Yesterday I went to see Transformers 2, it was some Press Screening, and a friend of mine got the tickets.

As a side note: suck it USA & Europe! Croatia first gets to see movies in cinema, due to our somewhat stupid tradition to rotate movies on Thursday rather than on Friday. So there.

So anyway, Transformers 2. There is nothing much to say about the movie. The story barely makes sense, and for the better part of the movie I was even not trying to follow it. The dialogues are non existent. But. And this is one huge but. The visual spectacle that Michael Bay (director) provided for us common people is just mind blowing. Funny thing that I said "blowing" because for most of the movie you watch things blow up. Seriously, from the moment Transformers 2 starts, shit blows up all over the place. Think of any object or building - chances are it was blown up.

If things are not exploding, getting crushed, smashed or in some way reduced to small chunks, then all the characters are cracking jokes. Most of the people will criticize Transformers 2, that it is just too funny and immature. I mean, when 10 ton giant robot shoots advanced weaponry into your direction, it is pretty hard to crack a joke. However, everyone does. All the time. In fact, this is breakdown of the Transformers 2, presented in this neat graph:

The love part had to be there so guys can take their chicks to see this. I mean, if it was just immature jokes and robots blowing shit up, you would never get her to go see Transformers 2 with you.

But I in no way hold this structure it against it. It's supreme fun to watch this movie. You sit down, strap yourself in the chair, with 2-3 ice cold beers (yes, they sell beer in our cinemas) and a snack, and you enjoy the display. And WHAT a display it is. It's like Bay hired absolutely everyone on this planet that can do 3D animation / modelling / FX, put them all in some underground bunker filled with state of the art computers and rendering farms and told them: "I want you to make everything explode. EVERYTHING. But in the cutest way possible." And then he phoned US Army, Navy and Airforce, and told them: "Give me all your toys. Yes, all of them. All the jets, bombers, and helicopters, all the boats, destroyers, carriers and submarines, all the hovercrafts, tanks, infantry and jeeps. Yes, all. Why? Well, I want to blow them up!!!!"

If aliens from a distant planet landed today and asked us to show them how far has our race technologically progressed, I would first show and explain them Google, and then show them Transformers 2.

Create, Build and Make - gives nice overview what people are striving for, at least through the eyes of the Google.

A total count of:

Websites (and related): 12
Good looks (and related): 8
Money (and related): 6

It seems we are in luck being in the web development business! If we fail as web developers, we have to make breast enhancement clinic, obviously.

As a great fan of 8 bit computers, when I see enthusiasm like this I get really excited! Back in my 8 bit days days I remember using Final Catridge extension for all my assembler needs. What would I give to have this baby - MMC Replay extension catridge which adds SD card reader and - ethernet controller to C64! Crazy! :)

Anyways, get your c64 from out of the closet, wipe dust and check out C64 Twitter client here.

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If you still haven't, you must check out latest Mr. Doob's Google Chrome JavaScript experiments: Depth of Field and Google Sphere. Keep in mind that this is ALL JavaScript. It's interesting to note, although those are Google Chrome experiments, they sort of work under Firefox too, Safari 4 tries but fails (it's slow as hell), and IE... ie is just not worth mentioning any more. :)

Yes, v4.0! This is pretty strange, because I blogged few days ago about Safari 3 on Windows. Apple probably timed Safari 4 release with release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Don't know what to say. Browser GUI looks looks remarkably like the one in Chrome (notice the new page and gear icons to the right). They removed loading progress from address bar which makes me sad but they added Windows standard font smoothing which now makes surfing in Safari more bearable. There is not no-smoothing option however.

CNET benchmarked Safari 4 and they say it's 42x faster than IE 7 and 3.5x faster than Firefox 3. Since I am hard nut and I don't believe CNET because I think Apple paid for those benchmarks, I used Futuremark's Peacekeeper browser benchmark to do my own benchmarking. Check out results for your self (higher values are better), no need to say how surprised I am:

I did benchmarking on my laptop running Vista w/ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100 and NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS.

Take a ride to the Earths orbit and back on Space Shuttle Atlantis solid rocket boosters. This video from Nasa looks surreal.

Today my iTunes auto updater kicked in and something interesting popped up. A new version of Safari for Windows. Last time I checked out Safari on Windows, browser was in some kind of early beta. Apple sure did improve it tremendously in mean time - it looks and it works like a real browser and it's packed with features.

My all time favorite Safari feature was a loading progress bar in background of url location input. Wohoo, that works under Windows now too. Apple really paid a lot of attention to details - they recreated crazy Safari input elements (which don't go well with Vista theme), they replicated "falling windows" animation OS X style inside the configuration tabs etc.

However, although I respect Apple for making such a nice Windows port, it just can't beat superior speed of Google Chrome or extreme extendability of Mozilla Firefox. Safari on Windows is slow (checkout speed comparison) and it uses some crazy font smoothing engine that I just don't dig.

We have been using very strange setups here at the office to test sites on Internet Explorer 6. Lot's of us still use Windows XP, and some of us still had default Internet Explorer 6 on our computers. When IE8 was released, we didn't upgrade immidiately so we could still test sites in default IE6 installations (lots of different fake/multi IE setups throw most bizzare errors, so testing under default IE installation was a must).

But couple of days ago we finally give in to the dark forces of Windows Auto update, and we upgraded to Internet Explorer 8.

The only correct way now for site testing under different Internet Explorer versions is by using virtual machine of some sort. Vmware is option, but you have to build your own virtual setup which can be a pain. However, Microsoft has been good enough to finally provide developers with Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images for their Virtual PC. You can download completely free, perfectly legal and working images of followign operating systems packed with IE's:

• Windows XP SP3 with IE6,
• Windows XP SP3 with IE7,
• Windows XP SP3 with IE8,
• Vista with IE7 and
• Vista with IE8.

All XP images will expire on August 31, 2009, which is the end-of-life for good old Windows XP, and hopefully end-of-life of Internet Explorer 6. Hello Windows Seven! :) (Btw, I've tried RC1 of Windows Seven and it ROCKS, not only because of the name).

I've accidentally discovered that Vista comes with a nice little screenshot grabbing utility called Snipping Tool. Click on Vista orb down left and type in "snip" into "Start search" input. It sure isn't feature packed as HyperSnap DX, but it comes in handy when you have to screenshot something in a hurry.

Btw, if you can't see Snipping tool in your Vista, go to Control Panel / Programs and Features, click on Turn Windows features on or off, and make sure Tablet PC Components is checked. Why they put it there, I don't know.