Don't watch Angel season 3 at the same time as The L Word.
Same actress in two very different roles.
martedì 15 giugno 2010
mercoledì 12 maggio 2010
Christian subtext in Angel. WTF?
I'm re-watching Angel season 2 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5, and in some ways they are exactly the opposite. When that happens usually Angel sucks and BtVS rocks.
E.g.: the Christian subtext in some Angel episodes is really stupid and annoying, while BtVS has often a clear anti-religion and anti-Christianity subtext (and sometimes "text", some of the bad guys at the end of season 5 where priests aiding what was pretty much a crusade). Obviously I like much more the latter.
Another example: while BtVS was showing an example of a vampire that can become a decent person even without a soul, in Angel (episode 2x17) we get the message that only a soul makes you a person, without it you're inevitably an evil monster, just because of what you are, and there's no possibility of change at all (yes, I know things will change a bit in later seasons).
Feminism.
Buffy has it, Angel doesn't.
And the problem is NOT the sex of the main characters, the difference is in the whole philosophy of the two series, at least the seasons that I'm watching now.
I'm not saying everything is bad outside Sunnydale, Amy Acker is great and everything, but Joss Whedon should have kept a closer eye on what they were doing in L.A. and kept this religious crap out of the show.
And, BTW, when you insert Italians dialogs in an episode, PLEASE, find someone who actually knows Italian to translate the thing and check that the actors are doing a job that is at least barely acceptable at reading their lines. And, no, a third or fourth generation immigrant that knows "pizza", "pasta", and "bonasera", doesn't cut it. Not even remotely.
The Italian dialogs in AtS suck beyond description. They are (involuntarily) insulting. Those episodes are completely unwatchable for anyone that knows this language. And I'm NOT exaggerating: they are really completely unwatchable.
P.S.: Angel gets much better in 2x21 and 2x22. Don't get me wrong, overall I like the show, but sometimes it could have been much better very easily.
P.P.S.: yes, despite using the SxEE nomenclature, I'm watching these two shows from regularly acquired DVDs, not from pirated copies. Give me good quality, no DRM at all and reasonable prices and I'll happily buy, even if there's pirated content available for a lower price.
E.g.: the Christian subtext in some Angel episodes is really stupid and annoying, while BtVS has often a clear anti-religion and anti-Christianity subtext (and sometimes "text", some of the bad guys at the end of season 5 where priests aiding what was pretty much a crusade). Obviously I like much more the latter.
Another example: while BtVS was showing an example of a vampire that can become a decent person even without a soul, in Angel (episode 2x17) we get the message that only a soul makes you a person, without it you're inevitably an evil monster, just because of what you are, and there's no possibility of change at all (yes, I know things will change a bit in later seasons).
Feminism.
Buffy has it, Angel doesn't.
And the problem is NOT the sex of the main characters, the difference is in the whole philosophy of the two series, at least the seasons that I'm watching now.
I'm not saying everything is bad outside Sunnydale, Amy Acker is great and everything, but Joss Whedon should have kept a closer eye on what they were doing in L.A. and kept this religious crap out of the show.
And, BTW, when you insert Italians dialogs in an episode, PLEASE, find someone who actually knows Italian to translate the thing and check that the actors are doing a job that is at least barely acceptable at reading their lines. And, no, a third or fourth generation immigrant that knows "pizza", "pasta", and "bonasera", doesn't cut it. Not even remotely.
The Italian dialogs in AtS suck beyond description. They are (involuntarily) insulting. Those episodes are completely unwatchable for anyone that knows this language. And I'm NOT exaggerating: they are really completely unwatchable.
P.S.: Angel gets much better in 2x21 and 2x22. Don't get me wrong, overall I like the show, but sometimes it could have been much better very easily.
P.P.S.: yes, despite using the SxEE nomenclature, I'm watching these two shows from regularly acquired DVDs, not from pirated copies. Give me good quality, no DRM at all and reasonable prices and I'll happily buy, even if there's pirated content available for a lower price.
martedì 27 aprile 2010
Get your HTML specs from the WHATWG, not W3C
If you are searching for the HTML5 specification (or simply HTML spec) I highly suggest getting the one from the WHATWG website and not anything from the W3C.
The reason is simple: the W3C has a long history of technically flawed and unreasonable specifications, and the WHATWG was born as a reaction to that madness and to bring the web forward after many years of stagnation while the W3C was masturbating with things like XHTML2.
When the W3C noticed that they were going to become irrelevant, they had a brief moment of sanity and accepted to collaborate with the WHATWG, but now seems like they are back to their old habit. Politics trumps solid engineering and decisions are heavily influenced by loud people who will never implement or use the technologies that they are proposing.
