Under the Dome - Season 1 Special FX

Well frankly speaking, after Breaking Bad got over I was looking for a new television series to get hooked to. That's when I came across this show "Under the Dome" showed on CBS. In fact, in about 7 days from today, the season 2 is slated to begin i.e. from June 30.

The show appealed to me, the moment I found that Dean Norris was a part of the star cast. Although apart from Dean Norris, the rest of the cast comprised of fresh faces with naive acting skills. The show's central premise is about a small town which is surrounded & covered by an invisible dome shield. The town is totally cut-off from the outside world. The story then revolves around the town's interesting adventures regarding the conservation of limited resources, brinkmanship, one-upmanship. It also covers earthly human themes like teamwork, pride, greed, cunningness, hidden agendas, internal politics etc.

This blog post today will only focus on the special FX elements of the show. I must admit the show's pilot episode did manage to catch my attention whereby I decided to follow-up all the remaining episodes. The pilot episode had some good eyeball-catching special FX, which piques one's interest. If you notice, all the next episodes feature a few seconds of the Episode 1 FX scenes before starting.

Here's a short list of some decent special effect scenes as follows :

Scene 1 : Episode 1 : A small private airplane like Cessna crashes on the dome. Good work here in showing the plane's parts being blown away while the debris falling on the ground.

Scene 2 : Episode 1 : The buffalo being cut into 2 pieces right in the middle. This one is a nice bloody scene where you actually see the the buffalo's spinal cord. Vegans might find this shot a bit offensive... probably :)

Scene 3 : Episode 1 : Sheriff Linda trying to communicate with her husband who's outside the dome. They try feel each other by touching the dome inside-out.

Scene 4 : Episode 8 : The scene where the egg turns pink. The scene about "The monarch will be crowned". Won't go much into the details here. Regular viewers might agree with me if they found this scene quite dumb and stupid, logic wise. If you're new to the series, these pics should arouse some curiosity I guess.

Lastly, I invite and encourage readers to post other FX scenes that I might have missed. Do post in your comments about what you feel about the show in general. Also drop in your expectations about the upcoming Season 2 & suggest plot ideas, twists etc. Happy viewing :)

Lock Screen in Mac OS X

Here's a quick tip for the month of May - Q) How to lock screen of Mac OS X?

Answer : Control + Shift + Eject button

Correct me if am wrong, the Windows equivalent to lock screen is Windows button + L  right

Tagging in Git

Git offers tagging capability, just like Subversion. Tagging is just like a checkpoint to denote a certain stage in the repository's version, perhaps to highlight some important event. Let's say you want to tag the repository as version 1.0, once some major changes were performed. Or perhaps tag the repository as v1.6.3 when a certain bug was fixed.

Let's see a quick illustration. Go to your repository and type the following :

git tag -a v1.0 -m "First version"

Now this has saved you tag as v1.0. You can see the tags by using the following command :

git describe --tags

v1.0

Also, you can see what changes were performed in the v1.0 by typing the foll. command :

git show v1.0

This will show all the committed changes included in the v1.0

Track file changes in Git

In Git, it is possible to find out which user did what changes in a specific file. The command to do so is git blame. Go to your git repository and type the following :

git blame <file-name>

Eg : git blame Test.sh

It will display the list of exact specific changes committed by all the users who made changes to the file Test.sh.

Note : It also shows the user's time zones. This can be helpful to track the times when the changes were performed, if the git repository is shared by multiple users across different geographies.

Stashing changes in Git

Guys, this is a post discussing the simple concept of "stashing" in Git. Let's say you are working on some changes in Git. However, before committing your changes, you are asked to work on something else urgently. Git gives you the ability to immediately shift your focus and keep your changes in a "stash", which can be committed later.

Let's try a simple example :

Assuming you have git installed and a repository to work on.

Go to the Git repository and create a new file : vi " Test.rtf"

Now, add the file to the staging list by using the command

git add "Test.rtf"

Note that now, the Test.rtf file is added to the staging list and is not yet committed. Lets say you don't want to commit your changes as yet. So you can stash your changes temporarily by using the following command.

git stash 

You will see a message like this :

Saved working directory and index state WIP on master: 4bed021 Added Test.rtf file
HEAD is now at 4bed021 Added Test.rtf file

You can view the stash list by using the following command :

git stash list

You'll see something like :

stash@{0}: WIP on master: 4bed021 Added Test.rtf file

Suppose you make multiple changes and stash un-committed changes, you can see the multiple changes when you run the command "git stash list"

Eg : 

stash@{0}: WIP on master: 385553f added 2 new files
stash@{1}: WIP on master: 4bed021 Added Test.rtf file

Sometime later when you are ready to commit your changes, all you have to do is pop the stash list

Type "git stash pop". This will pop the first element from the list i.e stash@{0} and make it ready to be committed.

In other words, stash is like an array stack with multiple elements (i.e changes) in it. When you pop the stash, the last element will be popped first (similar to LIFO - Last In First Out function).

You can then commit these changes using

git commit . -m "Adding pre-stashed changes"

So all your -ex stashed changes are now committed. Stashing can come in very handy if you have to work on something else before committing your changes. This is one of the strengths of Git versioning.

Invoke Ant build from Maven

The jar created by the Ant build can be then attached to the project using the Build Helper Maven plugin.

Consider the following example snippet of the pom.xml

<plugins>

   <plugin>

        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>

         <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>1.7</version>
            <executions>
              <execution>
                <tasks>
                      Place any Ant task here
                </tasks>
             </execution>
           <executions>

   </plugin>

 </plugins>

If required, you can then attach the jar created by the Ant build to this Maven project using another plugin named "build-helper-maven-plugin".

This plugin has various goals like build-helper:add-resource and build-helper:attach-artifact

Detailed information on this plugin can found here.

MySQL JDBC Connector on Mac OSX

If you're working on any Java based program which uses MySQL as it's back-end database, you might find this article extremely helpful.

In order to pull data from the MySQL database, it is first important to establish a connection with it so that the script can talk with it.

The connection can be established by using the MySQL JDBC driver. Now, this driver needs to be separately downloaded. Here's the download link btw. If you're working on Mac OSX, please select the platform-independent version of the Connector from the drop down.

Once downloaded, untar the tar (or unzip the zip file). Copy the mysql-connector-x.x-bin.jar to /Library/Java/Extensions.

If you're using Eclipse IDE for editing class files, you need to make some changes in Eclipse's preferences. So go to Eclipse -> Preferences -> Java -> User Libraries. Click 'New' to create a new user library named as "MYSQL_CONNECTOR_LIBRARY" for instance. Now, click "Add External JARs..." button and browse to the downloaded jar : mysql-connector-x.x-bin.jar.

So if you're Java application is trying to connect to MySQL database, the following code snippet might come in handy for quick reference.

import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.SQLException;

try {

connection=DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306", "username", "password");

}