My own personal Bond film ranking: from Dr. No to Spectre

Personal Bond film ranking after seeing Spectre:

Rank	Film	Comment
25	The World Is Not Enough (1999)	Terrible. Denise Richards playing a Physicist, named Christmas?
24	Die Another Day (2002)	Slightly better than The World is not Enough, that's all.
23	Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)	Look like they ran out of ideas for Bond after GoldenEye.
22	Never Say Never Again (1983)	Remake of Thunderball.
21	The Living Daylights (1987)	Can barely remember anything from this forgettable film.
20	Quantum of Solace (2008)	Yuck. Some decent scenes, but too long and mostly forgettable.
19	A View to a Kill (1985)	Excellent villain. Bond looks like he should have retired though.
18	Octopussy (1983)	Some redeeming scenes, but not one of the better bonds. Excellent Villain.
17	Moonraker (1979)	Often panned, but not a bad movie. Jaws is pretty terrifying in the role.
16	Licence to Kill (1989)	Better movie for Dalton, worth seeing. Bond goes rogue!
15	The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)	Great action sequences.
14	The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)	Scaramanga and little Nick Hack make for great villains.
13	Diamonds Are Forever (1971)	Excellent location in Las Vegas, the villains in this movie make it good, albeit a little campy.
12	Live and Let Die (1973)	Great Bond filmed in a New Orleans setting.
11	Skyfall (2012)	Long, but original plot and great storyline.
10	You Only Live Twice (1967)	Austin Powers stole a lot of ideas from this classic.
9	On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)	Refreshing timepiece, ensured that you don't have to be Connery to pull off a Bond.
8	From Russia with Love (1963)	Connery lives James Bond in this film. Epic fight scene on train.
7	GoldenEye (1995)	Perhaps the best plot for any Bond movie. Great all round cast.
6	Spectre (2015)	A "best of" Bond. Throwbacks to previous Bond scenes, looks like they broke the bank with some of the action scenes.
5	Casino Royale (2006)	Bond is back with this movie. A little long, but some great scenes here.
4	Dr. No (1962)	The first bond movie I ever saw. Amazing movie.
3	Thunderball (1965)	Perhaps Connery's best? Was so good they had to do an unofficial remake.
2	For Your Eyes Only (1981)	Has it all. Great bond girls, great action, great scenery.
1	Goldfinger (1964)	Gave life to a lot of James bond'isms. Never boring.

My week of Soylent

As part of Soylent's kickstarter, I ordered a week's supply to try it out.  I'm too much of a fan of eating real food to ever consider exclusively using Soylent as my main food supply, but thought it would be fun to try and see how it makes me feel.

Day 1

First off, the preparation is extremely simple, add the packet to the pitcher, mix with water and provided oil, and let sit in the fridge overnight.

The concoction is pretty thick, so gulping it down quickly was not an option for me.  I can't argue the convenience of using Soylent, I got up, took 5 minutes to drink before my bikeride to work, pack a liter for work, and that was it.

I was pretty bloated the first day, so didn't consume the full day's amount which was really surprising, I thought I would not have nearly enough.  Felt good, no energy crash all day.

Day 2

The second day was a little better than the first.  I wasn't keen on drinking a cold brown liquid first thing in the morning, but as soon as I downed a glass felt ready for the ride to work.

Felt less bloated all day, and therefore consumed more Soylent, consumed exactly a day's worth I would guess.  Again, no energy crash, felt pretty good all day.

Day 3 

We're going to a party tonight, they're serving Pizza and I wonder how I will feel mingling with people eating food in front of me.

WCF protocol error

This one was driving me up the wall, but after setting up a WCF tcp endpoint, I kept getting an error similar to:

net.tcp://... is unavailable for the protocol of the address

Solution is to re-install the Service model with:


C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319>ServiceModelReg.exe -r 
 
Hope that helps someone out!

Making my own wine rack

So I decided to put our loose wine bottles somewhere so they would be out of the way, but easy to find a bottle.

