To end the uneventful weekend we watched The Punisher (Review) starring John Travolta and Thomas Lane. Not paying attention to the introductory Marvel credits I thought that the film was going to be a 'serious' credible thriller but I missed badly. There is no mistaking the film for a violent comic story because it's absolutely nothing more. The pity is that John Travolta choose to play a major part in the film. 2 stars.

What a waste! We spent $20 to watch a horror home video on a cinema screen. The film was Open Water (Review) which guess what, is yet another shark horror movie. We meant to watch "Hero" but because of our obsession with worms we were late for the film and so we missed it. To give the devout credit to the film, it was much more realistic than all the best parts of jaws put together. The problem was that it is a very low budget bordering the amateur which is a waste watching it at the cinema. The worst part of the film was by far the completely out of context nude scene at the beginning which does an excellent job of priming you towards the banal ending. 2 stars for the suspense.

This week was document writing week. I had the Revenue Management document at work and my brother's SRS assignment at home. Ironically enough, both of the documents were not my job but as usual I ended up doing all the corrections and most of the document especially at work. My brother made a big improvement in his approach toward school work because he spent 3 whole days and nights working on the document. Until 5 days ago he couldn't bear spending more than an hour doing something. What's even more surprising is that he actually is paying attention to formatting and presentation, which was something he really had to work on. Again I cannot say the same for my work colleagues who were more interested in presenting my work than doing it themselves.

For the recommendation document I needed to compare two different systems with each other. I soon realised that in all the lessons I've been through in Computer Science nobody ever thought us how to evaluate systems or conduct feasibility studies. Go figure, in all my feasibility sections of the assignments it was always feasible to implement the project. Now I'm trying to research some metrics and diagramming techniques to help with system evaluation and feasibility study. I found this good paper entitled A framework for systematic evaluation of software technologiesby A. W. Brown and K. C. Wallnau which compares two different technologies and uses two great visual techniques; an onthology diagram and a spiral diagram which I don't know what's called. In my research I also found a good document which describes Revenue Management for those interested.

Unfortunately today we had a funeral of our friend's father who passed away yesterday at the age of 71. It was very sad watching him cry knowing that he's the most funny person and clown of our group. In the afternoon it was too windy to go anywhere so we remained at home watching a travel program called Alle falde del Kilimangiaro. At a certain point there were two features of holiday videos sent by the public, and my love got the brilliant idea of sending our video. I was very pleased with the idea knowing that she wouldn't dream of doing so if she thought the video was crap. The problem now is translating the video to Italian because the program airs on the Italian channel Rai Tre.

Yesterday we went to watch The Village (review). At first we were going to watch the movie as a DivX at home but after my bro couldn’t find the movie we had to go to the cinema. It was money so well spent that I paid for both nachos and film. I will say nothing about the actual film except that the second half of the film is brilliant. Obviously you cannot like the second part without watching the first part but I encourage anyone with even the slightest like for twists in tales to watch it. If you’re not convinced yet remember that the director is the same director of The Sixth Sense. 4/5 Stars

A week has passed and instead of acclimatising myself to normality I’m getting more nostalgic and in need of a holiday. Usually my better half suffers from this effect, but this time we reversed roles. Most probably the holiday video overdose I’m undergoing is enhancing the symptoms. After a whole week I’ve only managed to edit 1 of the 6 tapes I’ve recorded. This is getting a bit tedious and the blog and holiday diary are not getting enough time.

After postponing the film Collateral (review) in favour of sleep, yesterday we went to watch it. I must say it was much better than the trailer. I like films with loads of ruthlessly killed people; most probably it has something to do with my repressed inner desires. (2 stars for the story and 4 stars for the film)

Work is too busy to blog at the moment so that's why my posts are less frequent than usual. At home I'm either very tired after work, or else I'll have Malaysia homework to do which leaves less time for words.

This week I decided to refactor my automatic download / extraction programs to make them more robust and less susceptible to un-notified errors. This need came from the fact that I realised the stupidity of users, most of which don't bother to notify you when there is a download error. People do not realise that if they don't notify me I would not know what is going on with my automatic programs. At last I decided that I had to make the programs themselves notify me if they decide to take a day off.

