MOVIES : Women's Love

Saw this on Monday so it's not as fresh.
This is Khaled's (my uncle) number one hit movie in Egypt. It stars one of their biggest female actors and was a success throughout the arabic world.
It's basically about three sisters who all have different mothers, who are brought together by the death of their father to stay in one house for a year so they can keep their share of his wealth. The sisters hate each other at first, but then grow to appreciate their differences and the film transforms, slowly, into a story about them each trying to find love (in a boy :)
I laughed often, and really enjoyed myself. Khaled, in a speach afterwards, said that he wanted to make an arabic film that wasn't about the 'arabic problem', but instead about human problems: we are all human after all. Well he succeeded, I was enticed into this world of arabic love and was only occasionally surprised by a cultural difference that I wasn't expecting.
I thought the beginning credits of the film were an excellent way to begin - we have a little joke followed by a long journey through Cairo. This introduces us to the modern Egyptian Cairo, placing the story in a real place that isn't so different from the world I live in; already we are thinking about the characters as people who could be our neighbours.
Of course I am saying all this from the perspective of a Westerner, the main audience was arabic so I can't speak for them, but I did feel that the movie did an excellent job of saying 'here, have some fun, we are going to tell you an entertaining story about some _people_ and the loves of their lives'.

MOVIES : Metallica : Some kind of Monster

Why am I addicted to Metallica documentaries?
This was really good, tracking the making of the latest album, St Anger. It starts with the boys trying something really new: just jamming in a studio until they have some songs going. Sharing the reponsibilities for lyrics and tunes and so on.
In the past they have made riff tapes, and submitted them to Lars and James who would then go away and create tracks with lyric lines (no actual lyrics), and then come back and record them, and right towards the end come up with words :) Amazing to watch in the making of Black doco by the BBC.
We watch, as the film starts, a depressed, irritable James being totally unreasonable. Lars, in his emotionally 'mature' way, trying to be very reasonable and therefore pissing James off even more. The boys have a therpaist in to help them sort through problems since James told the old Bass player to go away (40k per month!)
Then everything comes to a head and James disapears: to a rehab clinic. He won't talk to Lars or Bob Rock (who I think they should have replaced with a real bass player much earlier) and doesn't return for over 6 months.
When he does he has new rules for them all: only play from 12-4 for example.
The film then follows the band's recovery (not just James') from 'some kind of monster', culminating in their triumphant return.
The doco is great, well put together and shows therapy as being both a wank and useful for these boys who are, just like the rest of us, a little f*cked up :) It really explains how the music ended up how it is - and especially the lyrics. I really liked it, and would recommend it to anyone with the vaguest interest in metallica or music creation in general.

MOVIES : Farenheit 9/11

Or is that 11/9?
Anyway, I finally managed to see this yesterday, after months of putting it off. It made me smirk, laugh, and cry. While not the most exciting documentary, while it had many specious arguments, its fundamental message(s) were, for a left winger like myself, undeniable.
War Sux.
Even now I start to get emotional as I think about all those people who are dying, as I type, in Iraq (or Sudan, or Afghanistan or wherever). The civilians, the soldiers, but not American politicians or their kids.
It just had me hating humans again and again. We are all like that, we all suck and hate and do 'evil' things to each other. We all want money and power and security, and are transfixed by fear.
Just this year I broke a promise for money. I hated myself for it. I was put into a position that I almost did it again just this morning (read my holiday blog for more on that...)

Back to the film. It was OK, not as many funny bits to relieve the tension as Bowling for Columbine - which I think is something you need when dealing with such important issues. It did try to cover a few to many bases; it would have benefited from a more focused approach (Ended up being more like 2/3 episodes).

MOVIES : Bride and Prejudice

This film is based on the novel of a similar name :) and directed/produced by the woman who did Baji on the Beach and Bend it like Beckam (seems to have an obsession with films starting with 'b')
It was great fun, really caught the flavour of the book, even if it was in a Bollywood setting, and had some nice things to say about the arrogant, colonial, 'we've got everything' west.
The costumes/colour was fantastic, the street scenes reminded me too much of India (and Janice of Cairo), and the dancing was fun.
The only thing I wasn't a big fan of was the music/singing. I found it didn't get my leg moving in time - and it doesn't take much to get my leg moving. And the singing felt really artificial - like it wasn't coming from the girls at all, but some other, professional singer whom they were miming to.
Janice said that she wondered if it was because we seemed to only be getting sound from the front speakers, not surround, and I guess taht is possible. It just didn't seem to have the punch I would like from a fun bollywood 'musical'.

PROGRAMMING : Javolution and '04 papers

JADE has now devolved into Javolution :) This is an interesting library with some interesting ideas, but I haven't used it so I don't know how effective it really is.
Also joel is editing a book of the best software articles from '04, and the list of possibles is currently very interesting.
I especially liked 'personality of a programmer' - some really good C programming hints _and_ examples of how real people program Macs

MOVIES : Alien Vs Predator

Oh Yeah!
Like 'Captain Sky...' this film had a superb vision - bringing together two fantastic franchises, linking in to the original films (lots of nice, subtle links they didn't have to put in, but did).
Good mix of suspense and action. All in all a pretty darn good film. I did go in expecting it to be overwrought, but it worked mostly - there was a small question of not 'raising the stakes' but I am fussy :)
Definitely worth a look, if only for how they've justified everything and had some fun too.
Go Girls!!

