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Star Wars: Episode III - The Revenge of the Sith premiered on HBO this weekend, so I finally got around to watching it. How was this movie well reviewed when it came out? It was both too long and too short. Too long in that there were far too many scenes that were just boring, and too short in that the most important plotline in the movie – the seduction of Anakin by the Chancellor – was drawn in the crudest fashion possible. Then there’s the fact that the Jedi, who theoretically wield an enormous amount of power and authority, are required to be perhaps the stupidest group of people in the universe, with Obi Wan Kenobi leading the parade of idiots. I thought they were supposed to be wise? ...

It’s hard for me to imagine a site that has changed the Internet in such a short time as YouTube. With YouTube around, the idea of installing third party applications in order to watch videos seems absurd, and the idea of actually sending a video file as an email attachment is completely obsolete. In the past, I would usually ignore links that pointed to video files because I didn’t want to have to deal with player issues, pop up ads, or other annoyances. Since I first saw the “Lazy Sunday” video on YouTube, I have seen dozens of hilarious and informative videos that I never would have bothered with before. And YouTube actually provides a humane URL for each video that can easily be pasted into an email or IM conversation. ...

Any recommendations for OS X screen capture applications other than Snapz Pro? It’s a fine application but it’s not compatible with my MacBook Pro.

Yesterday I was implementing a feature in a Ruby on Rails application, and it occurred to me to mention that aside from providing a strong basic framework for creating Web applications, Rails also generally nails the details. Our application has a basic paginated list view, and I needed to make the view sortable by the various columns. This is, of course, a standard feature of just about any decent Web application that displays data in tables, and I’ve implemented such views in Java, PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, and probably five other things that I can’t remember. ...

Over at SiliconBeat, the San Jose Mercury News tech business weblog, Matt Marshall writes: Apple’s technology makes it really difficult to play music on its iPod if it comes from sources other than its iTunes online store. This is lazy and bad reporting. I have thousands of tracks in my iTunes library, of which perhaps 10 came from the Apple music store. The rest are MP3s that I ripped from CDs, or obtained elsewhere (mostly legitimately – I won’t apologize for that bootleg of Coldplay doing the Hank Williams classic “Lost Highway” at a concert). ...

Yesterday I moved my iTunes library to my MacBook Pro to my desktop PC. Moving the audio files is really easy, but I didn’t want to lose my ratings, play counts, and playlists, and I had been conditioned to think that this was going to be really difficult. I had run into problems moving the files from one PC to another, but now I know that I just wasn’t doing it right. Here’s how you do it. ...

Declan McCullagh reports that network hardware makers are opposed to Net neutrality legislation, but fails to explain why. Telcos are going to need to buy a lot of network hardware in order to implement their plans for segmented services – the current hardware isn’t going to cut it. Greed, as usual, is the answer.

One question I constantly puzzle over and have not come up with a good answer for is the extent to which a person should pay attention to macroeconomics. To a certain degree, macroeconomic trends are important input into the decisions we make in our day to day lives. Should you take a risky job at a startup with high potential upside, or a safe job that may not pay as well but is almost certain to be stable for the next five or ten years. Should you buy a house today before interest rates get much higher or should you wait for the housing bubble to burst and buy on the cheap tomorrow? Is overseas competition going to eliminate your programming job here in the United States? What skills should you learn to keep that from happening? Is rising demand for petroleum in the developing world going to lead to a peak oil scenario where fuel prices only go up? Does that mean you should strongly consider moving somewhere urban so that your day to day life is less reliant on fossil fuels? ...

I gave my presentations earlier this week. The first presentation I gave did not go particularly well. I had written out the entire presentation by hand and practiced it many times, but then I actually brought the printout to the presentation and became a little bit too fixated on giving the presentation as written. Then the moderator turned out the lights in the room so people could see the projected slides and a I wound up having a very hard time following my written copy. I knew the presentation well enough to give it without the text, but not being able to see my printout caused me to be rather anxious. I don’t have a recording but at the end I had the sense that it did not go well. ...

I’m pretty sure that I exhibit one of the failings common to experienced developers trying to learn a new thing. That failing is an unwillingness to just hack out code. I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for a few months, but not as much as I’d like, mainly because I have many duties beyond just typing code into a text editor. That’s unfortunate, because I enjoy coding. I have lots of experience with many other languages, so Ruby on Rails was easy to pick up. If you know Java and Perl, you can pick up enough Ruby to get things done in hours. ...