A list of Oscar winners and their Rotten Tomatoes ratings

Here's the list. Enjoy!

Title	Year	Critics	Audience
Rebecca	1940	100	91
The Lost Weekend	1945	100	87
All About Eve	1950	100	94
On the Waterfront	1954	100	94
The Godfather	1972	100	97
An American in Paris	1951	98	77
Lawrence of Arabia	1962	98	91
The French Connection	1971	98	85
The Godfather, Part II	1974	98	96
Annie Hall	1977	98	92
The Artist	2011	98	89
All Quiet on the Western Front	1930	97	85
It Happened One Night	1934	97	92
Casablanca	1942	97	94
The Best Years of Our Lives	1946	97	91
Patton	1970	97	92
Unforgiven	1992	97	91
Schindler's List	1993	97	96
The Hurt Locker	2008	97	83
You Can't Take It with You	1938	96	86
Gone With the Wind	1939	96	91
The Bridge on the River Kwai	1957	96	90
In the Heat of the Night	1967	96	90
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	1975	96	95
Amadeus	1984	96	94
The Silence of the Lambs	1991	96	93
No Country for Old Men	2007	95	84
The King's Speech	2010	95	93
My Fair Lady	1964	94	87
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	2003	94	83
Slumdog Millionaire	2008	94	90
Mutiny on the Bounty	1935	93	79
The Apartment	1960	93	93
West Side Story	1961	93	82
Shakespeare in Love	1998	93	76
The Departed	2006	93	92
The Sting	1973	92	93
Million Dollar Baby	2004	92	87
Mrs. Miniver	1942	91	84
Rocky	1976	91	65
The Deer Hunter	1978	91	91
Ordinary People	1980	91	85
The Last Emperor	1987	91	86
Midnight Cowboy	1969	90	86
Ben-Hur	1959	89	81
Terms of Endearment	1983	89	81
How Green Was My Valley	1941	88	82
From Here to Eternity	1953	88	82
Kramer vs. Kramer	1979	88	85
Chariots of Fire	1981	88	76
Gandhi	1982	88	90
Rain Man	1988	88	88
American Beauty	1999	88	90
Platoon	1986	87	91
Titanic	1997	87	69
Chicago	2002	87	80
Grand Hotel	1932	86	76
The Sound of Music	1965	84	86
Gentleman's Agreement	1947	83	78
A Man for All Seasons	1966	83	85
The English Patient	1996	83	81
Tom Jones	1963	81	58
Braveheart	1995	80	83
Driving Miss Daisy	1989	79	78
Dances With Wolves	1990	78	84
Gladiator	2000	78	85
A Beautiful Mind	2001	78	91
Wedding Crashers	2005	75	70
Gigi	1958	74	74
Cavalcade	1933	71	33
Going My Way	1944	71	78
Forrest Gump	1994	71	93
The Life of Emile Zola	1937	70	71
The Great Ziegfeld	1936	59	58
Out of Africa	1985	59	83
The Greatest Show on Earth	1952	41	60

Here's the script.

#!/usr/bin/python

import urllib
import simplejson
import sys

apikey = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'

for l in open('d'):
    l = l[:-1]
    q = urllib.urlencode({'q': l, 'apikey': apikey})
    url = 'http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/movies.json?'+ q
    search_results = urllib.urlopen(url)
    j = simplejson.loads(search_results.read())
    if j['total'] > 0:
        m = j['movies'][0]
        title = m['title']
        year = m['year']
        critics = m['ratings']['critics_score']
        audience = m['ratings']['audience_score']
    print title, year, critics, audience

The 'd' input file contains the Oscar winner titles from WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award)

UTF-8 strings in trivial-ldap field values

Everybody using LDAP and Common Lisp probably knows the trivial-ldap library. It's a nifty, simple and concise implementation of the LDAP protocol in pure Common Lisp - i.e. no foreign library is needed to access your directory using this package. Trivial-ldap documentation states that UTF-8 strings are not supported, although the non-ascii string attribute value is properly passed in trivial-ldap:entry slots. Here is how you can easily get UTF-8 string attribute in Allegro CL:

(defun ldap-utf-8 (user pass base filter attribute)
  (let ((ldap (trivial-ldap:new-ldap :user user
                                     :pass pass
                                     :base base)))
    (trivial-ldap:bind ldap)
    (unwind-protect
         (when (trivial-ldap:search ldap filter)
           (loop for res = (trivial-ldap:next-search-result ldap)
                 while res
                 do (return-from ldap-utf-8
                      (octets-to-string
                       (string-to-octets
                        (car (trivial-ldap:attr-value res attribute))
                        :external-format :8-bit)
                       :external-format :utf8))))
      (trivial-ldap:unbind ldap))))

The arguments are self explanatory.

