Archive for September, 2005
Vitals by Greg Bear.
Average bio-tech thriller, much in the vein of Michael Crichton or Bear’s own Blood Music (which is better). It’s the Manchurian Candidate meets Blood Music. There are similar thoughts on the intelligence of bacteria and its ability to communicate with its intelligent host — I’ll never quite be able to look at intestines in quite the same way. The dust jacket blurb mentions a search for immortality, but it’s a MacGuffin — the actual plot jumps off into paranoid cellular conspiracy soon enough, dragging in Stalin and Beria for good measure.
It’s a page-turner, and Bear has learned a few new tricks: the plot jumps back and forth in time, telling the story through two different protagonists. The two stories are quite linked, and events in one show up in the other soon enough. Definitely makes for a more interesting read.
Good for a plane ride, but nothing worth keeping to read again.
September 28th, 2005
I have too much work at once. Transitions between projects are tricky things, and I have (yet again) managed to get caught in a squeeze between four projects (two major, two minor). Whine whine whine.
Anyway, VS.net 2003 will occasionally not help by locking up. Deleting the .NCB file helps. Argh! Nothing more annoying than my primary tool going bonkers and freezing while I’m trying to get some work done. Two hours wasted uninstalling/installing various helpers and tools.
Visual Assist X is lovely, but I suspect it contributes to the Visual Studio lockup-on-start. We have a metric ton of files in our solution, and Visual Assist likes to scan the header files. It usually doesn’t freak out, but I wonder about it. Does it suffer from corruption in its database of symbols?
Xoreax Incredibuild rocks hard when it works, but the last couple of builds (2.40 and 2.42) have not rocked at all. Corrupt files, broken builds and increased flakiness do not endear themselves. The compiler is the most important tool for the programmer, and it’s considered bad to mess it up. Internal Compiler Error is not a good thing.
I’ve been told good things about Code Historian but I don’t have time to try it out. Too busy finishing and starting projects.
September 22nd, 2005
Shazia Mirza, Irshad Manji, Shabana Rehman, Omar Marzouk…
Given that the shortest distance between two people is a laugh, then it looks as if Manji’s wish for a more questioning, frontier expanding Islam is slowly coming true. We’ll know that the Islamic reformation and renaissance is just around the corner when they open a stand-up club in Gaza…
September 19th, 2005
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the perfect excuse for pigging out on several large, nutty, chocolate-y bits of candy. It’s that kind of movie. A bit weird and strange in places, but satisfyingly normal in its story; where good triumphs and evil goes to bed without supper.
It starts off playing to the form of a childrens movie: a friendly narrator explains what is happening, the characters repeat the narrator. But once the doors open and the adventure gets underway, and Depp waltzes on stage in a disturbing, burning, melting singing doll show, the whole thing becomes a bit more grown up. By the end we get re-enactments of 2001 with chocolate bars and monkeys. The movie sticks close to the core of the story: it remains satisfyingly Grimm-ish and strictly moralistic. Come-uppances are served and wholesomeness is resoundingly rewarded. Along the way several movies are quoted, zingers fly by, and Danny Elfman delivers a great sing-along score.
September 19th, 2005
My good friend Stephen has finally completed his kayak trip along the length of the norwegian coast. Along the way he has taken a bunch of amazing pictures: a playful whale, amazing firery sunsets, fish and fowl.
An absolutely amazing journey. I’m expecting my sponsorship invoice to arrive any day now, now that he’s back in civilization.
September 18th, 2005
Said goodbye my parents today - they are flying south for the winter to sunny Beziers in the south of France.
Not a throat was unlumped or an eye unteared in the departure hall at the airport.
Strange (in an odd way) to see them leaving us, rather than the other way round. Also makes me proud of them — to actually do what everyone wishes for and dreams of doing. To pull up and move after the retirement kicks in; I wonder if I’ll have the same conviction after I’m 60…
September 17th, 2005
The new iTunes 5 looks nice but two things:
* why is everything in Norwegian all of a sudden? Did I miss something during Setup?
* What happened to the title bar? Putting the menubar up there is cute, but not having a title bar freaks me out.
The skinny look is different, but I kinda like it. The playlist used to lie on a larger slate window, but the slate padding is gone now.
When you do a search, a set of little buttons appear at the top of the song-list.
These buttons (All/Music/Audiobooks/Videos/Podcasts/etc) work as quick filters. We’ve been doing something similar with the activity list in SuperOffice since version 5 — very handy way of managing large lists of information.
