Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

It seems it will be a good year for kung fu Movies. I compiled a list of some of the promising upcoming movies in this genre, including some of the not so promising, but still worthy of mentioning somehow.
This year’s releases includes two kung fu sports movies, similar to Shaolin soccer, which I must admit, I didn’t watch myself. Both are probably not worth watching, but still worth mentioning.

Shaolin girl is a Japanese production about a Kung fu fighting, Lacrosse playing woman, who uses her mad skilzz on the field. She is played by Kou Shibasaki who also played Dororo, in the bizarre movie of same name.
Trailer

Kung fu dunk, is as the name suggest a basketball movie, but as I understand, without the humour that made Shaolin soccer popular. The movie is based on a Manga, surprisingly about a Basketball playing Shaolin kung fu student.
Trailer

Of the more serious kung fu movies, I personally will look forward to these:

The Forbidden Kingdom, has high potential with actors like Jet Li and Jackie Chan. The starring of Jackie Chan, might also suggest that this movie is on the more family friendly side.
Trailer

Wushu, is still a joker in my eyes. Not much info has been released, in English that is, and my Chinese level is still disappointingly low. I did find a little teaser-like clip, including live performance and interview with the actors.

An Empress and the Warriors, is another high potential epic martial arts movie. Judging from the trailer, the style and atmosphere can be compared with The promise, without all the crazy CGI. And again I can be totally wrong. The movie stars Donnie Yen, who also starred in the interesting Dragon Tiger Gate, and off course Hero.
Trailer

Red Cliff, is based on the battle of the same name in the Chinese literary Classic “Romance of the three kingdoms”. I have tried struggling me through the first volume of this saga, but it’s certainly is easier said than done. It is older than the bible, and includes so many names that it would be easier attending a reception packed with Spanish reporters, and memorizing theirs. Its by John Woo btw.

Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, is also based on the book(s) above, but there should be plenty of materials in those bricks for several action packed movies. Starring Andy Lau, it can certainly not be all bad.
Trailer

I will also check out Ichi which is kind of a Zatoichi meets Azumi. It could be very interesting. Also a remake of Akira Kurosawas Hidden fortress will release this year. Oh my.

When Microsoft says “server name”, they really mean “Server name\instance name”.

Due to online buying frenzies, I now have too much reading material queued up every month. Besides my “planning to read” queue, I now have 5 magazine subscriptions each month. Well one of those (the acm crossroads) is an extra magazine they throw in for free while subscribing to the CACM as a student (it is cheaper, ok). I like to read offline materials, while it is less selective, and it thereby strengthens the ability to be a specialized generalist. This reason is just a minor addition to the fact that reading paper based material, while lying on the couch sipping coffee just is damn relaxing.

I more or less just finished my first facebook app. It is an electronic version of Chinese flashcards, with some testing and scoring functionality. It started as a mix of my interest in learning the Chinese characters, and trying out the facebook developer framework.

As a facebook developer, you have the choice of writing your application as a canvas page which is embedded parsed html, returned from your script, or as an iframe. Though you have more freedom on the iframe page, you can’t really make use of the specific functions provided by the facebook framework, so the right choice would be to use the canvas page. The framework is pretty well thought of, even though it has its shortcomings. For security reasons and to generally prevent mess-ups, facebook provides their own version of javascript, called FBJS. Even though it is a serious pruned down version of JS, it does the trick.

I used the CEDICT database, for the Chinese words, and sorted them into difficulty categories according to their natural frequency. This does not necessarily reflect the number of strokes, which also can be a sign of difficulty. While not everybody has the Chinese language pack installed, I had to generate images of all the characters, and their pinyin representatives. I haven’t yet found the optimal font for generating pinyin images, so some of the representations can look a bit off.

While working in a IT service company, strongly influenced by ITIL, I have been inspired to divide my friendship services into service categories. These categories each have their KPI’s on certain areas, which indicate the goals for the service level.
I have yet to develop a payment plan for these categories, while I obviously expect something in return.

Bronze

SMS responsetime: 36 hours (8-22, weekends only)
Event attendance ratio: 5% (measured over 1 year)
Invitation to my events: 0% of events
attention at events: 5 min talk.

Silver

SMS responsetime: 12 hours (8-22, 7 days a week)
Event attendance ratio: 15% (measured over 1 year)
Invitation to my events: 30% of events
attention at events: 20 min talk (mostly demeaning jokes).

Gold

SMS responsetime: 2 hours (8-22, 7 days a week)
Event attendance ratio: 25% (measured over 1 year)
Invitation to my events: 80% of events
attention at events: 45 min talk (mix of seriousness and demeaning jokes).