I could have easily drank them all, but after further thought, decided to convert one of our downstairs closets into a mini wine cellar.

I was originally going to build it in place, but my wife convinced me to build it so it could be relocated in the future, so I started to think out a design.

I decided to build it using Pine wood (I like the look and it's reasonably priced), only the supports were non-pine (fir).

Here is a link to the construction:

https://plus.google.com/photos/104338446149726978470/albums/5830527587073893329

I made it to hold 18 bottles, 6 per row.  I build the rows separately, and then mounted on the 2x2 supports.

Adding PostgreSQL db to Asp.Net web project on Windows 7

Last night I was trying to connect an existing Asp MVC 3 app to use an PostgreSQL database.  It is using nHibernate, so I'm still going to have to determine if I need to tweak anything there, but for now just wanted to connect properly.

After installing Postgre, I needed to install the ODBC connector in order to establish a connection in my .Net application.  There was a little trick, when I used the ODBC configurator from the Start menu, I didn't see the newly installed ODBC adapter!  WTF?  Turns out, since I was running a 64 bit version of my OS, I had to run c:\windows\syswow64\odbcad32.exe in order to set my new ODBC driver.  There is also another way...

Install NpgSQL adapter, I used the latest .Net 4.0 install.  After referencing the Npg dll in your project (plus an associated Mono dll), you can simply use their wrappers in order to connect, here you can get the gist:

using NpgSQL;
var connstring = String.Format("Server=localhost;Port=5432;User Id=;Password=xxx; Database=DbName;");
var conn = new NpgsqlConnection(connstring);
conn.Open();
const string sql = "SELECT LastName FROM Users ORDER BY LastName LIMIT 10";
var da = new NpgsqlDataAdapter(sql, conn);
var ds = new DataSet();
da.Fill(ds);

Angular.js and setting up IIS to recognize JSON

Ok, so I've been messing around with Angular.js, so far, a great framework for client-side HTML manipulation.  Advantages include separation of concern (with an MVC architecture), and really good testing ease using Jasmine, taking advantage of Dependency injection, and awesome databinding features.

With regards to the Dependency injection, there is a $xhr service (it's a service used to GET data), but when I attempted to use it with IIS 7, no go.  Checking IIS under the hood, I found no MIME mapping to .json files, so after some digging on the web, here is how to set it up:

Configure IIS to recognize JSON:

IIS7 configuration to support JSON:

Using IIS manager: clock on IIS server (the main node on the left - where you see the machine name)

1. Add ‘json’ MIME Type

• Double click on ‘MIME Types’ icon
• Click ‘Add…’ link (under Actions section on the right side)
• In ‘Add MIME Type’ window type:

File name extension: .json
MIME type: application/json

• Click OK, You should see the .json MIME Type added to the list of the MIME Types list.

2. Add Script Map Handler for ‘json’ MIME Type

• Double click on ‘Handler Mappings’ icon
• Click on ‘Add Script Map…’ link (under Actions section on the right side)
• In ‘Add Script Map’ window type:

Request path: *.json
Executable: C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\asp.dll
Name: JSON

• Click OK (Message box pops up with a message: Do you want to allow this ISAPI extension?...etc ) Click Yes, You should see the .json extension added to the list of the Handler Mappings list

CDs and DVDs - Why???

As far as the CD and DVD technology, I've felt like I've been in a twilight zone episode for the past 5 years!

Let's face it, CDs were a breakthrough technology in the 80s, brought great features and portability over the existing tape players.  Later DVDs brought more storage and functionality, but I can't understand why this media is still being used commercially today.

Netflix tried to buck the trend and tried to push streaming versus physical DVD rental and the stock plunged, the masses rebuffed. (in this case the business model and content availability were to blame)

I have two little boys that rent DVDs from the library to see the latest Sesame Street video, it is rarely playable since a few tiny scratches render the medium unplayable.  Bring back the 3 1/2 floppy! :)

Solid State sticks are great, but I guess the cost per use ratio isn't as viable as the cheaply produced DVDs...

Any alternatives on the horizon so I can go on in peace?