Title : Revolutionary Road (2008)
Genre: Drama, Romance (according to IMDB – not to me)
Cast: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio
Director: Sam Mendes
Length: 119 min
Website: revolutionaryroadmovie.com
IMDB rating at the time of writing: 8/10
Nomark rating: 5.5/10

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio form a couple in Revolutionary Road, who are having problems finding their place in the world. They are planning on moving from the states to Paris, France. Unfortunately, their boat hits an iceberg, the boat sinks, poor Leo dies and their dream to be happy ever after together is drowned in the atlantic ocean.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist to write that down. This movie takes place in the mid-1950′s suburbs somewhere in Connecticut. Frank is a guy who’s still unsure about the what to do with his life. April however, knows exactly what to do. She wants to be an actress. After meeting each other on a party the movie skips to them being the happily married Wheeler family. The Wheelers lives on Revolutionary Road. Frank is a salesman and April takes care of their kids.

This movie is about the tension between Frank and April. April was forced to become a housewife after she gave birth to two children (who are almost never viewed in the movie somehow) and had to give up all her ambitions of being a successful actress, while Frank is unhappy at his boring office job.

The camera work and acting were good, but I didn’t really enjoy the movie. It was a bit too dramatic and depressing in my opinion. Maybe I watched the movie in the wrong time of the year (Christmas), but I had a hard time finishing the movie. I always rate a movie on how I feel after I watched it and I feel sh*t right now. I’ll give it 5.5 out of 10 for the good effort of the actors, but the story receives 4 out of 10. Only recommended if you want to get depressed…

I was surprised to hear Yann Tiersen on Dennis Ruyer’s Dance Department last week. It was a remix (duh! Otherwise it wouldn’t be on there), by Jay Haze. He didn’t really change much in the song, only an extra beat and the piano has an extra echo-ish thingy in it.

About Dance Department: it’s a weekly, award winning, podcast, hosted by Dennis Ruyer and Radio 538, a Dutch radio station. It’s full of great dance music and refreshing mixes. I can really recommend it!

Below is the mix on youtube, but I really recommend getting it through Itunes (or other media players which are able to read RSS feeds from the 538 site), because that version is way better. It’s podcast number 170 and the song starts after 15 minutes and 30 seconds.

The theme used on this site is called “Nomark Theme’ and is freely downloadable here.

I was working on an application which was using alot of number-formatting using Zend_Currency. I was using a view helper for this. The view helper looked like this:

class Sterc_Helper_ToEuro extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Abstract {
      public function direct($amount) {
 		require_once('Zend_Currency');
 		$currency = new Zend_Currency('nl_NL', 'EUR');
 		return $currency->toCurrency($amount);
 	}
}

There was a certain page which called this view helper about 10 times and the whole page took 12 seconds to load. I was initially looking at my MySQL queries, which caused some problems in this application before, but I was wrong. It was the view helper, containing Zend_Currency, which caused the problem.

To fix this problem, there is a caching option, which is documented here in the Zend Framework Manual.

I was about to test this, when I thought of another really easy fix for this issue: use PHP’s number_format. Why use an entire Zend Framework class when a PHP built-in function is available?

My new view helper looks like this:

class Sterc_Helper_ToEuro extends Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_Abstract {
      public function direct($amount) {
 		return '€ ' . number_format($amount, 2, ',', '.');
 	}
}

My page load time dropped from 12 seconds, to 0.13 seconds. Not bad!

I’ve been using Subversion for some years now for some internal projects at Sterc. Because of my recent switch to mac, TortoiseSVN wasn’t available anymore for me. I tried several subversion clients and ended up with svnX, Textmate’s internal subversion and Zend Studio’s internal subversion.

I mostly used svnX but it had some downfalls:
- no svn:ignore
- unintuitive interface
- no more development in the past year (or I’ve missed something…)

I stumpled upon an article on John Mertic’s blog today about Versions. Looking at Versions’ website I already got excited! A well designed site, a bit to much text on one page though, but way better than other subversion clients’ sites. I downloaded the demo, installed it, added a repository and everything works like a charm, very intuitive!

I will be using the Versions demo for the next 21 days and we’ll see if I will stay this excited about it. I’ll keep you posted.