What is the correct order to watch the Star Wars films in?

A friend of mine recently announced on Twitter that he was introducing his wife to Star Wars, however to my shock and horror he said he would be starting off with Episode 1 which just seemed so wrong…

I’ll be starting my eldest daughter off on the first Star Wars film (Episode 4) soon too, it just seems like the natural order. When I had calmed down and stopped frothing at the mouth I explained my worries to him and he asked for references.

Every conversation I have ever had on the subject of the correct order to watch the Star Wars movies in has resulted in an agreement that 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3 is the correct order, but I never got it in writing so I decided it was time to get evidence, from Twitter!

The first response was direct to me in IRC:

17:01 Caius: 4,5,6,1,2,3
17:01 Caius: *IF* you let them watch 1,2,3

That’s fairly standard, it’s often debated wether bothering with Episodes 1, 2 and 3 is worth it, though I think I will show 4, 5 and 6 to my daughters eventually. The rest of the responses came quickly on Twitter:

Well that was the sort of response I was expecting, except the one person who suggested Episodes 4, 5 then 6 followed by the Christmas Special. @mibly, you’re sick! Here is the response as a pie-chart to better illustrate the responses:

Not a single person out of my highly representative sample group voted for Episode 1, 2 then 3 first. I kind of agree with @prettierpixels that the in-jokes will be missed if Episodes 1, 2 and 3 are watched first, but I just have a sort of deep-down intuitive feeling that Star Wars will be spoiled if Episodes 4, 5 then 6 aren’t watched first.

Got an opinion? Post it in the comments!

NWRUG February 2009 – Nanite talk

For the first time in quite a while we had a talk at NWRUG, it seemed to go well and the free Pizzas and Beer provided by Engine Yard were very popular. About 12 people turned up. I was the only speaker and did a 45 minute talk on Nanite with a brief introduction to cloud-computing as that’s the environment I see Nanite being most useful.

Thanks to everyone who turned up and Engine Yard for the sponsorship. I promised a blog post with links to some of the resources from the talk, and here it is!

Useful links from the talk

Nanite (of course)

Kestrel (a starling replacement)

Delayed Job

Warren (A wrapper around AMQP from brightbox)

Engine Yard Solo

As I mentioned in the talk you can probably get away with using third-party APIs and calling it ‘cloud-computing’, this set of slides is really interesting:

Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow

Lastly the slides on SlideShare, though they don’t make as much sense as they do with the talk & my notes.

*update*

Pastie: control rabbitMQ using Nanite, controlling god using Nanite.

Next Month

More talks! Asa Calow has agreed to do a talk on Solr and I rather foolishley agreed to do another talk on Sphinx.

Foxy. Evil, but foxy.

It’s just a bit of fun, so would you?

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Today I discovered the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol. There’s a proper RFC and everything, most useful.

Seen on a list recently

Remember, top-posting because that’s where the cursor happened to be is like shitting in your pants because that’s where your arsehole happened to be.

Q. Does GTA San Andreas work on a MacBook Pro using WinXP and Boot Camp?

A. Yes it does, perfectly and at the highest detail level.

Slightly naughty

In IRC:

Wlll: “My name is Anne van Kesteren and contrary to what many people think, I’m a male.”
Wlll: The internet needs more laydees.
Wlll: 3D laydees that is.
ciaran29d: :|
Wlll: ones who can program Ruby
Wlll: And are hot.
ciaran29d: heh
Wlll: And slightly naughty.
Wlll: You get the idea.
ciaran29d: like, they use PHP?
Wlll: No, that’s just bad.

Bad Cookie

I am using the Rails cookie store that was introduced in Ruby on Rails 2 to store my session data on finder.overcycle.com. Rails will throw an exception if the cookie data is tampered with (Rails can check if the data has been altered), and as I use the Exception Notifier plugin I got my first ‘Cookie Tampered With’ email today:

A CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie occurred in account#signup:

CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.0.2/lib/action_controller/session/cookie_store.rb:143:in `unmarshal'

And the cuplrit? The Alexa crawler apparently. No Alexa crawler! Bad bot!