Movie: Grand Canyon (1991)

“Grand Canyon” [uk] is a great movie from 1991 with Danny Glover (after the 2nd “Lethal Weapon” movie) and Kevin Kline. I originally saw it when it came out and re-watched it today. It is a bit more somber in the middle than I remembered, but ends fairly upbeat. Lawrence Kasdan wrote and directed it. As an aside, he is responsible for the 2nd and 3rd original Star Wars movies having good scripts. For the new ones, George Lucas decided that he could write the scripts himself. And we all know how that turned out.

Bill Murray gives a rare interview

In August 2010, GQ published an interview with Bill Murray. It is one in only five he has done during the last 10 years. Reading it, one learns a lot of curious facts. For example, to do business with him, you have to call an 800 number and then he gets back to you – or doesn’t.

Sub-100ml products

If a container holds at most 100ml of liquid, you can take it with you in your hand luggage on an airplane. I don’t know if they were there before this regulation, but I’ve recently noticed whole shelves in shops (e.g. Rossmann in Germany) dedicated to sub-100ml products: toothpastes, deodorants, shampoos, etc. Cute and useful.



Update 2010-10-05: Looks like the 100ml limit will be lifted by 2013, thanks to new detectors that will be deployed by then. I wonder what this will do to the burgeoning sales of bottled beverages at airports.  [Source: Focus via Marianne Busch]




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Killer new GoodReader feature: PDF annotation

GoodReader is an iOS application for transfering and reading files, especially PDFs. The lastest version supports PDF annotation which is great when you have to give feedback on someone else’s work.

Finally! JavaFX script is dead

I never fully understood JavaFX script. It seemed like a nice enough language, but it neither completely replaced Java nor integrated well with it. Furthermore, some of the features of its library were sorely missing from Java, but not accessible from it. This is why it is refreshing to see the new JavaFX Roadmap. Its main tenet is that JavaFX script is being discontinued and that JavaFX becomes a framework for Java with many exciting features:

• Binding API: Well, OK, yet another one. Here is hoping that it will not be too cumbersome and find broad acceptance. The API will include observable collections (which are handy for GUI lists and tables).


• Media framework: for audio and video. About time.


• HTML5 support: parsing and display. Also desperately needed in Swing (SWT already has reasonable HTML display support).


• New table control: Apart from better looks, combining it with observable collections should get one the comfort offered by Glazed Lists.


• New rich text control.

Finally Java gets back the human resources that had been moved to JavaFX script by Sun. The new JavaFX features will make it much more appealing for developing desktop applications.



Update 2010-12-15: Why the new JavaFX makes sense