The Incredible Hulk is hollow. Discuss.

There are spoilers in here, you’ve been warned. I have not read a single review, these are my opinions after seeing the movie just now.

• Every underground chamber is well lit, even at night.
• A torch is always available, as well.
• Scary looking natives have nothing better to do than hide in chamber walls waiting for intruders.
• Unlimited numbers of bad guys can never shoot Indiana Jones, regardless of how many machine guns they wield.
• Every other scene must show IJ casting the classic hat shadow.
• He finds artifacts nobody else could find for hundreds of years just by blowing away some webs and pushing on some key rocks.
• The bad guys always have operatives in far away places, always able to locate him. (They are geniuses when it comes to following and tracking Dr. Jones, but apparently complete morons when it comes to shooting machine guns or finding the artifacts themselves.)
• Good guys can fall 50′ onto rocks and never break bones.
• When a waterfall is involved, add a few hundred feet. No problem.
• I did not detect the Wilhelm Scream in this movie. Amazing, considering how formulaic and predictable everything else was. Oops…according to Wikipedia, they DID use the Wilhelm Scream.
• Didn’t they have a car chase in one of the other movies?
• Space aliens? Are you kidding me?
• A monkey army?
• Gunpowder tossed in the air floating towards the box?

I give this movie 2 out of 10 stars. The first star is for the ants, which were cool. The second star is for my boys, who loved everything about this movie.

SMOP = Simple Matter Of Programming

I think I saw this on Digg a few weeks ago…or perhaps somewhere else. Anyway, I think this is a great idea:

Popup Scrollbar Concept Demo

It seems to address some very obvious limitations of scrollbars, I like the little triangle when the “thumb” gets down to 1 pixel, and I like that it’s easier to grab quickly with the mouse without having to very precisely point at the exact right spot. I suspect that GUIs supporting quick gestures are a lot more productive than GUIs requiring super precise pointing and clicking.

I do not have time to work on this, but I wonder if anyone out there is interested in putting together a Swing implementation of this component?

Next question…is this component a new innovation, or is this something that already exists, for instance, in OSX or some other GUI toolkit?

Damn. Today I was really hooked by a few great conversations…I was FIRED UP about some things…and Twitter GOES DOWN AGAIN. So I made this. Enjoy.

When approaching a Death Star landing bay, it usually looks like a side approach:

Unfortunately, your artificial gravity generator is broken. From your perspective, as you approach the landing bay, does it feel more like a vertical drop?

As you get closer, does your perspective immediately “flip” from the horizontal to the vertical sensation, or does it feel more like a sickening plunge over the edge of a giant roller coaster?

And how about those people working in the landing bays. For them, it seems like the bay is on the “side” of the Death Star. So I guess Death Star gravity must be machine-generated, because it always pulls “down”, rather than towards the center of the sphere.

If, like Twitter, the gravity generator fails, wouldn’t people fly towards the center of the station? For people on the top level, this is no problem. But people working in the side landing bays would fly towards the inside walls, and people on the “bottom” levels would fly toward the ceiling.

Is there zero gravity at the center of the station? (again, assuming the artificial gravity is temporarily broken)

Bad…what is the data type of the customer ID?

public Customer getCustomer(Object customerId) { ... }

Better…but a null customer ID makes no sense:

public Customer getCustomer(Integer customerId) { ... }

Best:

public Customer getCustomer(int customerId) { ... }

Anyone wanting to learn more about Sketchup should definitely check out Design. Click. Build.

I spent more time than I care to admit designing this Adirondack chair in Sketchup:

I then built a prototype, which consumed an entire weekend.

Unfortunately, my chair is not remotely comfortable. Maybe I should stick to tables.

Inspired by @dalmaer.

This is my first comic using Adobe Illustrator CS3. First impressions:

• Illustrator is very expensive, so it had better kick ass.
• Keybindings are highly unexpected and surprising, not like other graphics apps I’ve used. Why not Ctrl-D to duplicate the selection? Or Esc to unselect?
• Selecting was awkward in many ways.
• I really found myself wishing I could easily drag with the mouse to pan around.
• I really missed Xara’s ability to draw gradients and transparencies by simply dragging interactively on the drawing, rather than clicking through tiny little popup windows.
• Drawing lines, like the arms on the little people, did some unexpected fills between points, obscuring graphics beneath.
• Export to PNG is broken. Wow, unbelievable. Regardless of the resolution I tried, I always received an error. I had to copy to the clipboard, and then paste into another program in order to generate the PNG shown above.
• Getting that gradient right was extremely weird, it took quite a long time with many failed trips back and forth between those annoying, tiny little toolbar windows before I figured out how to adjust the colors.

Overall, Illustrator feels very old-school, with lots of tiny menus, toolbars, popups, and tedious context switching. Contrast this with something like Sketchup. First impressions with Sketchup are generally along the lines of: Holy crap…this kicks ass! I have no doubts I could slog through Illustrator and perhaps eventually become proficient, but this is my hobby and should be fun.

The whole reason I’m looking at other illustration programs is because Xara’s export filters are weak. I’d like to be able to share my original source material, in vector format, so other people can copy, modify, and play with the drawings. Xara’s format is too obscure, and it is unable to export to more common vector formats without bad corruption or crashing.

On the flip side, Xara is an absolute joy to work with, its bitmap exports are first rate, and it is incredibly fast. It uses direct manipulation and mouse dragging whenever possible, avoiding most menus and toolbar windows. There is a new version of Xara that I will definitely try.

Illustrator is probably off my list. I plan to try PhotoShop for the next comic.