We bought the book on 21 July and have finished it on 27 July.
No spoilers here.
J.K. has spent 17 years writing and we have spent 10 years reading about the world of Harry Potter. Now that it is over, I share J.K.'s feelings of being "elated and devastated."
I, too, will miss them.
Source: New York Magazine
The fifth Harry Potter was just released and speculation is beginning as to who will be cast for Half-Blood Prince which is set to start filming in September.
This article in New York magazine tosses a few names for the roles and some of the choices do make sense: (I like Bill Nighy)
-- Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn
-- Bill Nighy as Rufus Scrimgeour
-- Daniel Day-Lewis as Marvolo Gaunt
-- Kristin Scott Thomas as Narcissa Malfoy
-- Ian McShane as Fenrir Grayback
-- Michael Sheen as the Prime Minister
Of course all of these are purely the author's ideas as to who should play the characters. We really don't have an idea who will or won't be in the movie.
Expect some casting news in the coming weeks.
JULY 15, 2007 at 4:02 PM - Source: Yahoo! News
This shouldn't be a surprise to fans but with only five days of release behind it Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has garnered over $330 million from worldwide sales.
Domestically the movie has grossed $140 million since opening last Wednesday, making it the number one movie this weekend in the U.S. where it made $77.4 million. Overseas the movie reaped more than $190 million.
By comparison, in its first five days the movie is $30 million ahead of Goblet of Fire and over $40 million ahead of the last summer Potter release, which was Prisoner of Azkaban. Still, the fifth movie in the franchise didn't make as much in total as the previous movies for weekend tallies.
Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. said:
We're in the middle of summer, and we just said why not, because kids are out of school. It certainly turned out to be the right decision.
Order of the Phoenix did more business in five days than each of the first three Harry Potter movies did in their first full week, and it nearly matched the $146 million first week total of the fourth film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
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We were among the first to experience the movie - We were in the audience when Order of the Phoenix made its premier in Westlands Nairobi at the Fox Cineplex Sarit Center on Friday the 13th.
The book was very large, so some things got left out, but overall it was a great movie.
GO SEE IT!
Almost a year ago, David Brin wrote an article in Salon.com explaining Why Johnny can't code. Though I didn't read the article until today, it reflects feelings I have had for several years.
Way back in 1984, I had a High School Chemistry teacher named Rodney Land. There is not much from High School chemistry that survives in my brain to this day, except the importance of units.
Mr. Land used to make it a point, usually a humorous point, of driving into us the importance of units. "If you don't talk about units, you're not talking about anything." He'd ask the class about the forecast high for today. Someone would call out an answer, "85." His response would be, "85 what? ... sheep?" Then he'd ask about the speed limit on the road in front of the school. Though we had a drivers' license, and most of us drove to school by then, only a few would know the answer and call out, "25." To this he would say something like, "25 what? ... cows?" This importance of units has served me well, but not, perhaps, the way Mr. Land intended.
In 1981, I began at high school. Through a fortunate chance, the county where we lived had a program called "Program Challenge." Those students who scored high enough on certain tests were allowed to take extra courses, not required for the general attendance. It was in "Program Challenge" that I was personally introduced to computers. A friend of my mother was taking a programming course at a local college and I had assisted her with the punch cards on which her FORTRAN code was stored, but I was not personally involved with the computer until I sat down in front of the high school's only Commodore PET.
The PET was officially a business computer. When you turned it on, it came up in BASIC and said "READY." A cassette tape drive was the only storage method available to this computer and it sported a monochrome green monitor. After an hour or two using the computer, I would have afterimages of the letters and numbers in my eyes for hours. I spent a year learning to program in BASIC on that computer, and I was hooked.
In college, I took programming - FORTRAN, PASCAL, ASSEMBLER - all on the mainframe. After changing colleges, I was introduced to TurboPascal and didn't take to it, so I returned to BASIC or it's newer incarnation - QuickBasic. It was during college that PCs for the home and many businesses became affordable. I was in the middle of that wave as well and sold, assembled, repaired, and installed many PCs. I, finally, veered from the path of pure Computer Science, because the degree holders may have been fine coders, but they could not conceive of the hardware on which their programs ran, they could not swap out a floppy drive or format a hard drive - they were too removed from the units.
One of my first jobs after college was as a Computer Technician for a local testing lab. It was there, Mr Land's "units" teaching returned to me. While trying to explain computer conditions, problems, and solutions to the people I worked with, we kept tripping over the terminology or the "units." To assist the people in become more computer conversant, I designed and conducted several training sessions with the staff to make them aware of what a computer was - on the inside, the parts, how they interconnected and worked as a unit. To this day, when conversations get confused and we trip over terminology or concepts, I return to a more basic level and we establish common units from which we can build understanding.
My time in school, plus a couple of years either way, was the high time for coding. Don't misunderstand me, people make good livings coding today, but kids in school do not, for the most part, ever touch code. The basics of the Internet, eMail, Web Browsers, Business Collaboration applications and our Operating Systems (Windows, OS X, Linux, etc.) would not exist today were it not for these coders and their skills.