Now I've filled batch files with ERRORLEVEL trapping and added job failure notification in my scheduling program Automize. From experience it's much better to get e-mailed when the program is not working rather than when it is, because as time passes you start to unconsciously disregard success emails. The problem with this approach is that if the job is not run in the first place then you're not notified. It would be a great idea if a daily report can be sent at the end of the day so that at a glance you can identify the status of each job.

Hand in hand with this issue, this weekend I got interested in testing programs and frameworks. This whole testing thing is an integral part of extreme programming. It seems that the most common Java testing framework is Junit. JUnit is an open source unit testing framework, but it is extended to different variants of Java programming (like Cactus for JSP and Servlets and JUnitPerf for testing performance and scalability)

As a last note on computing, there is a good article about passwords or their lack of, in this new blog.

Yesterday we watched Gothika (review) starring Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz. At least the film proved slightly better than the newspaper articles. The first part could have been much more interesting but at the end of the second part the story gets interesting. 2.5 Stars.

While waiting for the next book on Ceausescu's Romania I've just finished reading The land of green plums an autobiographic account by Romanian born Herta Muller (1953) translated from German by Michael Hofman.

The story sees a group of university students living during the reign of the dictator in a nation ruled by suspicion, fear and hatred. Muller kicks off by describing Lola, a student whose liberal sexual desires attract a member of the party. As soon as he's fed up with Lola she is found hanged in her little cubic dormitory that hosts another 6 girls one of which is the narrator. The author then meets three friends who are "looking for someone who shared Lola's room", as the reality of the suicide is put to doubt. The group starts meeting regularly, singing folk songs, writing poetry and reading German books. This behaviour in turn attracts the attention of Romanian's big brother – the Securitate.

The hardships and traumatic experiences the young quartet face are amazing. They go to great effort to avoid the tentacles of omnipresent prying Securitate with the ultimate goal of emigrating from Romania, at the risk of death.

The style of the prose takes some time to get used to. With no clearly defined story line the narrator moves through her psychological evolution which is transmitted through a series of events. The book probably explains why people are so diffident of strangers in their country. Anybody living during the reign of the dictator has suspicion and fear carved deeply inside him to the point of making suspicion a reflex emotion. 4 Stars.

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Last Friday's wedding was a lesson in solidrinking (solitude drinking). After we nodded our way through the crowed we stuck to the bar like leeches and disregarded the entire reception. The only thing worth noting about the event was the simplicity of a civil wedding. The food was quite scarce although our location was not a favourite with waiters. We managed to leave before the final celebrations and the night end in the best idiom for the day – my mate vomiting!

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We've just been to the movies and watched the sequel of the whole nine yards, which was very originally called The whole ten yards (review) starring Bruce Willis (Jimmy Tedeski) and Matthew Perry (Oz). The original film was by far better than this strained comedy which was only saved by Matthew Perry (but I happen to like him). Some of the humour like the nanny farting every second and the dozen burps with a bottle of beer could only make primates giggle. The story is about a gang of Hungarian killers who want to kill hitman Bruce Willis, who's lost all the dignity of his glory days and turned into a wimp crying more often than a toddler. One can easily imagine what happens next. 2 Stars.

Try to guess this one; What managed to keep me away from my PC in a whole day locked up in my room? … gastrointestinitis. After all the praying to get sick, I spent the whole Czech Republic vs Greece football match vomiting every quarter of an hour, and was confined to bed for the whole of yesterday. What's more this virus spreads like the sasser, because even my better half got the virus just by watching the game together. Thinking on the positive side, this is a good way to start my summer diet after three days drinking only water.

I was meant to write this review on Thursday but I had to safeguard the PC from my vomit frenzy. On Wednesday we watched Monster (review) starring Charlize Theron and Cristina Ricci. The movie is based on the true story drama of America's first female serial killer Aileen Wuornos. To play the part of Wuornos a hooker turned serial killer, Charlize Theron transformed herself beyond recognition to great effect. The story starts with the friendship (love) between Wuornos and Selby Wall (Christina Ricci) who escape together in search for the American dream. When the hardships of life fail to cease, Wuornos restarts her old hooker job to get some cash. One day one of her johns gets violent and she kills him as an act of self defence. This experience starts a snowball effect, adding the victim count by another 5. Since the film is based on a true story there's little suspense and a lot of drama. On thing is crystal clear though, Charlize Theron fully deserved the Oscar for this masterpiece. 4 Stars for the movie / 5 stars of Charlize performance.