Movie Reviews

HULK: The main thing I remember about this movie is that it was rather long (over 2 hours) and the Hulk looked kind of fake although I got used to it. The one thing I didn't get used to was that the Hulk was a lot bigger than he traditionally has been in the comic book, cartoon or TV series with the average person only being about waist high to him.

The movie seemed to take itself a bit to seriously which translated to there being a lot more dramatic scenes and less action compared to other Marvel super hero films of the last year or so (Spider Man, Daredevil, X2, etc) although when Bruce Banner finally did "Hulk out" the scenes were fantastic. One thing that stuck out when they finally had Hulk taking down military planes and tanks was the way the movie went out of its way to show that Hulk didn't kill anyone despite the havok he was wreking across the land.

RATING: *** out of *****

SPY KIDS 3D: After noticing that the Spy Kids series of movies seem to have been good enough to go all the way up to having a trilogy I decided to check them out boy was I sorely disappointed. The first clue should have been when the girl at the counter gave me a pair of 3D shades.

The large amount of celebrity talent (Antonio Banderas, Selma Hayak, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Buscemi, Elijah Wood, etc) didn't change the fact that the movie was just a bunch of semi-related special effects shots strung together with the flimsiest of plots.

Just because it's a kids movie doesn't mean it has to be devoid of plot, full of hammy overacting and a pain to watch.

RATING: * out of *****

T3: This was better than I expected but then again I expected a total pile of steaming crap. Instead I got a decent action movie with good stunts, a nice pace and lots of explosions.

RATING: *** out of *****

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What's Wrong With This Picture?

From a recent eWeek article

At the W3C, if a person changes affiliation, there is an automatic resignation, and a new representative needs to be appointed. Often, the same person is reappointed, said W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly, in Cambridge, Mass

It's rare that I find a quote in the press that adequately sums up exactly why I despise the W3C standards process.

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RSS Bandit Keyboard Shortcuts

Torsten has been busy responding to feedback from various folks and has added a number of keyboard shortcuts to the current build of RSS Bandit. I've been way to busy with work and a number of article committments over the past few weeks to do much on RSS Bandit let alone anything much with BlogX. With the XML Journal article done and the spec work for most of the classes I own mostly done I plan to get an RSS Bandit release out next weekend (nine days from now not two days from now).

If I can hit that date (and work on some perf issues) I'll shoot for this month's Extreme XML column being a followup to my somewhat popular Building A Desktop News Aggregator article.

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XQuery BOF at PDC

I've seen growing interest in XQuery over the past few weeks and I'm considering organizing an XQuery Birds of a Feather at PDC. I'll definitely be there along with Arpan who is the PM for XML Query (XPath, XQuery, XSLT) on my team. I think I should be able to get one of our standards folks there as well, either Paul Cotton or Michael Rys. The question is whether there'll be enough interest amongst PDC attendees to take a shot at organizing it.

PS: The Microsoft XQuery demo site is still down. We are working with the IT folks to replace the faulty equipment and get the site back online. There is no ETA for when the site will be back up but I'll post about it when it does. I hope this addresses the concerns of the various people who have inquired about the site's downtime.

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.