This new button-oriented search interface fixes the big problem with the old interface: the little dropdown menu that the magnifying-glass triggered was too small and too annoying to be bothered to use.
The new interface works much better: the buttons afford experimentation, and the filtering stuff is pretty obvious. The buttons on the right of the split are different: they determine which field you are searching on, and this isn’t quite obvious unless you have a couple of hits in the list. Getting an empty list up after you click a button is baffling. Putting a little text up to explain why the list is empty would help a lot: “No albums named ‘Cherry’ found”.
September 8th, 2005
User interfaces seem to proceed through stages, no matter what technology is involved. First the new must mimic the old, before breaking away and exploring the outer limits of the design space, then finally settling on conventions and becoming mundane before the cycle repeats again.
The first cars are horseless buggies, with reins instead of steering wheels. Reins give way to various levers/stick/wheel systems, before finally settling down to the system we are familiar with today.
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Software CD players started out mirroring the physical CD players in the real world - down to the little LED displays and buttons of the real, physical thing.
After a while the designers realize that the old constraints no longer apply, and a slew of new interfaces burst forth, all challenging the old ways of doing things. During this phase we got things like winamp v3 skins, Microsoft Media Player version 9 and 10, which paint pretty pictures, but which didn’t really challenge the fundamental play/next/prev/stop model the software cribbed from the old physical CD and cassette decks.
iTunes was probably one of the first to leverage the advantage of having a screen and a keyboard attached to the player.
Suddenly you could see next song in the list on the screen. You didn’t have to create playlists ahead of time — the whole archive was there to manipulate in real time.
Software music players are still exploring the design space — and they have finally broken away from the old physical boombox.
The reason I bring this up is that we have got new phones at work. IP Phones. Internet telephony. Shiny. New.
You must have a program running on your PC in order for the phone to work.
This program is the users interface with the phone network.
This program is a prime example of the tyrrany of the real.
This program uses a scan of a real phone for its main window.
Nortel isn’t the only one to sin in this respect. There are plenty of other softphones which are also unable to break away from the constraints of the real world (XTen XPro, eStara softphone, for example)
But Nortel is the craptastic software I have to use on a daily basis.
There is a voicemail system in there as well, with the corresponding voice-driven menu system. Why does the menu system have to be on the phone? I’m sitting in front of a large color display with plenty of room for a list of messages in my mailbox. Do I have to listen to a women wibble on about the number of messages?
IP Telephony is still in the horse and buggy stage. We can only wait for the winamp/skinning phase to start soon, as useful but incomprehensible interfaces start to appear. The fact that SIP and the underlying APIs are fairly open means that there should be lots of experimentation as the infrastructure starts to become deployed.
September 7th, 2005
Doom - The movie trailer.
Ok - it will probably be a terrible, guilty pleasure of a movie…
BUT THEY KEPT THE CHAINSAW!
Awesome!
September 5th, 2005
Thud! by Terry Pratchett.
(also a board-game)
Pratchett is definitely in a more preachy corner this time. The book picks up the themes of tolerance, fundamentalism and multi-culturalism, so if you’ve read Small Gods, you know which corner the author is in. A fundamentalist dwarf is murdered, and trolls are the obvious fall-guy. Vimes has to solve the murder mystery, avoid starting a war, and deal with a growing city. The allegories are fast and thick in this book, and quite topical after the London bombings. Fundamentalism: bad. Multi-culturalism and tolerance: good.
Beating people up in little rooms — he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say ‘we’re the good guys’ and do bad-guy things.’
The allegory sometimes veers dangerously close to preachy, but a good laugh usually rescues the situation.
Some great names as usual: the Gooseberry personal assistant, the dwarf Grag Ardent, the Troll Mr Shine (him diamond!), Mr. Pessimal the auditor. (Pessimal is an old pun on optimal)
Also this is one of Pratchett’s more lascivious books:
Nobby falls in love with Tawnee the stripper, the policewomen go out for a razzle (discovering drinks with names like ‘Multiple Orgasm’, ‘Pink, Big and Wobbly’, and ‘Neck bolt’), naked policewomen (Sally the vampire, Angua the werewolf) almost in a mud-fight:
‘Yes. We’re both wearing nothing, we’re standing in what, you may have noticed, is increasingly turning into mud, and we’re squaring up to fight. Okay. But there’s something missing, yes?’
‘And that is…?’
‘A paying audience? We could make a fortune.’ Sally winked.
The best part of the book is the feeling that there is a big, living city growing up within the pages. And in this universe, driven by narrativium, good wins in the end by being better.
September 4th, 2005
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