Arrrrr

In, and tired, following my second viewing of POTC 3.

I understand that there are people who saw the first two, went to the third one and then complained that it was either silly or over the top.

Which makes me wonder exactly what they were expecting.

Having seen the first two, I was expecting stereotypes, silly action sequences, ridiculous accents, plotting of the most egregrious kind and general offenses against cinema. Oh, and fun.

Which, strangely, was exactly what I got.

To be entirely honest, if you don't think that ( spoiler )

is the coolest thing ever then you should be buried at once, as you are clearly dead.

For the benefit of the dense seats

One of the things that's annoyed me most about people's reaction to POTC 3 is that it was confusing and they couldn't work out who was doing what to who, where and why. I was left baffled, because although the plot is more convoluted than your average action movie it does all tie together, and I was delighted to be watching a movie where people's motivations made sense and the plot points of the movie were based on them. The problem seems to be that there were six characters all with conflicting motives, and this caused a fair amount of conflict between them. But frankly if you can cope with, say, a book, or a roleplaying game then you should be absolutely fine with this kind of thing.

So, for those people who either thought the plot made no sense, or were left confused by all the back-stabbing, here's the plot explained, along with everyone's motives( spoilers, of course )

Strangeness in C# compilation

Something I spent a couple of hours digging into today, and caused much strangeness. If you use C# then knowing this might save you having to do the same...

When working out which method to call the compiler works its way up the calling chain from subclass to baseclass looking for a method signature that fits. It stops looking as soon as it finds one. The problem arises because the literal 0 can be mapped onto an enum without any casting. Which means that if there's a subclass with a method on it that takes an enumeration as a parameter and a baseclass with a method that takes an integer the call will be made to the subclass, producing an unexpected result. This is only true with a literal 0 - passing in a variable will work fine.
( sample code follows )