(I forgot to mention that this film really highlighted one of the reasons I love the Alien films. The Aliens as designed by Giger are, of course, fantastic. The parallels between growing and alien which bursts from your chest and a woman giving birth are obvious - and Giger really pushes these parallels into his creatures - the volvic, spider like creatures that inseminate, the horrific births of this alien thing from your belly. Great stuff.
And this film definitely did not shy away at all :)

BOOKS : Monstrous Regiment

By Terry Pratchet
This was OK, story about a girl who pretends to be a boy and joins the army to find her brother (sound familiar?). It is Terry's book about war, truth, propganda, and how stupid men with dicks are.
It was well written and poignant (not that I know how to spell that word), but after reading Wee Free Men, his best book yet, it is not a surprise that it didn't blow me away. Well worth a read for a bit of serious fun, but I'd go for Wee Free Men first (in fact I am thinking of writing him a letter because I enjoyed Wee Free Men so much - considering I have been reading his stuff for 15+ years that's remarkable)

BOOKS : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night

This was a v. popular (maybe double plus popular?) book in London about 2 months ago, you would be hard pressed to catch a tube without seeing someone reading a copy. And after Jo's recommendation I gave it a read (even if she refused to read the book I recommended :)
It's not bad. Written from the perspective of an Autistic kid it is about him trying to solve a murder mystery - the murder of the dog in the title. It introduces the reader the complexities, simplicities and complete differentness that autistic peoples lives are.
I had been spoilt somewhat by having already read 'Faster than Dark,' a book Greg got me to read back in NZ which is also written from the perspective of an autistic person. That was really good, but I didn't like the end.
tCIotDitN is also really good, but didn't have as big an impact on me because of already having read a very similar book. The biggest difference between the two is that tCIotDitN is much more human, and tries to deal with family/social issues, while Faster than Dark is a 'sci-fi' book, dealing with philosophical issues. (Interesting that it is labelled sci-fi simply because it is dealing with a single scientific possibility that ultimately is just a question - 'what would you do if you could 'fix' your brain?')
I would recommend both to anyone interested, probably tCIotDitN first, then Faster than Dark.

WHAT THE : wierd Halo 2 promo

There is a wierd 'game' being played all over america, involving answering phone boxes when they ring and listening to, maybe even being involved with, bits of story. It's called I love bees.
Wierd

PROGRAMMING : Couple of things

OK, read a couple of articles today.
First was on the Nature of the Nature of Order. Sort of a summary of patterns as observed by the Architect who popularised the idea from the point of view of a computer scientist. Well it was a bit beyond me, I really think I need the full thing as the summary just didn't give enough information.
Second was a paper all about Acme, a text editor/window manager thingy a bit like Oberon/CAT designed to be an ultra powerful, mouse driven editor for programmers. Looks kinda cool, but I have to admit that since I am not a command line obsessor I haven't warmed to the idea of 'all your commands are text, just select and execute' even save, cut, paste and so on. I'd really like to have a go, but don't ahve a linux machine at the moment so I can't :(

PROGRAMMING : Extinction

I've been half-joking since my first job that, by the time 2005 comes I (as a programmer) will be a blue collar worker. Well 2005 is quickly approaching and it hasn't happened yet, but an interesting article (part1, part2, part3) proposes that it's even worse than I imagined... that rather than becoming blue collar, programming will essential become extinct altogether.
While I agree in some part with what he is saying, the article is fairly poorly written. Unfortunately the author insists on using obfuscated language, and referring to other peoples ideas on things in point form without, in my mind, adequate explanation. The lack of clarity thereby imparted makes the article less convincing than it might otherwise be.

PROGRAMMING : Wow. Goodbye SQL

Well, that'll never actually happen. But wouldn't it be nice if it was replaced by something better? Here is a website by some guys who have addressed the shortcomings of SQL. They've even written a book (new edition next year).
I am about to have a look at TTD. I wonder if I could write a translater from TTD to SQL? Prob not considering you'd have to re-introduce SQL problems :)

PROGRAMMING : Why not document it?

...Because then you have to support it. And then you have to maintain backwards compatability.
IBM, in an article about the POWER5 over at ars, mentioned that they haven't made a particular diagnostic interface public so they can change it and not maintain backwards compatability. Interesting take on it - Why not have a bunch of 'undisclosed' interfaces to things that are more powerful or whatever, but because they are undisclosed they are not official and guaranteed to NOT be compatable in the next version.

