Witness 1985 title

Witness – Japanese/Italian Blu-ray vs iTunes HD

Witness - watch your back - Bluray top itunes middile dvd bottom

Witness is a 1985 Amishsploitation-thriller staring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis and directed by Peter Weir. Three writers share credit: William Kelley, Pamela Wallace and Earl W. Wallace. Winning Oscars for its screenplay and editing as well as opening the Cannes film-festival, and being the eighth highest grossing film in the US in 1985, the film was a commercial and critical success. It is not yet available on Blu-Ray in the US, though international editions (which are basically the same disc) are available. I thought I’d compare the Blu-Ray with the iTunes 1080p edition to see which is worth your time.

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PySmaz a Pure Python Small-String Compression Library Ported from SMAZ

PySmaz is a pure python port of the SMAZ small string compression library originally developed by Salvatore Sanfilippo. I thought I’d just jot down a few notes about the experience of porting the library from C to Python. In particular the challenges around optimizing both the absolute compression ratio of the algorithm, ensuring throughput is acceptable for its intended use, while preventing the code from descending into an unreadable mess.

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Python: Pulling Apart IEEE Floats for Decimal conversion

While attempting to convert floats precisely to Decimals the other day I was caught out by the fact that Python 2.6’s print function defers to whatever the underlying C compiler’s printf function does. This meant that on Linux I got one result when I asked for ‘%.31f’ % math.pi, and on Windows – something completely different. This lack of portability is a pain, and I had to work around it.

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