Blindness - A Movie by Fernando Meirelles

Definitely one of the best movies I've seen in a couple of months. Based on a excellent book by Jose Saramago, I've read 2 years ago. Pretty original story about a city affected by an epidemic of blindness. Caused by some contagious virus spread by unknown means, which cripples everyone except one woman - a doctor's wife (excellent Julianne Moore in this role). While there were numerous pretty effective depictions of an epidemic (28 Days After and it's sequel 28 Weeks After come to mind), none was so touching and personal in depiction of radical change in human nature affected by loss of senses. Noteworthy performance by Gael García Bernal. Well worth the time and highly recommended.

I/O in Allegro CL multiprocessing code

Recent posting by one Timur Sufiev on slime-devel mailing list about tracing not working in threaded sbcl made me check how it looks for Allegro CL. First I found out what swank does in Allegro backend when you set swank:*globally-redirect-io* in your ~/.swank.lisp. It occurs that it creates a set of bindings in excl:*cl-default-special-bindings* for common stream variables:

• *terminal-io*
• *query-io*
• *debug-io*
• *standard-input*
• *standard-output*
• *trace-output*
• *error-output*

Each of them pointing to a synonym stream connected to current slime session streams. Unfortunately Allegro CL doesn't use this variable on every mp:make-process (or mp:process-run-function wrapper for that matter). Franz treats this variable as a set of sensible defaults which you can use in your own process creating code with the keyword argument :initial-bindings to mp:make-process or mp:process-run-function. OK - I read too much into the documentation :-/ It was all kindly explained to me by a Franz engineer in a swift follow-up to a "bug-report" I submited. Unfortunately there are situations where you don't want or simply can't modify code spawning a subprocess (notable example being hunchentoot or any other MP enabled web server). It would make you patch each and every new release of the software either by modifying the source code or replacing it's internal functions - both things a huge no-no. So - what to do if you really want to direct I/O from a subprocess to your slime session? The answer is pretty simple - use advice or fwrap facility in Allegro CL to instrument mp:process-run-function or mp:make-process invocation to add these defaults when you need it. Here is a relevant snippet:

(excl:def-fwrapper default-special-bindings (&rest args)
 (declare (special user::*provide-initial-bindings*))
 (when (and (boundp 'user::*provide-initial-bindings*)
            user::*provide-initial-bindings*)
   (let ((name-or-args (car args)))
     (when (not (listp name-or-args))
       (setq name-or-args (list :name name-or-args))) ;listify
     (unless (getf name-or-args :initial-bindings)    ;update arglist
       (setf (car args)
             (list* :initial-bindings
                    excl:*cl-default-special-bindings*
                    name-or-args)))))
 (call-next-fwrapper))

(excl:fwrap 'mp:process-run-function 'dsb 'default-special-bindings)

The way you enable this is not complicated as well. Just start the main thread with special variable user::*provide-initial-bindings* bound to non nil value. Like this:

CL-USER> (let ((user::*provide-initial-bindings* t))
         (hunchentoot:start-server))

Now every I/O you you do the above-mentioned streams should appear in your slime repl window. Function tracing of course will work as well.

Intro

This entry starts my "on-line diary". Blog is so last century and I'm not quite sure what weblog is ;) But - honest to blog, I will try to maintain it fairly often to hopefully increase signal/noise ratio in the Internet and even entertain my gentle readers from time to time. I'm an IT enthusiast, so - as for stuff which I will enter here - it's going to be mostly net-related. Sometimes cultural, sometimes technical. Anyway - keep your eyes peeled for the blizzard of entries.