I discovered yesterday that Barton Fink and The Draughtsman’s Contract are both available on DVD in France. Thankfully they both have English language tracks, so they’re now on their way to me. A combination of O-Level French, Google Translate, and the fact that all Amazon sites work pretty much the same way made it relatively simple to place the order.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which only seems to be available in Australia, arrived for me recently.
I found all of these pretty much by chance.
What I’d really like to see is a global comparison site for DVDs, telling me where things are available, and where appropriate comparing the differences in different regional versions, and telling me where I can buy whichever version looks best.
DVDcompare is pretty good, telling me for example that the Portuguese version of Lost Highway has a Dolby Digital 5.1 track and additional extra features. But it doesn’t tell me where I can buy it(I still can’t find an online Portuguese DVD site!), and it doesn’t know about any of the 3 DVDs I mentioned above.
I found a site once that did worldwide DVD price comparisons. But I can’t find it again.
Does anyone know of any useful sites for this sort of thing?
If we hope to be able to measure productivity in some quantifiable way, we must first appreciate what it means to be “more productive.” If I say that programmer A is “five times” more productive than programmer B, I mean that programmer A can finish a programming task in one-fifth the time it takes programmer B to finish it. Stated differently, it would take a team of five B programmers to keep up with programmer A.
Let me go one step further and define the concept of “perfect productivity.” A programmer is perfectly productive if he can perform a task in the same time it takes to specify it. There is no fat in the implementation. The code corresponds directly to the specification of the problem. The obvious corollary to perfect productivity is perfect maintainability. Code that corresponds directly to the specification of the problem can be modified as quickly as the specifications are changed.
Watching a programmer practice perfect productivity is like watching a court reporter. Both continue typing until the speaker takes a breath. Then they both stop and wait. There is a direct translation between words (specification) and keystrokes.
Perfect productivity is, of course, a fantasy, as is perfection of any sort. Being a fantasy, however, does not eliminate it as a goal. It is always our goal, and it should be yours.
— Gary A. Bergquist, The Zark library of utility functions
I’m a devoted Mozilla user, and a heavy user of its tabbed browsing facilities. I have the scroll button on my mouse set up such that clicking a hyperlink with it means “open in new tab” – a feature that I use a lot in my daily weblog reading. I end up with an accordion effect, where the number of tabs open grows and grows, and then shrinks as I reach the end of one line of meanderings, growing again as I pursue another avenue.
But, in a move of wonderfully insane design decisions, someone decided that the command to close an individual tab should be Ctrl-w and the command to close the entire browser should be Ctrl-q.
This means that approximately once a week, whilst trying to shut down a single tab, and go to the next in line, I accidentally clip the edge of the ‘q’ key in passing, and thus close down the entire browser, losing all record of the 10-20 tabs I probably had open.
This probably wasn’t even an accidental decision, or a “well, we only have 2 letters remaining” approach. Someone probably thought that “close one” and “close all” were similar enough in nature to put the keys side by side. Both keys are often used in other applications for purposes. It almost makes sense. Except it’s so completely wrong. And so completely annoying.
