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)
With the state's weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.
Riley encouraged Alabamians to pray "individually and in their houses of worship."
"Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for his blessings and to hold us steady during times of difficulty," Riley said. "This drought is without question a time of great difficulty."
NASA’s Gravity Probe B Relativity Mission shot into space about 3 years ago, with only one goal—to quantify Einstein’s predictions from Earth’s orbit. Earlier this year, at the meeting of the American Physics Society, principal investigator Francis Everitt of delivered the first results: Gravity Probe B has verified Einstein’s theory.
Another incredible discovery will be officially announced later this year. Not only did Einstein say that the universe curves around these massive bodies, he said they also “drag” space behind them, which creates a twist in the cosmic fabric. Everitt says his team will soon announce verification of this “frame dragging” effect, as well.
The experiment used four near-perfect spherical gyroscopes, each the size of a Ping-Pong ball, which formed the core of the experiment. These specific gyroscopes are the most perfectly spherical man-made objects in existence, as noted in the Guinness World Records. At the beginning of the experiment, the gyroscopes’ axes pointed to a distant star; as the spacecraft moved around Earth for nearly a year, the researchers carefully monitored the position of the axes.
Einstein’s theory predicts that the axes should shift by 0.0018 degree under the influence of Earth’s pull on space-time. After 18 months of data analysis, Everitt and his team used 18 months of data and concluded that the axial shift was a near perfect match of Einstein’s prediction. Everitt, a Stanford physicist who has spent more than 40 years on the project, says the results are quite sweet. “It’s really extraordinary to look at the output and see Einstein looking back, without any calculations or corrections,” he says. “This measurement is unprecedented in any test of general relativity.”
But was it worth it? The project cost $750 million and we all figured he was right beforehand. I mean, come on, it’s Einstein! At any rate, we now know for certain, and our near religious worship of the genius can continue undisturbed.
The project was first conceived way back in 1959, but was cancelled and restarted over seven times by NASA officials who wondered if the project was really worth the time and money.
No one can say for certain what the findings are worth in monetary terms, but for now Everitt and his colleagues get to bask in the light of being right. “You don’t get to do extremely worthwhile programs without fighting for them,” He adds.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More InfoI stated again, 'You are being rude to me and I want to speak to your supervisor'. Officer Wingate then said, 'Look, you're wasting our time. We were on a call to the Humphrey Terminal for a runaway teenage girl, and we would have been there by now.' I completely agreed that it was a waste of time for everybody. I noted that I was not being cited for any violation, nor told any statute that I had violated. I explained that I would follow the first and most reasonable, safety-wise, of the conflicting orders given to me, and then said 'I'm going to wish you both a good evening, and hope the rest of it goes better than this has gone.' I then got on my bike and began to leave.
Founded by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle and Jerry Weintraub, Not On Our Watch aims to use the powerful voices of prominent artists to focus attention and resources on global humanitarian crises. The organization is working through established aid groups like the International Rescue Committee by supporting vital relief efforts on the ground.
The first initiative aims to help uprooted people in the Darfur region of Sudan. Not On Our Watch will support programs that treat the sick, prevent the spread of disease, shelter the displaced, enable children to heal and learn, teach new skills, promote human rights and offer protection to the most vulnerable.
To kick off the fundraising effort, Warner Brothers Studios, together with Vanity Fair and CineVegas, are hosting benefit screenings of the new film Ocean's Thirteen, which is produced by Weintraub and features Clooney, Pitt, Damon and Cheadle.
The International Rescue Committee has been a lifeline to people impacted by violent conflict in Sudan for 26 years and currently provides vital aid to more than 700,000 people in dire need of help in the Darfur region.
The new organization Not On Our Watch, founded by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle and Jerry Weintraub, announced a donation today of $2.75 million to the International Rescue Committee to support the group's humanitarian aid programs in the Darfur region."The International Rescue Committee is at the forefront of providing lifesaving humanitarian assistance in Darfur," says Clooney, who visited IRC programs in Sudan and Chad last year.
Clooney was speaking in Chicago today, where Not On Our Watch announced the gift ahead of a benefit premiere of Ocean's Thirteen. The fundraiser caps a series of benefits, hosted by Warner Brothers Studios, Vanity Fair and CineVegas, aimed at raising funds for Darfur relief efforts.
"The Darfur crisis is not going away and hundreds of thousands of people continue to rely on our aid programs for survival," says George Rupp, president of the IRC. "These funds will help the IRC to treat the sick, provide clean water, prevent outbreaks of disease, deliver emergency shelter supplies, expand healing and learning programs for children and increase protection for the most vulnerable."
Not On Our Watch was launched last month and aims to use the influence and reach of prominent artists to spotlight underreported violent conflicts and atrocities around the world and raise funding for needed humanitarian assistance.
"Celebrities such as these have a unique ability to turn the world's attention to forsaken emergencies, access those who can effect change and generate significant resources to address critical humanitarian needs," says Rupp. "We are grateful for their dedication and goodwill and are committed to using the funding to aid some of the world's most desperate people."
