I’ve just seen the new Wallace and Gromit film, and it’s wonderful stuff. If, like me, you are a fan of the early Aardman work but felt that Chicken Run wasn’t quite up to the mark, then fear not! The dynamic duo are back! It’s just as good as the shorts, probably even better, but this time in full feature-length. Jolly good fun and highly recommended.
Oh, and any Archers fans will find Mr Growbag’s voice strangely familiar…
I almost never use the Sherlock application that ships with Mac OS X, but if I find myself in a U.S. city wondering what movies are playing nearby, it is one of the easiest ways to find out.
I fired it up this evening and found that all the channels seemed to be missing. An empty window – even less inspiring than some of the movies on offer at the moment.
If this happens to you, go to ~/Library/Caches/Sherlock and delete what you find there, then empty the Trash. That fixed it for me. Elementary, my dear…. oh, never mind.
Here’s a bit of nostalgia. Anyone remember Digital? How about the AltaVista search engine?
I was browsing through some of my old mail and came across a message from the dim recesses of January 1998. I had just tried the AltaVista translation service to convert a
Spanish review of a Digital laptop into English. It did some wonderful things like occasionally translating ‘desktop’ as ‘tablecloth’ and I thought the results were
quite charming. Here are the first few paragraphs:
“An equipment of high benefits that competes seriously
with those of tablecloth – by Abel Manto’n”
To the good thing one is accustomed immediately. Portable 575 HiNote VP
stand for casks is so powerful, that one week whole without igniting the
desktop computer can be happened nor remembering for anything him.
One is a cacharrito of 3.4 kilos of weight, with 2.16 gigas of hard disk and
one piece that combines in the same space the disquetera and the reader of
D-ROM.
From the last name comes to him there bent to this machine of 765,000
pesetas in its standard configuration. The computer that we have proven bond
something more, because it included an extension of memory, happening of the
16 megas of the basic equipment to 32.
The memory difference, as already it has been written so many times, is
fundamental to shoot the yield. Unfortunately, the extensions of memory
accustom to being specific for each model and the prices notice it.
An equipment to taste.
Paltar to choose a portable one well is necessary to have precaution in
verifying how the tastes of user to three basic parameters adapt: the
keyboard, the screen and the mouse, that with the programs that run is
essential.
On the keyboard it is necessary to say that a little out of place have some
keys, mainly the one to suppress, the one of beginning and the one of aim.
Model proven had keyboard English, which always incomoda a little, but more
annoying is to have to look for key to erase, which it is where it is
without leaf return, and is an infrequent place. By the others, it is
written wonderfully.
The screen is irreprochable. 12.1 inches, active matrix and a fantastic
angle of view. Sure the graphical card, that has much to do, is a PCI of 128
bits (pure lujazo), of most efficient. It allows a resolution of until
1024×768 points, although doing a trick of panning. That is to say, it
creates a virtual screen that ‘ sale’ of the visible screen and moves on
this one when the leader of the mouse takes towards the ends. Recommendable
and the appropriate thing is to use the resolution of 800×600, with HD
color, that produces the best visual results, without trap nor cardboard.
The great thing about getting older is that the percentage of the opposite sex that you find attractive is roughly proportional to your age.
The worst thing about getting older is that the percentage who find you attractive doesn’t quite work the same way…
My friend Geoff Jones has created a website of bloggers based in Cambridge, England at cambridgeblogs.com. If you’re in our part of the world, go and find your friends and add yourself…
I’m not actually in our part of the world at present, having driven from Vancouver down to Seattle yesterday afternoon. The trees in B.C. are just starting to turn red and the colours will be just phenomenal in a couple of weeks’ time. A very nice part of the world.
I’ve just seen a real gem of a film.
Dear Frankie is the story of a woman who has run away from a violent husband, taking her very young son, Frankie, with her. Frankie grows up writing letters to his ‘Da’, whom he believes to be an officer far away on a cargo ship , not knowing that his mother is actually reading the letters and writing the replies to protect him from the truth about his past.
Then one day, Frankie reads that his father’s ship is going to be arriving at the dock in a few days. His mother has to either tell him the truth, or find somebody who will pretend to be his father for a day or two. You can guess what happens. Ah, but can you?
This is Shona Auerbach’s first feature-length film, and what a way to start! Highly recommended.
Just how low will marketing people go?
“As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a
country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist
People’s Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the
world you’d want to live.” – Paul Graham
(Thanks to James Miller for that one)
No conference which discusses the Web can consider itself cutting-edge these days unless at least a couple of the speakers make reference to Ruby on Rails. For those who haven’t come across it, Ruby is a very dynamic programming language which has been around for a long time, but because it originated in Japan, it’s taken a while to gain popularity in non-Japanese-speaking parts of the world. Rails is a framework which takes advantage of the dynamic nature of the language to map SQL databases neatly onto Ruby objects. It has scripts which create a lot of standard stub code for you, and so in general it makes it very easy to create web applications based around a SQL database back-end, which an awful lot of web apps are, nowadays.
