Movies watched with my wife in 2009:

1. Jan-01 syecdoche new york
2. Jan-02 forgetting Sarah Marshall
3. Jan-03 city of ember
4. Jan-04 slumdog millionaire
5. Jan-07 bottle rocket
6. Jan-15 tropic thunder
7. Jan-18 goodfellas
8. Jan-19 kung-fu panda
9. Jan-23 gone baby gone
10. Jan-25 Harlan County USA
    
11. Feb-03 pineapple express
    
12. Feb-13 death proof
    
13. Feb-16 the international
    
14. Feb-18 eagle eye
    
15. Feb-28 Zach and miri make a porno
    
16. Mar-7 watchmen
    
17. Mar-10 man on wire
    
18. Mar-16 little miss sunshine
    
19. Mar-17 wristcutters
    
20. Mar-21 I love you man
    
21. Mar-22 bomb it!
    
22. Mar-23 body of lies
    
23. Mar-28 lars and the real girl
    
24. Mar-28 high fidelity
    
25. Apr-04 adventureland
    
26. Apr-05 the squid and the whale
    
27. Apr-07 monsters vs. Aliens (3d)
    
28. Apr-08 quantum of solace
    
29. Apr-18 knowing
    
30. Apr-19 ghost town
    
31. Apr-26 the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert ford
    
32. Apr-29 cloverfield
    
33. Apr-30 1703 miles to the happy
    
34. May-04 into the wild
    
35. May-10 capote
    
36. May-11 star trek (2009)
    
37. May-16 x-men wolverine
    
    (then several weeks occupied watching Lost)
    
    
38. Jun-16 up (3d)
    
39. Jun-18 the day the earth stood still (2008)
    
40. Jun-20 the hangover
    
41. Jun-25 transformers 2
    
42. Jun-27 reel paradise
    
43. Jun-29 rock'n'rolla
    
44. Jul-04 gran Torino
    
45. Jul-05 28 days later
    
46. Jul-14 seven pounds
    
47. Jul-18 Harry potter half blood prince
    
48. Jul 21 year one
    
49. Aug 1 forgetting Sarah Marshall
    
50. Aug 3 moon
    
51. Aug 13 district-9 (free preview!)
    
52. Aug 14 funny people
    
53. Aug 15 I love you man
    
54. Aug 25 waltz with bashir
    
55. Aug 29 it might get loud
    
56. Aug 29 milk
    
57. Sep 12 the 500 days of summer
    
58. Sep 19 jennifer's body
    
59. Sep 25 the wrestler
    
60. Sep 26 the informant!
    
61. Sep 28 u2- rattle and hum
    
62. Oct 3 whip it
    
63. Oct-8 house bunny
    
64. Oct-18 box of moonlight
    
65. Oct-23 the illusionist
    
66. Oct-31 hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
    
67. Nov-01 sigur ros- hiema
    
68. Nov-07 revolver
    
69. Nov-08 the men who stare at goats
    
70. Nov-09 step brothers
    
71. Nov-21 a very serious man
    
72. Nov-25 the time-traveler's wife
    
73. Nov-30 no country for old men
    
74. Dec-06 up in the air
    
75. Dec-18 star trek (2009)
    
76. Dec-23 avatar (3d)
    
77. Dec-25 sherlock holmes
    
78. Dec-28 children of men

I just published the last big set of changes to the photo gallery, finally implementing the features that I've wanted for years:

• As you view photos, the URL changes to reflect the current photo. This allows any single photo to be bookmarked, and it will show up again later if you come back to it via that bookmark.
  
  
• There are prev/close/next icons at the bottom of the photo, to help with navigation. In my older site, people often didn't realize that you could close the photo by clicking anywhere else on the page. Now there's an obvious close button, plus you can quickly browse to nearby photos without having to exit back to the gallery thumbnails.
  
  
• The page background gets darker while you are viewing a photo, to make the current photo stand out from the page a little better.
  
  
• You can right-click on a photo and save it. In my old framework, a right-click on the photo would cause it to disappear, making it very difficult to save local copies of the photo.

Now all I have to do is upload the rest of my old photos, which shouldn't take too long.

I've been working on the new site for months, using Google App Engine, and hoped to have it done before my hosting ran out with DigitalSpace.net on Sept-23. With that deadline approaching fast, I decided to go ahead and make the switch this weekend, even though the site is not 100% complete.

Things are mostly in place, but I'm only 2/3 done with the photo gallery engine. There is a really basic navigation scheme in place but it will be replaced with a much nicer Javascript system in the next few days.

After that, the big task will be to restore all the old photos that were there on the old site. This will take a little bit of time, because I will need to upload the photos to Picasa and then go through the slow process of tagging and describing them individually. In my old site, I stored all the photo meta data in one big flat text file, but now these attributes need to be attached to each photo separately.

Now this is a strange feeling.

A couple weeks ago, a friend turned me on to the hilarious blog fupenguin.com. The blog has a pattern: post a photo of an adorably cute animal, followed by a few scathing paragraphs criticizing the animal as if it were a pretentious human. I am not doing it justice, you have to read it to realize how funny it can be.

Just for laughs, I sent in a photo of one my cats, Scout. The photo had amused my friends and me for a few weeks and I thought it had a chance.

Sure enough, it showed up on the blog.

That site has over 7000 people who follow the new articles via Twitter, plus countless others who subscribe to the RSS feed.

It was weird coming home that day, and seeing Scout, knowing that so many people had read that article about her. Seriously, try to imagine this yourself - coming home one day, and realizing that your cat is more famous than you will ever be. Ever.

She didn't even realize it. I tried to show her the article on my iPhone, but all she wanted to do was get to her string.

Most people who develop for Google App Engine for Java use Google's Eclipse plugin. It makes it trivial to create a new App Engine project and dist it to the live servers.

The plugin is fine, but Eclipse is a whole different subject. I've been using IntelliJ IDEA since January and have definitely been spoiled by it. After IDEA, going back to Eclipse feels like taking a step backwards about 5 years. Plus, the JSP editor would crash on me after 10 or 15 edits, and the only way to fix it would be to close the file and reopen it. Seriously I couldn't fix that after many attempts at customizing my settings, it was just horrendous.

Then a few weeks ago I found out that IntelliJ had released a plugin just for Google App Engine development. I converted my project today and could not be happier. Changes to web pages (JSP, tag files, Javascript, CSS) require about a 5 second build before they are ready in the browser again. The only downside is that the overall app startup seems a lot slower (about 30-60 seconds on my ancient XP laptop), which is sad because you'll need to do that any time you change your Java classes.

I haven't tried using their release tool yet but even if I have to release by hand, it will be worth it to be using IDEA again.