Within a year of graduating college, Windows for Workgroups was released and within 3 years, Windows 95 was out. Once DOS has become the "dark side" instead of the place where everything begins, coding became less of a place to start and more of the last resort.
Today, kids in school, and this is very apparent in the Middle and High school where my kids attend, the concentration is on using tools instead of creating your own. Programming is relegated to college, whereas most other Math and Science topics are moving the other way with the Middle School introducing Chemistry, Biology, and Algebra.
These kids are whizzes at using the applications they have been taught in technology class. They can make the best presentations and pretty documents, but I think that it is wrong to have to wait until college to start programming. However, as all computers in the 1980's came with BASIC installed, none of the computers today come with anything that could be used by an interested student to easily get into programming. The current and upcoming generations of computing students are being guided into the "computer consumer" role - not giving the option of becoming "computer creators" if they desire. This Geek Gap is along the same lines our fathers knowing all about engines, their tuning and repair, and the generation gap of many of my fellows being barely able to change the oil or change a flat tire.
I have tried to pass along my knowledge by tutoring individual students in computer hardware, but now it is time to help more. Now it is time to take my many years of breaking the tasks down to explain them to business people and teach a new generation the logic and basic skills of programming. Whether they continue in programming or not, the skill of breaking a job into smaller tasks and ordering the tasks logically will benefit them for many years.
At The Capitol School, students have had technology class in addition to their normal classes for a few years (my wife having taught them 2 years ago). Now, I am constructing an Introduction to Computer Programming curriculum as an elective addition to their technology classes. I plan to utilize a version of ChipmunkBASIC (that runs on Mac and Windows), Squeak, Scheme, and Python.
from The Seattle Times
What: The Phrogram Company, based in Kent
What is does: Develops programming language that attempts to simplify computer development by making code read more like English.
History: Spun off from Morrison Schwartz, a computer consulting group started by Walt Morrison and Jon Schwartz.
KPL 1.0: The initial idea was to create a way to encourage kids to program. The first version of the software was called Kid’s Programming Language, and was launched in July last year.
International: The program was downloaded more than 100,000 times, Schwartz said, and grew in popularity as people voluntarily translated it into 17 languages.
KPL 2.0: After achieving so many downloads, Schwartz said Phrogram wanted to broaden the idea to include anyone who wants to make a computer program. He said computer games or programming, for example, could become as common as making videos and uploading them to the Internet. The new version, launched about three weeks ago, is called Phrogram, a play on “frog” and “program.”
Side-by-side: Schwartz said there’s a key difference between Phrogram and a programming language like C++. He said code is traditionally written with blocks of logic between curly braces — the { and } keys. A block of logic in Phrogram says: “If something is true, then do something.” Said Schwartz: “It’s easier to get started if what you are looking at and what you are typing is more like English.”
The outcome: Schwartz said Phrogram cuts down on the amount of code a person has to write. For instance, to control a 3-D spaceship as it flies around on the screen, it takes 35 instructions with Phrogram. In other languages, it would take 10 times as many.
Solving a crisis: Schwartz said the four-person company hopes it can begin to address the fact that fewer students are interested in computer programming in college. If the process becomes simpler, and if you make it more fun by teaching people to program games, popularity could increase. “One of our slogans is if you can read and type, then you can program,” he said.
Nitty-gritty: The software can be downloaded free from phrogram.com/, but versions are available for about $50 that allow developers to share a game or program they build without having to share the code.
from writer.live.com
Windows Live Writer Beta is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog.
Before installing Windows Live Writer Beta, please review the release notes.
Writer can publish to Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.
Writer knows your blog's visual theme. So you can see exactly what your posts will look like as you write them, before you publish. No more wasting time previewing your posts online.
Writer makes publishing rich media as easy as sending e-mail. Insert and customize photos, maps, tags, and lots of other cool content—then click the “Publish” button. It’s that easy.
Creating compelling blog posts is much easier with the ability to insert and edit tables, check spelling as you type, and format and hyperlink content at your fingertips.
Now you can blog anytime, from anywhere. Writer synchronizes drafts on your blog with changes you make when you're offline, so you don't have to worry about reconciling different versions.
I have tried this application and found that it is pretty good.
There was a problem initially loading the configurations for my Blogger blogs, but this was due to the Writer's analysis of the blogs, their templates, styles, and formats. A current problem with the Writer is it may time out if there are several images in blog posts. I had just uploaded several images from an outing and it timed out a few times before loading it finally.
Something else I am going to have to see how works are images... The Writer gives only 2 options regarding images - do not upload them or upload to an FTP location. I'm not sure that is going to work with Blogger, so I may have to go back to uploading the images to Photobucket and linking to them from there.
I'll let you know how it goes.
(I'm posting this entry with the Writer)
