True Detective - Season 2 Casting

True Detective Season 1 was over too fast too soon. The suspense build-up was great with clues pointing to multiple people. The finale however seemed too rushed up. The last episode where all the action took place seemed like a hush-hush attempt to end the first season. Anyways, with the season 1 ending, there's a lot of speculation on who will star in the series' season 2. The cast pairings is all about chemistry.

Here's an IronCladZone exclusive dream wish-list :

1. John Travolta & Denzel Washington - This duo starred in the 2009 train hijack thriller - The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. These two guys seem to have a silver tongue. They are too good in silvery conversations. Good qualities for detectives, who want to elicit a certain desired response for the questions they ask. They manage to capture the flow of your thoughts and compel you to think in their directions.

2. Leonardo Di'Caprio & Mark Ruffalo - The duo was quite charming in Shutter Island. Though the story was quite a mindf**k, the pair perform the investigations with good amount of rationality, logic and reasoning. The edginess of Di'Caprio and supportive calmness of Ruffalo seemed contrasting.

3. Jamie Foxx & Colin Farrell - This duo was cool enough as undercover cops in Miami Vice. The chemistry between them seemed quite good i.e they seemed to get along well. Farrell adds a coolness quotient to the whole scene and has a good screen presence.

4. Al Pacino & Robert De Niro - This pair rocked in the crime thriller Heat. Their restaurant scene is like the handprints on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. It will never be washed away. They came back again as buddies in Righteous Kill. Carla Gugino added a dash of glamor to the plot. I'd love to see them just to watch their friendly chemistry.

TD Fans, do not forget to comment or suggest which other pairs you want to see in Season 2. Any female leads in mind? Any other actor who can essay the role of a detective convincingly? Ping in your thoughts and suggestions. Ciao.

Blog Updates - March '14

As discussed in my previous post, Blog Reflections, I have been constantly thinking about improving the quality of the blog and making it accessible to a bigger audience. So on those footsteps, here are a couple of blog updates as of today.

• A new ShareThis widget is added to the blog to make sharing of posts much easier. This will enable users to share ICZ posts across different social networks - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest etc. A few users have pointed out that AddThis widget is also good. Am trying to analyze which widget helps in faster page loading times. Guys, please drop in your inputs about the same.

• A new Feedjit widget is added as well to track the live feed of visitors to my blog. This is an extremely useful analytics tool which helps me gauge the social interests based on the landing pages of the visitors. This should serve towards making informed decisions on creating more useful & like-able content. 

• Thirdly, in order to add some color to my blog, I've decided to change / update my blogger header image once every month. Hopefully, this adds some flavor to the blog's personality and boost returning visitors. Something on the lines of Yahoo, which often changes it's logo with a different font. Or something like Google's doodles.

Lastly, let me quickly review my audience charts. The top 5 (lifetime) visitors to my blog so far come from : 

1. U.S

2. India

3. U.K

4. Canada

5. Australia

Note that a few True Detective posts got some great visibility and users from all over the world visited my blog, especially Europe. Most notable visitors were from Poland, Italy, Belgium, France, Brazil, Germany, Romania, Netherlands, Sweden to name a few. 

Finally, I'd like to assure that IronCladZone always strives to create great quality content to cater to users needs. Have good day folks. Ciao.

FIFA World Cup 2010 Rewind - England vs Germany

The FIFA 2014 World cup is just about 3 months to go. The ticket sales for 60 matches will go live from today.

In the meantime, I just wanted to rewind back to the 2010 World Cup. There was one match which was really memorable to me. The game between England vs Germany - Round of 16. I remember I had watched this match at the Tonic pub of New York's Times Square. If you may be aware, Tonic happens to be a multi-level pub. So, the ground floor was fully occupied by the English fans while the German fans occupied the entire first level. This game was like a war. This was the game in which Germany defeated England by a massive 4-1 lead.

The Germans were chanting their national anthems, the English were singing patriotic songs. The whole atmosphere was so charged up. Fully charged up without Duracells or Energizers :) Some folks were waving their flags. Some were dressed in flag-colored costumes. The whole build-up before the game began was intense. I chose to side with the Germans on the first level. Me basically being a huge fan of the German national team. A fine mix of experienced players like Miroslav Klose, Lukas Podolski and new-generation stars like Thomas Mueller, Mesut Ozil. The line up was able and strong. The English' on the other hand boasted about Wayne Rooney and Lampard.

People were cooling off with the chilled beers as well. Especially the Germans. In fact, beer was flowing like water on that day. I hardly noticed anyone drinking scotch or vodkas or rum. Majority of them were having beers.

Let me recapture some great important moments of this terrific match including the goals.

Formation : Look at the initial starting formation of the two teams. The Germans had formed a 4-2-4 formation. The English had something like a 2-4-3-1. This is when the match starts.

