted into a hodge-podge plot and script, clearly trying to adapt to party girl's image and at the same time trying to keep the plot.

chris pine however, was better at his role. though admittedly, he is also a bit too young for the character. in fact, the whole cast is like that. but he showed that he can act, and he is good at that. in fact, he does get into his character so much that it feels like what you see on-screen is what the really is in real life.

but the absolute jewel of the movie was Samaire Armstrong. i just loved her in this movie. loved her, loved her, loved her! ok, i like girls who lets everything hang loose(nothing malicious guys[read: no offense, but there's pretty much nothing to let loose with her]), carefree but serious types. living for the moment but thinks about the future. and she's just so that! right, back to her acting. she was the one with the most personality in the whole movie, that's why she's the jewel, and that's why i absolutely loved her.

she's the one in the middle

plot wise, it could have been a lot better if they played up the conflict a whole lot more rather than "cheese"-ifying the whole deal. the one i'm talking about is the part where she want to kiss him but can't. a lot of fairy-tales use that formula liberally, so why they didn't do so here is a big misstep for me.

all in all, i'd give it 2.5 stars out of 5. watch it! ...as long as you don't have to pay for it.

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the next movie to take centerstage is Blind Dating.

this is a movie where you have the right cast, but its got a not good storyline. the script was wonderful, full of wit, though admittedly most lines aren't original and have been used here and there. i was laughing at pretty much every other scene.but seriously, how many jokes could you crack around a blind guy? at some point you realize that this is more comedy than romance. that means that there's more joke-cracking than actual plot. that sucks.

what's really off here is the pacing of the movie. at times it gets slow, even repetitive. sometimes its just right. its ridiculous. heck, for the most part you can't figure out where the story is meant to go. there's no clear and defined line as to what the conflict or resolution is. and because of this, some characters were more developed than others. some were only developed much later into the film when they should have been built-up at the beginning. the result is a film which doesn't stick with you when you walk out the theater.

but still, i loved it. there's only one lead role, which was filled-in amazingly by the guy i keep mentioning in the previous lines, and an wonderful collection of supporting roles, each a colorful and vibrant character. they are all just so lovable, so built-up(those who were at least), so natural. that's kind of what's nice with the movie. though i really wish it had a better storyline, one which doesn't zigzag around.

watch this movie, i think chris pine will be here for a long time and his next movies are to watch out for. i give this a 4 out of 5. go watch it! nice feel good movie.

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pigmatize!

i did a google search on the word pigmatize, see if mr. webster already included it in their dictionary... i came up with this site here. featuring the story of how the word pigmatize came into being. hilarious read. and no, its not yet in the dictionary, same with sourgrape/ing. =D

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sourgraping?

i got into looking up the exact definition for the word sourgraping. being that i'm best friends with google, i asked him for the definition of the word.

what's surprising is i didn't get any search result from a word definition website or even wikipedia. what i did get were blog posts from noypi bloggers.

so, is sourgraping a genuinely filipino-created word? much like pigmatizing? hmmm, i wonder...

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importing excellence in my sequel

i talked to a good friend of mine over the weekend. he wrote a program way back in the day to handle transforming of databases like, in particular it can handle converting excel files to sql statements.

lost already? well, this post is mainly for programmers and the curious.

while his script was wonderful and really graphical, i found that it was limitting. limitting because, and he knows about this too, the size of the file you are trying to convert is limited. it gobbles up resources quickly so trying to process a 10mb file will result in a 'fatal error'.

it has actually been a long time since i last used his script. why? well i found things to make my life easier.

<the easiest way to import an excel file to a mysql database is to use phpmyadmin. all you have to do is save the excel file as a CSV file or a Comma Separated Values file. from there, login to phpmyadmin, go to the table you want to import the data into, click import, and there it is!

if you don't have phpmyadmin or if the file is too big the browser might timeout uploading it, i wouldn't recommend using the command-line version built into mysql(mysqlimport thingy). too many things can go wrong. what you can do is download this little app i found in the internet which took care of that. its called the csv to sql converter. neat, huh? you can download it from here.

i had to import a 35mb csv file to a table recently. it's the zipcode database for the entire US. its huge. phpmyadmin didn't allow me to import it because it was too big, there's a 2mb limit in phpmyadmin. this app came to the rescue.

here are the steps:
1.) in excel, save the data as CSV. d-oh.
2.) run csv2sqlconverter.exe. it doesn't install into your computer, so don't worry.
3.) in the input file, browse for the CSV file.
4.) create a dummy sql file to store the result in, and browse for that in the output file.
5.) fill in the table name.
6.) fill in the field names you want your data to be inserted into(the column names/heading in excel). this is especially useful if you want to use mysql's autoincrement feature for the primary id.
7.) select whether or not you want to split the result file into smaller files. especially useful for big files, that way you can upload them safely without worry.
8.) press convert!
9.) locate the files and upload them or transfer them to the remote directory or working directory where you can access mysql via command line.
10.) open your command-line client.
11.) type in: mysql db_name < ouput_file.sql assuming no user is required, if required, adjust syntax accordingly(mysql -u user -p db_name < output_file.sql
12.) repeat step 11 for each of the output file.

there ya go! looks like a lot of stepes, but trust me, it shouldn't take more than two minutes(not counting upload time).

since we're in the topic of mysql, let me share with you a recent... encounter. i had a script which needed to pull data from 3 related tables(each having about 5k rows each). naturally, i used joins. when i deployed it in the real world, it didn't even last 5 minutes. it clogged up the database, and brought down the site. the reason? joins, by nature, are highly inefficient. in this particular case, my query, since there were additional criteria for each table being queried, pushed it to the very limit of its theoretical programming complexity: n*n*n.

the solution? there is no clear-cut solution for any situation. one very good and useful advice i can offer, like in this case, is to break down the query to smaller single table queries. the aim is to distribute the load between the database and the script. you can do that by nested loops, each loop level translating to a table in the database, with the innermost loop containing the least dependent table(in a situation where a.id = b.a_id and b.id = c.b_id and a.field_1 = something and b.field_1 = something and c.field_1 = something order by c.field_2, this is absolutely useful).

what's the difference? the difference is more likely than not, you will not need the entire result set. you'll probably just need the first 10 or 20. with a database query, the database would process all the rows and come up with the entire result set before truncating the result set to the first 10 or 20 you need. whereas in a nested loop, you can issue a break once you get the first 10! that, my friends, is the big difference, especially in the real world of shared hosting environment.

well, i hope tonight's post was of some help!