See e.g.: "Remove Section 5. Microdata". Hint if you don't understand what's going on: RDFa sucks, its proponents know it and so they are acting destructively on other technologies that may actually work and solve the problems that RDFa is supposed to solve. Hixie is the good guy here and Shelley Powers... well I really don't understand why she acts the way she does, ignoring any technical argument that doesn't fit inside her predetermined "solution".
Other references:
The reason is simple: the W3C has a long history of technically flawed and unreasonable specifications, and the WHATWG was born as a reaction to that madness and to bring the web forward after many years of stagnation while the W3C was masturbating with things like XHTML2.
When the W3C noticed that they were going to become irrelevant, they had a brief moment of sanity and accepted to collaborate with the WHATWG, but now seems like they are back to their old habit. Politics trumps solid engineering and decisions are heavily influenced by loud people who will never implement or use the technologies that they are proposing.
See e.g.: "Remove Section 5. Microdata". Hint if you don't understand what's going on: RDFa sucks, its proponents know it and so they are acting destructively on other technologies that may actually work and solve the problems that RDFa is supposed to solve. Hixie is the good guy here and Shelley Powers... well I really don't understand why she acts the way she does, ignoring any technical argument that doesn't fit inside her predetermined "solution".
Other references:
- http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2009/11/02-minutes.html#item06 (the data-* attributes are so useful and widely used that even I use them in one of my websites);
- http://hsivonen.iki.fi/rdf-competition/;
- http://hsivonen.iki.fi/ (some of this is obsolete, scroll down to "Blogish Notes" for the juicy new stuff).
martedì 28 luglio 2009
United Airlines sucks
United sucks really hard.
I made the mistake of flying once with them a year ago and I received today a junk email from them, with a disclaimer:
The message that UA is sending me is: we know pretty well that you disabled all the "email subscriptions" in your account (I double-checked), but we are sending you spam anyway because we don't value at all your time and your privacy.
Now the interesting technical part; I went to their website to check the preferences and change the email address:
I really hope that their server-side software wasn't written by the same group of people that wrote the HTML and JavaScript, or there may be serious security problems hidden under that crap.
And, BTW, for their site (which isn't valid HTML) they also use an ugly table-based layout with fixed width in pixels, and no graceful degradation with JavaScript disabled. That's bad, not criminally bad, but still very very bad. Their website would have been considered obsolete ten years ago...
Anyway, I've flagged their mail as spam in Gmail and will continue to do so with any future unsolicited email I'll receive from them.
So my suggestion is: don't register an account on the United Airlines website and don't fly with them. They suck.
P.S., message for UA: I'm willing to update or even remove this post if you apologize for the spam, promise to stop sending it and fix the bugs on your website.
I made the mistake of flying once with them a year ago and I received today a junk email from them, with a disclaimer:
You have received this email because it includes important information regarding the Mileage Plus program or your Mileage Plus accountBS. The content of the email was an advertisement about "close-in award processing fee", whatever that is. It had nothing to do with me, my Mileage Plus account or my flights. It was an unsolicited commercial email, a.k.a. spam.
The message that UA is sending me is: we know pretty well that you disabled all the "email subscriptions" in your account (I double-checked), but we are sending you spam anyway because we don't value at all your time and your privacy.
Now the interesting technical part; I went to their website to check the preferences and change the email address:
- the form field for the address only accepts emails up to 40 characters, which wasn't enough for me (I have a very long last name), so I had to manually fix the page DOM with Firebug; if you don't know how to do this, you're out of luck with United;
- there was a buggy JavaScript in the page that rejected my email as invalid (without saying why!), even a shortened version with less than 40 characters; I suspect they don't like a "+" in it, but my email is perfectly valid (I've checked in the RFCs). I wrote "javascript:document.ProfileForm.submit()" in my browser URL bar to work around this bug and send the info to their server anyway and it worked just fine.
I really hope that their server-side software wasn't written by the same group of people that wrote the HTML and JavaScript, or there may be serious security problems hidden under that crap.
And, BTW, for their site (which isn't valid HTML) they also use an ugly table-based layout with fixed width in pixels, and no graceful degradation with JavaScript disabled. That's bad, not criminally bad, but still very very bad. Their website would have been considered obsolete ten years ago...
Anyway, I've flagged their mail as spam in Gmail and will continue to do so with any future unsolicited email I'll receive from them.
So my suggestion is: don't register an account on the United Airlines website and don't fly with them. They suck.
P.S., message for UA: I'm willing to update or even remove this post if you apologize for the spam, promise to stop sending it and fix the bugs on your website.
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