For more information visit http://www.theIRC.org and
http://www.notonourwatchproject.org
There's an environmental storm about to hit the technology industry. Information and communication technology accounts for 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, according to Gartner. That's the equivalent of the airline industry.
The big question: What are technology executives going to do about it?
For starters, get more efficient. Gartner analyst Simon Mingay says the bright side is that there are so many inefficiencies in IT that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to bring down CO2 emissions.
However, regulators, product vendors, IT managers and businesses have to be on the same page, said Mingay at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.
In either case, CIOs have to prepare for another issue to worry about–carbon emission caps. If an enterprise is subject to carbon emission caps or involved with a carbon trading scheme it's highly likely that the CIO is going to be asked to cap power use pronto.
"Whether you believe in climate change or not, you have to prepare for that reality," says Mingay. "There's a mistaken belief that IT organizations will be able to continue to consume the power they do today."
Mingay says it's very plausible that CIOs will have to cut IT power consumption. It's also possible that environmental groups could start targeting heavy technology users. "The question is not why should you bother, but what are the risks if you do nothing," says Mingay. Gartner is projecting that by 2010, 50 percent of IT organizations will declare an environmental policy.
CIO goals should be to start a debate about an environmental policy, define a strategy, measure CO2 emissions and create procurement guidelines to improve your company's environmental standing.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program is moving ahead with orders from Nigeria, and strong interest in the machines from Uruguay, Nigeria, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, and Libya. The computers are destined to be the possessions of the kids, not the schools so the kids will have an incentive to take care of them.
The specs for this small laptop are impressive, the first models, the OLPC XO-1 will have:
First thoughts are that the amount of memory seems tiny and 1Gig storage... even tinier, but the OS is very efficient and I can remember being impressed by a lot less not so long ago. Besides, with the price of 1Gb, 2Gb, and larger USB flash drives coming down, additional storage shoudl not be a problem.
Other benefits: no bloatware (that heinous stuff that you never want that ships on your brand new laptop and takes up space/processor power), no capslock (because who uses it anyway), AND peer to peer everything ('bout time!)
Tech support may be the Achilles heel of the project. Not much has been said of the OLPC tech support. In areas where there is little or no communications infrastructure this could be a concern.
more info: OLPC
WiTricity works on the principle of magnetic coupled resonance. The MIT team built matching copper coils to precise specifications, so that when power was applied to one coil, it produces a magnetic frequency - in the MHz range, since you wanted to know - which causes the other coil to vibrate up to 7ft (over 2 meters) away. Meanwhile, other elctromagnetic fields, such as those surrounding computers, cell phones, and human beings, remain largely unaffected.
The scientists were able to light up a 60-watt bulb that had "no physical connection" with the power-generating appliance. "It was quite exciting," Soljacic said. The process is "very reproducible," he added. "We can just go to the lab and do it whenever we want."
Aside from the implications in clutter management (who wouldn't want to get rid of that tangle of wires behind the desk? Ugh!) there's a green component, too - imagine a world without the need for batteries and their weight, inefficiency, short life span and toxic chemicals. Current battery technologies are around 80-90% efficient at best, losing energy through heat and self-discharge; WiTricity is currently capable of about half that, but for a proof of concept that's pretty darn good. The group envisions a product which could supplant batteries in cell phones, Roombas, laptops, and other household items which require frequent charging.
source: MIT News Office
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The explosion went off shortly after 0800 (0500 GMT) at the City Gate Restaurant near the Ambassadeur Hotel between Tom Mboya Street and Moi Avenue.
Shop windows nearby were shattered and the area has now been cordoned off as anti-terrorist police with sniffer dogs comb the scene for further explosives.
Johnson Nyaga, eyewitness
The spot is usually busy with huge traffic as morning commuters change buses and rush to work. A junction outside the restaurant is one of the key picking and dropping points for buses in the city.
A local media photojournalist, William Oeri, reported seeing at least two body parts and a ripped off leg at the scene.
“Personal items are strewn all over the place,” he said.
Robert Maritim said he had been having his shoes shined near the blast and believed the dead man was a street sweeper.
Kenyatta National Hospital confirmed receiving 31 victims of the blast, six of them with serious injuries, being reported as in critical condition.
Security teams rushed to the area and cordoned off the scene as others searched the debris for evidence.
Some witnesses have claimed that the blast was triggered by a man who seemed to have been waiting for a bus.
"It was a very loud explosion. I thought it was a tyre burst but it was louder than that," Lang'at Justice, a 20-year-old student who witnessed the explosion, told Reuters near the chaotic scene.
According to the BBC, al-Qaeda is claiming responsibility for the attack, however this claim was not reported in either the local reports nor by the Aljazeera network. A senior policeman said that it is suspected that the attacker may have been a suicide bomber, but that has not been confirmed.