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blogger and multiply, not the perfect marriage

i was surprised this nifty little feature called cross-posting that multply is offering. so i tried importing one of my blog posts from my blogger.

bluntly: it worked. but it felt like it worked just for the sake of having the said feature.

sure, it got my post, but when it came to editing it to adapt to my multiply page's look... that's where it crumbles. i find multiply's textarea replacement a little too-limitting to the point that it takes over and tries to "clean" it up for you. but of course any person would know that the "cleaned-up" version sucks. there is a view source feature! great. but it doesn't make sense why multiply treats a carriage return as another paragraph when in "view source" mode. say, you forgive that and continue working on the underlying code. what's annoying is that perfectly logical, valid, non-malicious tags get stripped/modified while inserting some more of multiply's own tags. multply, please get rid of the "view source" tickbox if you're not serious about it.

perhaps, on last quirk is the fact that once an entry is made(imported), it is automatically treated as a blog post. big thumbs down. i imported a movie review and it's treated as a blog post. ok fine, you might argue that blogger only has blog posts so multiply imports blogger posts as blog posts. but the thing is, that's how blogger users are used to posting reviews, galleries, or what have you; as blog posts. but still, that is not reason enough to not be able to import directly into a different category.

but i guess i may be asking too much with that. thanks for the effort anyway multiply. i'll still continue using my blogger.

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what's in the mail today?

wierdness.

definitely.

about a week ago, i notced something different in my main yahoo mail account. the delete button moved. i paid little attention it until now, after a a week of clicking the wrong button.

i checked my secondary account, and since it doesn't get much mail, hence less deleting, and noticed that it still has the old toolbar set. what gives yahoo? is it because my main account receives an absurd amount of spam everyday(i receive at least 200 spams each day, if they were the real spam, i'd probably weigh a ton by now. thank God for yahoo's potent spam filter. though most of the penis enlargement stuff gets through to my inbox(i get about at least 10 a day), sometimes with pictures.)??

so i studied the differences and concluded that the move wasn't just cosmetic, new features were actually added...
well, the flag as spam was dropped. i never used that one, i've always used the not spam button when marking spam. good call on this one.
there's actually a functional and funky move button now!
checkboxes were added in the message list!

lastly, but certainly one feature which defines an ajax app, it now uses modal windows over pop-up windows. cool.

good work yahoo, keep it up... and keep up! it feel wierd to have two different ymail layout. ;-)

absolute boo-boo: i'm too lazy to correct this in photoshop, i got the old and new label for the modal window screen mixed up. d-oh!

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its black!

yep, spidey is black!

direct to the point: 3.5/5 stars.

i loved it! it was soo good, i think it was kind of perfect! then why didn't i give it 5 stars, you ask. good question.

thing is, it is a perfect example of a perfect commercial hollywood movie. you've got the hype, it delivers, you've got the actors, the characters, and the brand. it delivers in every aspect. and that's the thing, it delivers in every aspect. and we all know that if you try to be eveything, you sometimes end up as nothing.

you see, while watching this latest iteration of spidey, i found it hard to place it. is it comedy? is it drama? action? or even... horror? [yeah, some girls at the back of the theater were actually screaming] i now realized that the previous movie in the franchise did a terrific dance in balancing comedy, action and drama. forgive me, but this last movie had parts in them that were just too intense, too serious. you could say that there was too much story and that the movie got lost in the story. but don't worry, its still nothing like the harry potter movies.

it would probably have been better if they maintained the monotony[gad, such a word] of a particular genre, spiked by a little of the others. personally, it felt like a roller coaster, and not the van helsing type roller coaster sort of movie, its more like a.... comedy, then drama, then action, then drama, i mean heck! its not bad really, like a roller coaster, you do enjoy the twists and turns, its just that it makes it too... hollywood. commercial. like i said, its a great movie, really. it will make big bucks, but its not an instant classic. its too nice, its in danger of being forgotten tomorrow.

on an unexpected note, i do have to give credit to James Franco and his portrayal of Harry Osborn. he's one of the most lovable villains ever. he played his part well and he showed just how dynamic he can be. the part where he jut bumped his head and was back to his "old" self was, in my opinion, was one of the parts where he really shined. in fact, he felt like he was indeed a co-star in the movie this time around. heck, there were parts where he was the lead, and his name is not the one in the title. i think one reason is he showed that he's got the smile which could light up a room[ugh, that sounded so gay].

lastly, we saw the harry potter trailer before the movie and i'm going to make a prediction. the most unpopular book in the harry potter series[though personally, i loved that book] will have the best movie adaptation.

go watch spidey, its good. may it not be a forgotten movie.

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know what sucks...?

...what sucks is there's no option to export blog posts to something downloadable like a pdf or word or rtf or even simple plain text for backing up my blog. i guess that's one way to discourage users from leaving them. but you know what, i'll let you in on a secret, the best way to stop users from leaving you is to constantly making yourself better. same deal with relationships. you do not put shackles on your partner. its just wrong...

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