PROGRAMMING : Root Cause Analysis

Alan Cox says:
Root cause analysis: "I've got a friend who works on aeroplanes, and he has the wonderful job of, when a piece of an aeroplane falls off, cracks, or something before it was supposed to, they go to him and say 'why did it happen?'. And it's then not a case of saying 'oh, this analysis is wrong', it's saying 'how did this analysis come to be wrong? How did it make this wrong decision? Where else have we made this decision?' People are starting to do this with software."
"The OpenBSD Project started doing it with security in particular, and found it very effective. Every time somebody found a mistake, they'd take the entire software base for these systems - bear in mind, working in the open source world you have a lot of source code, so it's much easier - and you look, with the aid of automated search tools, for every other occurrence of the same problem, in all your software. Because if someone's made a mistake once, we know lots of other people will have made the mistake.
From an article that makes for a mildly interesting read. But I really like this idea, appeals to the fastidious side of my brain :) - and the part that is sick of fixing the same errors...

BOOKS : might look out for this one

Cradle to Cradle looks kind of interesting, talking about sustainable design of products. I am more into pragmatic/appropriate design, but might be worth a look

PROGRAMMING : Various

Now that I've had time to browse around a little (thank you Keith and Anne!!) I have a few articles of interest

Here is a really good article with Joel of Joel on Software talking about how the web has taken over even though it sux - a bit like windows :) Windows was 80% there when it took over the world, and now HTML is 80% there too. Does this mean that every new advance will be built on 80% technology?

And here is an article on Imaginate. Something written in COBOL recommended by Andy Hunt. I am reading it as I type (well, maybe not _as_ I type:)...Damn you Pete. Tell us how it's done!!

Want to know what papers to read about computer science and language paradigms. check this out then.

COMPUTERS : Really small computers, Oh My!!

I love em. Small computers. In fact if I a) had the money and b) hadn't seen one of them up close I would go and buy one of the latest iMacs right now. All I want is a screen, keyboard and mouse. Preferrably no wires.

But if I do have to put up with a 'box' then it could at least be small. Like the espresso. Or maybe not.

Here's one, the Jadetec Micro PC. Tom's even likes it! Of course onboard graphics (yuk) and slow hard disk make this £575 box a tad more expensive than the £180 one from Espresso...

MOVIES : Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Interesting.
Fantastic visuals set in an alternate 1939 where amazing steamtech-esk machines are running around all over the place, all shot in a cepia kind of colourless feel, and a Film Noir style to the story and characters. Apparently it was all shot against blue screen - no out of sound stage/built set stuff anywhere.
But the story was about as exciting as batsht, there was no soul, little risked, and the characterisation was trite.
I was also put off by the squirming kids all around, as it is a PG film and I saw it in the middle of the day.
Reminded me quite a lot, style wise, of 'I, Robot' but that had a fantastic story and really good characters. I can't find a review of it in my blog, suffice to say though that I thought it was grand, our Aussie director does it again.

LIFE : Burce Sterling and the UN

Bruce Sterling, a popular SciFi writer I don't think I've ever read :), has posted an article that, toungue only somewhat in check, proposes the marriage of the UN and the internet.

OPERATING SYSTEMS : Syllable

Another OS, supposed to be BeOS like, has been posted on slashdot. Syllable has lots of code already written, and no X-Windows legacy to slow it down (does this mean it's mainly linux?).
Had a quick look at screenshots and it looks very much 'play it again Sam,' but maybe I could just use the underpinnings...

LIFE : Save the world

Here is an excellent organisation which tries to save the world using Appropriate Technology - one of my favorite subjects. They may be christian, or at least use good fearing souls for funding, but the work they are doing seems to be excellent.
Having spent the past few weeks around England looking at museums about our forebares, it is amazing to think that a lot of our 'of course' stuff just hadn't even occured to anyone yet. Decent plough design, ram pipes for moving water and many more things could make peoples lives so much easier without severely impacting the environment.

BOOKS : The history of a number : E

Euler's number, e, is developed in great detail both mathematically, historically and conceptually. Along with i, pi, 1 and 0 it is one of the most important numbers in mathematics, being the basis of (e)xponential growth.
This is a superb and fascinating book, and makes me want to go back to uni and do maths that much more - I got that much closer to understanding the maths I did in Engineering and now I want the whole Gamet!
If you have any Calculus ability, and any desire to expand it this book is for you. I will be rereading it shortly.

e^(i*pi) - 1 = 0

(Brendon, have a read, I know how much you hate i, but this will show you that there are a lot more 'problems' with our numbering system, and demonstrate that they aren't problems, just different 'planes')

PROGRAMMING : Behind the 8 ball

Well, when I was sitting bored at work just before I left NZ I thought I'd start writing a new shell. One that was object oriented, and had a simple but strong syntax (ended up being quite Lisp like). It was coming along nicely, and then I left :( and haven't touched the computer since.
And so now I find out about Monad, an object oriented command line by MS which seems to have a lot of the features I was contemplating. Except the strong syntax. Why do command line junkies insist on having every command have unique parameter passing and structure?

grep pattern:tiest.*vilee files:[find directory:. name:*.doc]

ok, si it looks like you ahve to type a lot - but because of the strong syntax and the interface defined for the commands (Java objects :) it is very easy to do command completion on them... better even than in Bash... so you nd up (I hope) not having to type too much at all.