This week has gone by pretty quickly so I'm just going to share some thoughts I had this week. While I was in Taiwan I could not find a showing of District 9, Peter Jackson's new movie about aliens from space trapped in camps on Earth. Therefore when I got back one of the first things that I did was go watch District 9 with some friends. From watching the trailer, my first impressions was that it was going to be a movie about humans going to war with the aliens taking residence in South Africa. Another B-rated action flick perhaps? But by the time I exited the movie theatre I was quite blown away by the movie. At first it started off slow, kind of like Cloverfield, with the camera interviewing a bunch of people, except the main character was really annoying and reminded me of Steve Carrell from The Office. But as the movie progressed, the more human aspects of the film began to show and the need to survive really changed the character to someone different. Anyways I would highly recommend the movie for anyone to watch. There is a decent amount of gore though (just a heads up).
Another movie I watched this week was Inglourious Basterds. This movie was unique in it's own way. If you are going to expect a WWII action/shooter movie (like Saving Private Ryan), then you will be sorely disappointed. Granted there are scenes of action, but most of the movie's guts are in the dialogue. The dialogue is funny and witty, though long at times. Brad Pitt puts up a hilarious yet terrible accent while Christoph Waltz plays probably the most interesting Nazi I have seen in a movie (in a good way). Anyways it is also another recommended movie, though if I had one choice between District 9 or Inglourious, it'd probably lean more towards District 9.
So yesterday I picked up a copy of OSX Snow Leopard for my computer and just wanted to comment on the new refinements to an already impressive operating system. The installation took no more than an hour and I get some hard drive space back as advertised. I think the installation freed up about 10 GB of hard drive space.
After installation, I noticed that overall the operating system looks the same. Most of the refinements such as Grand Central Dispatch (which helps improve the performance of multi-core CPUs), OpenCL (utilizing GPU to help improve performance), and native 64-bit OS are invisible to daily use at the moment, though I suspect that once program developers tap into the potential in the future, applications will run much faster. One of the programs I use the most is Adobe Lightroom, which runs at the same speed. I have not tested other programs like Photoshop or Final Cut, but I'm fairly certain most things will run the same since they were not optimized yet to take advantage of the new technologies.
Safari 4, the built-in web browser, runs dramatically faster than on Leopard. Things like the Top Sites tab, Java loading, and loading websites just seem snappier overall. Sites like Gmail load at least 2x faster than with Safari 4 on Leopard. Quicktime player also got an overhaul and the refinements look sweet. The player automatically hides the borders and controls once you move your mouse away from the movie when it is playing. This helps to clean up the look of the player and is a nice subtle way to improve overall experience. The new Expose is also pretty cool and arranges things in a more clean outline than before.
Overall the refinements are worth the $29 price tag. I'm really hoping that developers tap into the new technologies such as OpenCL to improve performance in the future.
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