Indiana and other sequels

I am a big fan of Indiana Jones series, 'Raiders of the lost ark' and 'Last Crusade' are perhaps the best action-adventure movies of all time. These movies, released in the late 80's before CGI and "blue screen" existed, had a cult of followers. Of course, I was a kid back in those days and used to watch the movies at home on the VHS as we hardly went out for an English movie with parents (Yes, India has come a long way since those days, kids now a days can just pop in @ a mall and buy a ticket to watch a movie which was released in the US the same week!)

Anyway, Indy 4 was rumoured since the late 90's when Lucas started resurrecting the Star War saga with it's prequels. But it took Lucas another 10 years to make the announcement about the 4th part in the adventure series.

Sadly, the 'Crystal Skulls', does not live up to it's fans expectations, specially the 2nd half of the movie. The idea about the aliens and the story elements are borrowed from 'Tintin - Flight 714', which is very surprising as both Spielberg and Lucas have proven time and again that they are the best story tellers in Hollywood.

There is a lot of emphasis on action, but hardly any interaction between the characters, I really looked forward to see a lot of tension between Indy and Marion or 'Henry the 3rd' for that matter. But, there was hardly any! May be I am getting old and the movies are being made for the "Grand Theft Auto 4" generation! (Bu hey, I do play GT games and love them :) )

Also as a fan of the 'Last Crusade', I would have loved to see both Sean Connery and Harrison Ford together in this movie. Both are such fine actors and had great roles for them. But....

I hope Hollywood moves on and stops making all the classic remakes or sequels. I would rather watch the old movies again and again than watch the new sequels which have no story element in it.

I always longed for the sequel of Back to the future, but now I really hope, no one makes it. Paramount is re-launching 'TOS' in Star Trek 11 with an all new crew! But will they ever be to create the magic what William Shatner and other did in the 60s? I have my doubts...

ASP .NET in Delphi 2007

I am about to venture on to a new territory. Though I have developed ASP .NET based websites before, they were all done with Visual Studio 2003/5 using C#. Now for the first time I have been asked to use Delphi or RAD Studio 2007.
From what I gather, it's not so bad, but the biggest problem I forsee is the lack of code samples or help in Delphi. Not a problem for me as I can read / code in C#, but it could be for my team mates, who are new to C#.
As for me, I might actually end up writing lot of code in C#, only to realise that I am actually supposed to write the logic in Delphi!
Watch this space for more, I will share my ASP .NET experience in Delphi here soon.

Photography

Here it is! The Adobe Photoshop Express (BETA) - an online image editor and photo sharing web site. And here is my album for C&C
http://reflexion.photoshop.com/

WNS WT Chaps

Here it is, just caught these boys post lunch outside WNS WT building.

Beware : IE8 Beta is buggy

I know it's in BETA 1, but can you expect your older IE7 installation to go kaput once you use "restore point" in Windows XP to revert back? Welcome to Microsoft's yet another crappy offer - IE8.
First of all IE8 copies host of features straight from it's competitors FireFox and Opera - stuff like "Sessions" has finally made it in to IE in it's 8th reincarnation! I wonder why can't MS allow both IE7 and IE8 to co-exists? I have Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 4 installed side by side and no complaints! I think adding this feature will be more challenging to programmers at MS than rendering "You have opened a new tab" on a newly opened tab!

First test for me was to check if my yahoo mail works in it's new layout. As I expected it didn't, yahoo showed a message that it's not compatible with this version of IE. Thanks to some one at MS, there is a button on the tool bar called "Emulate IE7", which when clicked fools the websites that user is using IE7 and I just did that, which worked.
Let's see how it all goes, I now have IE8 Beta , FireFox 2 and FireFox 3 Beta 4 - among all these I found FireFox 3 Beta 4 really fast, website loading and rendering was much faster than IE8.