I wrote briefly about Ruby on Rails three months ago, and since then I’ve been sipping at the kool-aid – watched the intro videos, bought a Ruby book, and played a bit with the software – but I never quite got a taste for it. Ruby is so named because it was meant to be a better PERL, and it certainly is that, but I think there’s a few too many Perl-isms still lingering in the background. Ruby enthusiasts claim that it’s a ‘pure’ object-oriented language, more like Smalltalk than most of its competitors, because everything is an object, so you can do things like calling a method on an integer:
5.upto(10) { |i| print i }
but somehow this just doesn’t feel very natural to me. You can do some lovely things in Ruby, but I don’t think a language can lay much claim to purity when it still has things like the global $_ variable from PERL.
And so I’ve been very pleased to discover Django, which is a very similar framework that slightly pre-dates Ruby on Rails, and which is based on Python rather than Ruby. Python has been one of my favourite languages for a long time – I first used it in 1991 – and to my mind it’s rather nicer than Ruby for most things. It’s much more widely known, and all the benchmarks I’ve seen also show Python as rather faster than Ruby, and Django as higher-performance than Rails.
Django works the opposite way to Rails; you create particular kinds of objects in Python and run a script which produces the SQL tables which store them for you. In practice this doesn’t make a huge difference. The Rails approach can be more flexible, but with Django’s you get all your canonical source code in the same language. They both have their merits. But the default framework that Django produces is much more useful than anything you get for free with Rails; it provides quite a nice ‘admin’ interface which you can start using immediately for entering data without grimacing too much about the user interface.
My wife Rose needed to store some data in several related tables and access them from home and from the University. In one day I was able to take her data, which was mostly in tables in Word documents and get it via Excel, text files, and some Python scripts into a MySQL database. Django provided the web front end and by the end of the day she was entering her data via her browser into a set of inter-related tables with various conditions attached. I was working in the next room and from time to time I’d come in and say – “Look – there’s a search box now!”.
Remember that this was my first attempt at using the platform. Now, of course, I’ll be tinkering with it for ages, but the ability to get something up and running and useful so quickly is a great tribute to Django’s design. I also have a feeling, though I haven’t tested this yet, that much of Django might be more useful than Rails for any web apps which are not based on a SQL database.
Anyway – highly recommended.
Thanks to Martin for pointing me at these amazing computer-generated pictures by Jared Tarbell.
As well as being beautiful, most of them come in Java applet form, so you can watch them being generated on your own machine, and they’re also accompanied by source code.
Yesterday evening.
Swiss trains not only run on time, they also have clean enough windows that you can take photos through them!
I was visiting my old friends Pierre & Linda, who live in a little village high up in the hills. Here’s a view from Pierre’s commute in to work:
Pierre works in Martigny at IDIAP which doesn’t look quite like your typical research lab:
More photos of the area here.
In a little over a year from now, all official documents in the State of Massachusetts are to be in the standard OpenDocument format, supported by the latest versions of OpenOffice, KOffice, IBM Workplace, Abiword, and others.
This is great, and I’m hoping it will be the first of many such announcements. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for the IEE Review called “If You Love Your Data, Set It Free” (PDF) about the dangers of not using open standards for your data, and just a couple of months ago I applauded Microsoft for using open XML-based formats as the default for the next version of Office, though it turns out that these are not quite as ‘open’ as we might have hoped.
But in “Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn’t)“, David A Wheeler makes some important points that should be interesting reading for anyone able to choose their own document formats, and required reading for anyone choosing them on behalf of others. Some excerpts:
In many ways this decision was fairly obvious. OpenDocument appears, at this point, to be the way to go, with no realistic alternative, for any government….
Massachusetts’ Kriss emphasized that Massachusetts is not moving to open standards for economic reasons, but to protect the right of the public to open and free access to public documents, permanently. “What we’ve backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietar standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards.”…
Not everyone is made of money. Governments have to interact with people who have little money, and governments are often strapped themselves. For OpenDocument, this is a no-brainer. Some OpenDocument implementations are available at no cost (particularly OpenOffice.org and KDE KOffice) and have a licensing structure that allows that to continue that way indefinitely. And these are good programs, not poor quality demos…
There’s no doubt that this will cost money. Any transition — even a minor transition to a new version of the same product — costs money. But these are one-time costs, whereas staying where they are will cause more data loss, and by telling everyone now where they are going they can get everyone moving in the same direction (with more lead time, the risks and costs go down)…
The old Microsoft Office format is unspecified and will cause continuing data loss, and it fails to take advantage of XML technology. Even Microsoft is abandoning it. Microsoft’s XML format will prevent instead of help interoperability; it simply fails to meet typical government requirements, since its restrictive license prevents real competition and it failed to enter the standardization process (as requested by Europe and others).
Where governments go, those who work with or for governments often have to follow. But it’s for their own good.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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