Passions run high at the very 4th minute when Germany's Ozil almost nearly scored a goal. The English goalkeeper David James was lucky to defend it as the ball hit his knee and went up.

Goal 1 : Germany : After some great tackling and changing of possessions, Germany scored it's first goal on the 21st minute. And it was the experienced Miroslav Klosé. German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer took a long run to hit the ball which crossed almost the 2/3rd of the ground distance. Later the ball was finely pushed into England's nets by Klosé. Klosé touched the ball just lightly enough, without raising it and smartly angled it to the net's right cornor. Take a look at this.

Goal 2 : Germany : Going forward, James almost denied a goal on the 31st minute. Just a few seconds later, the ball moved to the other side and Defoe hit a header which hit the upper bar of the nets. Immediately later, there was amazing passing by Germany from Ozil - Klosé - Mueller - Podolski. Yes Podolski scored the 2nd goal for Germany on the 32nd minute. He smartly grounded the ball with his left leg, waited for 2 seconds and hit the ball straight into the nets past England's James. Boom. England was in deep trouble. They were down 2-0. Check this out.

Goal 3 : England : England knew by now, that it was in a big mess. Their defenses were falling apart. The Germans were taking charge and leading with aggression. Just around the 36th minute, Germany gets a cornor and Klosé misses the oportunity. It results into another cornor by Ozil, but was saved by James. The very next minute i.e at 37th minute, England gets a cornor and Upson converts it into a lifesaver goal by a header. It seemed like England was back in the game. Look at this.

Goal 4 : Germany :  After the previous goal, in the next 30 seconds, Lampard hits another smasher. Unfortunately the ball hit the upper bar of net and Neuer took a hold of the ball before it crossed the goal line. This was a controversial call by the referee. I guess many readers would relate with that. The game after this, went on at a regular pace. Both sides battling each others. No new goals till the half time. Not even after the 59th minute. Germany's Neuer saved a strong hit near the 60th minute. England's James Milner gets substituted by Joe Cole on 64th minute. Around 65th minute, Rooney gets blocked and Lampard gets a free kick. But it doesn't get past the German wall. Soon after, the ball rapidly moves toward's English nets. Some really fast running here by Podolski. Podolski passes ball to Mueller and GOAALL again. Mueller scores the 3rd goal for Germany. 67th minute. Check this out.

Goal 5 : Germany : Post the 3rd goal, Germany seemed destined to enter the quarter finals. Just a couple of minutes later around the 70th minute, Ozil speeds up the ball towards the nets and intelligently passes it to Mueller. GOALLLL again. Mueller does it again! The 4th goal for Germany. This goal highlights the raw speed power of the youth (back then, Ozil & Mueller were just in their early 20's). The English were too slow to catch up. See this.

By this time, the Tonic bar had turned into a battleground. The German occupied first level went absolutely crazy. Their happiness knew no bounds and they were in the seventh heaven. They reached the quarter-finals where they were to face the mighty Argentina. Nonetheless, they had crossed the crucial English barrier. On the other hand, the English occupied ground level was totally quiet and pensive. The sadness on their faces was too visible. The English hopes had come crashing down. They were out.

I will never forget this match. It was like the 21st century World War II - Hitler vs Churchill :) where history was re-written.

UTF-8 Encoding in Tomcat for Hudson

If you're using Tomcat container for working with Hudson, you'll most likely see a warning on the Manage Hudson page. Something like "Your container doesn't use UTF-8 to decode URL's".

In that case, we need to tweak Tomcat a little bit. Edit the server.xml file located at $TOMCAT_HOME / conf

Locate the line where connector port is mentioned. Once located, we just have to add the following next to it - URIEncoding="UTF-8"

Refer the i18n section of the official Hudson FAQ link here.

Quiet & verbose mode in Apache Ant

If you're using Apache Ant for building a project, you may notice that there are 2 logging switches available - quiet & -verbose. You may ask what is its significance.

-quiet switch tells Ant to print less amount of information to the console.

-verbose switch tells Ant to print extra additional amount of information to the console.

In better words, -quiet suppresses most messages produced by a build file. While -verbose increases the level of detailing by including details of each operation in the console. The -verbose switch can be extremely useful if you're debugging to try to find any errors. The verbose mode increases the traceability. Check the following link for additional information.

Subversion Working Copy errors with Cornerstone

If you may be aware, all Mac machines come pre-loaded with Subversion. You can find out which version is pre-installed on your machine by typing the following in terminal :

svn --version

Well, my default version was 1.6.x. And recently I decided to upgrade it to the latest current version v1.8.8. I also created a repository and a corresponding working copy using Cornerstone client for Mac. However it supports the older version 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 & 1.7 clients. It does not support yet v.1.8.8 client.

