Haywire Movie Review

By on January 26, 2012 in Movies

If you are going to have an action film with almost no story then you need to deliver wall to wall action to make up for it. Haywire does not do this. Haywire follows Mallory (Gina Carano), a spy for hire who is burned by the agency she works for and framed for a murder [...]

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Patrick’s 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2012

By on January 22, 2012 in Movies

2012 has started out pretty rocky for films. The cineplexes are currently clogged with the dreck of the year just like every January/February, months which are widely held as the dumping ground for films not up to par. With this in mind, I look a head to better times to come in the year with [...]

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Contraband Movie Review

By on January 16, 2012 in Movies

Contraband is a forgettable middle of the road crime thriller heavy on the crime and light on the thrills. Following a plot rehashed from dozens of other crime movies, most notably Gone in 60 Seconds with a sprinkling of Kiss of Death, Contraband tells the story of Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) a reformed smuggler who [...]

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imgscalr 4.2 Released

By on January 11, 2012 in Programming

Quick heads up to the Java developers out there using the imgscalr Image Processing Library, version 4.2 was just released! There is 1 new feature in this release and 1 bugfix: New Feature: New ULTRA_QUALITY scaling Method provides the nicest looking scaling result typically better than GIMP’s highest quality scaling method (Lanczos3)! Bug Fix: When [...]

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Uncharted 3 (PS3) Review

By on January 11, 2012 in Video Games

Summary [7.5 out of 10]: Uncharted 3 is the disappointing third game in an otherwise incredible series. I love Uncharted. I bought my PS3 with the express purpose of playing the first game and I thought the second game was one of the best ever made. I expected this same level of quality from the [...]

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Patrick’s 10 Least Favorite Movies of 2011

By on January 5, 2012 in Movies

Okay here we go. Same deal as the list of my favorite movies. This are not the objective worst films of the year but rather the ones that I liked least. In some cases, I outright hated them. If you want to comment or debate then do so in the comment section below but please [...]

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Patrick’s 10 Favorite Movies of 2011

By on January 1, 2012 in Movies

Alright, it is that time of year again when I look back on the year and pick out my 10 favorites put them in a vaguely arbitrary order and post them for the enjoyment of several people who will attack me and my sexual preference and history because they don’t agree with me about movies. [...]

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The Adventures of Tintin Movie Review

By on January 1, 2012 in Movies

A rollicking adventure with great animation, 3D and the most badass terrier ever, the Adventures of Tin Tin provides a nice distraction from heavy awards season pictures and abysmal overly sentimental dreck. Based on the Belgian comic series of the same name, The Adventures of Tin Tin follows the eponymous hero (Jamie Bell), an intrepid [...]

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Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 1 Movie Review

By on January 1, 2012 in Movies

Generally, despite their failure to approach real quality, the Twilight movies have tended to get better with each installment owing mostly to better directors taking the helm. Sadly, with Breaking Dawn part 1, the trend is thrown into reverse and we are handed easily the worst of the series, and for those of you keeping [...]

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) Movie Review

By on December 24, 2011 in Movies

Intense, visceral and well drawn the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo nails the feel and tone of the book. Based on the novel by the late Stieg Larsson, the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tells the complicated tale of disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) who is hired to investigate a decades old murder in the [...]

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Detailed Look at the Brilliantly Simple CouchDB File Format

By on December 21, 2011 in Technology

I’ve been researching CouchDB’s file format for the last week along side a few other efforts to understand resilient storage that is optimized for SSD or flash-based performance metrics. As it turns out, log-based file formats (and file systems) are optimal when working with flash memory like SSDs. CouchDB uses an append-only, copy-on-write approach to [...]

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Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

By on December 18, 2011 in Movies

Mining the same paydirt as the first outing, the second Sherlock Holmes film struggles to find gold but still manages to be worth the effort. Game of Shadows picks up through lines hinted in the first film and brings Holmes (Robert Downey Jr)  into direct conflict with the character’s greatest adversary, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), [...]

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Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol Movie Review

By on December 18, 2011 in Movies

Exciting and fun to watch, the fourth Mission: Impossible outing not only proves that the franchise still has sturdy legs under it but that director Brad Bird is just as good with live action as he is with CG animation. After a botched mission in Russia which leaves the Kremlin destroyed and the entire IMF [...]

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How to Unlock an AMD Radeon HD 6950 to an 6970 Easily

By on December 17, 2011 in Technology, Video Games

I purchased an XFX Radeon HD 6950 (2GB) video card a few months ago in preparation for all the triple-a titles that have come out in the last year; while I miss the PhysX support for the occasional game that supports it, I’ve been mostly happy. Shortly after the dual-launch of both the 6950 and [...]

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The Descendants Movie Review

By on December 6, 2011 in Movies

Both funny and heartbreaking, the Descendants offers a realistic portrayal of the trials of death and discovery and the things people go through to survive the death of a loved one who had some unexpected skeletons in the closet. Matt King (George Clooney) is a lawyer and land baron who finds himself trying to reconnect [...]

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imgscalr is Available from the Central Maven Repository

By on December 2, 2011 in Programming

imgscalr is a tight and simple image manipulation library for Java. As imgscalr’s popularity has grown more and more people have asked for access to it via Maven’s central repository. While The Buzz Media has provided access to imgscalr via our own Maven repo as well as GitHub downloads, developers have pointed out that it [...]

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