Archive for May, 2005
The Interpreter with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. Fun, good-ish thriller. You come into this knowing exactly what you are going to get, and it delivers. Much like Episode III does in fact. There is nothing terribly startling or surprising, but what is there hangs together fairly well (if not always terribly logically).
The hints of romance between Penn and Kidman didn’t get too annoying, and they both play it very cool, so it didn’t bother me. More bothering was Kidman’s tendency to not say things she should, and to run away from the police without too much trouble. What - they don’t have “protective custody” in New York? So … better than Bourne 2, but not as good as Bourne 1.
And Sean Penn is always interesting to watch.
May 31st, 2005
Frames per Second magazine - all about cartoons and animation, delivered in PDFs. Good stuff.
May 29th, 2005
 I am a Thrust-ship.
I am small and tricky - where you think I am, I probably am not. I can work very fast, but I tend to go about things in a round about way, which often leaves me effectively standing still. I hate rocks. Bloody rocks.
What Video Game Character Are You?
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May 27th, 2005
After fourteen years they have tied the knot.
May 26th, 2005
Wouldn’t it be nice if the phone system was as easy to use as internet services? Why is it so hard to send an SMS from a computer? Why is it nigh-on impossible to get the phone system to alert your e-mail if you get an SMS?
Well, it turns out the telecoms people thought so too, so they invented PARLAY - a set of standard APIs for talking to telephony back-ends. Nice. And then, because the APIs were kinda bizarre and complex (because this is the phone system, after all), they went and invented PARLAY X, a simplified web service layer on top of the plain old Parlay API. Schweet!
Now it turns out the local telephone company Telenor is involved in this. But there isn’t a peep about how to get access to the stuff, or how to get involved. It’s like they don’t actually want anyone to use this stuff.
Netcom has a dead simple HTTP-to-SMS message gateway. Better than nothing, but no way for outsiders to hook into their infrastructure. Disappointing, but at least they’ve priced it reasonably and made it reasonably easy to sign up for.
If we are ever going to get beyond downloadable ring-tones and java games then the services will need to hook back into the IT infrastructure. Parlay gives us the means, but as long as it remains locked in the R&D labs, phone services will continue to be either e-mail or WAP based.
Look at how standard APIs make the net flourish: I posted pictures to my blog from my phone via standard e-mail, through Flickr’s server in the states to my blog’s server. None of the actors here know any details about the others. All happens thanks to standardized APIs.
Telenor and Netcom should be pushing this kinda integrated services to drive more MMS traffic, but it seems to be too hard for them to understand. For example, why not have a personal log where all my incoming and outgoing SMS messages are tracked? Why not the same with MMS? Why not create a blog that is phone addressable (i.e. a person sends an SMS to themselves –> the SMS gets routed to the blog instead of back to themselves).
May 25th, 2005
I liked it. Lots of fan service in the movie, just like Kevin Smith writes. Nods to the original movie abound (the closing shot is beautiful!) while the fights are quite awesome. There are even small nods to other science-fiction — the shot of Yoda leaving Kashyyyk reminded me of ET for some reason.
It never slows down, and it dumps a huge amount of information at you all the while. For an infoholic like me, it’s good fun. The opening space-battle has so much happening that you could probably watch the sequence ten times before you’ve caught it all.
The biggest problem I had was with the dialogue - Lucas can’t write romantic chit-chat. He needs help. He had help on Empire and look how well that turned out! The romance scenes which are supposed to illuminate and create sympathy for Anakin fail utterly, becoming unintentionally comic instead. There’s nothing like “I love you” / “I know” here. It’s more “I love you” / “I love you too” / “I love you more” — yeech.
Still, it kicks ass to see the republic fall.
And who would have thought a Star Wars movie could be politically relevant? It’s not just a kid’s movie.
Senator Amidala: “This is how Liberty dies - with thunderous applause. ”
Anakin Skywalker: “You’re either with me or you’re my enemy. ”
Ok - not the deepest or most complex political insights, but scarily relevant to our times. If Dick Cheney starts to shoot lightning from his fingers then it’s time to get off this rock.
(Of course, in reality G.W. Bush is opposed to cloning, so we should be safe from the Clone Wars for a while longer)
May 25th, 2005
My old friend Stephen Løken is paddling from the southern tip of Norway to the northernmost tip (North-cape). He has done this sort of thing before: Lands End to John O’Groats, North Cape to Cape Town. He recons four months should suffice. Four months of roughing it and staying with friends along the coast. Stephen’s cheery disposition should help him charm the local inhabitants in the many many fjords he will cross along the way.
May 24th, 2005
Kopinor is the Norwegian Copyright Control society. They collect fees due to copyright owners. The notion that some copyrights do not have fees to collect seems abhorrent to them. Lawrence Lessig tried to explain but considers his attempts to explain a failure.
Now I happen to like the idea of compulsory licensing and the collection societies - it is what makes music on the radio possible - but Kopinor seem to be prefer a world where all works must be licensed as much as possible. More controls and more closely metered usage appears to be better for the copyright holder. Kopinor seem to like DRM (Digital Restriction Management)
What Kopinor haven’t considered are transaction costs that DRM systems impose. The harder something is to obtain, the fewer will bother. This is why the MSN music store and the CD-ON music store are too painful to use, while the Apple iTMS is a joy to use. The extra steps involved (”excise” as usability guru/designer Alan Cooper calls it) at MSN or CD-ON mean that over half the audience won’t bother.
In the case of academic works: the scientific method pretty much requires the distribution and sharing of hypotheses and test results. Otherwise it’s not really science, is it? Instead it’s just self-gratification. Copyright in academia revolves around either attribution (don’t steal my work) or remuneration for journals (don’t copy our articles for your class without paying for them). Academic journals have discovered that the internet changes the rules. Pre-press articles and online journals are already disrupting the remuneration part of academic copyrights.
The other problem I read-into the Kopinor discussion is a failure of imagination. These guys need to read The Magic Cauldron by Eric Raymond. It describes how egoboo/reputation economies work. Not everything revolves around money. Respect is also a powerful motivator.
May 23rd, 2005
Just the foundations left.
May 21st, 2005
Just the floor left. Erik chills out topless in the hint of sunshine that har broken through the rainclouds.
May 21st, 2005
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