Quantum Of Solace Was A Disappointment

I may be young but I guess I have seen my fair share of Bond flicks (from the early days of Shaun Connery to the latter days of Pierce Brosnan) and I must say Quantum of Solace was a disappointment by all standards. I must say though that there is one thing I liked, that was that the trend changed in terms of the General Bond Character presentation i.e.

• Little dependence on Technology
• More Aggressive with the ladies (not necessarily a good thing)
• Little or no sarcasm

Sadly too, these are the very things that make Bond who is he is. The problem I had was not necessarily with the character presentation, but the storyline (and its presentation).

• The action sequences were just too fast to be absorbed easily
• The plot was not well defined via the characters speech, although it could be easily inferred from the general activity trend
• The entire “Quantum” idea was not well presented (until probably the latter part of the flick where Bond actually mentions it)
• The storyline was confusing with respect to the actual threat being stopped (was it the oil, the water, the bad guy, the US government or MI 6)
• The intro segue (which is a hallmark of bond movies) was not captivating enough (length was adequate though). My roomie was half bored by the intro
• The end of the movie does not leave one with the hope for another Bond flick, it ends on a way too dull note (and they try to pick it up again with the Bond stride and shot with blood drip, which did not bring back the interest anyway)
• The Bond charm was missing in many ways and it rather seemed like Bond was more of a sex addict than a ladies’ man
• The action sequences although cool left much to be desired, especially the end sequence

I have not taken note of the director and probably the producers, but I hope they are funded so they can try again, because I don’t think they got it right this time around. I know they will do better if they are given a second chance. The real essence of Bond must be restored if we are ever to hope for another Bond flick anytime soon. I do like the lead character though (despite the fact that half the Bond world hates him as far as I can tell) and I think if he is well groomed, he could do a better job the second time around.

And that was my review.

Just To Add My Voice To The Random Query Trick

Once again I came face to face with a problem that seemed insurmountable. That little piece of nuisance that just seems to make your code not what you expect it to be. To put it simply, all I needed to do was to prevent an image I kept reloading dynamically from the server from being cached. A common problem faced by any new AJAX developer, and once again after Googling my ass off, I came across the solution to prevent caching on the client side.

The solution: “Append a random query string to whatever you are requesting from the server to prevent it from being cached”.

To prevent an image from being cached (which was my case), you could try something like this (PHP CODE Below):

// return image to be displayed

echo ‘<img  src=”‘ . $_POST[‘Picture’] . ‘?’ . rand(1,100) . ‘” width=”150″>’;

The echoed image information should have a randomly generated number between 1 and 100 appended to the query for the image, so a fresh image is returned always from the server. This works great in whatever situation you need to bypass the cached information on the client, be it Javascript, CSS or Images.

My Wish List For Dreamweaver CS5

So far I have read reviews and heard of some of the new features of Dreamweaver CS4 and I must say they are cool, but they still do not meet the expectations I had for it. Personally I have used earlier versions of Dreamweaver and demos of current versions and one thing I believe the software lacks (which others have done so well the incorporate) is a good code editor.

The current Dreamweaver code editor has remained much the same since version 8 and at that point it was lacking in “intellisense” (hope that is the right spelling). The Dreamweaver code completion features are not as adequate as they ought to be. Currently, code completion for HTML and CSS is fair enough, however, Javascript, PHP and other server side languages is still lacking massively. They thing I hate the most is that when I’ve coding a piece of Javascript in a PHP document, and I hit CTRL + SPACE to get the code completion menu, I’m giving the menu for PHP and nothing for Javascript. I guess I could say then that, it is more of a lack of code completion for Javascript than much else that is missing in Dreamweaver.

I’m yet to test out the new features in CS4 but I guessing much hasn’t changed since I have not seen any reviews about changes in the code editor. There are a lot cool features for CS4 like improved Live Editing and extra Spry framework features. I hoping for the best in CS5, because I also use Netbean (6.1 currently) and I must say coding in that environment is more than decent. All the best to Adobe, and let’s see if things change in that direction.