So if you try to see the logs from the Terminal or perform any svn operation from the command line on your working copy, you will get an error like :

The working copy at "x-x-x-x-location" is too old (format 10) to work with client version '1.8.8 (r1568071)' (expects format 31). You need to upgrade the working copy first.

This message can be taken care of by simply typing svn upgrade in the command line.

However, if you return to working with Cornerstone, you simply won't be able to access the working copy. It pops up an annoying message, something like :

Description : "Working_Copy_Example" the working copy's format is not supported.

Suggestion : The working copy must be downgraded to a compatible version before it can be used.

Technical Information

=====================

  Error : V4UnsupportedWorkingCopyFormatError

  Exception : ZSVNUnsupportedWorkingCopyFormatException

Causal Information

==================

working copy.  Please upgrade your Subversion client to use this

working copy.

     Status : 155021

It leads me to believe that Cornerstone works fine with Apple- supplied Subversion v1.6. However, if you upgrade it to v1.7 or v1.8 this can result in annoying errors. It seems like Cornerstone automatically detects which Subversion to use while creating the repos and working copies. There's no way to customize it on this front - I mean you can't define the svn location if you upgraded it to v1.8.

Though the Cornerstone 2.7 upgrade provides support for subversion 1.7 as described in its release notes, it is not possible to downgrade 1.7 to 1.6 or lower, if needed. Plus it doesn't support the newer subversion version 1.8.x as yet. Sure it does plan to integrate Svn v1.8 in a future update. But I feel isn't this a bit annoying, having to wait for Cornerstone to update after subversion updates theirs.

Guys, do post your comments if you think any good workaround or a fix to this annoyance is available. For now, am contemplating a switch to Versions. Ping in your views about it's strengths and weaknesses folks. You have a good day. Take care.

True Detective - Finale Clue Sheet - Part 4

Wow. The Part 1, Part 2 & the Part 3 clue sheets got so wildly popular. Thank you folks for the profound interest and tremendous response to the theories mentioned in these sheets. This whole exercise of observing and deducing clues is more like a PhD thesis :) Presenting one last final clue sheet for the Season 1 Finale. Ok, so here we go.

Clue 1 : Episode 7 : When Marty visits his ex-wife Maggie, the scene starts with focus on some photos on the desk. One notable photo is of Marty & her new husband. His face looks quite similar to the guy whom Lisa takes home from the bar in Episode 3. Remember? I've also mentioned about him in the Part 2 clue sheet. Was he someone with a hidden agenda? Or is this photo a mere distraction?

Clue 2 : Episode 4 : When Marty & Rust visit Sheriff Tate's office, you see some antlers on the wall. Also there is a fat cop who enters the cabin to hand over case files. Though the character seems like just another insignificant filler, question arises as to why he stayed in the cabin to listen to the whole conversation. I mean he could have just left after handing over the files. Is he involved as well? Well, this clue might be a by-product of a little bit of over-thinking. But nonetheless, am still including it in the list.

Clue 3 : Episode 7 : While Marty watches the snuff videotape, what we see is that there are 2 men who hold the hands of the girl and other 5 men are standing. So now we know for sure that it'a a gang of 5.

Clue 4 : Episode 7 : By now it must be crystal clear that the lawnmower man is the spaghetti monster. {98% probability} Chances are he could be merely scaring the girls so that they get lost in the thick woods. Since he knows the coastal geography pretty good. Maybe he's not a murderer. But an accomplice for sure. Question is who is he really? What's his identity? Is he the illegitimate child born out of Tuttle's extra-marital affairs? Is he actually Tuttle's son who's been perhaps disowned? Does he say "My family's been around here for a long time" because of this reason? Did he kill Tuttle in 2010? Many questions here. Let's wait for the episode 8. It's just a few more hours to go guys. Fingers crossed.

Clue 5 : Episode 7 : We saw that Marty played golf with his ex-colleague who's also now the sheriff. Remember he was also slapped by Rust in Episode 1? This is more of an observation.

Clue 6 : Lastly, the grandpa seems to be the head chief of the cruel cult as was indicated in my previous clue sheet. High likelihood - 70-80 % probability.

Well, finally whatever the outcome is, I really hope that some twist blows your mind out. High expectations here. Let it not turn out to be a damp squib. The motive, the rationale behind the gruesome pagan killings is perhaps what no one has anticipated yet.

Overall the series has been extremely satisfying, providing ample food for the brain. The story pacing, the background score, the colorful characters, the sound works, the editing was really top notch HBO stuff. I also believe this series will help boost Louisiana's tourism industry and also put it on the world's map. Just like what Breaking Bad did to New Mexico or Sopranos did to New Jersey.

The countdown has begin guys. Stock on some Act-II, Doritos, Cokes, Papa John's pizzas or buffalo wings. It's gonna be an entertaining night. Have fun folks. Ciao.