Friday, November 30, 2012

Stupid imageView bug

Posting this only because I tried to google the problem and failed.

If you create your own custom ImageView, and the end result is that on zooming or moving the image only a part of if gets zoomed or moved even though the matrix is computed right, check that you haven't hidden view.getMatrix() by accident.

Yeah, silly, I know.


Thursday, November 29, 2012

Beauvais


Beauvais is a small town a bit north of Paris. I always known it as the place Ryanair flies to because it's too damn cheap for CDG, and also, more charitably, as the place that has a cathedral with a famous clock. We figured that we would visit it on our way to Amiens.



On arrival we noticed in rural France, unlike in Paris, pretty much everything is closed on Sundays, and beheld the strangest structure.

It was quite lovely, and decorated as a proper Gothic cathedral should be, but it was the weirdest shape of all the cathedrals I have ever seen, and I have seen a few. It didn't have a nave. At all. Nor a spire.

Inside, it was the tallest church I'd ever seen (the tallest in existence, claims Wikipedia) - my photos don't quite do it justice - and had weird wooden things clearly keeping the walls from caving in.

 

The clocks was there too, with more faces than could fit into any picture, showing interesting things like the age of the world.



The flying buttresses outside looked very airy indeed, but clearly failed to buttress anything, and had to be propped up with huge iron beams.

Later I read up on the cathedral and learned that they never got around to building the nave in the first place, that they did in fact build a tower but it fell off about 500 years ago, that the choir caved in a bit and that it's quite a job to keep the damn thing standing. But damn, this marvel of medieval French architecture was beautiful and I wanna see it again.

More pictures here.


Wednesday, November 28, 2012

A health advice to self


Some years ago I tried to measure my blood pressure during an orgasm. I was at it for a couple of days, but my fine scientific experiment failed, partly because I was too preoccupied with the matter at hand to concentrate on the measurement, but mostly because a blood pressure measurement takes longer than an orgasm and I was not quite sure what kind of timing to aim for.

In any case I failed to notice any difference between my blood pressure during an orgasm and otherwise.

Recently I have repeated the experiment to see if my blood pressure rises while reading Russian newspapers. And damn, it does. Seriously. By 10 points or so. 15, if the author is a Finnish docent.

Oh well, I know what to do. Won't even be hard, since I only read it when something interesting (like Zavgorodnyaya case) is happening. Probably shouldn't read it anyway, it's much more annoying than Russian forums, and not half as entertaining.