The Boundingbox

3 Updates:

1. I’ve added a new chart with the current Planet51 competitors. Figures still talking…
2. I’ve replaced Polar Express with Bolt.
3. I’ve enabled Bolt and Happy Feet by default. Both where released on thanks giving, I think…

I’ve added a new group to compare with, Top5 Independent Movies:

1. Chicken Run
2. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
3. The Tale of Despereaux
4. The Wild Thornberrys
5. 9

About the Idea

The release of the Planet 51 is almost here, Nov 20th 2009. I’m interested in the box office of this movie so I decided to create some charts to to see the evolution of the box office in a visual way.

To track Planet 51 US Box Office I’ve gathered some information from boxofficemojo and I’ve done some charts to compare Planet 51 against other animation movies. For this purpose I’ve chosen 3 groups:

Sony Top 5: The top 5 animation movies with the best US box office distributed by Sony

1. Cloudy with a chance of meatballs
2. Open Season
3. Monster House
4. Surf’s Up
5. Final Fantasy

Top 5: The top 5 animation movies with the best US box office

1. Shrek 2
2. Finding Nemo
3. Shrek The Third
4. Up
5. Shrek

Top 5 Nov: The top 5 animation movies released in November

1. The Incredibles
2. Monsters Inc
3. Toy Story 2
4. Happy Feet
5. Polar Express

About the charts

1. Weekend Box Office: This chart let you compare weekend box office of Top 5 and Top 5 Nov movies against Planet 51.
2. Daily Box Office Normalized to Planet 51 Release Date. This chart let you compare daily box office of Top 5 and Top 5 Nov movies against Planet 51.
3. Daily Box Office Normalized to Planet 51 Release Year. This chart let you compare daily box office and release dates of Top 5 and Top 5 Nov movies against Planet 51.

Everyone is invited

Feel free to collaborate, make suggestions, add comments, whatever and whenever.

I’m thinking about developing some applications for iPhone. I’ve never code anything for Mac, so starting this trip to IPhone, the first stop is ObjC/Cocoa. Here I have collected some information I found useful for  C++ programmer to start coding ObjC .

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You never know from where the inspiration will arrive. Doing some banking managements I took a look at one interesting Euribor Web Page and  I came across a nice charts with lots of options to be able to explore values along a wide time range. Doing some research I found that the flash chart used belongs to amCharts. This web offers  the use of a wide range of flash charts for free, including the stocks chart, the one that I was interested in.

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Exiten muchos libros, charlas y conferenciantes dedicados a tratar sobre el tema de cómo gestionar equipos, cómo mantenerlos motivados, etc… Después de leer unas cuantas, las siguientes tienen algo de dejavù. En mi opinión, esta conferencia de Ed Catmull se destaca de las demás en 3 aspectos.

1. Ed Catmull es el CTO de una empresa de renombre dentro del la producción de películas de animación y resulta que es un sector del que no abunda información de gestión de equipos.
2. En esta conferencia la mayoría de los consejos y recetas van acompañadas de una breve descripción sencilla de como ha llegado a esas conclusiones. Como en cualquier problema es muy importante definir las condiciones de contorno para poder aplicar la solución más adecuada. Muchas conferencias de este tipo no describen el contexto que llevó a las conclusiones que se exponen obviando gran parte del problema.
3. La conclusiones que aporta Ed Catmull sobre los cimientos de Pixar a la hora de gestionar sus equipos, bajo una apariencia de convencionalidad no lo son. De hecho, creo que aporta ideas muy modernas de gestión pero sin negar que implica asumir ciertos riesgos para que realmente fraguen. Vamos que nadie da duros a peseta. Quien no arriesga no gana.

Antes de seguir recomiendo la lectura Conferencia, pero si no tienes mucho tiempo aquí va mi resumen. 

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The third level in backup security and one of the most important is to be able to store backups in a place different than the production place, well known as Keep backups off-site. Currently taking advantage of free services like gmail, it´s much easier to fulfill this third level of backup security and to have all your backups available through an internet connection. Here I show a homemade script that does the following steps.

1. Compress your web server, database and svn repository
2. Encrypt compressed files with openssl
3. Send those files to a gmail account
4. Clean gmail account removing old backups

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This is just a little tip for those who use python and work with COM automation components. If you are a windows user,  and you want to write python scripts to interact with Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Studio the best way to do so is using the this application’s COM componts. But most of the times finding documentation this COM components registered in your Windows is tricky and difficult. Using a simple tool that is automatically installed with the pythonwin module, you can get wrap python classes for all interfaces and constants exported by a registered COM component. This usually helps a lot to find non documented methods, and even to make your python script more legible and clean.

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A great friend and coworker drew my south park caricature. It was a hand drawing so I scanned and get a dirty grey-scale image, not to nice. So to get something cleaner I realized that I will need to vectorize the image. To do so I was looking for some freeware and I found Inkscape. This open-source software is surprisingly great and the vectorizing tool is awesome for someone like me that was facing this problem for the first time. So in the following lines, I will briefly document how to vectorize a bitmap using Inkscape and the help of The Gimp.

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